“Tell that cow of yours to tone it down a little,” my mother would shout from her stool in the breakfast nook. “They can hear her chewing her goddamned cud all the way to the state line.”
“Oh, Sharon,” my father would sigh.
“Oh, Sharon, my fat ass,” my mother would shout, dashing her plate across the counter and onto the floor. Moments later she would rethink her exact wording, adding, “It’s fat, my ass, but not as big as the can on that prize heifer you’ve got shoveling down three sacks of clover she harvested from the Kazmerzacks’ front yard, mama’s boy.”
My mother had a wealthy aunt, a calculating and ambitious woman who had married the founders of two Cleve-land department stores. The woman died paranoid and childless, leaving the bulk of her estate to my mother, her sister, and a handful of nieces. Having money of her own provided my mother with a newfound leverage. She took to wandering the house in a white mink cape, reading aloud from the various real estate brochures provided by a man who arrived late one afternoon introducing himself as her broker.
“This one’s got a full-sized redwood sauna, separate bed-rooms for each of my children, and a view of the distant volcanoes. It reads ‘Divorcées welcome, no Greeks allowed.’ Oh, it sounds perfect! Don’t you think?”
The money made her formidable, and within a month, it was decided that Ya Ya would be sent to a nursing home. My father packed her belongings into the station wagon, and we followed behind in my great aunt’s Cadillac, fighting over who would use the fake-fur throw.
She went first to a private facility, where she shared a room with a sprightly, white-haired lunatic named Mrs. Denardo, who crept out of bed late at night to shit in the hamper and hide Ya Ya’s dentures in the chilly tank of the toilet.
“I’m the stepsister of Jesus Christ sent back to earth to round up all the lazy, goddamned niggers and teach them to cook ribs the way they was meant to be cooked, goddamnit.”
We were enchanted and took to giving her the gifts meant for Ya Ya.
“What’s this? A sack of almonds, you say? You can take these and shove them right up your puckered pooholes for all I care. I don’t want nuts, motherfucker, I want drapes and shoes to match.”
Ya Ya complained strenuously, but lost in the energetic saga of her roommate, my siblings and I never paid any attention. We organized a variety show tailored to Mrs. Denardo’s exotic tastes and practiced for weeks, moving from the song “Getting to Know You” to a dramatic re-enactment of the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre.
“Your show was a piece of stinking shit,” she yelled, surrounded by an audience of beaming senior citizens. “You don’t know fuck about shit, niggers.”
The private hospital had seven circles of hell, and when Mrs. Denardo was sent upstairs to its steaming core, my brother, my sisters, and I lost interest in visiting.
Once the construction was completed, Ya Ya moved into a spanking new building reserved exclusively for senior citizens, a high-rise development called Capitol Towers. The apartments featured metallic wallpaper and modish asymmetrical rooms, the wall-to-wall windows offering a view of the local mall. No one in Raleigh lived in a high-rise, and we found ourselves briefly captivated by the glamour. My sisters and I fought for the opportunity to spend the night in Ya Ya’s swinging clubhouse, and one by one, we took our turns standing at the darkened window swirling a mocktail and pretending to be mesmerized by the glittering lights of North Hills.
I enjoyed pretending that this was my apartment and that Ya Ya was just visiting.
“This is where I’ll be putting the wet bar,” I’d say, pointing to her shabby dinette set. “The movie projector will go in the corner beside the shrine, and we’ll knock down this dividing wall to build a conversation pit.”
“Okay,” Ya Ya would say, staring at her folded hands. “You make a pit.”
Again my father hoped Ya Ya might make some friends, but the women of Capitol Towers tended to be short-haired modern grandmothers with compact cars and stylish denim pantsuits. They kept themselves busy with volunteer work and organized bus trips to Ocracoke and Colonial Williams-burg.
