GRAMMA B, with her breasts like swinging sacks of grain. When she walks, it’s like watching Big Ben toll. Gramma B lives in a single-wide off San Bernardino Avenue, where women in tiny skirts and high heels stroll lonesome as ghosts in the night. She chain-smokes mentholated Kools and spends her time with bingo and crochet.
Nenny doesn’t know what the B stands for.
Gramma B is Rick’s mom. She doesn’t talk much, and her eyes look swallowed in her face. There’d been a hardscrabble life years ago, rumbling around from motels to farmstead posts all across the northern New Mexico plains—but by the time Nenny knows her, it’s just a lot of doilies and awkward standing around.
“Did you get a new blender?” Rick asks, practically yells, because there’s something the matter with her ears.
“Yeahp. Mine was bust.” She starts to wave a hand toward the kitchen but then stops, as if realizing it’s the most boring thing in the world, which it is. Outside, the boys chase lizards and Kat flirts with guys who live in the trailer park, but it’s too hot out there and besides: Gramma B’s got an extensive collection of tiny animal figurines. Also, a stuffed parrot and a dog named Nuisance.
Here’s a thing that Nenny will never admit, not to anyone, ever: one afternoon, the sun slicing slantwise through the curtains and lighting up the lace, just a few weeks after Gramma B got her stage four diagnosis (“It won’t be long now,” the doctor said), Nenny stands before the glass shelves of figurines and wonders which will be hers when Gramma B dies. It is awful and wonderful at once. It’s like having something sparkling but grey sloshing around in her guts.
“B?” Mom shouts. “I think you should take some of these!” She’s waving a bottle of vitamins near Gramma B’s face, and Gramma’s nodding but also squinting and batting at the air like it’s swarming with flies. Rick keeps picking stuff up and putting it down, picking it up and putting it down. Supposedly the parrot could talk. Dirty words like a sailor, “When the Moon Hits Your Eye,” things like that. Won three state fair ribbons for that song before he died, Gramma B likes to say. Now he sits stiff and stuffed on a perch in a cage. Dulled green feathers, beady glass eyes. Nuisance, who never does anything, who doesn’t make any noise or cause any trouble and who can’t even be bothered to play, sleeps like a rock, snoring under the parrot’s cage by the door.
Nuisance
ON THE drive home, Mom says, “Nuisance? Who names a dog Nuisance?” She forces a small laugh and looks over at Rick.
But Rick is just driving. Even the kids know to shut the hell up.
It won’t be long now. Nenny watches the women on San Bernardino Avenue.
Fashions
TO LIVE in two houses is to have your feet planted precariously in two separate worlds. Mom’s house is a chaos of frenzy and needs and noise. Someone’s always running up or down the stairs, someone screams at someone else, video games blast, Kat yammers on the phone, Tiny blathers on about who knows what, Charles flip-flops between rowdy and detached, Bubbles often seems confused. Mom toggles back and forth between saintly and irritated, like putting food coloring in the milk just for fun but then yelling “No feet on the goddamned couch!” Rick is humorless and has bizarre, inflexible rules: no reading on the toilet, cabinets and drawers have to be closed. The cat pukes hair balls the size of other cats, and there’s always a fight about who has to clean it up. The upstairs bathroom stinks like hair spray and boy pee; everyone is testy and irritable and annoyed. If it seems that their collective frustration and disappointment should unite them, it doesn’t. It only pushes them further apart, like debris kicked up by a storm. In the evenings, when dinner’s ready, Rick doesn’t waste his time wandering the house to find them all, just puts two fingers in his mouth and whistles from the bottom of the stairs. He hates to spend money, so they hardly ever go out to eat.
At Dad’s, though, they eat out all the time. Denny’s and McDonald’s and Carl’s Jr. and Jack in the Box. At home in the apartment, they eat chips and cookies and crackers from paper plates, keep their clothes in small suitcases, sleep in sleeping bags on the floor. In the months after the divorce, when Mom moved in with Rick, there was a mania about Dad that’s hard to explain. It was like watching someone lose their mind. He’d pick them up for a weekend of camping, even if the forecast wasn’t good. “Come out of the tent, guys! This is nature!” he’d call, pointlessly chopping wood in the rain. He’d take them to a movie, then say, “Let’s see another!” or to 31 Flavors and encourage them to “Go on, try them all!” But other weekends he’d put on Metropolis to bore them while he slept like a dead man on the couch in the middle of the day. Once Bubbles said, “He’s just trying to be a dad.” He didn’t say “good dad” or “better dad,” and Nenny didn’t ask.
