Grandma Fear
Donald Seahill
In the spring of 1983, when I was eleven, my mom spent a few months in rehab and work release, so I lived with my grandmother on North Maple Avenue in Rapid City, South Dakota, where my family’s from. My mother and I weren’t on speaking terms with my grandmother at the time. That made it awkward. I was also getting into lots of fights with other girls at school. Between the skipping and suspensions, I was “more trouble than I was worth.” This is quoting everybody.
My grandmother was a Catholic woman in her late fifties, sharper than I knew at first. She loved to bowl, although she prided herself for never–like some people–“bowling for blood.” Other things were more important, including visits from attendance officers, threats of citations and court visits, and the cost of the two stitches in my lower lip. Paying to fix Linda Looks Back’s broken glasses was my grandmother’s idea, once she got the girl’s name straight. Linda was Lakota.
My grandmother said I could repay her the money two ways. First, by coming to the food bank where she volunteered. Second, by helping her at the kiosk gas station where she worked for an old friend of hers, Victoria.
“And maybe next time you pick on somebody your own size,” she said. We were scrunched together in the kiosk on a Friday night in the middle of June. I had a yellow Bic lighter and a dented old leaky cigarette tucked underneath the counter, hidden for later. I was trying to figure out how to steal a fresh pack from the rack behind her. She was immersed in a paperback copy of Carrie a friend at the food bank had lent her. The girl on the cover was looking straight at you, bewitched, while a shadow face glided out of the side of her head in profile.
Your own size, I thought. I didn’t understand yet how my grandmother worked. Before I saw the trap she’d set, I pointed out the obvious. Linda Looks Back was half my size.
“Oh!” Her eyes rounded with irony. “Then maybe you shouldn’t be so prejudice!”
“I don’t care,” I said, “if Linda is an Indian. She’s a bitch.”
“Linda cares.” She licked a finger and turned a page in her book. Swearing didn’t faze her. Nothing I did had fazed her yet. “What do you care about?” she said, implying I cared about nothing. “Take your finger out of there, I don’t want to buy more stitches.”
“Out of where?” I was probing the bullet hole in the kiosk’s sliding glass window. “What is it?” Like I didn’t know.
The gas station kiosk had two stools. Both were scooted up to the sliding glass window, competing for territory. When I wasn’t poking a finger through bullet holes, I was fiddling with flowers in the bucket at our feet, selecting and lifting out one long-stemmed carnation after another for a sniff. Occasionally a carnation might flail around and graze my grandmother’s weird little ear. She batted it away and frowned at Carrie. Sometimes I felt so pent up I caught myself fantasizing about screaming in her little ear for no reason or managing things so she fell off her stool and I caught her just in time, or didn’t.
The kiosk was cramped enough you could reach out and touch whatever Vicky had us selling here. From the start I’d made it clear my half was off-limits. We went back and forth at first about the taller stool, both of us hunchers probably trying to hide our weak chins, and even though she claimed the taller stool made her dizzy, it was strange for me to sit up higher than her. She’d also tried me on her other side for a night, but that put me in charge of tobacco products, so we switched.
This arrangement irked her, too, implying I was somehow responsible for donations to the kiosk’s only decoration, a giant, filigreed gold-wire cross. You were supposed to hang it on a wall, I think, but all the wall space was devoted to candy bars, lighters, cigarettes, and magazines, the pornographic ones in brown paper wrappers up in the back, and the illicit cardboard box of pint liquor bottles down on the floor. My grandmother had propped the cross on the counter under a vine of creeping Jenny that had sprouted through the corner of the rickety old kiosk and was happily extending its tendrils inside the place, white flowers and all. The cross loomed above me on my right, three feet tall and fashioned out of basically coat-hanger wire painted gold. Its twelve little shelves were designed for you to order and display the twelve little brightly painted porcelain scenes from the Life of Christ. So far, my grandmother had collected ten, not counting the ceramic figurine one of the Indians who hung out drinking and smoking under the overpass had donated.
“Does Vicky know about that?” I flicked my pink carnation at the cross (my grandmother had a rule against pointing with your finger). Stuck to one of the empty shelves was an orange Post-it note on which she had written in blue ballpoint pen, All Flower Purchases Go toward Completing the Cross! Donations Also Appreciated!
“You just focus on you.” She didn’t bother looking up from her book. “Stop touching that, please. It’ll get infected.”
“I’m not touching it.” My stitches. When I touched them, both black and stiff and prickly as thorns, I felt my fingertip and swollen lip throwing heartbeats back and forth, bip bip bip. I stared into space and mouthed this word against my finger, letting it evolve: Bip bip bip. Bitch bitch bitch.
I didn’t dislike her that much yet. Not like my mom did, whose stories about this woman were mainly meant to explain why we’d moved around so much, South Dakota to Montana, then Wyoming, then South Dakota again, often with boyfriends I despised, sometimes for work. Outside these stories, and except for the last seven days I’d been living with her, this woman was a stranger. She didn’t want me around, that much was obvious. She acted like I’d interrupted something important.
Basically, I was already eleven. We’d struck a truce loosely based on the fact it was way too late for her to go back and be my grandmother now. She did say I was too young to read Carrie, which was funny because my mom and a boyfriend named Darrin had taken me to the drive-in movie version when I was four or five. Once my grandmother fell asleep at night, I read all the good parts and sometimes bookmarked it wrong and the next day watched her riffling through the pages, impatient with herself. It surprised me she would read that kind of book, but she had no other activities besides bowling. Nobody visited her bare apartment. Except for the bowling league, she didn’t have friends, not even church ones. She said they died. That was a lie. I asked her why she didn’t use her rosary beads, thinking I was cramping her style as an unbeliever or something, but she just said come to mass and watch. I wasn’t going to mass. My mom had warned me.
But I did watch–I watched her. She was lonely for sure. Whenever she scrubbed something, she scolded herself in a funny whisper. Up close she smelled like Aqua Net and baby powder, and her fingers were stubby like a child’s and sort of grabby-looking and sad. She did nothing about the fine cheek-hair in front of her ears, dark and way too obvious against the kind of super-pale skin that looked like it was always getting rashy and irritated. Twice she’d used the word “grooming” with me. I could tell she had a lot of beliefs that weren’t really true, not exactly religious or even strict ones, but founded on lots of other beliefs stacked up inside her. She scared me the way it scares you playing Jenga. Disobey or disbelieve her, and it was like sliding out a block and holding your breath to see if she fell apart. It was wearing me out a whole different way from how my mom wore me out.
At ten o’clock, the pawn shop across North Maple went dark. That left the kiosk alone in the middle of its four old pumps. Our sign wasn’t illuminated, just a big metal cut-out of a red horse and the word GAS and four buzzing fluorescent tubes in wire cages, two shot out and two that flickered until my grandmother flipped the switch three times. I don’t know which I hated more, the dark skip of not existing for the second or two the lights were out or feeling like a target under what little light pooled around the kiosk.
“When can I go see Mom?” I asked. My mother’s work release was cleaning restrooms at the mall after it closed. If I walked to the mall, which I easily could, I would have to walk right by the Indians under the overpass. “You said.”
“We’re waiting for Murray.”
“You said.” I slumped on my shorter stool until my chin touched the counter. “Don’t lie.”
“Sit up, please.”
Half a block away, North Maple Avenue slipped under four lanes of I-90. I remember my mom telling me once you could go a thousand miles in one direction on I-90 as far as Seattle, and Boston or someplace like it two thousand miles the other. She made fun of Rapid City for calling itself the “center of the nation” as if that somehow made up for it being the middle of nowhere, which is what our kiosk felt like at night. The other side of the interstate used to be the edge of town, old washboard roads through hay bales and nothing. Now you came out on a whole a series of parking lots, acres of brightly lit pavement and glory under a two-story sign for the Rushmore Mall. Had Vicky’s kiosk been built over there, it might have attracted some traffic off I-90. As it was, most of our evening business was restricted to those brave enough to drive through these rows of run-down North Rapid condos where mostly Indians like Linda Looks Back and her family lived. For a while, Vicky had tried to harmonize the gas station’s hours with the mall hours, as if this might magically align us with mall business, which obviously it hadn’t. Lately she was keeping the kiosk open later, like midnight or one. She brought us these rattling cardboard boxes crammed with pints of Safeway liquor. I was assigned to affixing new prices on these bottles using Vicky’s sticker gun. The markup was ridiculous, I’m sure, and none of it was legal, but my grandmother did it anyway, supposedly for Vicky. She said she appreciated the money from the extra hours. She also bragged she wasn’t scared a bit to work at this location, this time of night.
“When’s Murray coming? I can walk by myself.”