“That is so cute!” they’d say, fawning over the tissue-paper Santa decorating the lobby. “Isn’t it cute? I told Hassie Singleton just the other day, I said, ‘That Saint Nicholas is just about the cutest thing I’ve ever seen in my life!’ And speaking of cute, where did you buy that sweatsuit? My goodness, it’s cute!”
The word cute perfectly illustrated the gap between Ya Ya and her new neighbors. Stretched to its most ridiculous limit, their community password had no practical application to her life. She owned no makeup or jewelry, wore no breezy spangled sweatshirts or smart, tailored slacks. Her door was free of seasonal cutouts, and she would no sooner square-dance than join the Baptist ladies for a tour of the historic pantyhose factories of Winston-Salem. She left her apartment only to ransack the community garden or sit quietly sobbing in the lobby, drying her tears with the tissues used to sculpt the latest holiday display. This was not the picture Capitol Towers wished to present. These were robust seniors hoping to make the most of their retirement, and the sight of our grieving, black-clad Ya Ya deflated their spirits. It was suggested by the management that perhaps she might be more comfortable somewhere else. Legally she met their residency requirements, but spiritually she was just too dark. They began keeping tabs on her, looking for some technicality, and were overjoyed when she fell asleep late one afternoon and set a small fire with her neglected iron. Forced to leave Capitol Towers, Ya Ya took up residence at Mayview, a low brick nursing home located next door to the old county poorhouse. This was an older, considerably less mobile crowd than she’d known at Capitol Towers. Many of the residents were confined to wheelchairs, their spotted scalps visible through tufts of unkempt hair. They peed themselves and sat farting in the lobby, chuckling at the trumpeting sounds that issued from their nightgowns. Unlike her former home, Mayview made no attempt to disguise the inevitable. There was no talk of one’s well-deserved golden years, no rented buses or craft carnivals. This was it, the end of the line, all passengers please double-check the overhead storage bin before disembarking.
It was a sad place to spend the afternoon, so rather than endure the death rattle of her roommate, my father often brought Ya Ya to the house, where she sat in the carport, staring off into space until it got dark enough to catch a few moths.
She was joining us for dinner one night in the backyard when my father, trying to engage her in conversation, said, “Talk about your shockers, did I ever tell you that Ya Ya found her own brother dead in the middle of the road? The guy was slit from his chin to the crotch, murdered by rebels just for the hell of it. Her own brother! Can you imagine a thing like that?”
“I imagine it every day of my life,” my sister Lisa said, tossing an olive pit onto my plate. “How come she has all the luck?”
“Was there a lot of blood?” I asked. “Did he crap in his pants? I hear that’s what happens when you die. Were his organs soft to the touch, or had they been hardened by the sun? How old was he? What was his name? Was he cute?”
Ya Ya cast her eyes toward the neighbors’ basketball court. “In Jesus’ blessy name,” she said, crossing herself with a bar-bequed chicken leg.
It was maddening, trying to get information out of her. Here she had a captive audience and a truly gruesome story but was unwilling to share it. My father had told us on several occasions that Ya Ya’s marriage had been arranged. She had been sent as a young woman from her village in Greece to New York City, where she was forced to marry a complete stranger, sight unseen.
“Did you have a plan B in case he was deformed?” we asked. “When you finally met, did you kiss him or just shake his hand? How did you know he wasn’t related to you? Did you ever date other guys?”
Each time we asked, our questions went unanswered. What we considered newsworthy was just another mundane detail of her life. Her husband, the man we addressed as Papou, had been just as morose
as she was. We had to turn their photographs upside down in order to catch them smiling. The fact that they had only one child told us everything we needed to know about their erotic life. He worked, she worked, their child worked; they never expected anything more out of life. Papou had died when I was six years old. He had been in the newsstand late one night when intruders hit him over the head with a lead pipe, rupturing a vein in his head. He was carried to the hospital and died on Christmas Day.
“Did you still open presents?” we asked. “After he died, did he crap in his pants? Did the thieves concentrate only on money or did they take magazines and candy bars while they were at it? Did they catch them? Did they go to the electric chair? After they were electrocuted, did they crap in their pants?”
