Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home (8 page)

I didn’t really think about what she was saying then. If I did, I shrugged it off as her being a little harder than necessary on Grandpa’s lack of conversational polish or on my mom’s newest husband’s uncouth Cudahy ways. I certainly never imagined that she spent her whole life married to a man she hated just so she could afford a better one for her daughter and her grandson.

The story, as I half remember, half imagine it—it was not a popular fairy tale growing up—starts with when she was a nursing student at Indiana University. She had caught tuberculosis and was quarantined in the TB ward where my grandfather, a med student, was doing his rotation. They hadn’t met before. With most of her ward mates being as attractive as anyone with consumption can be, he must have been a welcome sight.

After her release, my grandfather persuaded her to spend time with him, since he had a colleague’s old Hudson convertible at his disposal. It didn’t hurt, of course, that he was going to be a doctor, and that he had a some land up in Shelby County near her hometown of Pendleton, Indiana. When he asked her to marry him, however, she said no.

“He was good-looking enough, I suppose,” she said, “for the second son of a pig farmer.”

Gram spun the ice in her glass and watched it whirl.

“That was almost fifty years ago, if you can believe that.” She shook her head and held the empty glass. “Anyway, he asked for my hand.” She looked at the dark picture window, now covered with fluttering moths, and turned her mouth somehow both down and into a smile. “‘I don’t believe I care to’ is exactly what I said to that. I thought a very good deal of myself back then, as you might imagine.”

She shook her head and looked into her glass.

“But soon enough, well, everybody was joining the Army to improve their chances of staying stateside instead of being drafted and sent Lord knows where. Married couples got better picks and better accommodations, if you could call them that. They weren’t, it turned out. Smartest thing I ever did was to say no to that man. But I didn’t say it enough, now, did I?”

She got up to close the shade on the picture window. “Not very nice of me to torment those poor moths,” she said, dropping the blind. “What they think they’re missing in here I’m sure I’ll never know.”

Now, in the weeks after Gram’s death, something was wrong with my grandfather. He was not sleeping. He was losing weight. He was drinking more and more. And he was having a harder time urinating. “Probably that goddamned prostate,” he said over the phone. “There never has been any cure for getting old.”

It wasn’t what we wanted, to lose both of them. But still, Mom and I felt an odd sense of relief. If Grandpa was really ill, surely the nonsense with his—former? current?—lover named Ruth would have to end. It was almost as if we could finally say, Thank God—now we know it can’t get worse.

All our lives, my mother and I knew my grandfather through his obstinacy, his meaty silence. He was not an uncomplicated man. When he was called in to work or went out to fetch pralines and cream, my mom, my grandmother, and I spent much of the time trying to figure out what he was thinking, what he would say, what would make him talk.

It was not entirely unpleasant. His words were simple and direct, and interpretation was generally uncalled for. He said what he meant, leaving little cause for wonder. I have inherited his sometime stoniness, and hear him through my reticence.

That all changed after Gram died. Not with him and me: between us talk was business—good business—about school, about work, about books—but business nonetheless. Then, within days of Gram’s death, bouts of loquaciousness came over him. His thoughts were as odd as they were suddenly frequent—both because they were what they were, and because they were at all.

One night, Grandpa, Bob, and I were waiting for my mom and Jenae to meet us at the Grandview Inn in Waukesha for dinner. It was two days after the funeral, and Jenae and I would be leaving for Utah soon. It seemed like a good idea to get out of the house. My mom had to do the flowers for somebody else’s funeral that afternoon, and Jenae went to help, so the three of us sat, womanless, at the bar. We ate pretzels and watched a recap of the Masters. There was nothing to talk about except when were Mom and Jenae going to get there. My grandpa ordered a second gin on the rocks—never a good sign.

“Do you know,” he said, staring up at the TV, “how long it’s been since I had sex?”

I thought I may have confused something Dick Enberg said on the overhead TV. Bob did not show any signs of hearing—which was not unusual: he too was an elderly man, only a handful of years younger than my grandfather. I looked at Grandpa. He was watching the TV. I looked at the TV. Golf. Nothing but golf. Green fields and putters. I said nothing.

The words continued to wrap around the inside of my skull —
Do you know how long it’s been since I had sex?
—as though a teenager were toilet-papering my head.