“I’m not letting you walk by yourself. You are eleven.” Each syllable in my age was always distinct. This time she added some singsong language she’d picked up from a kid at the food bank. “No way, Jose.”
“Don’t even say that, please, Grandma.” Calling her that felt fake and weird. Mostly it was just polite, sometimes ironic.
Sheet lightning skated across the sky. There wasn’t any thunder yet. The blackness overhead went along perfectly clear and featureless until a flash revealed the thunderheads right above us. Around the kiosk everything was creepy and still like the night air had taken a big breath, waiting to blow. Every so often a semi or a car passed by on the interstate a half a block away, but never that many, maybe one per minute. The people under the overpass, all of them Indians, were talking and laughing. My grandmother told me they drifted down from the condos and bought drugs.
I wondered if they would sell me any. I had two dollars, a dime, and three pennies I had stolen from her purse. My lip was throbbing and my legs ached like I couldn’t stretch them any direction they needed to go. I kicked the cardboard box of liquor and wondered what drugs they would trade me if I brought them something, say a pint of whiskey or a pack of cigarettes. I could steal a pack and a bottle and clamp them in my armpits underneath my jean jacket. I sighed and snuck a hand along the counter behind Carrie to my grandmother’s radio, a little blue transistor one. I clicked it on and thumbed the dial off the warbly hymn-singing until I found some commercials that sounded like KKLS. Out of loyalty to my mom, I vowed to cry if “Harden My Heart” came on, but probably not the new one, “Take Me to Heart,” which seemed like repeating the same dumb idea. Plus, I wasn’t into either song anymore as much as “White Wedding” or “Little Red Corvette,” both of which would’ve worked much better to shock my grandmother.
“Turn it down, please.”
“I can’t even hear it!”
Lightning strikes far away made the radio hiss and spit. My voice was meaner than I meant. I felt like I might cry regardless, or actually scream. Push her off her stool, maybe. Tip the cross over so it whacked her on the head and I could escape. My mom would’ve done any of those things. My mom was fearless as hell. The year before last, she’d taken me and my friend Rochelle to a Quarterflash concert. That’s why I still halfway liked them. She claimed she knew Rindy Ross from back when they both attended WOU outside Salem, Oregon, which could’ve been true. We all got separated at the concert, though. Later that was used as evidence of something not good.
“Why do we have to wait for dumb-ass Murray?” Murray drove a tanker truck and delivered gas to the station.
“I like Murray.” She turned back a couple pages, bored of me, bored of everything. “Don’t you like Murray?”
I knew she liked Murray. I was about to poke fun at Murray for the time last weekend when he dropped down from the cab of his truck and fell on his ass, but something read my mind and sent a little red Corvette up North Maple Avenue from the direction of downtown. That never happened. Like it couldn’t resist, it swerved at the last possible second into the parking lot.
It might not have been a Corvette, technically. I didn’t know what Corvettes looked like, but it was red. It was also expensive looking, a sporty new convertible. The people inside were blasting Naked Eyes or something, four or five kids from the west side of town. Stevens High kids wouldn’t normally drive up North Maple to buy their gas. They must’ve been seriously on empty. I made use of their arrival as a distraction and started peeling off my jacket, but I hurried too fast. I knocked my grandmother’s elbow.
“Leave it on, please.” She glanced at the kids as they whipped their shiny red car through a giant U-turn around the rear of the lot.
“It’s hot! I’m roasting!”
“You,” she said, and raised her eyebrows at her book, “chose.”
I glowered at her. The red convertible pulled forward to the pump closest to the street. On the count of three, I vowed I was going to scream and push her. She was the one who’d made me wear the jean jacket, not me. Underneath I was wearing a Quarterflash T-shirt she said was “too revealing.” My mother had bought me the T-shirt before she tried to sneak backstage and got in the brawl. On the front was a big silver quarter with George Washington in sunglasses. The image was cracked and faded now, and the fabric was worn thin like I liked. The first time I wore it around my grandmother, she eyed me and said it was time for a training bra. I didn’t care for her tone and asked her a whole bunch of very serious questions about her girdle and did I need a girdle. Then the day before yesterday I shocked her beyond words by “mutilating” the shirt. I cut the collar-hole bigger and stretched it out so I could drape it off my bare left shoulder.
“After this car,” I said, choosing not to scream or push her off her stool but instead just calmly explain things for once, “I’m going to walk. To the mall. And see. My mother.”
She didn’t answer me. The red convertible angled to a stop facing the exit, which wasn’t a good sign. They did turn off their engine, though. That was good.
One girl giggled after the car was off. Somebody slapped somebody else. A big guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt jumped out of the back seat without even opening a door, he was that tall. He trotted around the car in these little deck shoes, chewing gum. His sunglasses were propped on top of a head of white-blond hair. I felt something intense about him, but it could’ve gone either way.
“Or,” I suggested, getting an idea, “they’re probably going to the mall. Right? They can take me.”
My grandmother closed Carrie. She laid it aside as if preparing. “I don’t think so, no.”
“Then I’ll fucking walk! You can’t keep me here!”
Fucking was a new one, by the way.
My grandmother tightened the corners of her mouth. She might have said my name at this point, as if my name meant “lower your voice, please.” Which I did, for a minute. I was scaring myself. She had just finished folding her hands on the counter in front of her, but when I said that she unfolded them again and nudged the book farther away. The book’s back cover showed a square little picture from the movie where Carrie was staring demon-eyed into space with dark lines of pig’s blood running down her face. A YOUNG GIRL GREW ANGRIER AND ANGRIER–AND A TOWN WRITHED IN PAIN.
At the gas pump, the guy wearing the Hawaiian shirt flipped open the red convertible’s little gas door. He unhooked the nozzle from the pump while talking to somebody in the car over his shoulder and clunked the nozzle into place.
“I’m not scared,” I said. The pump motor whirred and clicked. “I can walk under the overpass by myself. I’m not the one who’s prejudiced of them.”
“Hush.”
“You hush.” All at once, I hated her–not just on my mother’s behalf, but independently. My mother had once called her an “ugly old clone,” and even though I now believe I must’ve misunderstood her or she was drunk, at the time it made sense. My grandmother had these outside folds to her eyes she told me she’d inherited from her grandmother, Inga, who was mean. My mother had the same folds. So did I.
I channeled my mother. “You just want me to hush because it’s true.” My arms were folded. “You’re way more prejudiced than me.” A pale high school kid floated up from the passenger side of the convertible, looked at us with puckered lips for some reason, then slid back down. “You can’t even display that,” I said, and pointed with my finger, “you’re so fucking prejudiced.”
A ceramic figurine stood beside her radio. Three nights ago, an Indian man in his twenties had ridden a stripped old ten-speed down from the condos, circled the kiosk twice, and glided up to the window. I remember a bee sting over his eye, if that’s what it was, a runny nose, and the same type glasses Linda Looks Back wore. He smiled and gave my grandmother this figurine to add to her cross and asked if he could sweep the lot or something. My grandmother acted grateful and told him no, Vicky wasn’t hiring. He thanked her and rode his bike down to the overpass. Since then, we’d spotted him several times going back and forth between there and the condos.
After he left, I asked her why he called her “Grandma.”
“Oh, I don’t know. They call me that. Grandma Fear or something.”
This was her nickname. I was embarrassed. She embarrassed me more when she told me it had started off as “Fearless,” she didn’t know why, before they shortened it for fun. I didn’t like it either way. She was supposed to be my grandmother, thank you, and she had a real name. Her name was Rachel, just like me.
As to the figurine, she kept it beside her in case the guy ever wanted it back, or maybe stopped to buy some liquor and wondered where it went and accused her of something. It wasn’t scaled to fit the other ones she owned, not as detailed and bigger and honestly sort of cartoonish. Even I could see that. It was also broken. Not that any of this mattered, according to my grandmother. She said she didn’t display it on the cross because she couldn’t decide what scene from the Life of Christ it represented.
Bullshit, I thought.
“Admit it,” I said. “You think it’s a piece of trash. You think he’s coming back to fucking rob you or something.”
“Oh, enough,” she said, not really upset, just resigned. “The mouth on you.”
“Okay then.” I sensed some potential exhaustion and took it as a dare. Make myself annoying enough and maybe she’d let me go. Probably not. Maybe. I shot my hand in front of her across the counter and snatched the figurine. The kid pumping gas in his Hawaiian shirt had snicked the latch on the nozzle so he could lean against the car and fold his arms, candidly watching. I spun away on my stool to block my grandmother in case she tried to grab me, which she wasn’t. Somebody in the convertible slurped their drink through a straw, hard and loud. I held the figurine up to the cross, high up so everybody could see. “Where do you want to put it? Up here?”
