Fight Night(4)

I don’t know why saying bowel movement and stool is better than vag and piehole. It doesn’t matter what words you use in life, it’s not gonna prevent you from suffering.



Two weeks ago Grandma gave her Winnipeg Jets sweatpants to a guy who came to the door and today when Mom and I were walking home from therapy we saw that guy sitting on the curb outside the 7-Eleven wearing them and singing “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” Then we looked even closer and we saw that Grandma was sitting on the curb too and also singing “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” Grandma wasn’t wearing her track suit or cargoes, she was wearing a short skirt and sitting with her legs apart because it was hard for her to sit on a curb and I could see her underwear, which gave me my nervous tic of coughing. Grandma loves to be naked. She proudly tells the same story to every new person about how she inadvertently did a strip tease for a guy in Mexico City and he really, really enjoyed it. Grandma and Mom argue about Grandma giving things away, but Grandma says after the doctors killed almost everyone she loved she had to ask herself how she would survive grief and her answer was Who can I help? Grandma says doctors killed her family. Doctors killed my husband. Doctors killed my sister. Doctors killed my daughter. When she says that, Mom quietly tells me not to say anything except yeah, it’s true. Or, I agree with you, Grandma. You’re right. If Mom or I say anything else, like how can that be or that’s an exaggeration or anything like that, Grandma will erupt and probably have a heart attack because she already has so much obsolete hardware in her chest and a long scar that runs down almost her entire torso like a zipper. Grandma says doctors killed everyone when she’s mad or when she’s drinking Mom’s special rum from Italy, which is just ordinary Canadian rum that Mom poured into a special Italian bottle. Sometimes Grandma cries. She feels guilty. Then Mom has to sit down and hold Grandma’s hands and run through every scenario with her to make her see that she’s not. Grandma only loves Dr. De Sica. He’s young and handsome and Italian. He’s keeping her alive. He checks in on her. When the phone rings Grandma says oh, is that my De Sica? When she goes to his office she acts tough. She lies. So De Sica has to guess what’s wrong with her.

When I help Grandma get undressed for her shower I run my finger down her scar and go zzzzzzzzip! Step out of your skin, ma’am! She sits on a plastic shower chair that Mom found in someone’s garbage—when Mom brought it home Grandma said ha ha, obviously someone around here bought the farm—laughing and laughing and I lather her up with lavender French soap her friend William gave her for helping him fight his landlord and write a letter to his arrogant brother. I have to lift up her rolls of fat to get in the creases and even wash her giant butt and boobs and the bottoms of her hard, crispy feet and her toes which twist around each other. Then I have to soak up the three inches of water on the bathroom floor so she doesn’t slip and fall because that would be the end, my friend, she says. Then I dry her off and brush her soft white baby hair and put the bobby pins back in to pull it away from her face because Mom gave her a ridiculous fashionable haircut called a Wispy Silver Bob that goes in her eyes, and put her hearing aids back into her ears which I hate doing because you really have to push them in there hard and I think I’m hurting her even though she says I’m not. And I have to help her get dressed in clean cotton underwear—I always have to tell her to put her hand on my back for balance so she doesn’t tip over when I’m scrunched around her feet trying to get them to go into the holes of her panties—and her track suit or her cargo pants which she likes because they can carry all her painkillers and her nitro spray and her whodunnit, which this week is called FOE, and extra hearing aid batteries around with her. Then I find her red felt slippers and her glasses which I clean with my breath and the bottom of my t-shirt and put a fresh nitro patch on her arm which blasts dynamite into her veins and I hold her hand all the way to her bed taking slow, slow steps because she’s dizzy from the heat of the shower and the exertion of laughing so hard.

When she starts snoring I sometimes smoke a Marlie from Mom’s pack that she stores in the top drawer of her dresser for the goddamn glorious day she’s not pregnant with Gord and not so exhausted. I go out on the back deck and take just a couple of puffs and I look at the sky. Or I throw clothespins into a pail and try not to miss. If I miss, you’re not coming back. If I get them all in, you’re coming back. I started with the pail in my lap so it was really easy not to miss but then it seemed too easy a way to make you come back and then you didn’t come back anyway, so now I keep moving the pail further and further away.

Grandma is supposed to sleep with this machine on her face that has a tube and a box filled with water so she doesn’t stop breathing, but she hates it. Grandma doesn’t move when she’s sleeping but Mom flings her arms and legs around and talks and yells in her sleep. Grandma says Mom has a tiny bit of PTSD still, plus she’s searching. I asked Grandma what Mom’s searching for and she said, Oh, you name it. PTSD and searching don’t end when we’re asleep. Mom and Grandma know things about each other that they just have to contend with because that’s how it is. They don’t mind. They know each other. I found a letter that Mom wrote you six hundred years ago about the way she likes to sleep but obviously you never got it or maybe you got it but left it behind because you’re travelling light.

In case you want to know about how Mom likes to sleep I’ll copy it out for you. (Mom doesn’t know how to spell so I fixed the mistakes.)