I smiled. She’s a nonsmoker.
It’s also the same place that my other sister pinched me with lobster strength and taunted me until I picked up a dried-up, nearly white dog turd and hit her in the leg with it, upon which she immediately threw up, ran to her bedroom, and slammed the door, which resulted in the call to Uncle Jimmy.
On the other side of the yard is the swimming pool, into which Lisa, then a nine-year-old full-fledged spaz, rode her bike, at the deep end, because she couldn’t see past her huge perm head.
In the corner of the yard is a fig tree, sturdy, tall, and massive, producing figs that practically drip honey. My father planted that tree almost thirty years ago and babied it gingerly, from a twelve-inch sprout taken from my great-grandfather’s fig tree back in Brooklyn.
On the side of the patio is the storage room, bearing a puke-green door. On the inside face of that door, in pencil, are the names of myself and my two sisters, and hatch marks that document how we grew until we all hit our peaks of giantdom at 5’5’’. Lisa’s son at three matched the exact height she was when my dad started measuring.
Our house.
I drove by our house after my sister had sold it. The new owner hadn’t moved in, although she had hired people to chop down every tree in the front yard and had rented a massive Dumpster to place the debris of the demolished Z Brick wall and other structurally important elements she was ripping out of the house.
I called Lisa that night and asked her if she thought the new owner had pitched the green door into the Dumpster, too.
“Probably,” she sighed. “She called Dad and offered to sell it to him. He told me to peek in the alley every now and then to see if it was out there, but I’m too afraid of that damn chicken. It’s just a door with some marks on it, you know.”
“Yeah, it’s just a written-on door,” I agreed, nodding, though I understood that we both knew better.
Even now, years and years and years later, when I drive past my old street on my way to Nana’s old house, after the Dumpster incident, I can’t bring myself to look three houses from the corner and see that house.
Now that Nana was moving, I wouldn’t have a reason to drive past it anymore, and I was kind of glad about that. Standing in Nana’s empty living room, a different flood of memories came back, memories of my Pop Pop dancing to “Mack the Knife,” laughing, yelling that he was a “caged animal in his house” after we took his driver’s license away, and the place in the backyard where he would spread all of the old, stale bread to feed a hefty majority of the birds on or about the West Coast.
My grandfather was a character, and we all loved him dearly. I never knew of another grandfather who would do the things he did for me; picked me up every day from school until I finally got my own car; and whenever we went over to visit, he would present me with generic maxi pads and tampons when he found them on a dollar-days sale at Walgreens. He was an avid junk collector, a trash can harvester and pack rat, and he lived by the maxim that one man’s garbage was another man’s treasure, and the proof was always presented in a sloshy, bubbling Hefty bag, covered in “nothing you can’t wash off!” One day, when my mother, my sisters, and I were visiting, he vanished down the hallway and returned carrying a massive cardboard box.
“It’s for you people,” he said, motioning toward the treasure, in what he could not have known was a tremendous taunt. “It’s tonic for your hair. It’s brand-name.”
My sisters and I ripped into that box like it was filled with E-Z Bake Oven cakes, eager to grab handfuls of Vidal Sassoon, Prell, or the most fantastic bounty possible, the entire line of Fabergé Organics that spelled instant popularity in our respective second-, fifth-, and seventh-grade classes. It was the moment it was actually possible to break away from Notaro Hair, and being that we were traditionally White Rain girls at sixty-nine cents a bottle, we had never had the chance to wrestle free from our cotton-candy hair prison. Our grandfather, we knew, had just made all three of us Charlie’s Angels, and, damn it, tomorrow, our hair was going to feather like the back of a duck’s ass.
Within seconds, though, the fact that I was blind with possibility and hope vanished, and there it was in the light of truth, as a dozen African-American faces smiled up at us.
“Pop Pop,” I said as I tried and failed not to laugh. “This is Jeri Curl. This won’t work on us unless Mom slips us drugs, renders us unconscious so that we won’t fight back, and gives us home perms again.”
