Fight Night(2)

That’s how Mom talks. It’s probably not true. She lies. She hates words like modern and creative and sexuality and she hates acronyms. She hates almost everything. Grandma told me she doesn’t know how Mom was able to stop ranting long enough to get pregnant with Gord. She compared impregnating Mom to creeping up to the edge of an active volcano that you accidentally thought was inactive. She says Mom does the emotional work for the whole family, feeling everything ten times harder than is necessary so the rest of us can act normal. Grandma doesn’t believe in privacy and thinks everything private is hilarious because she was the youngest kid to be born into a family of fifteen people. Na oba! she’ll say when you’re in the bathroom. Look at you sitting all by yourself in this little room with your pants around your ankles, that’s priceless! Grandma’s dad forgot what all his kids were called and accidentally gave Grandma the same name as one of the older kids. Grandma’s mom used her as a form of birth control by putting Grandma next to her in bed for seven years. After seven years Grandma’s mom entered menopause so she was safe, and Grandma could go sleep for the rest of her childhood in the hallway.

Remember that woman, that friend of mine, who donated her head? Grandma said yesterday. Well, she’s dead. Almost every day Grandma gets a call about someone she knows being dead. This morning Grandma was watching the Blue Jays highlights and she said Vladimir Guerrero reminded her of a good friend of hers in junior high, Tina Koop. She’d just stand casually at home plate, not in a batting stance or anything, and hit a homer every time. I said Wow, what is she doing now? She’s dead, said Grandma. That’s how Grandma talks about her friends. She doesn’t scream about it. She doesn’t even cry. The only thing she and her friends talk about on the phone is dying. Grandma’s friend Leona called her yesterday and said, You’ll never believe this but Henry Wiebe has agreed to be cremated. What! said Grandma. That’s priceless! You know why? said Leona. No, why? said Grandma. Because it’s cheaper! They laughed their heads off. And more stylish! They laughed even more. Leona said Henry Wiebe was always secretly wanting to be stylish and then he found out that everyone he knew was getting cremated. When Grandma got off the phone she told me it was funny because Henry Wiebe preached to everyone for more than fifty years that cremation was a sin, but then he came into direct contact with his mortality and notorious cheapness and need to be stylish and realized that he could save money and be stylish by having himself cremated. But he’ll be dead, I said, so how can he be stylish and save money? Grandma said, You just gotta know Henry.

You can tell when she gets phone calls about her dead friends because she pours herself an extra schluckz of wine to watch the Raptors and she stares at me for long stretches and quotes poetry at me even though I’m not doing anything, just sitting there watching the game with her. Dead men naked they shall be one / With the man in the wind and the west moon. On the days she gets the death calls she grabs at me when I walk past her and I know she wants affection, but I hate always having to be the embodiment of life. When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone. Usually I deke to the right when I pass her chair and she misses because she’s really slow, but then I feel bad and I walk really slowly past her again so she can grab me. But then she feels bad about having tried to grab me when I don’t want to be grabbed and so she doesn’t grab me and I have to sort of just plunk down in her lap and put my arms around her. She says she’s knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door and she is at 110 percent peace with that. She says when she kicks the bucket I should just put her in a pickle jar and go outside and play already.

Our next class was How to Dig a Winter Grave. Grandma said when she was a small kid she went to a funeral in North Dakota and discovered that all the people who died in the winter there had to wait around until the spring to be buried. I was horrified! said Grandma. She heckled the undertaker. They didn’t know how to dig a winter grave?! Here’s what you do, she said. Heat up coals and lay them on the ground until it melts. Dig up that layer of dirt. Reheat the coals and lay them down on the ground again until another layer of dirt melts. Dig it up. Keep doing that until you’ve got a six-foot hole. Done! You don’t wait until the spring to bury people. What nonsense! Let’s phone North Dakota to see if they’re still making people wait until the spring to be buried, I said. Let’s do it, said Grandma. I called the North Dakota Board of Funerals. The man said, Yes, that’s just how it is here. Delayed burials are a necessary evil in North Dakota.

Grandma likes to sit on the top step of our front porch and water the flowers and fall asleep in the sun. She tilts her head way back to feel the warm sun on her face. The instant she falls asleep she loses her grip on the hose and it flips all over the place and sprays her awake and then she knows she’s had her nap and also accomplished a household task. She sprays cops when they have their windows down and are cruising slowly past our house because she hates them after what they did when Grandpa died, and just period. When they get out of the car and walk up to her she says things like, Here comes Rocket Man! Send in the clowns! The cops smile because they think she’s just a crazy old lady. But she really means business. She hates them. She doesn’t want to hate anybody but she can’t help it and she isn’t even going to pray about it because she thinks God secretly hates them too. When they ask all the usual questions, she doesn’t say a word. She points the hose at their little armoured feet if even one inch of a boot is on our yard and forces them to back onto the sidewalk.