The Ugly Cry

by Danielle Henderson

  “Is he okay?” I asked. Cory couldn’t hold himself up.

  “Get out of the way, child,” Grandma said, impatient to drag Cory into the house. I closed the front door behind him and followed as she pushed him into a chair at the kitchen table.

  “What’s wrong with him?” I asked. Cory’s arms were crossed on the table; his forehead rested on them as he cried, drips of snot and drool snaking their way to the floor beneath him.

  “He’s drunk, numb nuts,” Grandma said. “Drinking with his goddamn friends on the train tracks like a bunch of idiots.” She was filling the kettle; she put it on the stove, then grabbed the jar of Folgers and a mug. Cory, his head still hanging down, winced when she loudly dropped the teaspoon into the mug and slammed it on the table in front of him.

  “Why are you making him coffee?” I asked, feeling my anger rising. Shouldn’t she be furious by now? Shouldn’t she be yelling in his face?

  “To sober him up.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cory slurred. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  Grandma rolled her eyes. “Oh, shut up. I know you’re sorry. You’re gonna be even sorrier when you wake up tomorrow.” She walked over and started rubbing Cory’s back, then looked at me and motioned with her hand. “Go get a towel.”

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. Cory came home blind drunk, in a police car, driven by the police, and she was rubbing his back? This was the same woman who once told me that if I kept falling asleep with the overhead bedroom light on and running up the electric bill she would end my actual life.

  “Um, I’m sorry—why? Why should I get him a towel and be nice to him? He’s drunk!” I felt like every capillary in my body was about to explode. This was a situation ripe for lifetime punishment, and she was scurrying around like Mary fucking Poppins instead of burying his body in the backyard. I wasn’t interested in drinking. I’d seen enough after-school specials to understand that underage drinking always ended in car accidents, sexual assaults, or general life-ruining shame. Plus, no one that I hung out with drank. A girl named Stefanie who Alexis, my closest friend, and I hung out with sometimes brought a six-pack of Zima to a birthday party over the summer; I took one home to try in the privacy of my own room. After turning the bottle over in my hands a few times, I stashed it under my bed and tossed it out on trash night. I had fully bought into the idea that one sip could ruin my life, or at least ruin my chances of getting out of Warwick.

  “Keep your voice down, Dani,” Grandma whispered tersely. “He’s drunk. And who knows how long those jerks were drinking before coming home.”

  “He didn’t come home—he was brought home. BY THE COPS.”

  “Goddammit, Dani, go upstairs,” Grandma hissed. The kettle boiled; she finished stirring the coffee and brought it over to Cory, whose sobs quieted as he took tentative sips.

  “This is bullshit!” I shouted. Cory jumped as if he had just been electrocuted, then started crying again.

  “Go upstairs, goddammit!” Grandma was shouting now, too, which only caused Cory to grab his head in his hands and wail loudly.

  I stomped upstairs to my room. I tried to slam the door, but it just whispered along the high-pile carpet.

  About an hour later, I heard Grandma ushering Cory upstairs, talking mostly to herself while he gave the odd grumble in return. I listened through my bedroom door. “Let’s air it out, because you know all that alcohol coming out of your pores is gonna stink,” she said, opening a window. She must have brought a paper bag up with them; I heard the distinctive pop! as she snapped it open. “If you have to upchuck, do it in this bag here, okay?” She was talking loudly, the way Americans do when they travel to other countries, as if loudly saying something in English is the same as learning Spanish or French. His sneakers fell to the floor with a thud as she pried each one off. I could already hear Cory snoring by the time she left the room.

  I opened my door and chased after her down the stairs. “So he’s really not going to be punished for this?”

  Grandma sighed, easing down onto the couch and lighting a cigarette. “There’s no use reasoning with a drunk person, Dani. I learned that from your grandfather.”

  I felt confused. “What do you mean?”

