I Came with the House

Show patience. You've got to let things come to you. You've got to put up with everything else and sit still long enough and keep your flashlight low until the thing that you're waiting to see starts to rustle. Then it will slowly sneak out into the middle, and it will come to you. I didn't always believe this. I wasn't raised to believe this. I lived in a house where everything should have happened yesterday. I lived in a house where people would yell. Where the volume for everything was always set at 10. If you didn't yell, you weren't going to be heard. There was a real risk that you could wind up starving to death. You might get locked out of the house and have to sleep in a shed in the backyard. Let me tell you, I've slept in that shed. It's quiet. And I wanted to stay there so badly. I wanted to leave them, but no one else did. I couldn't understand it. I assumed that I came with the house. They bought it the year I was born. I figured that they moved in and they looked in one of the closets and saw a baby and just decided to keep her. I knew I wasn’t one of them. But I didn't rush out. I didn't run away. I waited. I knew something would come to me and it did. My father died. Look I loved my father like anyone loves her father, but honestly one less voice in the choir wasn't such a terrible thing (especially a choir that was so completely out of tune). When he died, there was movement. Like one of those little puzzles where you have to slide the pieces left or right and up and down in order to make the picture whole. Once he was gone, it got a lot easier to slide the pieces. Once the picture got clear, it was determined that I should go live with my grandparents. Now most old people are hard of hearing, but not my grandparents. You can whisper in their house and they'll hear what you're saying. And because of that they didn't shout. And they didn't play the television at the top of its voice. They could sit still. They left the door open until everyone came in from the car. This was new to me. These were my father's parents, and he had had a falling out with them. I can see why now. I thought I might have been found in the house, but I was sure that he was adopted. And actually it was true. He was. He had been the unwanted child of the woman who used to clean their home. She was unmarried and too young and didn't know enough English to survive. So they took her baby. With her consent, they gave him their name and a room in their home. Of course his mother kept working there so she got to see him until she met a man and got married and had a baby that she wanted to keep. She moved away. She left my dad behind. That’s the story my mom told me. I asked her if he knew this story, she shook her head and lit up a PalMal. Her mother-in-law told her the story in confidence. They thought about telling him later, but he was never quiet so they could never speak. And in their frustration they decided just to leave it alone. Now I sit quiet for hours, long enough for them to tell me his whole story. They told me everything about everything. It made sense to me because he wasn't a good man. Having such a wretched beginning explained a lot. To have a mother who would leave you for another man and another baby meant you didn't have a very good mother. And if you don't have a very good mother, well then you're not going to be a very good man. And that's exactly what it was. I went to the funeral. I watched everyone cry. I couldn't cry. Not for him. But I put my head down. How do you tell your family that you're glad your father’s dead? Once I moved in with my grandparents, I realized that this was a thought that wasn't really uncommon. In fact everyone who was a "relative" but not an actual relative was relieved that he was dead, too. The only people who truly missed him were my mother and my siblings. The main problem with the story is that I actually am his daughter. I'm related to both of them. I'm not related to these grandparents. They could kiss me inappropriately and it wouldn't be illegal. Not that they will. They're not inappropriate. That's how I know they're not my relatives. They're actually nice people, even with the TV on mute. So I felt like a guest in their home. Any strange behaviors or physical defects could not be passed down to me. The only thing passed down to me was roast beef and the mashed potatoes that my “grandmother” made every Sunday night. I even went to church with the woman. Three days a week. Why not? There was no coercion. No twisting of arms. Just a pleasant ride in a car two sizes too big for the woman. We spoke often in conversational terms. The only time her husband ever yelled at me was “Wet paint!” But it was too late and my pajamas went from pink to black. Oh, and she screamed when she found her husband, of course. I don’t know if that really was a raised voice or just a wail of shock and pain. He died sitting in his car in the garage, a tube attached to the exhaust pipe and the other end pouring exhaust fumes through a crack in the driver’s side window. It smelled awful. Weakness. Since my father wasn’t his son, I knew this kind of weakness didn’t run in our family. At the funeral home, a gaggle of relatives came. Not my dad. He was still dead. But even if he were alive, she knew he would stay away. She knew better than I did because I was sure he would just mock the old man and spit on his grave. But he couldn’t, and neither could I. Although I felt the urge to. Here I am not two months into my extended stay with these two old folks who were relieved that they had a second chance to raise a child right, and one of them offs himself. It turns out he was diagnosed with Parkinson's, and he hated the thought of the eventual deterioration of everything. 