“Oh, you don’t know!” my grandfather said angrily, throwing up his hands, and snatched the box back. “Hair is hair, anything works on it! You people are just too fancy to use marked-down stuff! Everybody at Walgreens wanted this, you know! The cashier even had her eye on it and tried to talk me out of it, but I knew what she was trying to do. I was thinking! She wanted me to put this stuff back so she could buy it for herself!”
Sure, I felt bad that my Pop Pop had just squandered part of his Social Security check on useless hair products meant for people with a different heritage, and although I loved him a lot, I didn’t love him enough to go to school the next day looking like Shalamar or the short guy in Hall and Oates. Furthermore, I could just imagine the look on the cashier’s face when the old Italian man shuffled up to the counter with a case of Jeri Curl, could simply not be talked out of his treasure find, and then paid for a case of it.
When I turned sixteen, Pop Pop once again shuffled out of the back bedroom with an oddly and distantly familiar blue box in his hand.
“Here,” he said, handing over the Lady Remington from my tenth birthday, which he had stealthily rescued from the trash years before. “Nana’s been using it, but I think you need it more.”
The proof of his treasure hunting was in his closet, in his storage room, and in his backyard, where his pilferings from other people’s refuse provided the flair in my grandfather’s “yard art.” Now, I’m not sure what exactly it is about retired men and utterly useless crap that when you introduce the two makes one of them drag the other home and prop it up as a decoration in the backyard. It’s not exactly two great tastes that go great together, but rather like the set designer from Sanford and Son had stopped by, armed with a van from Goodwill packed with items from a Superfund site. Among his outside treasures were: a Fisher-Price dollhouse, battered and broken, though it proved to be an agreeable perch for the bevy of birds that gathered for the daily feeding, and who, oddly enough, pooped only in the bathroom; Mr. Arizona, as my grandfather named him, an excessively creepy, huge, six-foot-tall stuffed doll that was made, apparently, from an old flag and sat in a chair on the porch; a massive set of bull’s horns that he tacked up above the sliding glass door; and a wide, odd variety of ceramic heads that Pop Pop had gathered out of the trash bins of the art class at a middle school where he worked as a janitor after he retired.
The heads were awful, horrible things, ugly enough that either the children who made them were horrified enough of their creations that they threw them away voluntarily or someone with their best interests at heart did it for them. I mean, they were big clay heads, fired and now solid, glazed, painted, and simply hideous; a wonderul idea in theory, but in practice, it was an optimistic assignment with ghoulish results. None of them looked human, they were the stuff of nightmares. I mean, honestly, plop a five-pound block of clay in front of any eleven-year-old and see what you get—it’s not going to be the head of the Venus de Milo or Michelangelo’s David, I can tell you that much. It’s going to have honest intentions but wind up more like a disfigured burn victim, a band member from GWAR, or something that escaped from the lab, but that did not stop my grandfather from lining his gardens with them, the grimaces peeking out from behind the bougainvilleas or springing up between the daffodils.
It was, in a word, breathtaking.
If someone were to simply peek over the fence briefly, they might have thought my Pop Pop was Lucretia Borgia or Jeffrey Dahmer, being that the carnage was everywhere, heads, heads, and more heads, and proud
ly so on display. Pop Pop, however, loved the heads, and even referred to some of them as “cute.” It didn’t help that they were in an array of colors—green, pink, purple, red, yellow, all easily requisite colors in the spectrum of decomposition, giving the grisly display something of a ghastly, circuslike air.
Over time, their numbers dwindled, as I’m sure some of them broke, but most likely it was my Nana sneaking out to the backyard in the middle of the night to toss them out, slowly, one by one, while my grandfather was sleeping.
After Pop Pop died, they all disappeared, as I knew they would. So did the Fisher Price Poop Bathroom Dollhouse, Mr. Arizona, and the blanket of bread crusts that Pop spread over his grass every day.
