bed

It was the dead of night. I couldn’t see anything, and I was trashed, so it took me a while to get the key in. Our house was above average just like all the other homes in our wealthy suburb. When I finally got the key in, the inside was just as dark. I didn’t know where I was stumbling, and then I felt this huge bulbous object against my arm. I knocked it over and an explosion of dust encroached me and all the marbled floor tiles around me. Fuck. Dad’s urn, again.

On came the lights. I could feel my mother angrily stomping her way down the stairs to me. I stood and awaited her wrath.

When she appeared before me, disheveled and in a robe, I thought that she was an apparition.

“Where the hell is it you keep crawling in from at this time?! It’s always the same shit with you,” she said, only beginning to get worked up.

She never seemed to care about my antics before.

Confused, I opted for silence. My mother looked down at the mess of ashes separating us.

“That’s it,” she sounded serious. “I told myself this would be the LAST TIME I sweep up your dad with the dustpan.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle. That tested the last of Mom’s patience.

“I’ve been too easy on you. I thought I was giving you space, letting you grieve, but you’ve lost control. I’m not going to sit by and allow this anymore. You’re 17,” this was the first time she’d spoken to me like this.

My head was spinning.

“I’m sending you to your grandma in the city,” she said. “You need some structure and discipline.”

I wasn’t close to this grandma, but I’d heard from other family members that she was nuts. A total shut-in. No one in the family really associated with her because she was just so eccentric.

She would dress much too young for her age, with vibrant tight shirts and pants more suitable for someone my age. One time, she picked up my cousin Sydney from after-school care in a tube top with a temporary tattoo of a cartoon angel above her left breast and a full face of cakey makeup. Needless to say, Sydney switched schools after.

In her later years, Grandma pretty much would never go out, because she spent all of her time forming parasocial relationships with the vapid TV hosts on her shows; and she was super paranoid from the endless stream of news and sensationalized crimes she absorbed all day.

There was no way I was going to be exiled to her place.

“Like hell I need structure, and from her of all people!” I told my mom.

“I’m running away, and you can’t stop me.” I started shuffling past her with the intention of going and grabbing my stuff.

“I’ll cut you off if you don’t go,” she knew how to get to me. I froze in my tracks.

“You wouldn’t dare,” I said defiantly.

“Try me,” she said with an unwavering assertiveness. My fate was clearly sealed. I sighed in resignation and folded at her threat.

The drive over there didn’t take too long. I wanted to explain to my mother why my grief had taken the direction it did, but I couldn’t. My resolve was to just find a way to go out tonight and not have to think about it, again. My mother refused to say when this Beyond Scared Straight experiment would be over, but I was hoping it wouldn’t occupy my entire summer. At the very least I would get to know the night life of the city.

When I got to my grandmother’s building I felt a sense of dread. The hallway was grimy and looked haunted. Her door was already ajar and I could hear loud Hispanic television sounding off. The apartment was more cramped than I was used to. When I got in, I had to waft through a cloud of cigarette smoke.

“Grandma?” I called out.

“Hey girl,” she answered with a thick Caribbean accent from the rear of the apartment.

“Come to the bedroom.”

The place was messy and eclectic; tons of decorative plates from Grandma’s island, fertility statues, crooked family photos, and Christian icons were scattered about. In true big city fashion, the kitchen was also the living room.

My grandmother was glued to the television set, in what looked like a pair of XL Betty Boop children’s pajamas. She was a short woman with shoulder-length, curly black hair. I took special note of how her hair was dyed totally black, like she couldn’t be caught dead with a single gray strand of hair at the age of 75.

She didn’t look up when I stepped in. She didn’t so much as flinch. I stood quietly in the room with her for a while, taking it all in.

“Um…nice catching up but I’m going out now. See you later or whatever,” I said.

I walked on back the way I came and she was instantly at the door, barricading it.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Doesn’t sound like a good idea.”

“I can’t be in the city and locked up–” I tried explaining before she cut me off.

“Do you not watch the news?” she asked, in a spell. “This week alone a girl your age was sexually assaulted downtown. In Harlem last Tuesday, they robbed this elderly woman who was in an empty train car during the day. My friend told me that the cousin of her half-sister's neighbor's best friend's dog was jogging in Central Park and got pushed. Her attacker ran off with her phone and some cash she was carrying. She’s hospitalized now. Every five minutes something happens.”

“You watch the news too much,” I said matter-of-factly. “If you watch your back then nothing can happen. Now let me go.”

She continued to guard the door.

“I’ll tell your mom how spoiled you’re acting,” she said. “Let’s see if she keeps on sending you money then.”

“Oh come on! Not you too.”