“He go to Jesus now,” Ya Ya would say. End of story. We asked our dad, who said only, “He was my father and I loved him.”
That was not the information we were looking for, but to this day it is the only response he provides. Is it loyalty that keeps him from telling secrets about the dead, or is there simply nothing to report? How could you spend that many years sleeping at someone’s feet and not remember a single detail?
“Of course you love Ya Ya,” he would say. “She’s your grandmother.” He stated it as a natural consequence, when to our mind, that was hardly the case. Someone might be your blood relative, but it didn’t mean you had to love her. Our magazine articles and afternoon talk shows were teaching us that people had to earn their love from one day to the next. My father’s family relied on a set of rules that no longer applied. It wasn’t enough to provide your children with a home and hand over all your loose change, a person had to be fun while doing it. For Ya Ya it was too late, but there was still time for my father, who over the next few years grew increasingly nervous. He observed my mother holding court in the bedroom, wondering how she did it. She might occasionally snap, but once the smoke cleared we were back at her feet, fighting for her attention.
I was in my second year of college when I received the news that Ya Ya had died. My mother called to tell me. I cradled the phone beneath my chin, a joint in one hand and a beer in the other, and noticed the time, 11:22 A.M. My roommate was listening in, and because I wanted to impress him as a sensitive and complex individual, I threw myself onto the bed and made the most of my grief. “It can’t be true,” I cried. “It can’t be true-hu-hu-hu-hu.” My sobs sounded as if I were reading them off a page. “A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. A-hu-hu-haw-haw-haw-haw-haw.” I had just finished reading Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory and tried to pass it off as my own. “I feel like a piece of my soul has been ripped away and now I’m just a kite,” I said rubbing my eyes in an effort to provoke tears.
“I’ll walk across the campus later this afternoon and search the sky, expecting to find two clouds shaped like hearts.”
“I’ve got just the thing for you, bud,” my roommate said. “Just the thing for you and me both because, I don’t know if I told you this, my own grandmother died just a few months ago. My brother dropped by to do his laundry and there she was, stretched out dead in front of her trophy case. That shit is harsh, my friend. You and me have got some grieving to do, and I’ve got just the thing to set free the spirit.”
His remedy involved two hits of acid, a bag of ice cubes, and a needle. We split a pair of gold posts and sat hallucinating in the dormitory kitchen as a criminal-justice major pierced our ears.
I flew home to Raleigh the next day, where my father said, “There’s no way you’re coming into my house with an earring. No sir, no way.”
I spent the next several hours in the carport, threatening to sleep in the station wagon, unwilling to compromise myself for the likes of him. “Asshole!” I yelled. “Nazi!”
“Listen,” my mother said, stepping out the door with a tray of marble-sized meatballs. “You take the earring out, we go to the funeral, you stick it back in before you catch your plane. The hole won’t close up that quickly, take my word for it. This is something I want you to do for your father, all right?” She set the tray upon the hood of the car and picked up a meatball, studying it for a moment. “Besides that, an earring looks really stupid combined with glasses. It sends a mixed message, and the effect is, well, it’s troubling. Give me the earring and I’ll put it away for you. Then I want you to come inside and help me straighten up the house. The Greeks will be here tomorrow afternoon, and we need to hide the booze.”
I removed the earring and never put it back in. Looking back, it shames me that I chose that particular moment to make a stand. My father had just lost his only mother, and I assumed that, like the rest of us, he felt nothing but relief. He’d been cut loose from his Greek anchor and could now drift freely through our invigorating American waters. Ya Ya left behind no money or real estate, no priceless recipes or valuable keepsakes, nothing but a sense of release; and what sort of legacy is that? I can’t help but imagine she had started off with loftier goals. As a young girl in Greece, she must have laughed at private jokes and entertained crushes on young stonemasons named Xerxes or Prometheus. When told she would be sent to a new world, I hope she took a few hours to imagine a life of cakes and servants, where someone else would shine her shoes and iron the money. Life had sentenced her to die among strangers. Set out to pasture, she spent her final years brooding and stamping her feet within the narrow confines of her fragrant stall.