  “Your grandfather. He drinks, always has. Drank away our chance to buy a house, drank away our chance to do anything, really,” she said, waving her hand in the air like she was swatting a fly. She sounded tired and continued talking to the air instead of looking at me. “He still drinks. Not as much. He thinks I don’t know. But you can smell it on them.” She waved her hand toward the ceiling. “Now this one starts.”

  I looked at her. She was slumped on the couch, staring at something years in the past. The skin on her face was pulling down toward her neck, ending in a pool of wrinkles. She closed her eyes, while I stood there, shocked. Granddad always had a few beers when our family visited from the city, but we didn’t have any alcohol in the house. He did work at a bar, but he never seemed to come home drunk, not in the way that I saw in movies—he wasn’t loud, he didn’t stumble over things or fall down. I looked at Grandma. What else didn’t I know? Was this her way of protecting me—just keeping me in the dark? For a moment, my world wobbled like a top about to fall. She was more adept at being a parent than I had ever realized or given her credit for.

  I still felt like Cory was an asshole. Getting drunk on the railroad tracks was such a 1920s hobo-with-a-bindle, lame-ass move. It bothered me that he could be so cavalier, while Grandma held me to a different standard of respectability. I was starting to see cracks in her tough façade, but it felt intentional—like she was showcasing her vulnerability because I was getting older and had earned the right to see it.

  But I was also worried. If alcoholism ran in our family, was this just the beginning of the end for Cory? “What if Cory chokes? Like the lady from the Mamas and the Papas?” My newfound interest in the 1960s lent itself well to situations like this, where I could whip out a factoid I’d heard on VH1.

  “He’s not going to choke, Dani,” Grandma said, her eyes still closed. “He’s going to sleep, and maybe upchuck. I’m tired, child,” she said, opening her eyes and grabbing the TV remote next to her. “Leave me alone.”

  I went back upstairs and poked my head into Cory’s room on the way to mine. He was facedown on the bed, fully clothed, snoring. I left his door open. I left mine open, too, so I could hear him breathing. Just in case.

  * * *

  —

  Grandma usually worked on Tuesdays, but one day when I came home from school, she was sitting on the couch, sponging her face with a wad of tear-soaked tissues. I’d never seen her cry before. Not like this.

  I was scared to walk over, not quite sure I could handle whatever elicited this reaction from her. I dropped my bag near the TV and walked over to her, kneeling down to try to meet her gaze.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “My best friend is dead,” Grandma said, sobs breaking open a space between every word.

  Patsy had been hit by a drunk driver while backing out of her driveway that morning. I instantly flashed to moments of her—red bouffant grazing the roof of her car while she drove us to the mall, eating pancakes at Perkins, drinking coffee at the All Seasons Diner, in Grandma’s kitchen on Jersey Avenue. She was there for my entire life, an extension of Grandma. She was also the first and only person Grandma was likely to spend time with—I never saw her reach out to other people to just get a cup of coffee or go shopping. They spent 90 percent of their time together laughing, especially after Nana Dar moved to Florida; it’s possible they kept the serious conversations away from us kids, but whenever we were around, they were always hunched over, complaining about how they were going to pee their pants. Patsy was the beating heart center of Grandma’s joy.

  Grandma was inconsolable until Granddad came home. She must have called him at work; he was home before t
he sun went down, which never happened. I floated up and down the stairs quietly, finding excuses to drift in and out of the kitchen while trying to examine this new way my grandparents were interacting with each other. It was like a curious theatrical production had sprung up in our living room. Granddad was bringing Grandma tissues; Grandma was lying on Granddad’s lap, still crying; Granddad was rubbing her shoulder. Before Luke, before bodies became dangerous, I used to make Grandma and Granddad kiss. “Kiss her!” I’d shout, jumping up and down and clapping my hands. They’d laugh as they pecked each other on the lips. “Now kiss him!” They entertained me a few times before declaring it was enough.

  “What’s wrong with you, ya pervert?” Grandma would laugh.

  Looking at them now, I realized love wasn’t something you could perform but something you felt together.

  For months after Patsy died, Grandma couldn’t get off the couch. She went to work, came home, and watched TV in the dark until she fell asleep. I forgot what her laugh sounded like.