“It’s for your own good. Don’t worry, we can go out when I run out of groceries!” she exclaimed.

I looked over at the kitchen: messy, but fully-stocked. I decided to let it go for the moment and calculate a better time to try and leave. She was clearly too impassioned to reason with. I walked over to the dumpy, partly deflated air mattress in the bedroom that had my name on it. I laid down on it and it let out a sad fart noise.

The bedroom was dark, save for the obnoxious blue light emanating from the bright TV. The minute a commercial hit, interrupting the uptight gossip anchor lady from speculating how long Jennifer Lopez’ current relationship will last, Grandma jolted.

Mechanically she walked over to the stovetop and reached for some freshly-brewed coffee. She all but chugged it down. The caffeine instantly taking effect, fueling her to life, a jittery Grandma grabbed hold of a cigarette out of her tattered pant pocket like a claw in an arcade machine. She smoked it out the bathroom window. Then, she returned to her scheduled programming.

I watched Grandma repeat this process at least ten more times. TV, coffee, cigarettes. TV, coffee, cigarettes. Again and again. When I caught her dozing off during the late-night news cycle, I tried to sneak out again. I made it half-way into the living room, and I really thought I was gonna be home-free.

“Don’t even bother,” she yelled out.

I stalked back; I found it incredulous that I came here to be a total prisoner.

She continued, “...one needn’t go outside to be free. That starts in your head.”

I obviously ignored her bizarre coffee mutterings.

I settled back on my little mattress like an obedient dog and watched Grandma perform more of her cycle. It was like my own scheduled programming. I began to hallucinate it happening at varying speeds, first quickly and then slower. It was striking how robotic and methodical she was about it; she always did everything in the same rigid order. It was as though smoking first and then drinking coffee, instead of the other way around, would set off an earth-shattering curse. I was at the edge of my seat when, in a moment of unexpected deviation, I saw her writing something in the darkness.

What could THAT possibly be, and how can she even see it? I wondered.

I wanted to sleep, so I tried to bore myself with the TV. What could possibly be so good about it anyways?

I had to sit up because I really wasn’t ready for what I saw.

I was on the television.

On the TV, I was depicted on my measly bed in Grandma’s bedroom, first looking pathetic, and then frantic. My every move was being captured. The footage of me then cut to footage of my mother and grandmother, who were dressed as reporters on the news station that’s always playing. They seemed to be laughing at me. I rubbed my eyes and looked again: gone. It took me several hours before I could fall asleep. I woke up feeling absolutely hellish the next day, almost on par with how I would’ve felt if my night had gone the way I wanted it to. It was early in the morning when I went into the kitchen where I heard grandma clanking pans about.

Chow time.

She was playing Marc Anthony loud enough to muffle the TV which continued to play in the bedroom. That TV was working overtime.

I only caught a few garbled words of the morning’s ridiculously-exaggerated crime report; something about bed poles being recalled over a design flaw.

The eggs were sizzling.

There was an interesting aroma in the air of tobacco-ey coffee beans and egg. Feeling half-dead from undersleeping the previous night, I couldn’t tell if the smell was coming from me or not. I caught a glimpse of myself in the uncleaned, antique living room mirror: lifeless with bulging under-eye bags. I plopped onto the worn couch and looked up at the wall of a million framed grandchildren and deceased relative photos.

Suddenly they all started staring down at me.

Their collective gaze was too much, and after that incident I went out of my way to avoid looking at the wall at all costs.​​

Under me I felt a cigarette, and to give myself a task I reached for the blue Bic lighter on the coffee table beside me and tried to smoke it. Grandma’s arm stretched ten feet, like a pool noodle, and grabbed it from me.

“Uh-uh,” she said. “That’s mine. Go and buy your own.”

That part pissed me off.

“Don’t you think I would?!” I muttered in vain.

Marlboro Lights weren’t even that good.

She went back to the stove and served me a plate. Using bread, bacon, and ketchup over the eggs, she formed a face with a smile.

“Hehe,” she cackled. “It’s a little face.”

Then, she tried to mimic the awkward smile the eggs were making.

What circle of hell was this?

I accepted my breakfast despondently. Grandma sat down beside me. I watched egg yolk drip down the detached, saggy skin of her neck as she began to speak.

“Look,” she said. “I’m sorry about your dad.”

I wasn’t expecting her to go there so I became engaged.

“People get into car crashes every day. I hear about it on the news constantly. That’s why I don’t drive. If he had only watched, too, he would’ve known that his exact make and model was one of the worst.”

Annnnnd she lost me.

I retreated into the bedroom. She called out to me:

“Listen, I’m having a new headboard delivered, I want to move my bed to where you are and have a better view of the TV, so it’s gonna be built around your space.”

