Writing About Me

My brother and his girlfriend are moving into my father's garage. My mother is moving next door to my father--with her boyfriend. My grandfather has lost control of his bowels and mows through adult diapers like there's no tomorrow. My best friend's boyfriend of five years left her suddenly. My boyfriend's birthday is tomorrow. The semester is officially done. A student recently told me I need to stop assigning readings about "cancer and dead babies and stuff."

These are some things that have been going on lately.

I know I haven't been here to tell you about them. I've been wondering why I stopped writing. I've been wondering that for a long time, actually. My reluctance to blog started shortly after I started up with The Lady-Killer. Why? Because The Lady-Killer and I spent most of the summer and fall of 2010 in bed, but we did not--contrary to Christine's opinion--develop bedsores. Also, living with someone takes up a lot of time. Seriously. There are days when I get in bed at night and think, "I wanted to do, like, eighty things all day, and yet I spent a good chunk of time lying on the couch reading a magazine and watching TLK play video games." The glorious thing about these thoughts though--and this is showing some real growth here, people--is that they generally do not bother me. The fact that I got almost no shit done would have driven me crazy, pre-TLK. But my world since TLK is like a whole new world, one where a psychiatrist prescribed me a whole mess of anti-anxiety meds. That's right. TLK is like a walking, talking anti-anxiety pill. Plus, he has a lip piercing that feels really good when you kiss him.

And here's another thing. I don't want to tell you some of these things. I mean, I do. I really do. I want to tell you about a million beautiful things about TLK--how he's so funny and charming, how he sometimes makes me giggle until I think I'm going to wet my pants, how he makes really good scrambled eggs because he puts cream cheese in them, how we sleep on the same pillow at night (a fact that, when I told my friends Emily and Christine, almost made them barf)--but I also don't want to tell you those things. I feel more private now. I want to hold some things close to the vest. (I mean, see that list of cute things about TLK up there? THAT IS NOTHING. TRUST ME.) But there's just something in me now that is saying Shhh.

I think it has something to do with me protecting TLK's privacy, and mine. I also think it has something to do with growing up. I mean, back in grad school, you could not shut me the fuck up. I wanted to talk about myself all day and night. And then after grad school, I wah-wah-wahed for months about how sad I was, about how rotten and dumb my life had become now that I had graduated and been forced out of the loving cocoon of the MFA program, where everyone is batshit crazy in really lovable (okay, mostly lovable) ways. I wah-wah-wahed over the Wily Republican, who I now, for days at a time, sometimes forget even exists (oh glorious, happy day that I never thought would come!). Then I wah-wah-wahed over having to take up waitressing when my adjunct gig was over for the summer. Oh my God, how did anyone stand me?

But now, I sort of don't want to talk about myself. And that's really startling to me, because I really love to talk, and I really love to talk about myself. (This, I think, has something to do with my family. Generally, during every phone call my mother and I have, we will spend 15 minutes detailing how stupid our relatives, our neighbors, our coworkers, or other people out in the world are. Then one of us will pause and say, "Well, you know, because we're obviously perfect." Sitting in judgment of others and thus illuminating our own awesomeness is one of our favorite pastimes, right up there with badminton and pierogi-eating.)

Anyway, sometimes I miss writing about myself, and sometimes I don't. Sometimes I think, holy crap! That thing TLK is doing right now is so funny (or weird! or crazy! or ill-advised!) I really should write about it! (I've said it before, but I'll say it again: TLK is a lot like my brother. He's lovable in the same way and for similar reasons that have made a lot of complete strangers who read this blog fall in love with my brother. Therefore, I think he makes a beautiful muse.)

Still, I have struggled to get it right when writing about TLK. It's easier to write about my brother than it is to write about TLK. A lot of what's funny between me and TLK has to do with the origin of our relationship, and that's one of those private things I'm not willing to share right now. I don't really care about exposing my brother's weird foibles. The kid is related to me, but it's like he's actually not. It's actually like he's some glorious, horrible space alien that took over the room in our house that had been previously reserved for my mother's typewriter. That kid--the one who took over the typewriter room, which I used to think was its own kind of heaven? That kid I'll expose all day long. TLK though? I'd rather not. That one's all mine.

So that's part of it. The other parts I'm really still trying to understand. But right now I have the inclination to be quiet, but who knows how that's going to go and how long that's going to stick around? After all, when I go home this summer, my mother will be convincing my grandfather that he can never again leave the nursing home and return to his house and that she, in fact, will be renovating the house and moving in. (Wait. Did I say "will be renovating?" I actually mean "totally already did it and has already had new furniture delivered. Surprise, Grandpa!)

In addition, my brother and his girlfriend are consolidating all the things they went to the trouble to dig up for their new apartment, which they've only been in for one year, and they will be moving those things into a small room off to the side of my father's garage. They'll be living there for God knows who long, which means they'll be there when I arrive at my father's house for my usual summer R&R. I think this year my stay at Dad's house will be less like a quiet spa vacation and more like a sitcom staring a boy who once frittered away his life savings at a Hooters.