“No,” I said softly.

He just shook his head.

Shortly thereafter, my mom and Jenae showed up and the maitre d’ took us to a table with six chairs. My mom sobbed into a napkin while a busboy got rid of the extra chair.

“It’s a sickness,” my mom had said. “He’s a sick man.”

With Gram cremated, and me safely back in Salt Lake City, my mom began to tell me things. Some things that she had known. Some things that she was just discovering. Things that both of us could very well have gone without knowing.

It all started the night when Gram got suspicious enough to pack my mom, twelve years old at the time, into her Buick and drive her all around Pekin looking for his bottom-of-the-line Porsche in the driveways of various women. Pekin was and is a small, chatty city, one where secrets were as poorly kept as they were prolific. My mom couldn’t get down low enough in the passenger seat.

Now, she told me, there are at least three women.

Ruth was sixty-something. She was a radiology tech back in Pekin. She lives with her daughter in Indianapolis, and while no one knows how long it had been since they’d seen each other, as soon as Gram died, Grandpa started talking to her and flying out to see her. They’ve been having an on-again, off-again affair for decades. Ten years longer, in fact, than I have been alive.

Lorraine was in her seventies. Quite soon after Gram died, my mom decided Grandpa needed some age-appropriate company and tried to set him up with a few of her elderly neighbors and customers. Better than Ruth, she thought, who was about the same age as my mom. My grandfather went out with five or six ladies within a couple of weeks but found all of them, except Lorraine, boring and self-absorbed. “All they want to talk about is their goddamned angina,” he said. “You’re old,” he told them. “What do you want me to do about it?”

And then there was Tonya.

Tonya was a nurse’s aide who helped take care of Gram three days a week. This was in the last few months, when a squad of helpers settled into the condo. Nurses, nurses’ aides, social workers—they were all good women, all with empathetic eyes and pursed lips, but they turned my grandparents’ home into a kind of field hospital, and as much as we wanted them gone, their final absence would mean only one terrible thing.

Tonya smelled like a bowling alley and had a swagger that was at once undermined and exaggerated by her scrubs, which had butterflies on them. The other nurses’ aides stayed busy and moved quickly, as if they might wreck the furniture if they lit upon it. After Tonya got Gram into bed, she’d plop down on the couch or on Gram’s own chair, kick her feet up on the coffee table, and reach for the bowl of nuts.

“Jesus,” she’d say, “that’s a lot of work.”

Tonya came to the funeral with her ex-husband/now-boyfriend. She wore a yellow dress fit for an Easter pageant, and the two of them gamboled through the narthex as though they were selling Fort Lauderdale time-shares. A week after the funeral, she started coming around again, at three in the afternoon, just like she used to, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

“She says she’s worried about me,” my grandfather explained. “It’s just for a little while.”

“She’s a goldbagger,” my mom said to me. “A golddigger—whatever. I don’t like it one bit.”

It was May, and Gram had been gone a month, and I admitted to my mother that I didn’t like it either. “But he’s
Grandpa,
” I said, as if a de facto statement of his relation to me would at once describe and prescribe, render him back to the quiet elderly man who always had batteries for my toys, who laughed out loud at Victor Borge, a man for whom a foxtrot is damned near reckless.

I was supposed to be the smart one in the family. My mom wanted to know now what everything meant. And because you can only say “I don’t know” for so long, I did what I have done most of my life: made shit up.

“We’re all dealing with loss in our own ways, Mom,” I said. My voice was draped in tweedy condescension. I was a teacher, a doctoral candidate; I knew what I was talking about. I was
smart.

But that was bullshit. There are times when communication should be illegal, subjects absolutely forbidden. This was certainly one of them, and I’m using it here as a dramatic expository backdrop for my own life story. I didn’t know what to do then, and I don’t know what to do now, but we need to believe in something—if not our actual lives as they are lived, then at least the stories we can distill from them.

But to my mom I talked about pain the way Kant talked about music, which is to say, briefly and without regard to the fact that it has its own life, its own categorical imperatives.

“Think about it, Mom,” I said. “He’s displacing all the energy and time and life he had put into caring for Gram into something new, something that makes him feel necessary again. It’s a terrible thing,” I told her, “to feel useless.”