Lightning flashed. For drama, you couldn’t have asked for better. The storm sent a cold gust of wind through the lot that shook the metal gas sign and rattled the wire cages around the fluorescents. One started flickering.
“If we move this one”–I leaped off the stool, balancing on the footrest, and slid a porcelain scene off the cross’s arm. The cross was overloaded and wobbly, and it trembled when I did it. For half a second the little Nativity at the very top promised to fall.
“Be careful! Sit your bottom down!”
“This one. Walking on water.” My stool slid from underneath me an inch, so I plopped back down. “We’ll move it.” I plunked it on the counter, hard. “We can rearrange. Make some room.” I snatched another scene off its shelf, this one lower and easier to reach. “Rock star Jesus. He’ll fit anywhere.”
“No! Put them back now, they’ll chip!”
She thought of these scenes as “heirlooms.” That’s what she called them our first night in the kiosk together when she showed them to me one by one, meaning that in her mind they would someday be handed down to somebody. Not my mother. Probably me. Each one was crafted by the hands of “artisans,” she said, from the “house of” somewhere French, three inches tall apiece and fired three times to give them super-vibrant colors that would never fade. Over the years they would become even rarer, she told me, now that the ninety-five-day “firing period” had ended. She reverently took them down and showed me each one’s “maker’s mark” that proved its authenticity, and when that failed to impress, she dug out their certificates, illegible calligraphy on fake brown parchment. She said the company had sent her a brand-new scene every six to eight weeks, although, this time, a couple months had passed. She suspected a good one must be coming.
“Look,” I said. I splayed one hand on the counter and stood on the stool’s footrest again to reach. The Indian guy’s figurine slipped onto the vacant shelf overhead and looked out-of-place. “It fits. You’re the only–”
“Move!”
I dropped on my stool and got shoved. Whoever was driving the convertible had started the engine. I had missed that part. I heard the fast-talking DJ on their car radio booming out a number for concert tickets, free, to caller number seven.
“Stop pushing!” I said.
“Rachel, move!” Her voice was high-pitched and wavery. She slapped my back, and I spitefully hunkered down, playing the victim even while I threw out an arm to block her from the rock star Jesus or the cross or whatever she wanted. My mom had told me stories about this woman beating her with a hairbrush once so hard the hairbrush broke. She made her cut her own switches from the backyard tree, too, and often left welts across my mother’s butt, although the worst was the dislocated arm from when my grandmother wrenched her off her feet for a swat. I took these slaps across my back as proof of something, multiple things, her cruelty, my loyalty. I turned my head and checked my only audience here, the high school kids. The guy in the Hawaiian shirt was looking straight at me. Behind him, a pair of girl’s arms were stretched above her for a yawn, and when they came down, they descended around his hips, embracing him. She pulled him backwards off his feet. It was like a romantic comedy thing. His sunglasses dropped from his head to the tip of his nose, and he tumbled into the back seat.
I was smiling the whole time he went, flattered and confused, like I was part of it. The convertible pulled forward.
“No, no, no!” my grandmother shouted. “Stop!”
People do this. They fill their tank and avoid paying by driving away. Sometimes, like these kids were doing, they leave the nozzle hooked in the car as they leave. My grandmother had warned me what to do if this happened.
She battered my back to reach the pump switches. The convertible’s driver punched it, the rear tires squealed and smoked. Lightning flashed. Somebody whooped and tossed a Slurpee. The gas hose stretched taut, the boxy old gas pump shuddered, and the nozzle popped free. It twisted and flipped around mid-air under the force of its own spray before it clattered to the pavement, spewing gasoline.
I slipped sideways off my stool, ducking and yelling under a hail of slaps. Without meaning to, I body blocked my grandmother trying to come around me from that direction. The convertible hit the street, cranked a hard right, and roared off toward the mall.
By the time my grandmother flicked the switches, a whole lot of gasoline had gurgled and pooled around the island of those two pumps. It was spreading off in different directions, too, showing where the lot was sunk and canted wrong. Under the flickering fluorescent light, it crept along the asphalt’s dips and hollows toward the kiosk with a horror-movie glitter, like evil black water come to life, sneaking toward us. I said, “Shit,” or something useful like that, and got to my feet. My grandmother flew out the door behind me, muttering no and Murray and Vicky. I started to follow but she yelled.
“Stay!”
Like I was a dog. My mouth opened and I panted like one. “Fuck you,” I finally said, though the door was swinging closed.
It scared me how fast she was moving. The black sky, crammed with secret thunderheads directly above us, tested out its first rumble, and wind blew cold enough to let you know it was hailing somewhere close by. My grandmother brought out this broom, a sad, old straw broom you’d use in your kitchen. Its corners were worn down and rounded, and a few crazy bristles had sprung out sideways. She went after the spill like a madwoman, no plan, no particular direction she was pushing the gasoline. She whisked and splashed and scolded in that funny whisper. Maybe there was a grate in the lot somewhere and a drain, I don’t know.
My knees were shaking. I climbed up on my stool and dug my sad little cigarette and yellow Bic lighter out of hiding from under the counter. I wanted to call my mom. The kiosk had a phone, but I didn’t know her work number. I doubled over and popped the cigarette in the part of my mouth without any stitches, flicked the lighter and sucked and blew and coughed in my elbow so my grandmother wouldn’t hear. The cigarette was shitty but better than nothing. I had already rifled through my grandmother’s purse several times before in search of my mom’s number, but maybe my grandmother was sly. I pulled her purse off the counter into my lap and twisted the gold clasp. The purse was turquoise, fake leather, cracked. The fold-over top opened on the smell of Wrigley’s.
I wasn’t crying or anything like that. As far as I was concerned, my grandmother could go to hell. I was done. A breeze wafted the reek of gasoline through the kiosk, and past the tobacco smoke I noticed the stitches in my lip tasted of blood. A burst of thunder shook the glass window, with its lone bullet hole. I missed my mom so hard I trembled like I was cold, and maybe I was cold, but that was part of missing her, too. The whole week I was missing her, my grandmother kept telling me, You don’t want to mope now. You don’t want to dwell. I choked out a laugh when I spotted the new thing in her purse, a bottle of pills. Around my cigarette I said her own favorite word: Bingo. For a disguise she’d folded a piece of notebook paper and wrapped and rubber-banded it around the bottle. A lot of differently shaped pills were crammed right to the top, some oblong, some round. My plan for the bottle started creating itself before I could even think. Pint of liquor, bottle of pills. Hi, Mom.
My mom liked both. A lot.
I blew smoke in my grandmother’s purse, a gray rank cloud, and snapped it shut in there as a gift. In the flickering dark outside, she pushed around the gasoline while I pocketed her secret pill bottle in its wrapper. Rock star Jesus watched from the counter. I took a big bold drag on the cigarette and blew it at him. He was designed to appear as if he was floating off the ground, sort of creepily, dressed all in white with big loose sleeves and blow-dried hair, his arms extended to balance in the air like, Look at me, ta-da!
I picked him up to stop the creepy floating. Describing him too much here will make me sound religious, which I prefer to think I’m not. My grandmother had called this scene the Transfiguration, or Ascension, whichever. Going through her scenes that first night, thinking she was teaching me, she named each one, starting the whole story at the top of the cross with the little Nativity. “Bethlehem,” she said, showing me Joseph holding a hooked staff like Little Bo Peep and baby Jesus waving at us. Under that went the Baptism, “in the Jordan,” she said, two men fully clothed so nobody thought they were taking a bath together. The cross’s arms got miracles like Walking on Water, and the middle got the Last Supper, three times as big as the rest but priced the same. The Lord’s hair shone golden as the grails and little dishes, and you’ve never seen so much dramatic gesturing during a meal. Ministry scenes were tucked in wherever they fit, Woman at the Well, Sermon on the Mount, Jesus Washing Some Guy’s Feet, all taking place “around Galilee.” The bottom of the cross was all downhill: praying in the garden not to die, getting judged and sentenced anyway, the Passion like a bloody scene from a war movie, and below that the Crucifixion. The Ascension went at the very bottom. When I asked my grandmother where it was happening, she said Jerusalem, but technically it wasn’t. He was in heaven, right? So why put heaven at the bottom?
Like I cared. Apparently, I did, though, because I tried putting things back where they belonged. I don’t know why. I planted one knee on the counter and reached down the Indian’s ceramic figurine. Clearly it wasn’t part of the set. It depicted Jesus trotting along with a big grin while holding something in the air, playing keep-away from two little kids running beside him. They were laughing up at whatever he had, but the figurine was broken. The hand and what it held were missing.