So maybe I'll be back, but maybe I won't. Either way, I wanted you to know that everything is good--more than good--and that I'm just wrapped up in it, loving it, and being quiet about it for right now.

Merry Christmas from the Stupid Girl

Let me be clear: I do not know Polish. My family is Polish, yes, and my grandparents infused some Polish words into my lexicon, but those were mostly words for food (kapusta! pierogi! placek!) or body parts (butt=dupa!) and thus were not enough for me to pick up anything substantial.

Upon hearing that I was Polish and could not speak the language, two of my old (perverted) customers at the diner--the ones who, when I asked them what they'd like to eat one night, gestured to my apron, which was slung over my hips, and said, "Oh, you know.")--took it upon themselves to teach me parts of the language. But they always chose the worst possible times. They'd test me on last week's lesson on a swamped Friday night, when I was running to and from the kitchen with my arms piled high with plates of fish fry. I was a very bad student. I'd always end up muttering something that was halfway correct or in no way correct, and they'd always look disappointed and tell me to study harder. "You have to listen to us," they'd insist. "You have to listen very carefully."

But I was less interested in listening to them and more interested in making it through the summer so I could get out of that diner and to Maine, where I would start my full-time teaching job. After all, it was possible these men were not being good teachers. It was possible that while they were telling me, "This is the phrase for 'good morning to you'" they were really telling me the phrase for "Your female bits look mighty delicious this morning, and I'd wish you'd take off that apron and service me right here in the dining room."

I didn't trust them, and I didn't trust their Polish.

And so my Polish is still rusty.

As it turns out, if I were a little better at speaking the language, I wouldn't have had to rely on my brother's girlfriend on Christmas. She was the one who ended up translating for me when my grandfather started hissing Polish words at me shortly after dinner, just as the cousins and I were setting up our annual Uno Smackdown in the living room.

Here's the deal: My grandfather has many things wrong with him--legs still riddled from a childhood bout of polio, heart disease, no peripheral vision due to stroke, bad lungs, general bowel craziness, etc.--but the one thing he takes the least care of is his diabetes. He hates taking his medicine, he hates pricking his finger, he hates having to care about the number that his meter beeps back at him. So mostly he does none of those things.

I was over at his house the other day--not because I am a good granddaughter, but because I had to give him something of his my mother had accidentally left at my apartment in Maine during her Thanksgiving visit--and while I was there I felt compelled to make his lunch and do his dishes. I knew he was supposed to be taking his medicine and worrying about his blood sugar, so I made him do it while I stood there and watched (or, more specifically, pretended to dry a pan for fifteen minutes), and so he did. When the number came back as 346, I asked if that was good or bad.

"Well," he said, "it means I'm about ten seconds away from a coma."

But he just doesn't care about those things, and that became even more clear on Christmas, when the cousins and I were sitting around waiting for the Uno to begin. Grandpa was in a recliner in the corner, watching us through slitted eyes.

When my cousin Sarah got up to get herself a raspberry candy, my grandfather said, "Hey. Give me one."

I watched as Sarah took one of the candies for herself and then lifted the whole bowl and transported them over to where he was sitting. He slipped his fingers into pile and drew out several candies that he immediately shoved in his mouth.

"Grandpa..." I warned.

"Be quiet," he said.

Later on, it was sponge candy. Sarah was heading back to the kitchen for some, and my grandfather requested that she bring him one. Actually, several. Actually, bring the whole plate.

Appealing to or guilting my grandfather wasn't doing the trick, so I said, "Don't do it, Sarah."

She looked between the two of us, and then my grandfather narrowed his eyes at me. He started mumbling something under his breath. It was garbled, fast, angry. It was Polish.

"Well, I don't speak Polish," I said. My voice was light, bright, cheery. "So here's a bonus: I don't know what mean thing you're saying about me right now!"

But my brother's girlfriend, whose very Polish grandmother has taught her more of the language than I'll ever know, was there to translate.

"He's saying, 'Shut up, stupid girl!" she said.

And I nodded, said, "That seems about right," and turned back to the game at hand.

Difficult: Four About My Grandfather

(1.)

This weekend at my cousin's graduation party my grandfather tried to explain where he got another of my cousin's nicknames from. He calls her "Schwartzy"--short for Schwarzenegger because, apparently, he had predicted that she will marry someone with a very long name.

"You can predict who we're going to marry, huh?" I asked.

"Oh yes," he said.

"Okay," I said. "Go ahead. Who am I going to marry?"

He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. "A monkey," he said.

"A monkey?"

"Bozo the Baboon," he said. "You're going to marry Bozo the Baboon."


(2.)

At the same party, my aunt told us this story:

One day after work she picked up my grandfather after work and took him to dinner. At dinner, he was unable to concentrate on his food because he was too distracted by the girl--"She couldn't have been more than fourteen," my aunt said. "I swear!"--who was leaning over into the cooler to scoop ice cream.

