Texts from Bennett (12 page)

“Your mom didn’t have to attend school in the summer, but I did. I had to attend a summer school to help me read and do school-work good,” Lillian said. Her words were no longer slurring, she had life in her face, and her posture was near perfect.

“Well, it was a big pie on my face, for me. See, back then we didn’t have air conditioners, so it was really stuffy and hot, and the summer-school teacher was rotten to us kids. Wouldn’t even let us get a bottle of Coke to cool off with! I was in class with mostly simple kids. Kids who couldn’t tie their shoes or do arithmetic. How should I say it?”

My aunt, suddenly impish, looked both ways to make sure no
one could see her, cupped her hands over her mouth, and whispered, “slow kids.”

She straightened back up slowly. “Ya see, I hated it like anyone would. I wanted to be out at the swimmin’ pool, doin’ cannonballs with my friends. I didn’t wanna wear saddle shoes and a skirt all day till my mama come get me after work. ’Cause she always finish her flask of Scotch on the way to pick me up, so she’d be hollerin’ at me about how I was just the worst damned thing ever happen to her. Time I get home from summer school, I’d have to go to my room grounded.”

“Were you grounded every day of summer?” I asked.

She stared into space as if she were attempting to mentally play back every summer day she could ever remember, to take inventory and check to see if she was grounded or not, so she could provide the most honest answer possible to my question.

“Yeah,” she said.

I can’t describe to you how childlike and innocent her face and voice were when she said that. There was no fight in her voice. Her face slightly bubbled up into a morose melting pot of immature expressions.

“Why?” I asked, defensively.

“Well, my dad ain’t like me too much. I just come out that way when I was born I guess. People don’t like me around much, so I spend most of the time in a bedroom.”

“Did you just lie in your bed all day?”

“No. I didn’t have a bed.”

“You didn’t have a bed?”

“No. I used the couch or the hammock in the backyard when it was nice out.”

“You slept on a hammock?”

“Yeah,” she said with the same innocence as before. “But it was comfy. Who needs a bed when it’s nice outside? You can talk to the frogs and the stars.”

I reached forward and held both of her brittle hands in my palms. They felt stiff and stubborn. It was either from the sticky remnants of the George Clooney ice-cream sculpture that she’d created and
flattened in the bowl. Or it was a genuine surge of fear over whatever narrative was going on in her imagination. I could tell my grabbing her hands comforted her a bit. Which is good, because I had some difficult questions for her.

“So wait, whose bedroom did you go into if you didn’t have one and were sleeping outside?”

“Whoever ain’t usin’ their bedroom, I go in there and sit on the floor and draw pictures. Then if they want their room, I go to someone else room, or the laundry room mostly.”

“I see. What did you do in the laundry room?”

“Play with my pet bird, Hattie Pearl. Had her five years. She would chirp and sing songs about Vietnam with me. We stayed in the laundry room most days together. She was nice to me. Prolly the nicest friend of mine beside your mom. Until Daddy decided he hated my bird.”

“Wait, huh? What do you mean?”

“My daddy gave most of our pets the death penalty.”

“Huh?”

“Besides his mini-Chihuahua, Chili, he hated animals.”

“And what did that have to do with your bird?”

“Well, Daddy . . .” She popped up her eyebrows as if to say,
Hello? What do you think happened, genius?

“Oh boy.”

“Daddy think she was bothersome to me and what not. I annoy him a bunch ’cause it took me a little longer to get my times tables remembered than most students. One day he—”

I realized that I already knew the story. My mom had told me it over the years, and I didn’t know if knowing what was coming would make it easier to hear Lily’s version of events, or harder. I always knew the story took place in the laundry room, but what I didn’t know was that Lillian was essentially
exiled
to the laundry room.

Grandpa Mike was the fountainhead of our family’s cruel and unusual alcoholic dysfunction, and just about every seedling and grand-seedling that sprouted from his loins grew up with several of his urban legends already firmly implanted into their archive of memories and family tales. Unfortunately, all of this made you want to leave the theater before you even saw the ending.

The way I had always recalled this particular story was relatively soft-core in comparison to the other Grandpa Mike anecdotes.

