Fight Night(11)

Next class was Boggle. First Real Boggle and then Fake Boggle which is when we make our own words from the letters, words that aren’t real words, and we tell each other what they mean in under a minute. Grandma writes them all down. She told me what a cipher key was. Then we had Fast Cooking. We made Survival Casserole and 1-2-3-4 Cake in sixteen minutes, which was a record. Grandma recorded it, which for her means writing it down on paper. Grandma likes to do everything fast. When she wants to leave and Mom and I aren’t ready she yells, Bus is loading in lane seven! Mom gets so mad when Grandma takes off down the sidewalk before Mom can get her shoes on to help her. Once, in the middle of a blizzard, Grandma was adamant about going to her book club because they were doing Euripides who is a peer of Grandma’s. She said they’re the same age and shared a desk at school. Back then she was 5'7" and Euripides was jealous of her. She had to help him with everything because he was a dreamer. She took off to book club before me or Mom could catch her. We waited at home steaming mad because it was a very serious blizzard and Grandma was a fucking nutbar for going out in that weather. She came back hours and hours later like fucking Achilles returning from Troy. Mom was so mad she didn’t help Grandma off with her winter boots. Grandma was triumphant. Her face was all red and she was covered in snow. She told us she got to the streetcar stop on the icy streets by throwing down her woolen hat for traction and stepping on it and then picking it up and throwing it down again, stepping on it, and so on and so on until she got to the stop and then she told some very handsome guys standing there to push her onto the streetcar and there you go, she made it to Euripides. How did you get back? I asked her. Mom was already off slamming things around in another room. She didn’t want to hear how Grandma got back. I just did it the same way! said Grandma. I have not been in the company of so many handsome men in quite some time! Unless you count that last ambulance ride. They just love to help me! We got you, they say. You’re good. We got you. Isn’t that wonderful ?

Next class was Ancient History (Made Modern). Grandma told me that when she was born her mother was so sick and tired she thought she was going to die, so she left the hospital and went home, what else could she do? She left Grandma in the hospital to be taken care of by the nurses. That’s why Grandma wanted to become a nurse later. They loved Grandma and fought over who got to hold her. Grandma’s mom had fourteen other kids at home to take care of so she got well again and then sent for Grandma. When Grandma turned eight her dad gave her a job. When the house started filling up with smoke she had to run downstairs and shovel coal. She slept in the hallway and had a good vantage point for detecting the smoke. When she was eight her parents had taken her out of their bed and put her in a crib in that hallway because she was small for her age and because they had run out of beds and bedrooms. Grandma was nimble enough to leap right out of the crib at the first hint of smoke. The rest of the family could slumber on obliviously while little Grandma shovelled the coal and saved them all from suffocating in their sleep. Her parents loved her very much. Her father was a rogue who became a rich lumberman and her mother was pious and had been a thirteen-year-old maid in the city and was stood up at the altar twice by Grandma’s dad because he liked being in the bush with the men and didn’t know if he was ready to settle down and have fifteen children with a poor maid. He’d really wanted to marry a different lady but that lady’s brothers said no way, she couldn’t marry that wild lumberjack. Then that other woman had an accident and became a different person. Grandma’s father built their house with the strongest wood, oak, to prevent Grandma’s older brothers from destroying it with their roughhousing. They literally swung from the rafters and threw themselves down staircases and slammed their bodies against the walls all the time. They lived in the town on the main street next to the lumberyard. When Grandma went to play with her friends who lived on farms they teased her for not knowing how to extract fluids from animals or kill them. One of them forced Grandma to cut the head off a chicken. Then they ate that chicken for dinner and chased Grandma home, waving the chicken’s feet and head at her. Grandma turned around on the gravel road and told them all to go to hell, that was no way to treat a guest. When she got home she was in trouble with Willit Braun for telling the farm kids to go to hell but her father told Willit Braun to stop being a hypocrite. Kids will be kids. Get down from your pulpit. Grandma’s dad shooed Willit Braun off the porch and gave Grandma a Cuban Lunch chocolate bar he’d bought in the city. Every time he came back from the city he had a Cuban Lunch for her. And one time a mug that said Fino alla fine.

When Grandma’s dad died, her brothers took over everything and left the sisters in the dirt. They even stole the house that was supposed to go to the girls. They made all the workers in the factory pray together every ninety minutes and promise God they wouldn’t form a union. Grandma was fifteen years old. Her brothers sent her away to Omaha, Nebraska to study the Bible and work as a live-in maid for an American family. They wanted her to find a husband or become a missionary so she’d be taken care of by someone other than them. That’s patriarchy, Swiv, make a note. I waved my phone at her.

One time, Grandma’s brother’s wife felt very guilty about randomly having married into all the family money while the legitimate heirs, Grandma and her sisters, had none of the family money, so she wrote Grandma a cheque for twenty thousand dollars. Grandma beat a fast track to the bank to cash it before her nephew could put a stop payment on the cheque. Later he told Grandma that his mom, her brother’s wife, was not in her right mind when she gave Grandma that cheque. Whenever she was feeling generous her family called her crazy. Grandma used the money to pay off a bunch of loans and to buy a screen door so she could feel the evening breeze without getting eaten alive by mosquitoes after schlepping around all day in the blazing hot prairie sun. All her life she had wanted a screen door. A few years before that she had asked her nephews for a screen door, at cost, from the family business, but her nephews said no, that was impossible because if they gave Grandma a screen door, at cost, they’d have to give all their aunts a screen door, at cost, and where would that all end? Also, the nephews said they made high-end products and that probably wouldn’t be suitable for Grandma. What on earth does that mean? Grandma asked me.