"That's right," my grandfather muttered under his breath. "Keep leaning. Keep going. Farther over. Oh yeah, that's good. That's right."

Later, after dinner, he mentioned he'd recently seen a nice Jeep for sale over on the Indian reservation and he was wondering if my aunt might take him over there. She said fine, she'd take him. She was tired and she hadn't yet been home that day, but she wanted to make the old man happy--she hasn't been around him all her life, considering she married my uncle maybe only 10 years ago, and she hasn't hit her limit yet--so she asked him if he was certain he knew the way to where they were going because she didn't.

He said sure.

He lied.

He got them lost.

She stopped for directions, and the man in the gas station said it would take another forty minutes to get where they needed to go. Still, she took him.

When they arrived at the reservation, my grandfather found the Jeep he was interested in--why? Because he wants one, but only to use in the field; he swears only the field (yeah right)--and he toddled over to it and started touching it.

"There's not a for sale sign on it," my aunt said. "You're sure it's for sale?"

"No," my grandfather said. "I guess I was wrong. I guess it's just someone's Jeep."

And then he tried to lift the hood to look at the engine.


(3.)

He wants a Jeep. He wants wheels bad. But he has had a stroke. His vision is iffy. His doctor wrote a letter that revoked his license. Still, still, still, that man swears he is fine, he is good, he can drive, he wants something he can pilot. He says he's in the market for a Jeep, as if we could forget the three flat-tired ones that have sunk into the ground behind his house. These are the Jeeps he drove near the end of his career as a driver, and each is busted in a unique way from his string of "minor accidents." He routinely drove into the picnic bench outside his favorite diner. He routinely clipped passing mail trucks or concrete mixers or Mazdas.

And if no one is willing to get him a Jeep, he's ready to compromise. He'll take a motorized bike.

"That way," he says, "if I have an accident, I'll only end up killing myself."


(4.)

"You know," my mother said at the family party, "when people at work ask me to describe my father, I just say, 'He's difficult.'"

And Then He Mentioned He Might Shit on My Seats

At 2:00 the other day my mother called me and said, "Hey. You want to come out for dinner?"

I said sure. Of course I did.

Then there was this. She said, "Bring your grandfather."

My grandfather lives next door to my father, in the house he has let go to pot since my grandmother's death in 2003. For the entirety of his life, my grandfather never had to make his own food, tidy his own house, do his own laundry, take care of his bills and other important matters. But after grandma was gone, suddenly he was faced with an important decision. Either he did the stuff he never had to do, or he didn't do it and live in squalor.

He chose squalor.

The house is filthy. People--my uncle, his wife, my brother, my mother--come to tidy it, come to tell him he can't keep living like this, but because they come, and because they have picked up where my grandmother left off, he doesn't see any reason to shape up.

A few weeks ago my brother went over to the house to make sure grandpa's medicines were lined up for the week ahead. He came prepared to do a little cleaning, too, since grandpa has been known to shirk even the most basic of normal cleaning duties--like keeping his urine in the bathroom. He, like his father before him, had, for a while, taken to urinating in a bucket kept in the living room, by his recliner, where he no doubt watches hours of pornography like he was recently when my mother came by for a scheduled visit.

Anyway, when Adam showed up to our grandfather's house, he found the man watching television while the kitchen surfaces crawled with maggots. The man--who is capable of getting up and putting his uneaten food in the trash, who is capable of running a sponge over spilled spaghetti sauce, who is capable of taking the trash from his house into the garage; and I know this because he is capable of walking down to the back lawn to check on his garden, to water his plants, to climb on the tractor and mow patches of the field in his backyard--the man chooses not to do any of those things. And so there are maggots. Maggots my brother had to clean up. Rotten food my brother had to hold while he searched for a trash can that was no longer in the house. Messes he--and everyone else--has to clean up.

When I hear these things, I get so angry I can hardly breathe. I recognize that I have it easy, that I'm not here, that I don't have to deal with the man on a daily basis, that I am not his son or his daughter, both of whom had to live with his cruelty and indifference for years, and therefore I should suck it right up and do what little I can do--like transporting the man to my mother's house for a spaghetti supper on a Sunday night--but sometimes that seems like the most exhausting thing I could ever ask myself to do.

And so I was angry at my mother when she asked. But I, after a few hours of sulking, agreed to do it. I went over to his house and went to the front door to collect him. He came down tottering down the hall, shrunken, skinny, wearing suspenders to keep his pants up around his waist. He looked sad, pathetic, a hangnail of his former self, but I wasn't fooled.

I made nice, loaded him into my car, and then held awkward conversation for thirty minutes about the following things: bird shit, elderberries, hay baling, and his cat. He didn't ask me a single question about myself. He didn't wonder how I was doing up in Maine, how the semester had gone, how my writing was coming along. He didn't wonder about anything. But at the end of the drive, as we sat at a stop light near the turn for my mother's house, he did let me know one crucial thing about himself.

"I sure hope we get there soon," he said. "If we don't, I think I'll just shit on your seats."