It is true, what I said. It is false.

“I know, Matt,” she said. “Jesus Christ, do I know.”

My mom kept setting Grandpa up with her golf-league widows, and one by one my grandfather dismissed them to their knitting. All the while he was flying back and forth between Milwaukee and Indianapolis to see Ruth. Tonya was “stopping by” who knows when or how often, except that the crystal ashtray on his coffee table, usually filled with peanut M&M’s, was lately choked with cigarette butts, and the recycling bin in his garage was overflowing with cans of domestic beer he never drank.

Meanwhile, his doctor expressed some concern over Grandpa’s prostate, and he had been scheduled to undergo radiation therapy in lieu of surgery. I was useless in Salt Lake, but my mom was confident it would turn out to be a good thing.

“I know it’s terrible,” she told me, “but I think it’s what we need. It’ll knock some sense into him. And he won’t be able to take care of himself, so I will, and I promised Gram—she made me
swear
—that I wouldn’t put him in a home. I said I’m going to take care of him,” she said, “and that’s what I’m going to do.”

One day in June, I found myself talking to my grandpa on my cell phone. I was driving on 11th Avenue, well above the Salt Lake Valley floor, and that day it smelled of sulfur and smoke and the air was a hazy yellow-brown from a wildfire north of Bountiful, where I taught a class. Heretofore in my life, wildfires were what happened in wildest Montana or in the thankless San Bernardino Mountains. They were wilderness fires. They weren’t supposed to sneak up on you while you were commuting to work.

“Well, I guess you should know,” Grandpa said without preface or segue. “The big news here is that Tonya and I are pretty serious.”

This was six, maybe seven weeks after Gram died.

It was over a hundred degrees. My truck was already near overheating, the air was the color of punishment, and my grandfather was telling me something about a woman who eats cigarettes and shoe leather.

“What does that mean?” I asked. “‘Serious.’” There was a stop sign. It made sense. I knew what I was supposed to do.

“Well,” my grandpa said, terse and cornered. “I guess it means that we care an awful lot about each other, Matt.”

“Okay,” I said. “I don’t know that I understand.”

I had always fancied myself a pretty empathetic guy. A writer. A waiter. A teacher. Someone who knew how to listen and let people know that I was listening without being ostentatious about it. At this moment, the sonic experience of my listening must have sounded like a needle bouncing and scratching near the spinning center of a record.

“You know, Matt,” my grandfather said. It was his own teacher’s voice. The voice that had told me such things as
Take the club back as far as you can, and then take it back another foot.
“What all men really want,” he said, “is a trophy wife. I guess you know that.”

I don’t remember the end of that conversation. I don’t remember how I arrived at school. I don’t remember how I taught grammar, syntax, and style for an hour and a half.

I do remember having to stop several times on my commute to add coolant to my overheating, ancient Land Cruiser. And I do remember the fire. At least I think I remember the fire. Something was on fire that whole summer. I remember the smoke. I remember the swirling, sepia skies. I remember those hopelessly little planes swooping down, dumping tiny buckets of water on a fire the size of a mountain.

ON OUR STREET
in The Avenues, kids ride garbage cans down the mile-long hill, steep as a luge run. They’re tall, barrel-shaped cans with two wheels on the bottom and an attached lid on top, and the kids jump inside them as though into a sleeping bag, aim feet-first downhill, and torpedo out of sight. From 11th Avenue to 3rd, there are no controlled intersections on our street, so whether you’re in a garbage can or on a skateboard or any other wheeled vehicle, you’ll be doing sixty by the time you hit the first stop sign.

In the nine or so months that we’ve lived there, I have called 911 for accidents three times from my porch. Also, the people who lived in our apartment before us (they bought a house a couple of blocks away in hopes of rejuvenating their marriage) are getting divorced. And their dog, Kilo (yes, as in kilogram—the husband smoked a lot of dope), recently got hit by a car. The guy’s dog in the apartment next to ours also got hit by a car. The guy was an artist, already divorced, and his current girlfriend is clinically insane and has poured mineral spirits on one of his paintings and threatened to burn the whole place down. Jenae is convinced our apartment is haunted. I don’t argue. Ghost or no ghost, there’s certainly a disturbance and things are getting worse and it isn’t just our apartment.