As You Were Page 11

  It’s impossible to keep you segregated, so she combines classes for everything, even quiet time, which is like nap time, but all she does is turn out the lights, and you put your head on the desk for a while. That’s when it’s the teacher’s turn to stare out the window and do nothing—all to the musical stylings of one kid who plays the piano for thirty minutes. “Chariots of Fire” over and again, if memory serves.

  All this makes the first grade great, but the second grade redundant. Still, there are times when the teacher needs to separate you: usually when a bored mind cannot be properly busied, so you go out into the hallway until she can decide what she should do with the two of you.

  You sit across the hall by the boots and backpacks and snowmobile suits of the kindergarten class, while this other unnamed character sits beneath the construction paper mural made by the whole split class. The mural is a giant purple octopus with a different student’s name written inside each of the suction cups glued along the length of the tentacles.

  Thanks to thirty-some seven-year-old abstractionists, it looks more like Cthulhu leering down at passersby.

  Splayed out all across the granite floor between the two of you are colored pencils, crayons, markers, manila paper, and scissors. Somehow, the conversation turns to mothers. He says, “The octopus is your mom,” like he knows you don’t know who she is or where she is, or how she could be anybody, even an octopus. Or Cthulhu.

  He won’t shut up about it, so you throw markers at him, and miss him for the most part. He still won’t shut up, so then come the colored pencils. They bounce off the wall behind him or fall short.

  The teacher says not to say shut up, but be quiet doesn’t cut it when you really do mean shut up, and he still won’t zip his lips, so the scissors go next. Then he really won’t shut up. He screams my arm my arm my arm mixed with ow ow ow. Or is it my mom my mom my mom? Now he wants his mom and you think shit shit shit. Why is it always three? Yeah yeah yeah, beginning, middle, and end. But there is no end to his crying, and you know this won’t end well because he’s being a big baby about the scissors sticking out of his bicep, so you run to his side and do everything to shush him, but he won’t stop his bellyaching.

  The teacher can’t hear his cries courtesy of the concrete walls and her hammering on the upright piano in the back of the classroom, accompanied by the screeching of the songs the class will sing at the Christmas pageant. But you’re still fucked.

  Ed-the-janitor runs down the hall and sees you standing over some crying kid who is bleeding all over with a pair of scissors sticking out of his arm, so, naturally, you get knocked out of the way and on your ass.

  Ed-the-janitor has a flat top haircut—like you do—but his is a salt-and-pepper color. His eyes hide behind the yellow lens of his prescription shooting glasses, so you can’t see what color they are—not that pissed off is some sort of eye color. He pounds on Mrs. T’s door until she comes out into the hallway and sees what you did and grabs a handful of your hair and marches behind Ed-the-janitor, who scoops up the other kid and brings him to the nurse’s office.

  Ed-the-janitor leaves Mrs. T and the bleeding kid with a pair of scissors sticking out of his arm in the nurse’s office and takes you by the arm to go see the principal. The whole way there, you stare at the blurry blue letters—USMC with an eagle, globe, and anchor—beneath the coat of fur on his forearm.

  Sweat stings your eyeballs, and you blink, and blink, and blink, and the tattoo turns into a giant cross and the initials RT.

  Dad’s hands are clamped around your neck, cutting off the air, banging you against the back door in Grandma’s kitchen. He’s saying something, but it’s getting hard to hear, and you’re blinking your eyes slower now. Your fading consciousness convinces you it is the same as taking a deep breath. Something cats are said to do if they trust you. Your hands are clasped onto his wrists, but you are not fighting them as much as you are fighting gravity.

  Grandma Audrey and Debbie scream at him to stop: It was an accident It was an accident It was an accident. But he keeps on until your back breaks through the wood of the panel door, and it separates from the hinge. Frustrated, Dad lets you fall to the floor like some filthy rag he can’t believe he touched. It looks like he is out of breath as he grabs onto the doorframe with both hands, but then he stomps on your guts and nuts like he doesn’t want you to live long enough to have any kids of your own.