"What?!" I said.

"I've got to go to the bathroom," he said. "And I'd hate to leave that kind of mess on your seats." The way he said it, though, made me think that was a fairly big lie, that he wouldn't actually mind doing such a thing. He was, after all, past embarrassment, and it might've been the most interesting anecdote of his week.

"WE ARE RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER," I said. "JUST HOLD IT."

He held it, and when we got to my mother's house, he spent the next twenty minutes in the bathroom, while the rest of us sat on the back porch looking down into our plates of spaghetti.

Later, after we'd pushed back from our plates and were sitting and listening to my brother tell one of his stories--this one about taking his girlfriend on a sketchy trip to find an unmarked graveyard that was supposedly haunted by the ghosts of dead fetuses that had been extracted in illegal, quick, and dirty abortions--my mother noticed the bruises on my leg (fall) and arm (collision with kitchen wall).

"Jess," she said, "where did all those bruises come from?"

"She always bruises easily," my brother said. "You know that."

"It's true," I said. "I do. But these are from substantial things. This one," I said and twisted around so everyone could see the black and blue circle that marked my upper arm, "is from running into the corner in the kitchen the other day. You wouldn't believe how bad it hurt."

My grandfather, who was sitting next to me, turned to consider the bruise. "Oh yeah?" he said. Then he raised his index finger and jammed it into my arm, straight into the center of the bruise.

I saw white behind my eyes. It hurt just as bad as when I had first hit the corner and slumped into the wall, my breath knocked out of me. I wanted to hit the old man back, to hurt him like he'd hurt me, but I couldn't do that, and I couldn't say anything either because that's not what we do in this family. We let that man hurt us, and we press our lips shut and just let him do it again. And again. And again. And he will because that's what he knows best, that's what he loves, that's exactly his favorite thing in the world.

Dirty Old Man

"Your uncle's on vacation for a week," my mother says when I call her this morning, "so I've got Grandpa Duty."

"Oh yeah?" I say.

"Yeah. I started yesterday and I'm already sick of it," she says.

This seems reasonable to me. After all, I know what a pain in the ass my grandfather can be. Just last night, for example, I had a dream about him that seemed to sum him right up. In the dream, he showed up after I had just finished baking a batch of chocolate chip cookies and frosting a dozen sprinkled cupcakes. He walked right into the kitchen and sat in a chair in front of those forbidden sweets and reached out for one.

"GRANDPA!" I said. "You can't have any of that!" I swatted his hand away from the cupcakes.

He looked at me and then back at the cookies, the cupcakes. He reached again.

"No!" I said and hit his hand again. "No! No! No!"

The dream was pretty accurate. My grandfather is a whiner, a big overgrown baby who will keep reaching for the things that are bad for him, even after he's been told not to. When my mother tells me she is already tired of her father's antics and she is only a day and a half into her duties, it doesn't surprise me one bit.

"So, what's that been like?" I ask her.

"Ugh," she says. "I went over there yesterday afternoon, and when I walked through the door there was a porno playing blaring from the living room."

"GROSS!" I say.

"It gets worse," she says. "He came trudging out from the bathroom and started talking to me like it was no big deal. I could hear the girl moaning. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore. I said, 'Dad, what is that?'"

"Oh God."

"And he said, 'Oh, that's one of my adult movies.' He didn't even go turn it off. He just wanted to sit there with me and have a conversation with that playing in the background. His daughter! He wanted to have a conversation with his daughter while a porno blared!" she says.

"I'm going to throw up," I say.

"Yeah, so was I," my mother says. "I finally had to tell him it was disgusting and that I was going to go shut it off."

"Inappropriate!"

"So inappropriate," she says. "He's getting weird. He's a really dirty old man."

"And today you're making him a meatloaf," I say.

"Yeah," she sighs. "And today I'm making him a meatloaf."

Holiday Gems from My Grandfather

When you get my grandfather to sit down at the dinner table on a holiday, you can never really tell what you're going to get. Still, one thing is for sure: what you get is usually inappropriate. And while my brother made it his mission to say the word nipple as many times as humanly possible in the span of twenty-four hours, my grandfather decided to give us his arsenal of responses to insults. Nothing celebrates the birth of Christ quite like my grandfather saying the words fuck, ass, shit, and dick while his family pours wine and assembles slabs of roast beef and neat piles of horseradish on their plates. Here are some of the highlights:

(1.)

Grandpa: When people say "Fuck you!" to me this is what I say to them. I say, "If you did, you'd never want to go back to sheep."

(2.)

Grandpa: When I was at the home, there was this woman Irene who didn't like me very much. One day Irene told me to go straight to hell, and I turned right around and I looked at her and said, "Now, Irene, I will never go to your house."

(3.)

Grandpa: Goddamn this dog! He's got his nose in my ass.

Mom: Sorry, Dad. He's just a puppy. He's just trying to play.