76 years was long enough. I can just hear my father criticizing the old man for how quiet he was every time my dad got into trouble as a kid. He would just look past the child’s face and shake his head. Drove my dad nuts. My dad wanted him to take a baseball bat and whack him hard in the head, but the silent treatment was worse. When he got into those old stories of his misery with these two limp wristed phony parents, those were the days when I wanted to come live here but couldn’t. Now I am here, and I see my dad’s point. Now, I suppose she’s going to kill herself or just stop living, and I had been enjoying our time together. Her life was rich with friends and activities. Now, who knows what’s next? The answer came quick when not a hiccup happened to her busy life. The biggest difference was in the quantity of food she prepared for our Sunday night meals. Also, she asked me to sit in his dining room chair. Which I did. It made all the passing a lot easier. It was as if she found a hole in her slippers. She just patched it and kept walking. That was the type of thing my dad would do. The zipper on your favorite jacket gets lost? Use a paperclip and just keep going. We had a cat who got sick, and my mom insisted we take him to the vet. My dad said, “We are not going to stand in the way of that creature’s right to die.” And so we didn’t and it did. We buried the thing in the grass just past the fence in our backyard. No ceremony, though. No wake. Just a deep hole and the cat wrapped up in a pillow case that was odd without a pair. It was useless and now so was the cat. That story reverberated in me as I watched my grandmother handle her husband’s death like a stoic pro. Goddamn, it reminded me so much of him that I had to tell her. She smiled but tried to fight it. She looked me square in the face and asked if I was good at math. I said “I do alright with it, I guess.” “Good, now take my age and subtract your father’s age.” “Well, I’m pretty sure you’re 72.” “Go on.” And he would be 53. So 19 is the difference” She took a sip of her lime seltzer water, her favorite drink outside of a whisky highball that she drank every night during Jeopardy. “ Now, take four years off of that age. Let’s say I’m really 68. What’s the difference now?” “I knew the answer but not the angle. What was she driving at? “15.” “Yup. 15 years. I was 15 years old when I got pregnant.” “Did you have another child that died or also ran away from you?” “No. Only your father ran away. A lot.” I sat back in my grandpop’s reclining chair and I reclined it. “I don’t get it.” Maybe I really wasn’t so good at math. “Well, you might.” She stood up carefully and told me to shut off the tv. It’s BINGO night up at HISS Methodist church, and my grandmother was feeling lucky. It was a goodnight for both of us. We both came out winners, but I have to admit doing my grandma math was not settling down in my brain. I like our quiet car rides, but this had to get out. “When did you adopt my dad? How old were you?” She adjusted herself in her seat and said “19.” “Okay.” I listened to the road signs passing by my open window. “So what? What’s the deal with knocking four years off to 15? Why did you tell me that?” “She paused to inhale because she had a lot to say. “I had sex at 15 with an older man who lived down in Virginia where my family is from. Only my father and mother and I moved up here to Baltimore.” She kept her eyes on the road. “I got pregnant and put the baby up for adoption.” Cars whizzed by going the other way. “That baby was your father. When I met your grandfather when I was 19 and he was 26, I fell in love and told him about the baby. Since he was once an attorney (did you know that?), he made arrangements for us to adopt him ourselves since your father was stuck in the foster care loop.” She let out the air she didn’t use. “So…..” I tested myself against everything I have ever known. “So that whole cock and bull story about a cleaning lady was a lie?” “Yes.” “And you really are my grandmother?” “I always was, despite the blood ties.” “Did he know it?” I looked at her face carefully as she spoke. “Your father? No.” And that’s all we said until later that night after we were home for a few hours when she announced she was going to bed and would I turn down the TV? “Ok”. So I turned it down. Why not? She asked nicely, and it is her home, after all. Our home. “No problem, grandma. See you in the morning.” “Goodnight, hon.” I thought about the hatred my father had for his parents, and it made me love her that much more because…fuck him. Fuck him and the horse he came in on. I got up quietly from the floor where I had been watching Johnny Carson, and I unlocked the front door and stepped outside into the darkness of the quiet country where we lived. I found a nice little clump of earth. I dropped to my hands and knees and dug a deep hole. I stood up and turned around, pulled my jammies down and peed in the hole. I pulled up my bottoms and turned around and spit in the hole. I got back down on my knees and screamed into the hole “FUCK YOU!” Then I covered the hole with the earth and I patted the grass back into place. I stood up and watched the lightning bugs two-step all around me. It reminded me that the only change in my grandmother’s life was that she lost her square dance partner because damn it all if I was going to wear one of those cooky dresses or the studded boots. No, ma’am. I walked back to the house and shook a fist at myself for missing Johnny’s monologue. “Dammit,” I whispered. “That’s my favorite part of the show.”