  This goes on until Grandma puts herself between the two of you and pushes him away. And surely there is more to tell, but when your brain is split between taking notes and shutting out the pain, you kind of turn out the lights and stare out the window, too.

  YABBA DABBA DO

  COMMODITIES ARE NOT A RAW material or primary agricultural product that can be bought and sold, such as copper or coffee. Commodities are why you stand in line at the community center on the first Saturday of every month. There you receive blocks of pasteurized cheddar cheese product that comes in the same sort of flimsy cardboard box the government uses for clips of Ml6 ammunition. You’d think your seven-year-old self could tell the difference between MREs and commodities, with those gallon tubs of peanut butter, boxes of instant nonfat dry milk, egg mix, seedless raisins, corn flakes cereal—all of which comes in nondescript white waxy cardboard packaging lined with aluminum, or something silver-colored. But then there are the rusted cans of carrots and green beans, along with the ones featuring the silhouettes of the animal supposedly inside:

  BEEF with juices.

  PORK with juices.

  One Whole Chicken with Broth without Giblets.

  There is bag after bag of sugar and flour, too. But being handed sticks of butter or tubs of margarine is not something there’s a memory of. Neither is ever being out of Crisco.

  If you’re lucky, the local grocery stores pitch in boxes of macaroni and cheese. Not Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, but the kind that doesn’t have a TV commercial.

  Sometimes there is a twenty-pound sack of potatoes or a five- pound bag of apples. Sometimes they’ve already gone soft. There is always the bread that has to go straight into the freezer, so it won’t go bad.

  Let’s not forget the farina: the flavorless, generic knockoff Cream of Wheat. Thankfully, there is always a big bowl of sugar on the table to fix its flavorlessness.

  Grandma takes her coffee black—no sugar—so she doesn’t care how much you put on your cereal, so there is always a little white crystallized island rising from the sea of milk in your cereal bowl. When the farina and fake corn flakes run out, there is a bowl of rice with milk and cinnamon to get you through until school serves something for lunch. The rice gets hard to eat after it turns cold. It’s harder to eat once you see the kids you can help for just sixteen cents a day eating the same thing on the television set.

  The Saturday after Halloween is when Grandma makes the first few batches of Christmas cookies. Thanks to her Betty Crocker cookbook looking like the collected works of Dickens, with dozens of dozens of recipes she’s scissored out of the newspaper sticking out of the pages, half serving as bookmarks, you never know what she’s going to make until it’s time to lick the beaters or roll out the dough when she says her hands hurt.

  Saturday morning is always one of solitude. It’s when you wake to watch cartoons before the rest of the house stirs.

  Friday night is when Grandma Audrey and Grandpa Bub spend the evening at the Moose Lodge doing their damnedest to outdrink one another, but that’s after they go to the grocery store. It’s almost winter, which means it’s too cold to take you and leave you out in the parking lot with the dogs. But, because it’s almost winter, it also means they can leave the food in the car and not worry about anything melting or defrosting in the back of the station wagon.

  They put the bags where your feet go when you ride in the rearfacing seat. The metal floor keeps everything cold, and laying the rear-facing seat down flat turns it into something of a makeshift cooler. But not bringing you with means Grandpa Bub will have to hau
l all the bags by himself. It also means you don’t know what they bought, so the joy of finding a box of Fruity Pebbles in the Tupperware cabinet the next morning is nothing if not worthy of note.

  It’s not the generic stuff that kind of looks like Fruity Pebbles, the stuff that goes stale halfway through the bag despite Grandma putting it into a Tupperware pitcher. It’s not that stuff you find, but Post Fruity Pebbles. Your favorite of all the cereals. Not the puffed rice cereal Grandma always gets, which is so bad the manufacturer doesn’t even bother naming it. Not the stuff with the consistency of week-old popcorn, but Fruity fucking Pebbles.

  Opening the cabinet and seeing the box is akin to discovering El Dorado.

  You pour a bowl and drizzle ice-cold milk over the top, foregoing the spoonfuls of sugar. It is, after all, wholesome, sweetened rice cereal—it says so right there on the box—so you savor every spoonful until every orange, red, yellow, purple, green, and berry blue flake is gone.