The story goes: Grandpa Mike was grilling a couple of slabs of ribs out in the backyard for the family (himself) on a Sunday afternoon. It was a swelteringly hot July day, and a bout of cloudbursts and torrential rains had soaked the city a few days prior to that, so the humidity was miserable at levels that only Midwesterners can understand. The weathercock planted on the house’s pointed roof was hardly moving, if at all. It was horrid outside. The breeze was hot.

Grandpa Mike started getting drunk before the sun even rose that day. By afternoon, he was a violent sack of bones and booze. Lillian was secluded in the laundry room and ordered to study her multiplication tables. Upon hearing Grandpa Mike fumbling around and cursing in the kitchen, she stuck her head out and asked him if she could come play in the backyard with everyone else and have some tasty ribs.

Grandpa Mike stumbled into the laundry room and said, “Sure,
kid. You can come have some ribs. But you gotta recite your times tables. Every single one from one times one up to twelve times twelve. If you get ’em all right, you can come have some ribs and play. Hell, I’ll even let you play in the hose. But if you miss one . . . if you miss just one . . . you get flicked in the forehead.”

“Okay, Daddy, here I go. Ready, Daddy? One, two, three, go!”

She looked down at her math book and started reading from the multiplication grid.

“One times one equals one, one times two equals two, one times three—”

“
Why are you reading from your book, Lillian?
” he screamed, smacking the book out of her hands onto the floor.

Kitty (my grandmother) and Lillian’s three sisters, including my mom, heard the commotion from the lawn and ran into the house. When they got to the laundry room, Lillian was trembling with fear.

“Start again. No books. Same rules. Now! Go!” Grandpa Mike commanded.

“Uhhhhhhhm.” Lillian swallowed nervously. “One times one is two—”

“
One times one is two?!
” Grandpa Mike screamed. “
One times one is two?!
”

He flicked her in the forehead. She held her hands over her face and buried it into the corner behind her.

“Michael, you leave her alone. God damn it.
You hear me?
” Kitty, also drunk, was yelling at Grandpa Mike.

“Quiet! Fuckin’ pig tell me what to do in my house! She needs to learn! She’s stupid! She’s
no good,
” Grandpa Mike yelled, then grabbed Lillian’s arm and spun her around to face him again.

“
Again.
Do it right this time!”

“It’s okay, Daddy. I missed one. I better do my homework in the laundry room instead of play.”

“Again.
Now
.”

The sisters left the laundry room and quietly sat outside trying not to listen. They knew that trying to intervene would only make it worse for Lillian. Kitty knew it too. All they could do was hope he’d lose interest and leave her be.

“Okay, Daddy. I’mma try now,” Lillian said. She began mouthing the equations in her head and using her fingers to keep track of the numbers. “Okay . . . here comes. One times one is one. . . . I know that, silly me from before! One times two is—”

“Stop using your fingers to count!” he screamed, and slapped her on the top side of both hands.

Lillian’s bottom lip was shaking terribly. She was mortified of even speaking again and was on the verge of bawling.

“I don’t want yummy ribs, Daddy, I’ll just go ni-night now. I’m tired,” Lillian pleaded while trying to force a yawn.

“Again. Do it right. You’re not going to be an idiot under my roof.
You hear me?
How can you make it in the world as an idiot? Now, twelve times twelve. Do twelve times twelve and you can have barbecue with us,” Grandpa Mike said.

“
Stop picking on your daughter, you heartless bastard!
” Kitty screamed, before taking the flask of vodka she was holding and chucking it at Grandpa Mike’s head. The bottle somersaulted through the air, missed Grandpa Mike by three feet, and crashed into Hattie Pearl’s birdcage, busting its thin wooden frame into pieces.

The bird floated out of the twisted, broken frame of cage remnants and began nervously circling around the laundry room. Lillian was still a little kid and too short to reach Hattie Pearl’s flight radius. Even when she tried jumping up and down with her arms stretched into the sky, saying, “Come here, bird! Come to me, birdie!” she couldn’t reach Hattie Pearl.

Grandpa Mike, however, took matters into his own hands. No pun intended. He saw his daughter desperately jumping and reaching for the bird.

“Well, shit. I see why you’re so damn dumb. You spend all day playing with a stupid fuckin’ bird instead of studying.”

He backhanded the tiny bird into the wall, instantly killing it.