“When I get like that, I want you to shoot me, no questions asked,” my mother whispered. “Disconnect the feeding tubes and shut off the monitors, but under no circumstances do I want you to move me into your basement.”
We nodded at the casket — my brother, my sisters, and I — knowing that with her, it would never come to that. Our father, on the other hand, the man weeping in the front row, he would prove to be more difficult.
next of kin
I found the book hidden in the woods beneath a sheet of plywood, its cover torn away and the pages damp with mildew.
Brock and Bonnie Rivers stood in their driveway waving good-bye to the Reverend Hassleback.
“Good-bye,” they said, waving.
“Good-bye,” the reverend responded. “Tell those two teens of yours, Josh and Sandi, that they’ll make an excellent addition to our young persons’ ministry. They’re fine kids,” he said with a wink. “Almost as fine and foxy as their parents!”
The Rivers chuckled, raising their hands in another wave. When the reverend’s car finally left the driveway, they stood for a moment in the bright sunshine before descending into the basement dungeon to unshackle the children.
The theme of the book was that people are not always what they seem. Highly respected in their upper-middleclass community, the Rivers family practiced a literal interpretation of the phrase “Love thy neighbor.” Limber as gymnasts, these people were both shameless and insatiable. Father and daughter, brother and sister, mother and son: after exhausting every possible combination, they widened their circle to include horny sea captains and door-to-door knife salesmen. They did it in caves with their Doberman pinscher and on their slanted roof with the construction crew hired to replace the shingles. The first two times I read the book, I found myself aching with pleasure. Yes, these people were naughty, but at the age of thirteen, I couldn’t help but admire their infectious energy and spirited enjoyment of life. The third time I came away shocked, not by the characters’ behavior but by the innumerable typos. Had nobody bothered to proofread this book before sending it to print? In the opening chapter the daughter is caught with her brother’s ceck in her pissy, calling out, “Feck me hard, hardir.” When on page thirty-three the son has sex with his mother, he leaves the woman’s “tots glistening with jasm.”
I showed the book to my sister Lisa, who tore it from my hands saying, “Let me hold on to this for a while.” She and I often swapped baby-sitting jobs and considered ourselves fairly well read in the field of literary pornography.
“Look in the parents’ bedroom beneath the sweaters in the second
drawer of the white dresser,” she’d say. We’d each read The Story of O and the collected writings of the Marquis de Sade with one eye on the front door, fearful that the homeowners might walk in and torture us with barbed whips and hot oils. “I know you,” our looks would say as the parents checked on their sleeping children. “I know all about you.”
The book went from Lisa to our eleven-year-old sister, Gretchen, who interpreted it as a startling, nonfiction exposé of the American middle class. “I’m pretty sure this exact same thing is going on right here in North Hills,” she whispered, tucking the book beneath the artificial grass of her Easter basket. “Take the Sherman family, for instance. Just last week I saw Heidi sticking her hands down Steve Junior’s pants.”
“The guy has two broken arms,” I said. “She was probably just tucking in his shirt.”
“Would you ask one of us to tuck in your shirt?” she asked.
She had a point. A careful study suggested that the Shermans were not the people they pretended to be. The father was often seen tugging at his crotch, and his wife had a disturbing habit of looking you straight in the eye while sniffing her fingers. A veil had been lifted, especially for Gretchen, who now saw the world as a steaming pit of unbridled sexuality. Seated on a lounge chair at the country club, she would narrow her eyes, speculating on the children crowding the shallow end of the pool. “I have a sneaking suspicion Christina Youngblood might be our half sister. She’s got her father’s chin, but the eyes and mouth are pure Mom.”