“‘K,” I said to her.

Whatever it was she was talking about.

Later, as we were in the middle of the 5pm news report, a Dominican delivery boy showed up out of breath, having ascended six flights with no elevator. The prospect of a boy coming excited me mildly, so I tried to get myself together a little and vie for his attention. I wet my hair and touched up my makeup. Funnily enough, my grandma was also doing her makeup.

I had spent the greater part of that afternoon fantasizing about the delivery boy falling in love with me and taking me with him. He’d come in, drop the bed poles, and carry me down the stairs bridal style.

When he finally did walk past me, he let out a disgusted groan. Figures, I thought. I turned my attention to the TV, now moved out to the living room, while he constructed the foundation for and later connected four rusty bed frame poles around my tiny mattress in the bedroom.

Grandma picked up some stray bubble wrap and started playing with it, right in front of the TV.

“I love it,” she said.

She threw some my way but I could not be bothered to react or understand what was going through her mind. After the boy finished his job, Grandma gave him a poor tip and sent him on his way. I then crawled onto my rubbery chamber, and I poked one of the poles with my toe. They rattled quite easily and seemed like they would give out if I touched them again.

You get what you pay for.

I kicked another pole lightly but it still set off rattling dramatically.

“Hey!” Grandma started. “Those things aren’t screwed in securely enough. Keep messing with those poles and an ambulance will have to come and take you away. I have to get my son to come and fix this trash.”

An ambulance taking me away. Interesting.

While grandma parked in front of the TV to dance along to a cheesy jingle, I saw my opening. I started kicking at the poles with a bit more fervor with each jut. This was the moment I had been waiting for, truly. I alternated between glancing at Grandma and at my tall, oxidized tickets to freedom; to outside. I kicked as hard as I could and was hastily struck on the head.

“FUCK!” I heard my grandmother call out.

She promptly collapsed. I seem to remember paramedics coming to get me and shoving me into an ambulance downstairs.

For a fleeting moment I was able to experience the bliss of New York’s piss air. I was struggling to blink, but from what I could see, everyone around me had my grandmother’s face; EMTs and passersby alike.

I regained consciousness in a sterilizing, fluorescent hospital room. I felt myself in a daze. There was a TV mounted up on the wall, and it was broadcasting me, right there on the bed.

I hate this show, I mumbled to myself.

I looked all around me: no sight of Grandma. I was surrounded by stuffy, uniformed clipboard-wielders, AKA social workers. One of them was a lady with crooked glasses, standing a little too close.

“Heeyyy sweetie. You’re awake,” she said, almost mockingly.

“Your grandma isn’t,” one of the uniformed men did not miss a beat to chime in. I widened my eyes in disbelief.

“What?! What happened?!” I asked.

“Jeez, Carl. She just woke up,” I heard the lady tell him.

“She was found on the ground, by her bed like you were. She’s in this hospital too, but she still hasn’t regained consciousness.” The lady said slowly.

“And we can’t really get ahold of your mother at the moment,” another one of the guys added.

I started to feel pretty awful.

“We peeled this off of her pajamas,” the lady said while holding something strange.

She then handed me a baggie of miscellaneous items: cold scrambled egg chunks, a still-lit cigarette, a stained and folded picture of the Virgin Mary Guadalupe, and a letter. I read it to myself.

“Dear Daughter, I’m writing to you to say how great it feels to finally have company. I’ve had such a nice time, I hope my granddaughter soon can, too. I hope that here she may find a new perspective for life like I did with my grandma. I hope she finds happiness. She deserves it.”

My eyes watered. I knew instantly that this was what she was scribbling in the dark during the middle of her rebooting routine. It struck me as a tender gesture I would have never expected from her; a lucidity in emotions that surprised and saddened me. What other untapped sentimentality was she secretly sitting on?

I began to think back at her weird hijinks: making faces out of food; her childlike joy with dirty bubble wrap; the faces she would make at me when I looked bored; and her dancing to that commercial jingle, loving life. I wasn’t sure how long I would be stuck in the dreary hospital with none of my family, but I got the sense that I had just exchanged one type of confinement for another. I didn't realize that when I bashed my brains in with those cylindrical slabs of metal.

Maybe she was onto something. Not with the self-imprisonment and chronic paranoia per se, but with this ability to find lightheartedness in places no one would think to. These are attributes that I lost with my father. It all starts with your mind. I wiped my tears and tried to regain my composure.

“I have to go see her,” I said to the social workers hovering over me.

I got up, until the TV loudly played our local news station’s unmistakable jingle. I felt like a pet whose owner was calling her name. I looked, and Grandma was a reporter again. She was smiling at me, and I smiled back.