Now, Lillian’s version of the story stops right there: Hattie Pearl dies. Beyond that, all Lillian can conjure up are vague, scattered memories due to justifiably blocking out 90 percent of her life. My mom’s version of the story, however, while factually identical, and much easier to swallow due to the natural, inadvertent, emotional
verve of Lillian’s version of the story, extends one beat longer. And when Lillian abruptly quit telling me her version of the story, my mom’s version of the story continued on in my head, and the image that was permanently lasered into my mind as a child, every time my mom told her version of the story, displayed itself in full color and high resolution.

After Grandpa Mike backhanded Hattie Pearl into the wall, Lillian looked up at him, and with her bottom lip positioned into a lumpy frown, cried, “If you love me, then how come you kilt my bird? I love you and wouldn’t kill your bird!”

I stood up to leave the room for some fresh air, or something to shake the sullen blob of goop I had morphed into. The only thing I felt but pure sadness was a weird sense of joy. I just wanted to hug Lillian and tell her I was happy she was on my couch, safe with me.

My physical composure had become fragile. I felt so much hurt for her. Of course Bennett turned out how he did. Of course she ended up dating a guy like Tim. Instead of acknowledging that she was a baby birthed from a damaged pneuma, who needed parental patience, special understanding, and deeply therapeutic massaging of her frontal and parietal lobes, they neglected, and eventually, abandoned her.

“I’m shaken up right now,” I said to my aunt, who seemed to be back to staring through a pharmaceutical narcosis. “No one should have to go through that. No one. You’re such a nice person. You shouldn’t have had to experience such bad summers.”

Suddenly, her muscle fibers tightened as she snapped out of the pill haze completely. Her irises reengaged her surroundings. Her face went from a vampiric pale to a golden clay tone. She was operating at full physical, mental, and cognitive potential again.

“Wait, Macky! You didn’t let me tell mah story. I loved the summertime. Did I say summer was bad? I loved summer.”

“Oh. Well, no, I guess not. You started to talk about my mom and the schoolhouse a bit, but I thought you were done.”

“No, I’m not done!” she said and pulled me back onto the couch. “See, your mom. She was the littlest sister, but all of us loved her so much. She was my best friend. She knew how hot it get up in
that damn schoolhouse. So she take twenty-five cents from Daddy’s change cup. Then she sneak her lil’ behind out the house while Daddy sleepin’. And she go to Mr.Lou’s ice-cream stand and get a strawberry cone and bring it to the schoolhouse! Every single day unless she was runnin’ errands about town with Mama.”

“You’re kidding?” I said, wide-eyed. “Really?”

“Well, I had to get permission to use the latrine. And she would wait outside the window till I open it and say, ‘One strawberry cone for Ms. Lily!’ Sometimes it would melt by the time she gave it to me, ’cause the teacher ain’t give me the hall pass till I threaten to pee my britches. But not always. Sometimes it be nice and cold and ready to munch! I ate it right there in the bathroom. Never got caught!”

I missed my mom. Not entirely because of Aunt Lillian’s stories. I just felt like my mom passed away when I was too young to truly cherish how good our relationship was. Aunt Lillian didn’t have a mean bone in her body, and after really conversing with her, and absorbing so many of the similarities she had and still has with my mother, I was very relieved that we were under the same ceiling.

Aunt Lillian slipped back into an opioid stupor and began slurring her words again. It was equal parts breathtaking and bizarre to see how telling narratives about emotionally volcanic memories could bring a sharp, serene, completely sensical person out of Aunt Lillian.

She wasn’t quite making sense to me, but she definitely wasn’t confusing me anymore.

I drank too much that night and woke up submerged in a post-wine katzenjammer the next morning. My head was buzzing, and every fiber of my body slowly shriveled and wilted as the alcohol exited it. My body was uncomfortable. So quite appropriately, as any dehydrated, hungover lush would spontaneously do at 7 o’clock in the morning: I decided to mow my lawn. I had just gotten a lawn mower for my birthday from my dad.

Harper was still asleep, so I flipped her arm off of me, snuck out of bed, threw on some old clothes, and ninja-prowled downstairs to the garage. I wasn’t sure if it was too early to start mowing my lawn or not, but I at least wanted to make sure my new lawn mower was going to function properly. I didn’t have a backyard as a kid, so I’d never actually mowed a lawn before, and I knew absolutely nothing about my lawn mower. I wheeled it out onto the driveway and gave it a top-to-bottom examination.