Grandpa: Well, I don't like it. He's acting like that dog your brother had down in Texas. That dog was always running up behind you and sticking his nose in your ass. After a few days, I'd had quite enough of that. So there was this time I could hear the dog coming--he was running right up behind me, ready to stick his nose in my goddamned ass--and I was ready for him. I waited until he had his snout buried as far up in there was it would go, and then I let a fart rip as loud as I could. And you know what? That dog backpedaled so fast it was like he'd been shot. He never put his nose in my ass again after that.

Thanksgiving: A Play in Four Acts

Act I: The Arrival

We open on my uncle's kitchen. My uncle is carving a turkey. A smoked ham is already sliced and waiting on the stove. There is Southern gravy--floating thick with giblets and hard-boiled egg, his wife's favorite--in a large pot. A sweet potato casserole that would make you see God is steaming on one of three tables.

Enter the Cousins. There are six of us. We are a little misbehaving gang. Five minutes after our arrival, my brother has already cussed fifteen times, none of those times discreetly. "Adam!" my mother has to keep saying. "Adam! ADAM!"

My cousin Aaron, who talks sass like no one else, interrupts one of my stories to ask if I ever, ever, ever shut up.

"I will kill you," I say, but I am kidding. I am in a good mood. After all, I have already pulled kittens off the back porch and cuddled them under my chin. The kittens are Abbey's half-siblings. Her mother, it appears, gets around.

Now that I'm in the kitchen, I wonder why there are three tables crammed into the currently-being-renovated-room. I am not entirely certain we know enough people to sit in that many chairs. "Who's coming to dinner?" I ask.

My uncle explains that he and his wife--a slow-talkin' Tennessee lady he met while working in the South--have somehow signed on to cater the wedding of someone they know from work, and--surprise!--those people are coming to dinner to test their food out before agreeing to the catering.

I have questions--who tests out a caterer's food on Thanksgiving; since when has my uncle been a caterer; don't these people have family dinners of their own to deal with; who comes over to a co-worker's house on a major holiday--but that will have to wait. There's another surprise!

My uncle looks over his shoulder, not stopping his turkey carving, and mouths the words THEY. ARE. BLACK.

For a moment I think I have hallucinated. For a moment I think I am getting my leg pulled. Everyone knows what an awful sort of racist my grandfather is. If pain and embarrassment were amusing, it would be sort of funny if someone other than the white people he was related to sat down for a holiday dinner with my grandfather--especially if that dinner involved giving thanks and expressing love and tolerance. Ha! Ha! The thought of that is mildly amusing and not bad fodder for a story, a novel, a play.

Then I realize my uncle is not laughing and that he is instead flaring his eyes in a terrified sort of way.

"Oh Jesus," I say.

My mother's boyfriend calmly gets up and takes his glass--not a wine one, but a giant plastic pop cup--over to the counter and pours himself a tall drink of White Zinfandel. When I get up to follow suit, he says, "Yup. Keep pouring."

Act II: The Dinner

My grandfather arrives at the exact same time as my uncle's co-workers. I can't imagine worse timing. I am in the living room when it happens, and I see my aunt trying to lead my grandfather--who is tapping his cane over ice--to the house. I see the co-workers headed to the house, too, and they are carrying a small child bundled in winter finery. This makes me even more nervous because if there's anything my grandfather hates more than black people it is black people who have procreated and thus contributed to another generation of black people who will go on ruining his country long after he is unable to complain about it.

I skitter away from the living room, back into the kitchen. "Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus," I say.

When my grandfather finally makes it into the room, everyone starts talking all at once about everything. His pills! The weather! The pie! His dead wife! Anything that cannot even remotely be brought back to any race, cultural group, or religious sect that my grandfather despises. If we can just bamboozle him! If we can just keep him dazzled for an hour! Maybe we'll all make it out alive!

It is the child that makes me the most worried. He is the cutest thing I have ever seen, what with his little sneakers and little jeans and little holiday sweater. He is three and just learning to talk, and whatever he does say comes out loud, shrieky, and sort of wrong. I want to pick him up and tickle him and listen to him giggle. I sense, however, that my grandfather wants to talk about his hair--I can sense the words nappy and afro on his tongue--and I start guzzling wine and praying that our small corner of the world will suddenly crack open and suck the whole family into a fiery abyss so at least our deaths are quick.

This does not happen. But the Cousins act up and say foul things and cavort in a manner that makes it hard to hear anything that is going on over at the adult table. When pie is served, everyone is still in one piece, no one is crying, and I take this as a good sign.

Act III: Moaning

The Cousins have eaten so much and so quickly that we have all made ourselves sick. Sick as dogs. We cannot get comfortable. We arrange ourselves in different locations, trying to find a place that allows us to be the least nauseous that's possible. We try sitting next to the Christmas tree, in the parlor, on couches, in high-backed chairs. We finally settle on the floor directly in front of the bathroom, just in case anyone needs to go shoot turkey and stuffing from their mouths, which, considering the way my brother is moaning and writhing, might just happen. No, really:

Act IV: The Departure

We are sitting in the back living room. The adults are sitting in the front living room, down by the tree, and they are watching TV. They are talking adult things. No one is screaming, shouting, or cursing, so we assume my grandfather is being made--somehow--to be quiet.

