Fight Night(3)

Grandma likes to tell Mom we’ve accomplished household tasks every day because Mom is having a complete nervous breakdown and a geriatric pregnancy which doesn’t mean she’s going to push an old geezer out of her vag, it means she’s too old to be up the stump and is so exhausted and when she comes home from rehearsals she’s all, God, what a mess, god you guys, what a dump, you can’t pour fat down the drain, these pipes are ancient, you can’t overload the toilet with toilet paper, why are there conchigliettes everywhere, can’t you two pick up a dish or put this shit away or have you ever even heard of household tasks? Mom’s latest domestic freak-out is that she always has to put all the food that’s in the fridge at the very outer edges of the racks so that it’s entirely visible to Grandma, otherwise Grandma thinks there’s no food because she can’t see it, and she doesn’t move things around to see the food in the back of the fridge and then she orders take-out or just eats ice cream or bacon or handfuls of cereal from the box. So now Mom lines everything up in a row on the outer edges of the fridge racks with labels like THIS IS LENTIL CHILI! EAT IT! THIS IS KALE SALAD! EAT IT! Grandma doesn’t eat anything green. Not a single thing, ever. It’s like Samson and his hair. He can’t cut it or he’ll lose his strength. Grandma can’t eat green things. She can detect green things in her food when Mom tries to hide them in there. I’m not going to spend my last five minutes on earth eating rabbit food! She takes a long time, like it’s an opera or something, after she’s detected the green things, to slowly pick them out of her food one by one and put them on the table beside her plate. Mom sighs and takes the pile and eats it herself but she never stops trying to trick Grandma and Grandma never stops not being tricked. Grandma won’t eat red soup. Mom made borscht for us and Grandma said I am not eating red soup. Why not? Because I don’t eat red soup!

Mom says to me, Don’t say up the stump, don’t say that thing about a skunk’s asshole, don’t say vag, don’t say shit tickets. And Mom says to Grandma, Use the sub-titles or top volume when you watch Call the Midwife, not both. Why would you use both! What difference does it make to you if I use both? It’s using too many of your senses at once! Na oba! It’s up to me how I use my senses! Grandma loses her hearing aids in the exact same places every day. I try to keep all her dead batteries in an old thyme tin to bring them to the right part of the garbage dump but yesterday Mom was so exhausted from her rehearsals and carrying Gord around 24-7 that she mistakenly shook the batteries into the spaghetti sauce and we had to pick them out at dinnertime and make tiny piles of them next to our plates, which in Mom’s case is next to piles of Kleenex from blowing her nose constantly.

At dinner Mom said she doesn’t know why she’s so tired all the time, the third trimester is supposed to be one of renewed energy. She doesn’t even have the energy to play Dutch Blitz. She said she’s supposed to have a burst of energy to clean and organize the house in preparation for Gord’s arrival. The burst is called the nesting instinct. I have it! I said. I’m the one who cleans everything! Mom rubbed my hair around and said, Oh, that’s so cute, you’ve got the nesting instinct. Which is obviously not cute. I don’t want to have instincts. I said Grandma, listen to this. First try, mister. Second try, mister, third try, mister, and … you’re out! Grandma didn’t hear me. She pretended to. Don’t try me, mister? she said. I shouted it again. Na kjint! said Grandma. She was still pretending. I shouted as loud as I could, and Mom said Swiv! Jesus fucking Christ!

There is the sound of continuous screaming coming out of Grandma’s bedroom from women having babies or from the babies themselves being forced to be born or from people being murdered or from people discovering the bodies of the murdered people. Grandma says British women sure scream a lot when they discover dead bodies. I would too, I told her. No, no, she said. It’s a body. It’s nuscht! Grandma rides her Gazelle for fifteen minutes while she’s watching her shows. She says hoooooo in between strides and afterwards, Goot, goot, goot. Gownz yenook. Only her dying and dead friends know her secret language. She takes lines from her shows and practices them on me all day with a British accent. Swiv, darling, we must make a dash for the continent!

Grandma said in Editorial Meeting that I should say “plug your piehole” silently to myself, if I have to, so I don’t get Mom riled up because Mom is city now and with Gord and everything. Grandma says that when Mom goes scorched earth our only hope for survival is to take cover in a different room and wait for it to blow over. For Pythia to stop ranting at Delphi. Grandma says I should try to turn Mom’s oracling into elegant hexameters like the Greeks did. She said a hexameter is a poem with a curse built into it.

Grandma has known Mom since Mom was born on the hottest day in history before the invention of fans and AC. The room was a furnace! said Grandma. Blood and fire! She said when Mom was born the doctor was so useless at removing babies from women that Grandma had to say to him would you please get your hands out of me and let me do this myself. Mom finally popped out angry and crimson-red, like a tiny Satan. When Mom goes scorched earth she swishes oregano oil around in her mouth to prevent her from saying horrible things she’ll regret and to boost her immunity even though there’s no scientific evidence that it does. Grandma told Mom today, before Mom went to rehearsal, that I hold it in when I’m doing the Sudoku in the morning and then I miss the boat. Mom said, What are you talking about, boat, and Grandma told her I have a fixation about finishing the Sudoku before I do anything, including Editorial Meeting and having a bowel movement, and then my stool retreats back inside me and colours my outlook for the whole day and is probably the thing that causes the Nike swooshes under my eyes. Swiv is sponsored by Nike? said Mom. Slay me. Mom stared hard at me like she was trying to see right through my skin to the piles and piles of built-up stool inside me. Then she said, Hmmm, just keep trying, Swiv. Just try to relax, sweetheart. She slid her thumbs along my Nike swooshes. She hugged me and then she left.