Grandma and the Girl
Thanksgiving Day, 2001, a floppy-haired cherubic man-boy stands outside his mother's childhood home in Moweaqua, IL, smoking a cigarette, wondering how in the world the Dallas Cowboys ended up starting Ryan Leaf on national television, taking in the considerable pleasure of a snowy holiday at home. He pauses to notice a squirrel scampering in the distance. He never sees squirrels back in New York City, and he cocks his head in the same way the squirrel is cocking his, and they look at each other, and there is a tiny moment of recognition, two displaced beings just trying to find their way in the world, just trying to get a nut.
He is pondering this vague, tenuous and likely nonexistent connection when his grandmother, a tiny woman of about 78 years, smacks him in the back of the knee with a folding chair, crumpling him to the snow.
"You're not coming home for Christmas?" she barks. "You're ignoring your family for some hussy from New Jersey? A hussy with a big ass?"
His grandmother dyes her hair jet black to "impress the boys" at the high school where she volunteers to oversee afterschool detention in the cafeteria. She is looking down at him, suddenly very tall, and he hopes the big-assed hussy, who is indoors explaining intricate makeup procedures to his little sister, has not overheard them. And his knee hurts.
"Well, Grandma, I'm sorry," he says. "I promised her that if she came to Illinois with me for Thanksgiving, I'd spend Christmas with her family in Jersey."
His grandmother is not chewing tobacco, but it seems as if she should be. "That girl doesn't like you, she just likes your money," she spits, a strange declaration considering the boy hasn't been able to legally write a check in New York County for months. "You can see it in her eyes. She's an East Coast snob, a priss, and she'll milk you for every penny. You're too good for her."
The boy is quiet as he lifts himself from the snow and massages his knee. His grandmother is a lovely woman who has becoming a fierce protector of her kin since become a widow 14 years earlier, on Thanksgiving Day, in fact. He has never seen her quite this fiery-it's kind of funny, really-but he loves her anyway and, truth be told, is a little touched.
His grandmother's face softens as she returns to the role of fragile septuagenarian. "It's just that family is so important, and it won't be the same without you here," she says, sniffing. "You're so far away, and Grandma never sees you."
He hugs his grandmother and he sees his girlfriend inside, wearing a fluffy fur coat and hair that took her an hour to put together that morning, making everyone late to Grandma's. She is looking outside at the two of them. Is she touched by this familial bond? Is she aware that his entire family hated her instantly? Is she still insistent that his grandmother's holiday decorations are "tacky as fuck?" He does not know. She turns and walks away; more wine, surely.
Christmas Day, 2001, the boy, wearing something she made him put on, one of the four outfits she had laid out for him, is standing in a strange home in the South Jersey suburbs, discussing the Buffalo Bills with her brother, who seems as scared of her as anyone.
"Rob Johnson is the best quarterback for that team, obviously," the boy says, and before he has the chance to proselytize further, the girl grabs him by the scruff of his neck, like a dog, really, and drags him to a closet in her parents' spare room.
"See this?" she says when they arrive. She is holding a leather jacket the boy loves to wear. It is beaten up, torn, ratty and altogether exhausted, but he loves it. It is his jacket, the way that his dad had his chair. She has bought him a new jacket, of a shinier, more expensive vintage; she has always hated his jacket.
She puts the old jacket in the boy's face and whacks him with it like a newspaper on that dog's snout. "This is gone, you hear me, gone," she growls. "You need to start dressing like a real man, not a fucking slob, okay?"
He puts his tail between his legs and whimpers, trying not to pee on the carpet.
His Christmas gifts for her did not go over well. He is poor, this boy, so he had to scrape together what he could, considering her tastes. Candles, he thought: girls like candles. So he bought about 20 of them. Upon receiving them, she had remarked that they were cheaply made.
He bought her Victoria Secret's pajamas, not even the sexy kind; she would return them a week later to buy a lacy black bra he would never see.
He knew she valued big brand names, so he sold some old books he had lying around, nothing too valuable, just the hardcovers he doubted he'd miss, to buy her the only item with the Christian Dior name he could afford: a picture frame, with a picture of the two of them smiling and happy on the beach. He called this his "signature" gift, the centerpiece, the one that would finally, finally impress her.
When she opened it, her face steeled: "Oh. A picture frame. I guess that's why you wanted me to open this one last. Um, thanks."
He had written her a long letter detailing all his feelings for her in wordy and rambling, indistinct paragraphs. As of this moment, the one with his face in the jacket, she had not read it.
She takes the jacket away and, making sure he is watching closely, fires it into the closet, crowded with old board games, photo albums and socks. He looks at it for the last time. He wonders if he will miss it. He guesses he will. He asks her: "So, uh, what do we do with that coat now?"
Her face tightens into a snarl. "Hell, I don't care," she bites. "It can just sit in there. Let the cat shit on it, for all I care." They then head into the family room for a round of Trivial Pursuit with strangers.
Two weeks after Christmas, the girl, tired of the boy's floppy hair and his tendency to telepathically communicate with squirrels, tells him to go away, tells him he needs to grow up, tells him it's over. He musters up the nerve to ask her to mail him his old coat back, and, to his surprise, she does.
Christmas Day, 2003, a more clean-cut version of the boy, wearing a turtleneck no less, stands in the front yard of his home in rural Mattoon, IL, smoking a cigarette and petting his family dog, who is 15 years old and whose legs vibrate desperately every time she crouches to pee. She will be dead in six months, and it is unlikely, no matter how much he pets her, that she even realizes he is there.
His grandmother sees him outside and comes through the front door. Her hair grows blacker every year. She gives him a hug and asks him how his flight home was. He says it was fine, even though some man on the plane kept asking him how often he got laid, with that pretty face of his.
"So, I'm glad you actually made it back this year," his grandmother says. "No girls out there holding you back, keeping you from your family."
He grins, painfully, and says, no, no girls keeping him in New York, Grandma.
She brushes some lint out of his hair. "Well, you should find yourself a good girl," she says. "You're getting old, you know. Your grandma would love to see you get married sometime, after all. There aren't any nice girls out there in New York?"
He nods and says there are, Grandma, there are. He touches his knee absent-mindedly, and they head inside.