But it’s been close to four months, and things have settled in their own way. They don’t really watch Metropolis anymore.
* * *
The nice thing about weekends at Dad’s is that Boots lives right down the hall. Everyone calls her Boots because it rhymes with “Oots,” which is a derivation of her last name. Boots goes to public school and lives with her mother in an apartment filled with plants and colorful paintings on the walls. She wears cropped neon-colored shirts stamped with animal prints and acid-washed jeans that she makes herself in the building’s yard. She seems older than Nenny, but they’re the same age, and Nenny likes her because she’s nice and will talk about whatever and does interesting things, unlike all the dorks at Sacred Heart. All they want to do is play jump rope and braid each other’s hair.
It’s a Saturday in fall, and crows rustle and squawk in the trees. There are cones around the pool because supposedly it’s getting cleaned, so all the other apartment kids are playing behind the building in the parking lot. It’s better this way, talking to Boots without a bunch of babies hanging around.
“You wanna draw fashions?” Boots asks.
“Sure,” Nenny says. It’s Boots’s favorite thing to do, and Nenny’s learned a lot about fashion in the past few months, designing clothes with Boots. If you’re going to mix patterns, mix at least three—stripes with chevrons with plaid, for example. Always incorporate neon, the brighter the better. Never wear navy with black. Remember: layer, layer, layer. It’s the kind of stuff that doesn’t occur to you when you wear a uniform to school.
“Okay.” Boots starts pulling markers and pens from her backpack. She regularly carries art supplies. “What’s our theme?” When they draw fashions, they always have a theme.
“Um, let me think.” Nenny looks out over the concrete and the murky pool. Last time it was ball gowns, and winter wear the time before that—hot new takes on coats and scarves. “How about school uniforms?”
Boots pops her eyes. “That is brilliant,” she says, laying notebooks down. “We’ll reinvent your entire wardrobe.”
They start to draw, both girls fixated on their task. Boots doodles some blazers with matching ties, then reworks the saddle shoe. Nenny sketches variations on the white blouse. When Boots designs a new skirt, this one short and inches above the knee, Nenny says, “No way. Mother Superior would flip.” There’s a jumper with shoulder pads, then one with a bold sash. Plaid is replaced with paint splatters and polka dots. They discuss the importance of accessorizing, all the cool things you could do with bleach. The afternoon wears pleasantly on.
“Do you like wearing a uniform?” Boots asks.
Nenny wrinkles her nose. “Not really. It’s too hot when it’s hot and too cold when it’s cold.” She thinks. “Also, they itch.”
“What’re they made of? Like, what’s the cloth?” It’s the kind of question Boots would ask. She’s curious about most things.
“I don’t know. Sand?” And Boots smiles and bugs her eyes again. She buries her head for a quick sketch, then turns her paper toward Nenny. “Look at this,” she says. She’s drawn a hill of sand with a girl’s head popping out, and the girl looks a lot like Nenny. They both laugh.
It’s nice here, it’s simple—
no drama, nothing’s a big deal. Nenny likes being with Boots because it’s easy in a way that being at home is not. It feels straightforward and therefore real.
“Wanna walk to Thrifty’s?” Boots asks.
“Sure,” Nenny says, so they do.
Fear #37: Earthquake
A NINE point five is going to strike and rip the town, their street, their house, them, in two. What starts as a soft rumble in the middle of the night swiftly transforms into the apocalyptic shrieking of the earth itself, like God howling as a beast would howl and then tearing off his clothes. The bunk beds buckle and Tiny is crushed like a pancake. Kat is ripped to shreds by broken glass. Bubbles, scrambling for the safety of an open doorway, is struck in the head by a falling beam, and his brain goes pop! out of his skull. Charles—not one to panic, but still, his decisions are never wise—somehow ends up in the pool, and dies when a live wire snakes across the ground and lands in the shallow end, and he is zapped so bad that his hair turns white and his eyeballs explode and his spine comes shooting, strangely, out of his chest. He never stands a chance.