  We didn’t put up a Christmas tree that year. It usually went up in early December; Bobby or Granddad would drag the box out from the closet under the stairs, take the green plastic frizz out of the box, and pop the poles together. Cory and I pulled apart each branch, spreading them the way a real tree would look, while Grandma directed us from the couch. We threw stringy tinsel on it while Grandma told us the story of each ornament. “You made this in preschool,” she said to Cory, hanging a round piece of cardboard with gold spray-painted macaroni on it. The multicolored bulbs rested on some of the branches, hot to the touch. It was a wonder the house never burned down.

  Sometime around the third week of December, I asked Grandma if we were going to put up a tree. I was really asking whether we were going to have Christmas; it wasn’t a big family event, but it was something to look forward to. We called all the family in California, and I was still young enough to have some surprises under the tree, even if I no longer believed in Santa Claus.

  Grandma rolled over. She’d been lying on the couch, the TV throwing light and shadows on her face. “I don’t feel like Christmas this year, Dani,” she said into the couch cushion, her back to me. “Watch whatever you want on the TV. I’m going to sleep.”

  I went upstairs and lay on my bed in the dark. I didn’t feel like Christmas, either. There was something about seeing Grandma’s grief that helped me identify my own.

  I didn’t have a language for it, but the lethargy I had been feeling was depression. None of the things that brought me happiness worked anymore—not music, or painting, or reading. If you sliced our house in half like a dollhouse, you’d see me and Grandma, in different rooms but stacked on top of each other, both of us lying down with our grief. Grandma’s body mirrored mine as we each stayed on the couch or in bed, her pain echoing my own pain. I couldn’t stop thinking about Luke, and Mom, and all the ways they each hurt me. I couldn’t talk to Grandma about how I was feeling, because I didn’t know how to describe the way I felt, like all my thoughts were a giant blob of dough in a colander that I had to force through the holes with great effort just to take a shower or do my homework. Maybe Grandma would remember her own grief, so she could understand all the times I just wanted to let the dark slip over me, to just sleep, and sleep, and sleep.

  * * *

  —

  A few months after the holidays, Grandma started feeling better. There were more days when she sounded like herself again, and, most surprising, she booked a trip to take Cory and me to California.

  Sweetie Pie had moved to Sacramento a few years before, joining Aunt Connie and her husband, Uncle Glen, so we hadn’t seen her in a while. Uncle Glen was stationed there in the military; when Sweetie Pie got old enough to retire, it somehow made more sense for her to move across the country than it did for her to land upstate near us. She always visited us when she lived in New York City; this was the first time I was in her home, instead of the other way around.

  This was a big trip for us. Grandma tucked away tips, tax returns, and anything extra for years in order to bring me and Cory with her on this trip to California. She did it herself and made a point of reminding me of that while we sat in the travel agent’s office: “Your granddad didn’t pay for any of this—I wanted to see my family, so I paid for it.” We were wedged into uncomfortable wooden chairs in front of an expansive desk, waiting for the travel agent to come back from the printer. I could see our laundromat out the window as I wondered why Grandma felt the need to tell me this. It wasn’t a secret to me that she paid for almost everything we ate, did, or possessed; she never shut up about it.

  I was still afraid of heights and flying, but no one was as nervous as Grandma. We got to the airport fifteen hours before our flight took off, which gave her a smooth thirteen hours to fidget and ask if I thought anything would go wrong with the flight. She packed enough luggage for any possibility—if a snowstorm touched down in Sacramento, we’d be ready. She insisted on overseeing Cory and me as we packed, even though my plan was to bring the same T-shirts and cutoff jeans I had worn all summer in Warwick. My suitcase could have fallen out of the cargo hold and I wouldn’t have missed a beat for the entire two weeks we were gone.