A dove, maybe? Or was he pointing to heaven? It bothered my grandmother she couldn’t remember which Bible scene this was. She sat there holding her hand on her forehead for almost an hour and stared. Suffer the children? Maybe. But why was everybody running around like that?
Whatever it was, it wasn’t a miracle. The arms of the cross got the miracles, so I swapped it out, grabbed the Walking on Water scene to put it back. Jesus was offering his hand to a drowning guy trying to crawl through the water in a panic while his Master’s sandals rested on the porcelain waves, big curls of cobalt blue. Honestly Jesus could’ve looked a little more concerned about his friend.
As I was placing the scene, the cigarette burned the knuckle of my other hand. It jolted me a little. The stool went out from under my leg.
The cross wasn’t secured, as I said, just propped. When I fell against it, all the little scenes and the giant Last Supper slid forward and sideways and let go of their shelves. It was like a knickknack apocalypse. Some hit the counter, others hit the floor. One bounced out through the open window and made it all the way to the pavement where it quietly broke like something cheap, like a piece of chalk.
My grandmother stopped sweeping. Her head came around at the clatter and pop. Her eyes sped from this to that, taking it in. Nothing she saw contradicted what she thought.
“What did you do?” she yelled. “Out of there! Out!”
I backed down off the counter. Two fingers were tangled in the wire where I had caught the cross. I laid it down and extricated them and found a small cut on my arm seeping separate dots of blood. I stepped very carefully backwards on a porcelain shard that crunched and snapped from under foot and skittered away.
“Oh, my Lord! Get out! Go! Go!”
The kiosk floor was littered with bright debris, white and sharp where it was broken, bold and cheerful otherwise: blues, reds, greens, golds. I bent to the cardboard box and pulled up a brown pint with a pink sticker I’d affixed to its dusty shoulder only yesterday. I chose a careful path towards the door while my grandmother cursed in a high-pitched voice outside that broke like mine might have, if I’d cared about anything so much.
“Fuck you!” I said. This was automatic. This was me and my mom. I slipped into view from the back of the kiosk, trying to keep my cigarette and my stolen pint of liquor out of sight. She was standing over the dumped Slurpee, the giant size one. One arm was out. She was jabbing a crooked finger–the finger, I thought, of an ugly old clone–at the overpass and the mall.
“Just go! Go get your mother!”
I was hurt enough to mock her. “Why? Because all you care about’s your fucking knickknacks? You don’t care about me! Or her!” Something pent up surfaced and broke. “You’re a terrible mom!”
Lightning. A touch of ice in the air.
“That not true!” she said in a voice like a girl’s.
For a few seconds, we faced each other, both of us out of breath. So much had happened so fast that we had to stop and let it catch up. The flickering fluorescent light above us was reflected like tiny lightning across the face of the glossy black lake of gasoline where she stood with her sodden broom.
“I just can’t do this again,” she said. “I just cannot.”
She might have been crying. I didn’t think so. She sounded more like she was talking to herself. I thought she might’ve gone crazy. I tried to remember when we’d “done this” before, me and her. We hadn’t. I’d lived with her a week, if that. We’d argued twice so far. The rest was just bickering.
“Then don’t,” I said. “I don’t care.” I didn’t know this woman, wasn’t going to know this woman beyond the fact she used to beat my mother. As I turned to leave, I tried to hide my pint of liquor. This accidentally angled the cigarette ash just right for a breeze to skim the tip and take away a glowing fleck. An eddy carried the spark around in front of me. My grandmother saw it. I watched it spin and land on dry asphalt and wink out. A few inches away, a liquid tendril reached from here to the lake of gasoline where my grandmother stood. I looked at all this gasoline, glossy and black and ready. Between my fingers burned a cigarette.
I was eleven years old.
I was eleven years old, and I pictured it all. I saw the woof and wicked blue and how it would race from me to her, slip underneath her and fire that soaked old broom. Maybe she would stumble backwards, maybe it would knock her off her feet and she would fall in the flames, too shocked to scream for help as she kicked and rolled and was engulfed, flapping her burning hands like wings. . . .
From where I was standing, I couldn’t see her eyes. I didn’t need to. Her whole self was watching me. She saw me thinking about it and deciding.
I swept the cigarette to my lips as I went. Even I could feel how small a gesture it was, how drained of defiance. I stomped across the asphalt to show I wasn’t running away, but that failed me, too, because I wasrunning away, leaving behind the flickering fluorescent for the much bigger flash of lightning that lit up the curb and clumps of grass that fringed the sidewalk like a snapshot from a cemetery.
Behind me I heard a name spoken. Maybe mine. Oh, Rachel!
“Bitch,” I whispered.
Like I said: automatic. These were words I was always using. For just that reason, they might’ve been a comfort, but just the opposite was happening. The sidewalk led me down, down and under the overpass. The path was empty of everything but shadows and a couple old bikes. I had sense enough to tuck the pint of liquor underneath my jacket, less because I feared getting robbed or molested than talked to.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. As I charged under the overpass, I developed this really involved fantasy out of nowhere that the Indian guy who’d given my grandmother the figurine had recognized me in the kiosk already as the girl who’d picked a fight with Linda Looks Back, his cousin or something. He and his friends were waiting to surround me. They didn’t surround me, but they did fall silent as I passed, a half dozen shadows sitting up there beyond the concrete supports, smoking and drinking on the slope of bare dirt. Their silence felt like a judgment on me, like they’d seen it all and understood what an absolute shit I was. I caught the white of somebody’s McDonald’s bag, but that was all. Only one weird thing happened as I passed, and it wasn’t that weird. The timing was actually perfect. A basketball came rolling down the slope and across the sidewalk just inches in front of me. A basketball, maybe as a joke or a comment. It left the curb, and I heard it behind me skipping off across the last of North Maple Avenue.
On the other side of the overpass, out in the open again, I didn’t stop until I reached the two-story sign for the Rushmore Mall. The sign was like base. If I touched it, I’d be safe, or at least I could go behind it and hide myself. Which side would hide me, though, and from who or what? I started walking around and around the sign, hiding from one direction and then another, still sort of waiting or even hoping for somebody to follow me on their bikes, ride big circles around me in the empty parking lot until I bribed them to go away with the liquor and the pills. This never happened, of course. Something worse had already happened. It was something I had done or almost done or only imagined. I could walk as far as I wanted around that sign, but wherever I went I would find it waiting for me. I could see it waiting for me in these acres of empty parking lot, all this new white pavement lit up here and there by lamp posts designed to look like this was olden times. And off at the edge of everything, the city’s only mall unfolded its golden wings in big illuminated storefronts, some lettered, some not. A lone white van sat parked at the curb by the main entrance, possibly my mother’s crew.
My heart pounded faster. Was she there? I circled my sign and waited for something to stop, but it wouldn’t stop. What had happened with my grandmother was permanent now, just like everything else that’s ever happened. All of it started chasing me around my sign, a whole set of facts and circumstances I’d evaded by lying about it to the only person willing to go along with the lie, the one person I had just left behind. What happens to a lie you tell somebody once you abandon them? Without my grandmother pretending to believe my lie, the real facts and circumstances were coming after me, starting with the fact that Linda Looks Back had never broken my lip. These two stitches and this blood I was tasting right now were my mother’s doing. That was the truth. It’s why they put me with my grandmother.
Each time around the sign, I checked that lone white van. I could no more go near it than I could return to my grandmother. I was worthless, uniquely worthless, or not even uniquely, and I wasn’t equipped to cope with that. I twisted open the pint of liquor and got down a sloppy swallow that seared the stitches in my lip, then I propped the pint on the pavement and went for the pills. Thank you, Grandma Fear, thank you, thank you. I ripped the notebook paper off the bottle, snapping the rubber band. I palmed off the child-proof cap, and white pills and pink pills cascaded down my wrist and rained around my feet, hopping and scattering. I managed to smash a good-sized handful against my tongue. As I bent for the liquor to wash them down, the page of notebook paper unfolded in my hand. I read a single line in ballpoint pen, my grandmother’s handwriting:
Please forgive me–Rachel.
That was me. My name is Rachel. On my tongue, the little hill of pills dissolved in spit and alcohol. I stood there open-mouthed and frowning, vowing no, no, no, forget it, I wouldn’t forgive her, no. I heard the dribbling of the basketball from under the overpass, steady and considered against the throbbing stitches in my lip. I felt my grandmother getting smaller and smaller. An icy raindrop smacked the paper. I felt light-headed, maybe relieved, if that’s the word, if you won’t think me too dark for saying it, or blame me. For as long as I could, I stayed confused, clinging to how she could’ve known ahead of time that we would fight like this. How could she foresee I’d find these pills, then steal them, then read her note? Worst of all, why ask me for my forgiveness?
This puzzle took some time.