Thankfully, Mom and Rick die peacefully in their sleep.
Nenny, however, gets trapped in a tiny airtight crevice when two walls collapse, her face smashed into her knees and drywall smooshing her spine. For a few days—after the initial, high-pitched panic—she is fine. She befriends a small field mouse that has made its way inside a crack, and passes the time telling him stories about his own magic-filled and adventurous youth: “And you were proclaimed a knight, and all the other mice children cheered!” She names the mouse BobbySocks, and on some deep, unarticulated, spiritual level—where everything glows and nothing has a name—she is sure that this is all somehow meant to be: a shuddering earth led to this collapsed wall led to this entrapment led to this fated friendship between rodent and girl. An epic, transformative epiphany is about to occur, when BobbySocks begins to nibble her toe.
That’s how Nenny dies: not by succumbing to starvation and fatigue, but by being eaten alive.
Sorority
LIKE MOST girls her age, Nenny has always wanted a sister. Someone to share secrets with, a guide for life’s adventures, a mentor for things like bras and maxi pads and what to do about boys. She’s long dreamt of a sisterhood like Mallory and Jennifer Keaton’s on Family Ties. It’s sometimes biting and a little mean, okay—but they always come back to each other. They always circle back to love.
Kat, to be sure, is not what Nenny had in mind. None of this is what Nenny had in mind. They share the biggest room in the house, but still it’s too small, crowded with Kat’s posters and knickknacks. Her bed is never made; her dresser vomits clothes. She hardly talks to Nenny, and when she does, it’s only to say something crass or rude. “You know Jordan Knight is gay, right?” Kat with her crimped hair and mismatched earrings and lip gloss and Guess jeans. She listens to bands like Mötley Crüe and Poison, is obsessed with Bret Michaels, runs her fingers over his face in some magazine and purrs “Bret is such a babe” to whoever’s on the phone, seems not to notice or care that he looks like a girl. Kat wears blue eye shadow and lacquers her hair with Aqua Net and goes on dates with boys no one ever meets because “I’d rather die” than invite them in. Mom says things like “They should at least come to the door” and Rick says, “Leave it alone,” because it’s better to surrender some battles than to wage all-out war. So Kat puts on earrings that nearly reach her chin, props a magazine next to the mirror and follows the steps for lipstick and liner and blush—the “perfect sun-kissed look”—listens to “Unskinny Bop” once, then twice, then again, puts on a pair of pink socks and over those a pair of neon green, steps into her white pumps, and it’s been almost four months now, four months crammed together in the world’s smallest room, and Nenny knows better than to ask where Kat is going, knows that at best she’ll be told to “mind your own beeswax” and at worst she’ll be ignored. Nenny looks through the window down to where Kat stands at the bottom of the drive, a purse slung over her shoulder and snapping her gum, waiting for this week’s dream date to come and rescue her, to come and whisk her away.
Bizarre Beginnings
THE WAY Mom tells it is that one day last week, while she was filling up gas, the dog just jumped into the back seat and would not budge. She had no choice but to bring it home. What doesn’t make sense to Nenny is, why was the back door of the car hanging wide open? Who opens the back door when they go to fill up gas? It just doesn’t add up—but terrible stories have bizarre beginnings, so somehow the whole thing fits.
Anyway, now they have a dog. She’s filthy as all get-out and not technically mangy but mangy still. She looks as though the devil poured grease on her fur before he ran away laughing. Her eyes too: there’s something wrong with her eyes. One’s always swelling up and glazing over, and a yolk-yellow ooze drips out of both. But she’s okay—she doesn’t bark much and doesn’t bother them while they eat.
After about four days, the kids realize she doesn’t have a name. “Hey! What should we call the dog?” someone says when they’re watching TV. They look at one another, then at the dog, then back at one another, and their eyes start to wander the room. It’s the visual equivalent of grasping at straws, because they really don’t know the dog well enough to have a whole list of potential names. They could call her Fleabag or Mange, but that doesn’t seem right. So everyone’s looking around during commercials—commercials don’t matter anyway.