  Grandma was excited to visit her mom, but she was less excited about Sweetie Pie seeing my current hairdo. “You need to brush whatever is left of your hair over that shaved part,” she instructed as soon as we got to Aunt Connie’s house. “And don’t wear one of those outfits, either—wear something normal, with no holes or tears or rips or paint on ’em.” Before we got in the car, I parted my hair in the middle and combed it down to frame my face. It covered the shaved part of my hair underneath; I looked like a tan Emo Philips.

  “Mom might surprise you, Carole,” Aunt Connie said to my grandma when she picked us up from the airport at the start of the trip. Her driver’s seat was pushed so close to the wheel that I wondered how she could navigate around her chest. We talked on the phone every weekend, but I’d only met Aunt Connie twice before, when I was a baby and they came back to New York for visits. She had always been short, but she seemed positively tiny now that Cory and I were six feet tall. Her salt-and-pepper hair was short and natural, and she still wore her signature red lipstick. Grandma was in the passenger seat, looking out the window.

  “I know. We talk on the phone,” Grandma said.

  “But it’s different in person. I just want to prepare you, Carole. It’s very upsetting in person.”

  This was the other reason we were here, the real reason, the one I overheard in phone conversations without ever having anything explicitly explained. The low-tone mention of Alzheimer’s, the way Grandma wondered if Sweetie Pie should still live on her own. I had the feeling we were there so that Grandma and Aunt Connie could make a big decision together, something that was hard to do when you were three thousand miles apart.

  Sweetie Pie’s apartment was in the lower level of a small complex; judging from the amount of motorized scooters parked in the walkway, most of the people who lived there were around her age. Her place was filled with books, photos, crocheted blankets from her sister that were similar to the ones we had at home, and records. It was elegant but cozy. The largest wall in her living room was covered with framed family photos. The only pictures we had hanging on our walls at home were the three senior portraits of my mom, aunt, and uncle, all in decreasing degree of afro as each graduated. I walked over for a closer look while Sweetie Pie bustled around the kitchen, her hair in the same soft curls I’d always remembered.

  “Are these from Jersey Ave?” I asked, pointing to a frame on the wall of three autumn leaves pressed under glass.

  “Yes, Dani, they are,” Sweetie Pie said. “Do you remember picking those with me?” She was smiling as she walked over slowly.

  I remembered. The simplicity of hunting for the brightest colors on the most crisp day. Sweetie Pie always had an innate patience with us, a
slow-honeyed southernness that showed us a peek of her Virginian roots. She had that thing that people called “effortless elegance”—she looked comfortable and cool even then, wearing a bright blue skirt, a light blue button-down, and a black ribbon tied in a bow at her neck. A delicate beige cardigan was draped over her slim shoulders. I was a foot taller than her and constantly felt the urge to grab her in a powerful hug. Her sentimentality rivaled Grandma’s hardness—I couldn’t believe that this serene, delicate woman raised such a tough taskmaster of a kid. I was starting to see that between Aunt Connie’s femininity and Sweetie Pie’s kindness, Grandma was kind of an outlier herself, sharing with me our insistence on being independent and doing things our own way. She was able to grow into who she was because she knew her mother loved and respected her no matter what. That may be the unseen benefit of growing up with motherly kindness. It was difficult to accept that this existed in my family, too, that mothers in my direct lineage could be so outwardly tender.

  Sweetie Pie patted my shoulder and walked back to the kitchen. Grandma and Aunt Connie were trying to help, but she shooed them out. Cory was splayed out on the couch, bored out of his mind and not even trying to hide it. I turned back to the leaves. We had pictures in our photo albums from all the times she visited when I was small; I remembered her so vividly. But the leaves threw me off-balance emotionally—no one ever told me full stories about our family, and there was so much about my own life that I didn’t understand. We weren’t sentimental—Grandma told stories about her childhood only if I asked, and never with an air of importance. Sweetie Pie’s walls were filled with memories from top to bottom—pictures of all her grandchildren and their kids, scrawled pictures with shaky letters made with chubby little preschool hands, school photos of Cory and me that Grandma diligently sent out every year. It was my lineage filling these walls, the way I was connected to something bigger than my own small, erratic family.