Donald Seahill
In the spring of 1983, when I was eleven, my mom spent a few months in rehab and work release, so I lived with my grandmother on North Maple Avenue in Rapid City, South Dakota, where my family’s from. My mother and I weren’t on speaking terms with my grandmother at the time. That made it awkward. I was also getting into lots of fights with other girls at school. Between the skipping and suspensions, I was “more trouble than I was worth.” This is quoting everybody.
My grandmother was a Catholic woman in her late fifties, sharper than I knew at first. She loved to bowl, although she prided herself for never–like some people–“bowling for blood.” Other things were more important, including visits from attendance officers, threats of citations and court visits, and the cost of the two stitches in my lower lip. Paying to fix Linda Looks Back’s broken glasses was my grandmother’s idea, once she got the girl’s name straight. Linda was Lakota.
My grandmother said I could repay her the money two ways. First, by coming to the food bank where she volunteered. Second, by helping her at the kiosk gas station where she worked for an old friend of hers, Victoria.
“And maybe next time you pick on somebody your own size,” she said. We were scrunched together in the kiosk on a Friday night in the middle of June. I had a yellow Bic lighter and a dented old leaky cigarette tucked underneath the counter, hidden for later. I was trying to figure out how to steal a fresh pack from the rack behind her. She was immersed in a paperback copy of Carrie a friend at the food bank had lent her. The girl on the cover was looking straight at you, bewitched, while a shadow face glided out of the side of her head in profile.
Your own size, I thought. I didn’t understand yet how my grandmother worked. Before I saw the trap she’d set, I pointed out the obvious. Linda Looks Back was half my size.
“Oh!” Her eyes rounded with irony. “Then maybe you shouldn’t be so prejudice!”
“I don’t care,” I said, “if Linda is an Indian. She’s a bitch.”
“Linda cares.” She licked a finger and turned a page in her book. Swearing didn’t faze her. Nothing I did had fazed her yet. “What do you care about?” she said, implying I cared about nothing. “Take your finger out of there, I don’t want to buy more stitches.”
“Out of where?” I was probing the bullet hole in the kiosk’s sliding glass window. “What is it?” Like I didn’t know.
The gas station kiosk had two stools. Both were scooted up to the sliding glass window, competing for territory. When I wasn’t poking a finger through bullet holes, I was fiddling with flowers in the bucket at our feet, selecting and lifting out one long-stemmed carnation after another for a sniff. Occasionally a carnation might flail around and graze my grandmother’s weird little ear. She batted it away and frowned at Carrie. Sometimes I felt so pent up I caught myself fantasizing about screaming in her little ear for no reason or managing things so she fell off her stool and I caught her just in time, or didn’t.
The kiosk was cramped enough you could reach out and touch whatever Vicky had us selling here. From the start I’d made it clear my half was off-limits. We went back and forth at first about the taller stool, both of us hunchers probably trying to hide our weak chins, and even though she claimed the taller stool made her dizzy, it was strange for me to sit up higher than her. She’d also tried me on her other side for a night, but that put me in charge of tobacco products, so we switched.
This arrangement irked her, too, implying I was somehow responsible for donations to the kiosk’s only decoration, a giant, filigreed gold-wire cross. You were supposed to hang it on a wall, I think, but all the wall space was devoted to candy bars, lighters, cigarettes, and magazines, the pornographic ones in brown paper wrappers up in the back, and the illicit cardboard box of pint liquor bottles down on the floor. My grandmother had propped the cross on the counter under a vine of creeping Jenny that had sprouted through the corner of the rickety old kiosk and was happily extending its tendrils inside the place, white flowers and all. The cross loomed above me on my right, three feet tall and fashioned out of basically coat-hanger wire painted gold. Its twelve little shelves were designed for you to order and display the twelve little brightly painted porcelain scenes from the Life of Christ. So far, my grandmother had collected ten, not counting the ceramic figurine one of the Indians who hung out drinking and smoking under the overpass had donated.
“Does Vicky know about that?” I flicked my pink carnation at the cross (my grandmother had a rule against pointing with your finger). Stuck to one of the empty shelves was an orange Post-it note on which she had written in blue ballpoint pen, All Flower Purchases Go toward Completing the Cross! Donations Also Appreciated!
“You just focus on you.” She didn’t bother looking up from her book. “Stop touching that, please. It’ll get infected.”
“I’m not touching it.” My stitches. When I touched them, both black and stiff and prickly as thorns, I felt my fingertip and swollen lip throwing heartbeats back and forth, bip bip bip. I stared into space and mouthed this word against my finger, letting it evolve: Bip bip bip. Bitch bitch bitch.
I didn’t dislike her that much yet. Not like my mom did, whose stories about this woman were mainly meant to explain why we’d moved around so much, South Dakota to Montana, then Wyoming, then South Dakota again, often with boyfriends I despised, sometimes for work. Outside these stories, and except for the last seven days I’d been living with her, this woman was a stranger. She didn’t want me around, that much was obvious. She acted like I’d interrupted something important.
Basically, I was already eleven. We’d struck a truce loosely based on the fact it was way too late for her to go back and be my grandmother now. She did say I was too young to read Carrie, which was funny because my mom and a boyfriend named Darrin had taken me to the drive-in movie version when I was four or five. Once my grandmother fell asleep at night, I read all the good parts and sometimes bookmarked it wrong and the next day watched her riffling through the pages, impatient with herself. It surprised me she would read that kind of book, but she had no other activities besides bowling. Nobody visited her bare apartment. Except for the bowling league, she didn’t have friends, not even church ones. She said they died. That was a lie. I asked her why she didn’t use her rosary beads, thinking I was cramping her style as an unbeliever or something, but she just said come to mass and watch. I wasn’t going to mass. My mom had warned me.
But I did watch–I watched her. She was lonely for sure. Whenever she scrubbed something, she scolded herself in a funny whisper. Up close she smelled like Aqua Net and baby powder, and her fingers were stubby like a child’s and sort of grabby-looking and sad. She did nothing about the fine cheek-hair in front of her ears, dark and way too obvious against the kind of super-pale skin that looked like it was always getting rashy and irritated. Twice she’d used the word “grooming” with me. I could tell she had a lot of beliefs that weren’t really true, not exactly religious or even strict ones, but founded on lots of other beliefs stacked up inside her. She scared me the way it scares you playing Jenga. Disobey or disbelieve her, and it was like sliding out a block and holding your breath to see if she fell apart. It was wearing me out a whole different way from how my mom wore me out.
At ten o’clock, the pawn shop across North Maple went dark. That left the kiosk alone in the middle of its four old pumps. Our sign wasn’t illuminated, just a big metal cut-out of a red horse and the word GAS and four buzzing fluorescent tubes in wire cages, two shot out and two that flickered until my grandmother flipped the switch three times. I don’t know which I hated more, the dark skip of not existing for the second or two the lights were out or feeling like a target under what little light pooled around the kiosk.
“When can I go see Mom?” I asked. My mother’s work release was cleaning restrooms at the mall after it closed. If I walked to the mall, which I easily could, I would have to walk right by the Indians under the overpass. “You said.”
“We’re waiting for Murray.”
“You said.” I slumped on my shorter stool until my chin touched the counter. “Don’t lie.”
“Sit up, please.”
Half a block away, North Maple Avenue slipped under four lanes of I-90. I remember my mom telling me once you could go a thousand miles in one direction on I-90 as far as Seattle, and Boston or someplace like it two thousand miles the other. She made fun of Rapid City for calling itself the “center of the nation” as if that somehow made up for it being the middle of nowhere, which is what our kiosk felt like at night. The other side of the interstate used to be the edge of town, old washboard roads through hay bales and nothing. Now you came out on a whole a series of parking lots, acres of brightly lit pavement and glory under a two-story sign for the Rushmore Mall. Had Vicky’s kiosk been built over there, it might have attracted some traffic off I-90. As it was, most of our evening business was restricted to those brave enough to drive through these rows of run-down North Rapid condos where mostly Indians like Linda Looks Back and her family lived. For a while, Vicky had tried to harmonize the gas station’s hours with the mall hours, as if this might magically align us with mall business, which obviously it hadn’t. Lately she was keeping the kiosk open later, like midnight or one. She brought us these rattling cardboard boxes crammed with pints of Safeway liquor. I was assigned to affixing new prices on these bottles using Vicky’s sticker gun. The markup was ridiculous, I’m sure, and none of it was legal, but my grandmother did it anyway, supposedly for Vicky. She said she appreciated the money from the extra hours. She also bragged she wasn’t scared a bit to work at this location, this time of night.
“When’s Murray coming? I can walk by myself.”