“How about…Rex?” Bubbles says.
“Rex is a boy’s name, stupid,” Charles says.
“So?”
“So she’s a girl.”
“Ooh! I know! Thursday! Cause today is—”
“How about Kat?” Nenny says, and everyone laughs because Kat’s not there.
“Um…Lampy?” Bubbles tries again.
“Lampy?”
“Yeah. Like the lamp.”
“How about Daisy?” Charles suggests.
“Daisy don’t work,” Tiny says.
“Why in the hell not?”
“Cause daisies are yellow, and this dog is…mud.”
“Sh! It’s back!”
A silence befalls them that’s nearly religious because this is, after all, TV. There’s trouble in the Huxtable house. Denise is upset because the record company where she works won’t promote her (it’s been three whole weeks!) and Cliff’s gotta have a physical because he eats way too many hoagies and trea—
“How ’bout Cosby?” Tiny shouts in the middle of the show, and they’re just about to riot and start tearing off ears when they realize: it’s actually a pretty good name. Nenny doesn’t point out that it’s also kind of a boy name—at least that’s the way it sounds—’cause she knows it’s better than nothing. Certainly it’s better than Lampy.
So that’s how Cosby gets her name.
* * *
Cosby is a decent, if mellow, family dog. She likes to lie around while they watch TV, and seems relieved and grateful when they feed her every night. It’s clear she didn’t get fed much, or at least not with any kind of consistency, by whoever owned her before. She wolfs the whole bowl of bits down and hardly even chews, as if each is her last and only meal. One afternoon, Charles goes out to find something in the garage, and at one point he picks up a baseball bat to move it to the side. When he does, Cosby—silent lump of a dog, never barks, never complains—scurries under the parked car, trembling and whimpering, and cannot be coaxed out all day. Rick becomes suspicious. Two days later, Rick tries it again: picks up a baseball bat and just holds it in his hand. Same thing: she curls under the car and whines. Afterward, Rick is very quiet, so they press him—“What? What is it?”—until he solemnly explains: Cosby had been abused.
Some things are impossible to fathom. That rage or spite or drunken blindness or whatever it is, whatever you call it, could compel you to beat a dog with a baseball bat. Nenny feels cracked in half.
Still. Cosby is a filthy, filthy animal. In another place, in another time, in s
ome other world, Nenny buries her face in Cosby’s fur and reveals all her secrets and sorrows, all the things she’s dying to have someone hear.
In this life, though, it is just too much: that filth and mange are just too, too much. Nenny will pet her, sure, but only while wearing gloves. She simply can’t imagine touching that fur with her bare hands.
Windsor
THERE’S SOMETHING about Charles and Kat’s mom that isn’t like anyone Nenny knows—or kinda knows. Nenny’s only met her a few times. Her name is Windsor and she wears beautiful clothes, like cowboy boots and ankle-length skirts and a necklace with a white crystal on a long silver chain. Her hands are covered in turquoise rings the size of small plates, and she wears a tasseled leather coat and five or six bracelets on each arm. She looks like the kind of lady you’d see in a movie, smoking at a pay phone outside some bar—but she isn’t. She drives a beat-up car, a car that looks scooped from the trash, but you can tell she doesn’t care. She lives in Apple Valley, which is over an hour away.
Windsor comes to drop off Charles and Kat, and stands in the living room brushing her hair from her eyes. Her earrings are hoops, her smile wide and toothy like Kat’s, her teeth big and crooked like Kat’s, freckles like distant stars speckled across her cheeks.
“How about some tea?” Mom offers, like Stay awhile, have a seat, but Windsor flips a hand toward the door.
“Oh no, I should get going,” she says. When Windsor comes, she always brings little gifts, small things like gumballs or those free mints you get at restaurants, and she brings one for each of them, because she’s the kind of woman who thinks of them all. She chitchats with Mom and Rick about the weather, about her job driving a delivery van, and smiles toothy and bright, bearing little gifts and looking something like a lyric from a song.
Every Other Weekend Page 3