  The shitstorm that is the second grade fades away when the fruit- flavored tie-dyed milk splashes across the two thousand or so taste buds on your tongue. Chickadees sing their songs for you from their perches on the crabapple tree in the backyard while you drink down the last drop of milk.

  It’s that good.

  When Grandma comes downstairs, you spring to your feet, ignoring the cartoons, not even waiting for a commercial break, and wrap your arms around her, hugging her, thanking her, reminding her how Fruity Pebbles is your all-time favorite.

  Your words stop her patting the top of your head and cause her to march over to the Tupperware cabinet, where she sees you did indeed help yourself to a heaping bowl of Fruity Pebbles. Except they weren’t for you and now she can’t make her Christmas bars. But she still reaches for the rolling pin. Not the wooden one. The marble one. The one that has no other use than being ornamental, until the very second she uses it to crack your sacrum.

  The doctor calls it a sacrum; everyone else calls it your tailbone. And Grandma tells the doctor it wouldn’t have happened if you’d just slow down and walk down the stairs, rather than run.

  PAPER OR PLASTIC

  YOUR CHILDHOOD STINKS. MAINLY BECAUSE Grandma Audrey’s house sits east of the paper mill, west of the sewage treatment plant, and two blocks north of a crematorium. There’s nothing north of the neighborhood except the railroad tracks that bring in the trains filled with taconite pellets from the world’s largest open-pit mine, which leaves the sodomized land with a gaping hole where the Misaabe-wajiw once stood. The only good thing that comes from all this is when the taconite pellets bounce out of the hopper cars and onto the tracks. They’re like steel ball bearings the circumference of nickels and can take any window when launched from a wrist rocket.

  It’s a crapshoot as to what you’ll be breathing while walking to the grocery store, which is now your main chore since the overstep with the Fruity Pebbles. Seeing as how you can only buy as much as you can carry, some days you get the full bouquet by the third or fourth trip back and forth, depending on which direction the wind is blowing.

  The house is exactly three blocks from two different grocery stores. SUPERVALU to the west, which sits across the street from the high school, and Home Market to the east, which sits across the street from the elementary school. Home Market is basically a huge butcher shop. Most of what they sell comes by the pound or the slice. Other than that, they sell only a sprinkling of conveniences—never more than two or three of any one thing. Except for trading cards. You name it, they’ve got it: baseball, basketball, football, boxing, hockey, wrestling, Garbage Pail Kids. But you only buy the ones that come with a complimentary piece of Bazooka bubblegum.

  Nothing can ruin a day quite like a stick tumbling and shattering on the sidewalk. But on the other hand, when the white powder comes off the top card without it getting splattered with spit, there’s next to nothing that can sour the afternoon.

  Grandma sends you to pick up some bread and bologna one day, and for some reason, you decide to take a quarter and a couple of pennies from the leftover change to buy a pack of baseball cards—call it a shipping and handling fee.

  Grandma counts the change against what the receipt says she should have, and she screams about how she’s been robbed. She jumps out of her seat and says something about how she has to hide her jewels and runs up to her bedroom and stuffs the entirety of her jewelry box into her bra.

  She doesn’t hit you, though.

  Instead, she chain-smokes and rocks in her chair at the dining room table and says she doesn’t know what to do with you. It doesn’t stop her from sending you shopping with a handful of coupons and a pocket full of cash, oddly enough. All the cashiers at SUPERVALU learn your face and notice when you come back to return an item.

  When Grandma sends you to buy a bag of russet potatoes, you hang them from the handlebars and are too busy trying to get home lickety-split, like Grandma said, to notice the bag swings into the spokes when you turn a corner or pump the bike side to side to get going a little faster. The bag finally busts open about a half a block away from the house. The spokes hack off a half dozen or so potato chip-sized slices before a second potato slides from the bag, and you watch it take a turn around the wheel before it bashes into the forks and bends a few of spokes and sends you sliding across somebody’s grass.