“I’m not letting you walk by yourself. You are eleven.” Each syllable in my age was always distinct. This time she added some singsong language she’d picked up from a kid at the food bank. “No way, Jose.”
“Don’t even say that, please, Grandma.” Calling her that felt fake and weird. Mostly it was just polite, sometimes ironic.
Sheet lightning skated across the sky. There wasn’t any thunder yet. The blackness overhead went along perfectly clear and featureless until a flash revealed the thunderheads right above us. Around the kiosk everything was creepy and still like the night air had taken a big breath, waiting to blow. Every so often a semi or a car passed by on the interstate a half a block away, but never that many, maybe one per minute. The people under the overpass, all of them Indians, were talking and laughing. My grandmother told me they drifted down from the condos and bought drugs.
I wondered if they would sell me any. I had two dollars, a dime, and three pennies I had stolen from her purse. My lip was throbbing and my legs ached like I couldn’t stretch them any direction they needed to go. I kicked the cardboard box of liquor and wondered what drugs they would trade me if I brought them something, say a pint of whiskey or a pack of cigarettes. I could steal a pack and a bottle and clamp them in my armpits underneath my jean jacket. I sighed and snuck a hand along the counter behind Carrie to my grandmother’s radio, a little blue transistor one. I clicked it on and thumbed the dial off the warbly hymn-singing until I found some commercials that sounded like KKLS. Out of loyalty to my mom, I vowed to cry if “Harden My Heart” came on, but probably not the new one, “Take Me to Heart,” which seemed like repeating the same dumb idea. Plus, I wasn’t into either song anymore as much as “White Wedding” or “Little Red Corvette,” both of which would’ve worked much better to shock my grandmother.
“Turn it down, please.”
“I can’t even hear it!”
Lightning strikes far away made the radio hiss and spit. My voice was meaner than I meant. I felt like I might cry regardless, or actually scream. Push her off her stool, maybe. Tip the cross over so it whacked her on the head and I could escape. My mom would’ve done any of those things. My mom was fearless as hell. The year before last, she’d taken me and my friend Rochelle to a Quarterflash concert. That’s why I still halfway liked them. She claimed she knew Rindy Ross from back when they both attended WOU outside Salem, Oregon, which could’ve been true. We all got separated at the concert, though. Later that was used as evidence of something not good.
“Why do we have to wait for dumb-ass Murray?” Murray drove a tanker truck and delivered gas to the station.
“I like Murray.” She turned back a couple pages, bored of me, bored of everything. “Don’t you like Murray?”
I knew she liked Murray. I was about to poke fun at Murray for the time last weekend when he dropped down from the cab of his truck and fell on his ass, but something read my mind and sent a little red Corvette up North Maple Avenue from the direction of downtown. That never happened. Like it couldn’t resist, it swerved at the last possible second into the parking lot.
It might not have been a Corvette, technically. I didn’t know what Corvettes looked like, but it was red. It was also expensive looking, a sporty new convertible. The people inside were blasting Naked Eyes or something, four or five kids from the west side of town. Stevens High kids wouldn’t normally drive up North Maple to buy their gas. They must’ve been seriously on empty. I made use of their arrival as a distraction and started peeling off my jacket, but I hurried too fast. I knocked my grandmother’s elbow.
“Leave it on, please.” She glanced at the kids as they whipped their shiny red car through a giant U-turn around the rear of the lot.
“It’s hot! I’m roasting!”
“You,” she said, and raised her eyebrows at her book, “chose.”
I glowered at her. The red convertible pulled forward to the pump closest to the street. On the count of three, I vowed I was going to scream and push her. She was the one who’d made me wear the jean jacket, not me. Underneath I was wearing a Quarterflash T-shirt she said was “too revealing.” My mother had bought me the T-shirt before she tried to sneak backstage and got in the brawl. On the front was a big silver quarter with George Washington in sunglasses. The image was cracked and faded now, and the fabric was worn thin like I liked. The first time I wore it around my grandmother, she eyed me and said it was time for a training bra. I didn’t care for her tone and asked her a whole bunch of very serious questions about her girdle and did I need a girdle. Then the day before yesterday I shocked her beyond words by “mutilating” the shirt. I cut the collar-hole bigger and stretched it out so I could drape it off my bare left shoulder.
“After this car,” I said, choosing not to scream or push her off her stool but instead just calmly explain things for once, “I’m going to walk. To the mall. And see. My mother.”
She didn’t answer me. The red convertible angled to a stop facing the exit, which wasn’t a good sign. They did turn off their engine, though. That was good.
One girl giggled after the car was off. Somebody slapped somebody else. A big guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt jumped out of the back seat without even opening a door, he was that tall. He trotted around the car in these little deck shoes, chewing gum. His sunglasses were propped on top of a head of white-blond hair. I felt something intense about him, but it could’ve gone either way.
“Or,” I suggested, getting an idea, “they’re probably going to the mall. Right? They can take me.”
My grandmother closed Carrie. She laid it aside as if preparing. “I don’t think so, no.”
“Then I’ll fucking walk! You can’t keep me here!”
Fucking was a new one, by the way.
My grandmother tightened the corners of her mouth. She might have said my name at this point, as if my name meant “lower your voice, please.” Which I did, for a minute. I was scaring myself. She had just finished folding her hands on the counter in front of her, but when I said that she unfolded them again and nudged the book farther away. The book’s back cover showed a square little picture from the movie where Carrie was staring demon-eyed into space with dark lines of pig’s blood running down her face. A YOUNG GIRL GREW ANGRIER AND ANGRIER–AND A TOWN WRITHED IN PAIN.
At the gas pump, the guy wearing the Hawaiian shirt flipped open the red convertible’s little gas door. He unhooked the nozzle from the pump while talking to somebody in the car over his shoulder and clunked the nozzle into place.
“I’m not scared,” I said. The pump motor whirred and clicked. “I can walk under the overpass by myself. I’m not the one who’s prejudiced of them.”
“Hush.”
“You hush.” All at once, I hated her–not just on my mother’s behalf, but independently. My mother had once called her an “ugly old clone,” and even though I now believe I must’ve misunderstood her or she was drunk, at the time it made sense. My grandmother had these outside folds to her eyes she told me she’d inherited from her grandmother, Inga, who was mean. My mother had the same folds. So did I.
I channeled my mother. “You just want me to hush because it’s true.” My arms were folded. “You’re way more prejudiced than me.” A pale high school kid floated up from the passenger side of the convertible, looked at us with puckered lips for some reason, then slid back down. “You can’t even display that,” I said, and pointed with my finger, “you’re so fucking prejudiced.”
A ceramic figurine stood beside her radio. Three nights ago, an Indian man in his twenties had ridden a stripped old ten-speed down from the condos, circled the kiosk twice, and glided up to the window. I remember a bee sting over his eye, if that’s what it was, a runny nose, and the same type glasses Linda Looks Back wore. He smiled and gave my grandmother this figurine to add to her cross and asked if he could sweep the lot or something. My grandmother acted grateful and told him no, Vicky wasn’t hiring. He thanked her and rode his bike down to the overpass. Since then, we’d spotted him several times going back and forth between there and the condos.
After he left, I asked her why he called her “Grandma.”
“Oh, I don’t know. They call me that. Grandma Fear or something.”
This was her nickname. I was embarrassed. She embarrassed me more when she told me it had started off as “Fearless,” she didn’t know why, before they shortened it for fun. I didn’t like it either way. She was supposed to be my grandmother, thank you, and she had a real name. Her name was Rachel, just like me.
As to the figurine, she kept it beside her in case the guy ever wanted it back, or maybe stopped to buy some liquor and wondered where it went and accused her of something. It wasn’t scaled to fit the other ones she owned, not as detailed and bigger and honestly sort of cartoonish. Even I could see that. It was also broken. Not that any of this mattered, according to my grandmother. She said she didn’t display it on the cross because she couldn’t decide what scene from the Life of Christ it represented.
Bullshit, I thought.
“Admit it,” I said. “You think it’s a piece of trash. You think he’s coming back to fucking rob you or something.”
“Oh, enough,” she said, not really upset, just resigned. “The mouth on you.”
“Okay then.” I sensed some potential exhaustion and took it as a dare. Make myself annoying enough and maybe she’d let me go. Probably not. Maybe. I shot my hand in front of her across the counter and snatched the figurine. The kid pumping gas in his Hawaiian shirt had snicked the latch on the nozzle so he could lean against the car and fold his arms, candidly watching. I spun away on my stool to block my grandmother in case she tried to grab me, which she wasn’t. Somebody in the convertible slurped their drink through a straw, hard and loud. I held the figurine up to the cross, high up so everybody could see. “Where do you want to put it? Up here?”