The Cousins are playing Uno. My brother is discussing all the bathroom trips he's made this evening. He is cataloguing the results of those bathroom trips. He's talking about poop and smelly farts. He is making my girl cousins squeal Gross! Gross! Gross!

He occasionally drops a sentence or two about how much sex he and his girlfriend are having.

"Just kill me," I say.

I say that for several reasons. First, eww. Second, this is the most nervous I've felt in a long time--and I've recently gone out to lunch with The Boy From Work, and the moment before I opened the door and saw him for the first time since we broke up was a pretty sweaty moment--and I feel like we're all sitting around waiting for something to go wrong.

During a lull in the game, my brother needles me in the ribs. "Just look at him," he says. "He's dying to say something. You can tell." Then my brother slaps a Draw Four Wild onto the pile and turns to my cousin Aaron. "Take that, Fuck Head," he says.

After an hour or two of digestion--during which the sweet little three year old has torn around the living room, chasing after the cat, climbing under the Christmas tree, plucking off parts of my aunt's massive Christmas village--my uncle's co-workers are ready to go. They plop their son into his snow boots and winter coat. They pull a hat over his head. They say goodbye, wave, thank everyone for everything, say how full they are, and then they shut the door behind them.

All the Cousins' heads whip around to see our grandfather, who is sitting like some shrunken king in a chair angled directly at the television, but most of us are too far away to hear him. Still, his lips are moving, and they are moving fast and quick.

My brother, who is sitting closer to him than any of us, widens his eyes. He rolls those eyes to the ceiling. He shakes his head. "You don't want to know," he says. "You just don't."

But in that moment I am thankful for that small mercy, for the fact that he at least kept his mouth shut while guests were there, for the fact that he didn't ruin their holiday and send them away from our family thinking, What the hell is wrong with them? Just who do they think they are inviting us over and letting that happen?

And already we are moving on, blocking him out, sliding more red-yellow-green-blue Uno cards across a towering pile, saying take that! and ha! and suck it! and, really, it's not a bad way to spend a night. In the back living room, we are all getting our assess whooped at a game we used to play four hours with our grandmother--a woman we loved more than anything ever--and in the front living room, my grandfather is spilling hate from his lips, but for once we don't hear it.

I Imagine There Will Be A Lot of Awkward Silences

My grandfather was raised by a woman who got her kicks off drowning kittens in front of her children and grandchildren. I never knew the woman, but that--and heaps of other evidence--makes me come to the conclusion that she probably wasn't the most nurturing soul. This is probably part of why my grandfather is the way he is: full of rage and hate.

And I was thinking about this today as I stood crammed up against a wall in a funeral home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where a memorial service was being held for the chair of our department's father. There were so many people in attendance they spilled over into a back room, and even that wasn't enough to contain them all, so the funeral directors set up another room, not in view of the podium, where the visitors could watch the service on an in-house television feed. To say that this man, our chair's father, was a wonderful and beloved man is the biggest underestimate in the world. He was worshipped.

I'd never met him, but I understood from the way people were acting, from the stories that were told, that this was a man you'd love to know. Which, of course, prompted me to wonder what exactly would happen at my grandfather's service. I felt slightly guilty wondering about this, especially considering my grandfather doesn't exactly seem to be going anywhere. He's had awful health for pretty much his entire life (polio, heart disease, emphysema, hypoglycemia; he's had strokes, heart problems, breathing problems; he smoked cigarettes for 40-some years, but of course never developed cancer, although my grandmother did--twice, and the final time killed her), but he's grouched his way through it all. He's yelled at his family, at paramedics, at nurses, at doctors--in fact, at his most recent surgery, my grandfather decided to call his doctor a fag--but he's still made it through in the face of all that sourness.

So what can I assume will happen at his wake, his funeral? Will it be well attended? Will the people there come for him or for us? Will an entire town turn out to say one last goodbye to the man who called them all faggot assholes, queer shits, mouthy bitches? Will we put a good picture in a gilt frame, balance it on a casket, and watch as people come forward to look fondly on that snapshot of him in better health and times?

Most importantly, how will I feel? Ever since the Christmas that changed everything, I have not wanted to be anywhere near my grandfather. It is awkward and awful. He wants to go on pretending nothing happened. He wants to go on being the same man he will always be. And I only talk to him now because I was forced to when my grandmother got sick and died.

In our family history, there are a million moments--both big and small--that I'd rather forget because he somehow ruined them, but there are other things to consider, too. At one time, I was my grandpa's girl. There is a famous family story that involves a day shortly after I came home from the hospital. My grandfather packed me carefully into my carrier and drove to his favorite breakfast place--a place where anyone who was anyone in town dined on the weekends--and walked me from table to table, showing me off like I was the best baby the world had ever seen. When people tell that story, my grandfather will break in and say, "I was ten feet tall that day."