Then, one day, when my nephew Nicholas was about three years old, we were throwing a ball back and forth in Nana’s backyard when the ball rolled over and stopped at a bush. When I went over to retrieve the ball, I bent down to get it and jerked back when I realized something in the bush was looking at back at me.
There was an eye, a definitely creepy eye, deep in the middle of the bush. I could barely make it out, but it was an eye. I thought to myself that it couldn’t be; how could one of the heads be in the middle of this massive bush?
When I looked at the bush closer, I realized it was not really a bush, but the thick, dense shoots of an olive tree that used to be on that spot until Pop Pop had it cut down when I was a kid. There had been a short stump, a stump apparently worthy of becoming a stand for a ceramic creature head, and as the shoots began to grow around it, the head was forgotten, until the shoots became a bush and the head had been swallowed by it.
“There’s a head in that bush,” I used to delight in telling my nephews to scare the holy crap out of them, and because they were so little I’d get to do it once or twice a year, because they would have forgotten all about the last time I bet them a dollar that Nana had a head in her hedge.
Nicholas, the sensitive, cerebral nephew, would scream and ask how it got in there when I showed him the evidence; David, the aggresive, id-driven nephew, would immediately take a stick and attempt to kill it. Then I’d get to tell them a story about their great-grandfather, whom neither got to meet, and how he used to decorate his backyard with very odd things that made the yard very special. I was going to miss that yard. It was always easy to make a buck there.
It was probably the last time I would be in this backyard. After we moved Nana and got her settled into the new house, there really wouldn’t be any reason to come back. Everything was packed, on the truck, and already gone. There wouldn’t even be a reason to drive past the house anymore.
In addition, Nana wasn’t the only one in our family who was going to be moving. Only the day before, my husband received an acceptance letter to attend graduate school in Oregon. By the end of the summer, our house would be empty, too.
“That’s it,” my husband said after he loaded the last of Nana’s boxes. “We’ve got everything. We should go and get to Nana’s new house before the movers get there.”
“Yeah, sure,” Nana agreed reluctantly. “Who wants to hang around this old empty house?”
“Hang on a minute,” I said as I put my car keys down. “I forgot something.”
I went out into the backyard, went to the bush, and stuck my hand in. I was able to get my hand around the face of the head, but I couldn’t pull it out from the middle. The bush had been growing for years, and the sprouts were no longer sprouts but branches, some of them an inch thick.
“What are you doing?” my husband said as he came out of the house. “We need to go. The movers can’t get in without us.”
“Just wait a minute,” I said as I stuck my other hand past the branches to the center. “This will just take a minute.”
I grabbed the back of the head with my other hand, but I could already tell this was going to be a tough fight. The branches were stronger than I thought they would be, and they had the head in a sort of prison, with the shoots acting like thick bars all the way around it. I just tugged and I pulled; I felt my arms get some deep scratches, but I wanted that head. Finally, I yanked the head out from it’s decades-long perch on the stump, through the branches that had hidden it and, in a sense, kept it safe from a Dumpster death at the OCD hands of my Nana.
“What the hell is that?” my husband said, completely horrified. “If that’s what I think it is, I did not see this. I didn’t. I cannot be an obstructor of justice, I am going to grad school. You lied about your family the whole time! You are just like the Sopranos, but without Little Steven!”
“Touch the grody head,” I taunted as I pushed it toward him. “Touch it! And this wasn’t a Mafia hit, you dork! It’s just the head of my first husband.”
“I hate you so much,” he replied. “What is that thing? It looks like an Orc. Is that Rosemary’s baby, or at least part of it? ”
“Naw,” I replied, laughing. “It’s just my soul.”
“Well,” he said, “if you won’t tell me what it is, would you please tell me what you’re going to do with it, and that hopefully it’s not going somewhere in our house?”
“Nope, it’s not going in our house,” I confirmed. “But as soon as we get our new house in Oregon, it’s going straight into the backyard.”