Lightning flashed. For drama, you couldn’t have asked for better. The storm sent a cold gust of wind through the lot that shook the metal gas sign and rattled the wire cages around the fluorescents. One started flickering.
“If we move this one”–I leaped off the stool, balancing on the footrest, and slid a porcelain scene off the cross’s arm. The cross was overloaded and wobbly, and it trembled when I did it. For half a second the little Nativity at the very top promised to fall.
“Be careful! Sit your bottom down!”
“This one. Walking on water.” My stool slid from underneath me an inch, so I plopped back down. “We’ll move it.” I plunked it on the counter, hard. “We can rearrange. Make some room.” I snatched another scene off its shelf, this one lower and easier to reach. “Rock star Jesus. He’ll fit anywhere.”
“No! Put them back now, they’ll chip!”
She thought of these scenes as “heirlooms.” That’s what she called them our first night in the kiosk together when she showed them to me one by one, meaning that in her mind they would someday be handed down to somebody. Not my mother. Probably me. Each one was crafted by the hands of “artisans,” she said, from the “house of” somewhere French, three inches tall apiece and fired three times to give them super-vibrant colors that would never fade. Over the years they would become even rarer, she told me, now that the ninety-five-day “firing period” had ended. She reverently took them down and showed me each one’s “maker’s mark” that proved its authenticity, and when that failed to impress, she dug out their certificates, illegible calligraphy on fake brown parchment. She said the company had sent her a brand-new scene every six to eight weeks, although, this time, a couple months had passed. She suspected a good one must be coming.
“Look,” I said. I splayed one hand on the counter and stood on the stool’s footrest again to reach. The Indian guy’s figurine slipped onto the vacant shelf overhead and looked out-of-place. “It fits. You’re the only–”
“Move!”
I dropped on my stool and got shoved. Whoever was driving the convertible had started the engine. I had missed that part. I heard the fast-talking DJ on their car radio booming out a number for concert tickets, free, to caller number seven.
“Stop pushing!” I said.
“Rachel, move!” Her voice was high-pitched and wavery. She slapped my back, and I spitefully hunkered down, playing the victim even while I threw out an arm to block her from the rock star Jesus or the cross or whatever she wanted. My mom had told me stories about this woman beating her with a hairbrush once so hard the hairbrush broke. She made her cut her own switches from the backyard tree, too, and often left welts across my mother’s butt, although the worst was the dislocated arm from when my grandmother wrenched her off her feet for a swat. I took these slaps across my back as proof of something, multiple things, her cruelty, my loyalty. I turned my head and checked my only audience here, the high school kids. The guy in the Hawaiian shirt was looking straight at me. Behind him, a pair of girl’s arms were stretched above her for a yawn, and when they came down, they descended around his hips, embracing him. She pulled him backwards off his feet. It was like a romantic comedy thing. His sunglasses dropped from his head to the tip of his nose, and he tumbled into the back seat.
I was smiling the whole time he went, flattered and confused, like I was part of it. The convertible pulled forward.
“No, no, no!” my grandmother shouted. “Stop!”
People do this. They fill their tank and avoid paying by driving away. Sometimes, like these kids were doing, they leave the nozzle hooked in the car as they leave. My grandmother had warned me what to do if this happened.
She battered my back to reach the pump switches. The convertible’s driver punched it, the rear tires squealed and smoked. Lightning flashed. Somebody whooped and tossed a Slurpee. The gas hose stretched taut, the boxy old gas pump shuddered, and the nozzle popped free. It twisted and flipped around mid-air under the force of its own spray before it clattered to the pavement, spewing gasoline.
I slipped sideways off my stool, ducking and yelling under a hail of slaps. Without meaning to, I body blocked my grandmother trying to come around me from that direction. The convertible hit the street, cranked a hard right, and roared off toward the mall.
By the time my grandmother flicked the switches, a whole lot of gasoline had gurgled and pooled around the island of those two pumps. It was spreading off in different directions, too, showing where the lot was sunk and canted wrong. Under the flickering fluorescent light, it crept along the asphalt’s dips and hollows toward the kiosk with a horror-movie glitter, like evil black water come to life, sneaking toward us. I said, “Shit,” or something useful like that, and got to my feet. My grandmother flew out the door behind me, muttering no and Murray and Vicky. I started to follow but she yelled.
“Stay!”
Like I was a dog. My mouth opened and I panted like one. “Fuck you,” I finally said, though the door was swinging closed.
It scared me how fast she was moving. The black sky, crammed with secret thunderheads directly above us, tested out its first rumble, and wind blew cold enough to let you know it was hailing somewhere close by. My grandmother brought out this broom, a sad, old straw broom you’d use in your kitchen. Its corners were worn down and rounded, and a few crazy bristles had sprung out sideways. She went after the spill like a madwoman, no plan, no particular direction she was pushing the gasoline. She whisked and splashed and scolded in that funny whisper. Maybe there was a grate in the lot somewhere and a drain, I don’t know.
My knees were shaking. I climbed up on my stool and dug my sad little cigarette and yellow Bic lighter out of hiding from under the counter. I wanted to call my mom. The kiosk had a phone, but I didn’t know her work number. I doubled over and popped the cigarette in the part of my mouth without any stitches, flicked the lighter and sucked and blew and coughed in my elbow so my grandmother wouldn’t hear. The cigarette was shitty but better than nothing. I had already rifled through my grandmother’s purse several times before in search of my mom’s number, but maybe my grandmother was sly. I pulled her purse off the counter into my lap and twisted the gold clasp. The purse was turquoise, fake leather, cracked. The fold-over top opened on the smell of Wrigley’s.
I wasn’t crying or anything like that. As far as I was concerned, my grandmother could go to hell. I was done. A breeze wafted the reek of gasoline through the kiosk, and past the tobacco smoke I noticed the stitches in my lip tasted of blood. A burst of thunder shook the glass window, with its lone bullet hole. I missed my mom so hard I trembled like I was cold, and maybe I was cold, but that was part of missing her, too. The whole week I was missing her, my grandmother kept telling me, You don’t want to mope now. You don’t want to dwell. I choked out a laugh when I spotted the new thing in her purse, a bottle of pills. Around my cigarette I said her own favorite word: Bingo. For a disguise she’d folded a piece of notebook paper and wrapped and rubber-banded it around the bottle. A lot of differently shaped pills were crammed right to the top, some oblong, some round. My plan for the bottle started creating itself before I could even think. Pint of liquor, bottle of pills. Hi, Mom.
My mom liked both. A lot.
I blew smoke in my grandmother’s purse, a gray rank cloud, and snapped it shut in there as a gift. In the flickering dark outside, she pushed around the gasoline while I pocketed her secret pill bottle in its wrapper. Rock star Jesus watched from the counter. I took a big bold drag on the cigarette and blew it at him. He was designed to appear as if he was floating off the ground, sort of creepily, dressed all in white with big loose sleeves and blow-dried hair, his arms extended to balance in the air like, Look at me, ta-da!
I picked him up to stop the creepy floating. Describing him too much here will make me sound religious, which I prefer to think I’m not. My grandmother had called this scene the Transfiguration, or Ascension, whichever. Going through her scenes that first night, thinking she was teaching me, she named each one, starting the whole story at the top of the cross with the little Nativity. “Bethlehem,” she said, showing me Joseph holding a hooked staff like Little Bo Peep and baby Jesus waving at us. Under that went the Baptism, “in the Jordan,” she said, two men fully clothed so nobody thought they were taking a bath together. The cross’s arms got miracles like Walking on Water, and the middle got the Last Supper, three times as big as the rest but priced the same. The Lord’s hair shone golden as the grails and little dishes, and you’ve never seen so much dramatic gesturing during a meal. Ministry scenes were tucked in wherever they fit, Woman at the Well, Sermon on the Mount, Jesus Washing Some Guy’s Feet, all taking place “around Galilee.” The bottom of the cross was all downhill: praying in the garden not to die, getting judged and sentenced anyway, the Passion like a bloody scene from a war movie, and below that the Crucifixion. The Ascension went at the very bottom. When I asked my grandmother where it was happening, she said Jerusalem, but technically it wasn’t. He was in heaven, right? So why put heaven at the bottom?
Like I cared. Apparently, I did, though, because I tried putting things back where they belonged. I don’t know why. I planted one knee on the counter and reached down the Indian’s ceramic figurine. Clearly it wasn’t part of the set. It depicted Jesus trotting along with a big grin while holding something in the air, playing keep-away from two little kids running beside him. They were laughing up at whatever he had, but the figurine was broken. The hand and what it held were missing.