He spoiled me. I was his only grandchild for a good long time, so I had his undivided attention and affection. He took me for special trips on his tractors and jeeps back into the family woods, where he would teach and quiz me about the different types of trees and animals. Whenever we went to town, my grandfather would find occasion to duck into one of the gas stations and fish out our favorite treat: ice cream sandwiches. He'd often come back to the car nibbling the soft, chewy cookie edges of his, and I'd squeal, "Did you get me one? Did you get me one?" and he'd make a big production about no, he hadn't, he'd forgotten, he was sorry, he'd get me one next time, did I want a bite of his? And as I crossed my arms and pouted, he'd tell me to take a look in his jacket pocket, and that's where I'd find my own ice cream sandwich--a little melty, a little sticky, but delicious nonetheless.

I'm not sure how I'll match all that up in my head when I finally need to, when I finally need to face his absence. I'm not sure how I'll do it because I can't now. I don't understand how it is you can go from loving someone so completely, so unconditionally, to wishing to be anywhere else but in the same room with that person because he has done things to you that are so hateful, so evil, so awful you wish you weren't related.

And it's not just me. It's the whole family and everyone he's ever come into contact with. How will we all handle it? How are we going to approach that day? I'm almost fairly certain that the service will feel absolutely nothing like the one I attended today--one that made me want to cry because I felt just how much everyone in the main room, the overflow room, and the television room would miss that man, that good man who loved them all more than anything.

Just In Case Anyone Was Wondering How He Was

Yesterday afternoon I took off and drove down to Portland to see the new X-Files movie. If nothing else, I am a giant geek at heart, and I have loved the X-Files and its alien-monster-freak parade since it began.

If you were to ask me exactly when it was I realized I was hooked on the show, I would tell you it was that episode with the giant tape worm guy that made me say, "Okay, that's it. This show is seriously badass." That particular X-File was so horrifying and disgusting I refused to go into a Porta-Potty--which was a breeding ground for the giant tape worm guy--for a long time afterward. And even though I will now use one if I have to, I still give it some serious thought before I go in.

Anyway, it is my intense love for the show (and specifically Mulder) that inspired me to be one of the first people to see the movie on its opening day. And I'll say this about the movie: it would've been better if they'd let me write it. I appreciate what they were trying to do, and I appreciate the "twist" they gave us, but it could've been better if someone had given the dialogue a second thought.

But that's not really the point. The point is that afterward--after I'd spent an hour and a half thinking that if David Duchovny showed up at my door with that thick beard he was sporting through most of the movie, I'd rethink my policy on beards if he'd just come in and talk to me about psychic rats, about alien autopsies, about inbred killers, about parasitic twins--after all that, I called my mother. She was my X-Files partner for years. We'd park ourselves in front of the television and say things like, "Should we turn the lights on now? Should we? What do you think?" because we knew that if we watched certain episodes of the show with the lights off, there'd be no hope for sleep come bedtime. After extra creepy episodes, my mother would request we walk back-to-back down the hallway. We'd straighten up our shoulders, press our backs together, and scuttle down the hallway in quick half-steps that kept us glued together so that no ghosts or zombies or clones could get us.

After I saw the movie, I called my mother to rub it in. "Guess where I just waaaaas!" I sang into the phone when she answered.

"Where?" she said.

"Watching the X-Files mooooovie!"

"No fair!" my mother said. She grumbled and sighed. "I want to see it!"

I asked her what she was doing that night--I figured she could very well convince her boyfriend to take her out for a Friday night show.

"We're just taking grandpa back," my mother said. "We had dinner."

That meant my grandfather was in the car with my mother. That meant there was no way I was getting out of speaking to him. I sure tried though.

"Oh!" I said. "Well, I hope you guys had a nice dinner. I'll let you go. I'm on my way to the mall. I'm almost there."

"Okay," my mother said. "Well, here. Talk to your grandfather first."

I rolled my eyes up to the ceiling of my car. "Okay," I sighed.

There was a pause, a fumbling, and then my grandfather answered the phone. "Hello?" he said, sounding confused, like he had no idea who I was even though my mother had already announced me.

"Hi grandpa!" I said in the brightest, fakest voice I could muster up.

"Oh, hi, kid," he said.

"Hi. How are you doing?" I asked.

My grandfather cleared his throat. "Well," he said, "I've got diarrhea."

And what does one say to that? It was not my intention to ask after his bowel movements--I'm pretty sure that's not what's implied in the everyday statement How are you doing?--but that's what my grandfather gave me, and I had to say I was sorry to hear that but I bet he had a nice dinner anyway, and he said he did, and then I decided that was enough for the day, so I announced I was going through a toll booth and I needed to hang up so I could find some change. There wasn't a toll booth in sight, but believe me when I tell you that was a very necessary white lie.