Back to the Homeland
I swear I am never letting my parents go to Europe again. The last time they went, they came back with roughly nine hundred of the same pictures that everyone who just comes back from Europe has. We were on Photo 765 when my father leaned over the dining room table and pointed to one teeny-tiny minuscule window on the side of an enormous cruise ship.
“Now, that was where we stayed,” my father said, tapping the photo with his finger. “See that window? That was the window to our room on the boat. Behind it was your mother, and I think this was in Mallorca, so she stayed in the room and scratched at herself.”
“It was a rash, but it was more than a rash,” my mother spoke up from the other side of the table. “It was like a full-body scab. It would not surprise me at all if that cruise ship washed its sheets in sand, because when I woke up that first morning, I was nothing more than a tomato with a mouth.”
“A tomato with a mouth who vomited every time we hit a wave, which, on a ship, is a little difficult to avoid,” my father added.
“That is a lie,” my mother replied. “I didn’t get seasick until we got to France.”
For the benefit of his children and for the trip to Europe, my father invested in an extra-fancy camera that can take wide-angle 180-degree shots, so we “could really get a feel of what it was like,” although that feeling could have been reached far more successfully if he had bought us all round-trip tickets to Rome. In any case, my dad had a little trouble figuring out how to use the 180-degree feature, so he basically stood still and clicked, moved a quarter of an inch to the left and clicked, moved another quarter of an inch to the left and clicked, and so on and so on, until he was satisfied after forty minutes that he had captured the whole shot faithfully. That dedication, however, was nothing compared to the time it took to assemble the jigsaw puzzle of the Tyrrhenian Sea my father had thus created and had spread out on my mother’s dining room table. For nearly five hours, my entire family was held hostage while my father color-coded specific quadrants of the scene with Post-It notes, unable to leave until we ooohed and aaaahhhed over the finished creation, and individually told him what a good investment the 180-degree camera was. The massive work turned out to be not another boring picture, but another very large boring picture that didn’t quite match up in some areas (overexposure was my father’s explanation for the gaping holes in the two-foot-by-three-foot image, or maybe it was just the times when he had to reload the camera and forgot in what quadrant he had last taken his quarter-inch picture), which created minor waves of nausea if you looked at it for too long, or, as my mother experienced it, “Makes me feel like France.”
“This is Italy,” my father said, flipping to Photo 766. “Frankly,
I didn’t like Italy too much. It was very . . . old-looking.”
“At first, I thought the Italians were very friendly and touchy-feely,” my mother added. “I thought they could sense we were related, or at one time were one of them—”
“As is documented in Photo 767,” I nodded, pointing out a woman whose hand looked disturbingly close to my mom’s ass as my mother’s sandblasted face attempted to smile for my father’s expensive camera but looked more like she had just stepped on a nail.
“Oh, that one,” my mother nodded. “I thought she liked me until your father realized she was reaching for my wallet.”
“Here,” my dad said proudly, “is the Vatican. That’s the Pope’s window. He sleeps in there. If the light is on, it means he’s home. See? The light is ON. You know what that means?”
“If Photo 769 is a shadow of the Pope getting undressed and cameoed by the mystical ‘Pope Is Home’ light, I am freaking out,” I said blankly.
“See this?” my father continued, flipping to another photo. “This is a place called Pompeii where a volcano erupted and covered the town in ash.”
“And when they dug the ash out, they found the shells of people laying like this,” my mother said as she covered both of her eyes, “like this,” she said as she stretched her arm across the table and grimaced, “and like this,” she continued, and as she looked up, her mouth fell open and she put her hand to her forehead. “Of course, by the time they were dug out, most of them were dead. Isn’t that what the guide said?”
“Something like that,” my father said with a nod.
“I think Pompeii was kind of a . . . seedy town,” I ventured. “I saw a special on TV that showed some old brothels with dirty pictures on the walls. Did you see anything like that?”
“Pornography was not on my agenda,” my mother snapped. “I did not go to Europe to see a peep show and look at filth. Show her more pictures of the Vatican. You wouldn’t believe that place if you saw it. The size of that gift shop really is a miracle. It’s enormous!”