A dove, maybe? Or was he pointing to heaven? It bothered my grandmother she couldn’t remember which Bible scene this was. She sat there holding her hand on her forehead for almost an hour and stared. Suffer the children? Maybe. But why was everybody running around like that?
Whatever it was, it wasn’t a miracle. The arms of the cross got the miracles, so I swapped it out, grabbed the Walking on Water scene to put it back. Jesus was offering his hand to a drowning guy trying to crawl through the water in a panic while his Master’s sandals rested on the porcelain waves, big curls of cobalt blue. Honestly Jesus could’ve looked a little more concerned about his friend.
As I was placing the scene, the cigarette burned the knuckle of my other hand. It jolted me a little. The stool went out from under my leg.
The cross wasn’t secured, as I said, just propped. When I fell against it, all the little scenes and the giant Last Supper slid forward and sideways and let go of their shelves. It was like a knickknack apocalypse. Some hit the counter, others hit the floor. One bounced out through the open window and made it all the way to the pavement where it quietly broke like something cheap, like a piece of chalk.
My grandmother stopped sweeping. Her head came around at the clatter and pop. Her eyes sped from this to that, taking it in. Nothing she saw contradicted what she thought.
“What did you do?” she yelled. “Out of there! Out!”
I backed down off the counter. Two fingers were tangled in the wire where I had caught the cross. I laid it down and extricated them and found a small cut on my arm seeping separate dots of blood. I stepped very carefully backwards on a porcelain shard that crunched and snapped from under foot and skittered away.
“Oh, my Lord! Get out! Go! Go!”
The kiosk floor was littered with bright debris, white and sharp where it was broken, bold and cheerful otherwise: blues, reds, greens, golds. I bent to the cardboard box and pulled up a brown pint with a pink sticker I’d affixed to its dusty shoulder only yesterday. I chose a careful path towards the door while my grandmother cursed in a high-pitched voice outside that broke like mine might have, if I’d cared about anything so much.
“Fuck you!” I said. This was automatic. This was me and my mom. I slipped into view from the back of the kiosk, trying to keep my cigarette and my stolen pint of liquor out of sight. She was standing over the dumped Slurpee, the giant size one. One arm was out. She was jabbing a crooked finger–the finger, I thought, of an ugly old clone–at the overpass and the mall.
“Just go! Go get your mother!”
I was hurt enough to mock her. “Why? Because all you care about’s your fucking knickknacks? You don’t care about me! Or her!” Something pent up surfaced and broke. “You’re a terrible mom!”
Lightning. A touch of ice in the air.
“That not true!” she said in a voice like a girl’s.
For a few seconds, we faced each other, both of us out of breath. So much had happened so fast that we had to stop and let it catch up. The flickering fluorescent light above us was reflected like tiny lightning across the face of the glossy black lake of gasoline where she stood with her sodden broom.
“I just can’t do this again,” she said. “I just cannot.”
She might have been crying. I didn’t think so. She sounded more like she was talking to herself. I thought she might’ve gone crazy. I tried to remember when we’d “done this” before, me and her. We hadn’t. I’d lived with her a week, if that. We’d argued twice so far. The rest was just bickering.
“Then don’t,” I said. “I don’t care.” I didn’t know this woman, wasn’t going to know this woman beyond the fact she used to beat my mother. As I turned to leave, I tried to hide my pint of liquor. This accidentally angled the cigarette ash just right for a breeze to skim the tip and take away a glowing fleck. An eddy carried the spark around in front of me. My grandmother saw it. I watched it spin and land on dry asphalt and wink out. A few inches away, a liquid tendril reached from here to the lake of gasoline where my grandmother stood. I looked at all this gasoline, glossy and black and ready. Between my fingers burned a cigarette.
I was eleven years old.
I was eleven years old, and I pictured it all. I saw the woof and wicked blue and how it would race from me to her, slip underneath her and fire that soaked old broom. Maybe she would stumble backwards, maybe it would knock her off her feet and she would fall in the flames, too shocked to scream for help as she kicked and rolled and was engulfed, flapping her burning hands like wings. . . .
From where I was standing, I couldn’t see her eyes. I didn’t need to. Her whole self was watching me. She saw me thinking about it and deciding.
I swept the cigarette to my lips as I went. Even I could feel how small a gesture it was, how drained of defiance. I stomped across the asphalt to show I wasn’t running away, but that failed me, too, because I wasrunning away, leaving behind the flickering fluorescent for the much bigger flash of lightning that lit up the curb and clumps of grass that fringed the sidewalk like a snapshot from a cemetery.
Behind me I heard a name spoken. Maybe mine. Oh, Rachel!
“Bitch,” I whispered.
Like I said: automatic. These were words I was always using. For just that reason, they might’ve been a comfort, but just the opposite was happening. The sidewalk led me down, down and under the overpass. The path was empty of everything but shadows and a couple old bikes. I had sense enough to tuck the pint of liquor underneath my jacket, less because I feared getting robbed or molested than talked to.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. As I charged under the overpass, I developed this really involved fantasy out of nowhere that the Indian guy who’d given my grandmother the figurine had recognized me in the kiosk already as the girl who’d picked a fight with Linda Looks Back, his cousin or something. He and his friends were waiting to surround me. They didn’t surround me, but they did fall silent as I passed, a half dozen shadows sitting up there beyond the concrete supports, smoking and drinking on the slope of bare dirt. Their silence felt like a judgment on me, like they’d seen it all and understood what an absolute shit I was. I caught the white of somebody’s McDonald’s bag, but that was all. Only one weird thing happened as I passed, and it wasn’t that weird. The timing was actually perfect. A basketball came rolling down the slope and across the sidewalk just inches in front of me. A basketball, maybe as a joke or a comment. It left the curb, and I heard it behind me skipping off across the last of North Maple Avenue.
On the other side of the overpass, out in the open again, I didn’t stop until I reached the two-story sign for the Rushmore Mall. The sign was like base. If I touched it, I’d be safe, or at least I could go behind it and hide myself. Which side would hide me, though, and from who or what? I started walking around and around the sign, hiding from one direction and then another, still sort of waiting or even hoping for somebody to follow me on their bikes, ride big circles around me in the empty parking lot until I bribed them to go away with the liquor and the pills. This never happened, of course. Something worse had already happened. It was something I had done or almost done or only imagined. I could walk as far as I wanted around that sign, but wherever I went I would find it waiting for me. I could see it waiting for me in these acres of empty parking lot, all this new white pavement lit up here and there by lamp posts designed to look like this was olden times. And off at the edge of everything, the city’s only mall unfolded its golden wings in big illuminated storefronts, some lettered, some not. A lone white van sat parked at the curb by the main entrance, possibly my mother’s crew.
My heart pounded faster. Was she there? I circled my sign and waited for something to stop, but it wouldn’t stop. What had happened with my grandmother was permanent now, just like everything else that’s ever happened. All of it started chasing me around my sign, a whole set of facts and circumstances I’d evaded by lying about it to the only person willing to go along with the lie, the one person I had just left behind. What happens to a lie you tell somebody once you abandon them? Without my grandmother pretending to believe my lie, the real facts and circumstances were coming after me, starting with the fact that Linda Looks Back had never broken my lip. These two stitches and this blood I was tasting right now were my mother’s doing. That was the truth. It’s why they put me with my grandmother.
Each time around the sign, I checked that lone white van. I could no more go near it than I could return to my grandmother. I was worthless, uniquely worthless, or not even uniquely, and I wasn’t equipped to cope with that. I twisted open the pint of liquor and got down a sloppy swallow that seared the stitches in my lip, then I propped the pint on the pavement and went for the pills. Thank you, Grandma Fear, thank you, thank you. I ripped the notebook paper off the bottle, snapping the rubber band. I palmed off the child-proof cap, and white pills and pink pills cascaded down my wrist and rained around my feet, hopping and scattering. I managed to smash a good-sized handful against my tongue. As I bent for the liquor to wash them down, the page of notebook paper unfolded in my hand. I read a single line in ballpoint pen, my grandmother’s handwriting:
Please forgive me–Rachel.
That was me. My name is Rachel. On my tongue, the little hill of pills dissolved in spit and alcohol. I stood there open-mouthed and frowning, vowing no, no, no, forget it, I wouldn’t forgive her, no. I heard the dribbling of the basketball from under the overpass, steady and considered against the throbbing stitches in my lip. I felt my grandmother getting smaller and smaller. An icy raindrop smacked the paper. I felt light-headed, maybe relieved, if that’s the word, if you won’t think me too dark for saying it, or blame me. For as long as I could, I stayed confused, clinging to how she could’ve known ahead of time that we would fight like this. How could she foresee I’d find these pills, then steal them, then read her note? Worst of all, why ask me for my forgiveness?
This puzzle took some time.