  So much time has gone by that Dad stands on the front stoop looking for you, and when he sees you, he goes back inside and waits.

  After you wipe your feet, he takes the bag away and slams your face into the front door for wasting Grandma’s money. The second time he shoves your head into the door, you get the deadbolt smack dab in the side of the head. You don’t even get to say sorry. Instead, you slump down to his feet and bleed onto the welcome mat.

  While walking back to the kitchen, he notices you forgot the sour cream, too, and he lets the whole house know. When you don’t bother to move, he takes hold of your two feet, plants his boot atop your bladder and ball sack with such force you can’t help but piss your pants.

  When you still don’t get the hint to get up and go get the sour cream, he kicks you along the floor of the mudroom and down the steps of the stoop. You have to walk back to SUPERVALU and get the sour cream because you can’t stand to sit on the seat or push through the pain to pedal the bike, wobbly as the front wheel is now.

  LARGE PRINT

  UNCLE HAROLD SQUINTS TO SEE who his visitor might be, smiling a curious, welcoming smile when the shadow crosses the threshold of his new room. He sits in the dark every afternoon so his roommate can nap, no matter who the roommate might be.

  Navigating the room proves problematic until you see the neon orange vinyl chair glowing in the corner next to the bathroom door, beneath the television set. The same chair sits in the same spot in every room. This alone is enough to fill a fading memory with a bit of déjà vu.

  An episode of Matlock projects an array of disorienting, shifting shadows—a kaleidoscope of blue and white hues—none of which help to illuminate the face of the silhouette taking a seat a few feet from the foot of the bed.

  Uncle Harold sits and waits with sealed lips, quivering and clutching a dusty Bible.

  The citrus-scented antiseptic spray stings your nose when you sit. It brings to mind the death and disease and bouquet of smells that come along with the last moments of life, the scent the staff work so hard to candy-coat. It’s not like they’re striving for some Good Housekeeping award. This is just the last stop before the funeral home. This isn’t a retirement community plopped down amidst a Florida orange grove, but a hospice care facility in the shadow of an array of abandoned industrial monstrosities which once meant jobs but now whisper how Duluth is going the way of Detroit.

  You slip off your coat, drape it over the arm of the chair, clutch a Bible too.

  Uncle Harold releases the brake on his wheelchair and shuffles his feet, bringing himself closer to the neon orange vinyl chair an inch at a time. Seeing how long this is taking, you slide forwar
d and lean into the light.

  Surprises washes over him, makes his face fall, and he erupts into laughter, sounding something like a succession of hiccups. Genuine joy. A homing beacon from the years of your youth, along with Grandpa Bub’s smoker’s cough when you’d look up from the magazine rack and realize you were all alone.

  This is Great-Uncle Harold, but that sounds weird. It sits too long on the tongue. He’s Grandpa Bub’s brother—not Dad’s uncle—so, Great-Uncle Harold it is. To be technical.

  “Oh, Jeff. It’s good to see you. So good to see you.” He leans forward, patting your knee countless times before squeezing it and taking a second to peer into your eyes.

  “It’s great to see you, too. New room, I see.”

  “Yah, got here after lunch today.”

  “How was it?”

  “Gah...it’s no good. Nothing like my Harriet ever made,” he says, shaking his head, trailing off and doing what he can to swallow tears. “I can’t believe she’s passed,” he continues, “Sandy too. They were good girls. Good girls.”

  You never know what to say when he brings this up. What do you say to someone who lost his wife and daughter in the same summer to the same cancer?

  “That’s a nice picture of you and Auntie,” you say, pointing toward the dresser. “When was it taken?”

  “Oh...at church. When they took portraits of all the members. Right before her first surgery. About two years ago now,” he guesses, grabbing hold of the picture, wiping away the dust covering her face with a thumb, shaking all the while—not because of the ache in his heart, but because of the Parkinson’s. “I kept some flowers from the visitation, but they haven’t brought them over from my old room yet. Maybe tomorrow. You remind them on your way out, won’tcha, Jeff?”