If You Ever Wondered Why I Don't Like My Grandfather, Here's a Reason Why

Yesterday when I went over to my uncle's to visit the kittens, my grandfather was in the kitchen. My uncle had sprung him from the assisted living home he recently moved in to--a place that has improved his health immensely; a place he loathes--and brought him over for dinner. After I loved up on the kittens, I went on it to see him.

He asked how I was, what I was up to. I told him my father and I had spent the day at a memorial party for a family member who recently lost her young husband. One day he'd just tucked himself in for a nap and never woke up. This would be devestating for anyone, but it was extra devastating for this girl, the daughter of my father's cousin, because she has cerebral palsy. She does not have the strength to hold their son--still little, still a baby--and will have to rely on her parents to do most of the parenting for the rest of their lives.

I told my father this story. I told him about how awfully sad it all was, how she'd made a speech and played a song in her husband's memory before beef on weck and cake was served, and my grandfather looked at me and said, "You know what you should do with a woman like that?"

"What?" I said.

"Just take her out back and shoot her," my grandfather said. His mouth was a grim line across the stubbled folds of his face.

I stared at him. I stared at him for what felt like an eternity. When I was finally able to open my mouth, all I could say to him was, "That was an awful thing to say. Really. Just awful. Mean."

My grandfather nodded and then shrugged. "Well," he said, "I am a mean man."

I had never heard anyone sum it up just so precisely.

This Stuff Is Getting Old

I'm home. I've been running since the moment I parked my car in my father's driveway. It's been party-party-party-drink-drink-drink-shop-shop-shop-decorate-decorate-decorate. I've graded essays. I've decorated cookies and assembled stockings. I've even braved the malls.

It's been a whirlwind. And last night I was whirled over to the first family party of the season. We went over to my mother's brother's house for a holiday meal. My grandfather was there, and he was in fine grandfather form. He had a pretty substantial stroke last year, and the stroke took his eyesight, but only at first. It came back. Well, most of it came back. Since then, he's been busy pretending he can do everything he used to do. One of those things is drive. The man insists he can drive and has no problem with it, although there's plenty of evidence to the contrary.

As soon as we walked in last night, my grandfather cornered my mother and started telling her the most ridiculous-sounding lies I've ever heard. My grandfather needs to take a refresher course on the art of lying. He needs to hang around small children who are much more convincing at it than he. He built up these fanciful stories about these crazy drivers who have hit him, forced him off the road, caused him to get in accidents. Like, six accidents in the last month.

The first happened when he was getting off a freeway. My grandfather had an elaborate story about a crazy driver who was in such a hurry to beat everyone else off the ramp that he hit someone in front of him, which caused my grandfather to hit him. Then the crazy driver motioned for my grandfather to follow him to a parking lot so they could exchanged information, but he just followed my grandfather, took down his plates, and sped off. Then he charged my grandfather with a hit and run.

More plausible story? My grandfather hit this person and actually did run because he's had several accidents (and gotten several new vehicles because of this) since the stroke, and he's in danger of losing both his insurance and his license.

The second story was about a crazy drunk dump truck driver who was weaving all over the road and forced the car in front of grandpa into a ditch before he plowed into grandpa--who was now driving a rental vehicle since his car was in the shop. The crazy drunk dump truck driver scratched the hell out of the side of the vehicle and took off the rental's driver side mirror.

More plausible story? My grandfather, who lost his peripheral vision with the stroke, didn't even see the dump truck, and he was the one to hit someone and ding up the rental car.

As he told these stories, there was a lot of foul language, a lot of grumbling, a lot of Can you believe these people?! moments. It was quite an impressive show. He tried his hardest, gave his best effort, but none of us were buying it. Not for one minute.

And that's just what it's like with my grandfather: he has very little regard for the effect his actions will have on others. It's always been that way.

It was that way again last night. As he was shuffling out of the room to get his coat and leave, my grandfather stepped up onto a decorative holiday rug my aunt has in the living room. It features a Santa Claus who is really quite tan--the thread that forms his skin is more mocha-y than vanilla-y, and this disturbed my grandfather. He looked over his shoulder to see if we were all paying attention, then he smiled and gestured to the rug. "Look," he said, "it's Nigger Claus!"

I sighed. It's as if he just doesn't care, as if he hasn't learned his lesson. Of course, he doesn't think there is a lesson to learn. He is still punishing me for my audacity several Christmases ago, the year I decided I was sick and tired of him giving racist speeches at the dinner table as we spooned ham and mashed potatoes onto the holiday china. He is still trying to say, Hey, little girl, you don't know anything about anything, and I don't give a shit about how rotten I make you feel. I'll say what I want. I'll die saying those things.

As my grandfather pulled himself out of the room and limped toward his coat, I reached for a large hunk of fudge and shoved it in my mouth so I wouldn't have to worry about saying anything. I was tired. I was really, really tired.

"Well," my uncle said, "that was clearly meant for you."

"I know," I said. It was touching, really. I'm so glad that's how my grandfather chooses to show his love--especially during the holiday season--by showing us all we are inferior to him, that he doesn't give a shit about our feelings, not even a little bit.