One Step Remembered

Perhaps my father's best story involves the stepping on of some guy's foot while they were fighting.  My father, as he tells it, did not want to fight the guy, but the latter persisted and when it was apparent that no resolution could be found, my father stepped on the guy's foot, punched him in the face, then, when the guy tried to step back-and he couldn't-my father punched him again. Knocked that piss-ant out cold.  He hasn't fought since, or so he says, and to this day none of us knows if that famous step was an accident or an ingenious piece of street-fighting savvy.  I used to think it mattered, but I've stopped wondering.  He knocked that piss-ant out.  My father did that.

Lightning

I am in the closet with my grandmother.  I call her Gram.  My mother and her brothers call her Ma.  With no light in the closet we are alone among the coats.  She was cooking when the thunder started--rubbing the skin of an eight pound turkey--so her hands are slick with butter.  She's afraid of the lightning and spends most storms in the closet since, as a child in Ireland, she saw her brother struck down and killed.  I know this from my mother because Gram never speaks of it.

The closet smells like leather, like the inside of a boot, and Gram and I are holding hands as if we are siblings, as if I'd been born in Ireland and not in some American town.  And while I've seen death--my own father's--I've never seen someone die, or seen the smoke come off someone's skin.  Because of this, I am calm, or at least I pretend to be.

In the woolen darkness we do not speak.  She cannot put words to her terror, but I stay with her and squeeze her hands when the whole house shakes from the storm. We are in the closet for fifteen minutes or so before Vincent, her youngest, comes home.  He knocks hard on the closet door and she doesn't like the sound.  I want to take him by the throat, but he's a miner and much too strong.  "Ma," he says, "you're safe in the house.  Jesus would you come on out."  

He complains about his dinner, about the turkey uncooked by the stove, and when my anger speeds my pulse, she tries in her way to calm me.  I have distracted her with my temper, which seems to work for a moment.  She knows, as do I, that it's better to let Vincent holler. 

And then a strange thing happens.  I start to hum "Danny Boy," one of two Irish songs I know, and instead of settling down, Gram begins to cry.  At first it's just a sniffle, but then she trying not to sob.  I ask her why this makes her cry, thinking only after I've started that her brother might have done the same (perhaps his name was Daniel), but she doesn't answer.  Not at first.  She drops her hands from mine and wipes her eyes with her apron.  Then, still shaking, she finds my ear with her short-nailed thumb and begins a whisper in her thick Irish brogue. 

 

She tells me that before she left the Old Country to come to the States, she had loved someone.  It was a silly love, she says, the kind only young girls have, and the boy used to sing her a song whenever they were alone.  Not "Danny Boy," but something no one sings anymore.  "How I miss that place," she says.  "My people are all buried there."  She takes my hands again as the thunder crashes outside.

In ten minutes we will come out, both with buttered hands, and if my uncle even says one thing, if he looks at her like she's a child, then I will go for his throat and squeeze until I've cracked his windpipe.  Then he will do the same, only much much worse, but the beating I'll take will be worth it.

Expiration Date

Here's where we differ: I won't drink milk after the expiration date and she will.  A fine match, I'm sure, though we're screwed when the cottage cheese goes over.  She doesn't eat cottage cheese.  Candles are another matter--scented candles, the kind that harken back to my childhood, the same candles that stir my memory bringing back babysitters and the aunts who must've burned such candles themselves.  She can't stand them.  I mean she can't be around them without sneezing.  Allergic.  But I'm not allergic to olives, so what's my excuse?  Kalamatas make me gag, not sneeze.  So what are we left with?  Chocolate.  Well, that's an easy one.  Beer and most wine.  The West Wing and Evolution.  

I took her to a basketball game, made her wear the t-shirt, and she cheered, asked questions like "Why do they keep shooting from there when they keep missing?"  What could I say?  Apparently formal logic does have a place in sports.  She was a good fan, dancing with the rest of the crowd, slapping me five after dunks and swats.  And where have I returned the favor?  I don't leave abruptly anymore?  I call when I'm going to be late?  I try not to raise my voice, to become angry when she asks for footnotes?  I say, "Clinton was leading by double digits this summer and now she's on the ropes," and she asks me, like I should have remembered the source, "What poll was that?"  I say, "That national poll.  The important one," and she wants to know which one specifically, but I can't remember because how am I supposed to recall the names of polls when we are in bed and my brain has turned off and hers is still at full speed.  The woman wants citations for Christ sake.  

And yet, when I wake up and she is there (on her 1/3 of the bed), her mouth slightly open, the slow breath moving through her lips; I know that I can put my feet on hers, that she will not be angry.  I can rub her head and she will purr in her own way, as if she were some lithe cat with freckles, and it's on these days that I rise and down my pill, keeping it between my teeth until I get to the fridge where the milk is past due, and damned if I don't drink it. How many women can do that?  How many freckled women?

Guillotine

Imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon a guillotine in my attic.  I seldom visited the place, thinking it full of pink insulation which had, when I was young and thought the stuff like cotton candy, cut my little tongue on a mouthful.  I had no use for the attic considering ours was a one-story house with an  angled roof, the height of which I'd determined would prevent a suitable room, a place where my friends and I could hide and play and keep magazines and such.  A place to drink Scotch because my dad had loads of it and we, my friends and I, took dares seriously then.

The guillotine was near the front of the house, where the roof was at its highest pitch, and the tall structure was covered, as one might cover a guillotine, with sheets and blankets.  It was surrounded with oil paintings and boxes of puzzles I had never been able to finish.  How my parents (or sister) had acquired such a thing, I'll never know; nor how they hoisted it into the attic through the small window in the ceiling.  But how is less important than why, at least until I understand.  Why was it there?  My father cannot speak French and my mother, highly unread and easily put to sleep, would not know such an instrument if she had built one herself. It must have been my sister then who, at three years younger was ambitious as a fox and never minced words about her displeasure at our family, encouraged her squat friends to lift the damned thing over their heads into the pink clouds of sharp/soft fiber.  

Where she got the thing--assuming, of course, she did--and how and why no longer interest me. I am in the instrument now, my head in the space for heads, my hand strangely on the pull-rope.  I have touched the blade and it is dull, except if one were to run a finger down its edge, as one might a car door window, and do it with a measure of speed, then it would leave a mark, perhaps draw blood.  With this knowledge I have "assumed the position"; I have "stepped up to the ledge and let go of the railing."  Perhaps from where you sit this seems a strange situation; dire, if you have any learning at all.   For me, however--and I won't say I was lured--the seduction to such a predicament comes entirely from within.  

The voice is not French, as some might assume, nor does it have a recognizable tongue.  It urges, even pulls if the feet stall, until you are face down in your attic, your head like a waiting cigar; until the hand yanks the rope and you hear the blade sliding downward, guided by someone's woodwork, and you realize what a mistake you've made and how your father was wiser than you thought and your mother, however much she spoke on the phone, had bore you with few strings attached, strings cut at last by your sister.