This is an excerpt from my book Outrunning Crazy
Great Grandma Jib who lived in County Galway, Ireland, got mad at her husband for lipping off one too many times and when no one was looking socked enough money away to buy a one-way ticket to Canada. On that trip, while everybody below was puking and hanging on for dear life, she started courting one of the deckhands. He was the one who eventually became Nana’s father. This new man was called up to duty for WW1, three months after they landed in Canada. Nana never met her Dad because he went overseas and got killed a few weeks before she was born. This elevated him to saint status because he died before anybody found out what was wrong with him.
‘A man you know little about is the best man of all.’
That’s what Nana’s sister, Great Aunt Margaret, used to say. She ran away too because her husband turned out to be gay, which I don’t think bothered her until she caught him with her undergarments on. He was a big man in the shoulders so she could never get the bras to go back to their regular size.
Then there was Launa, Alberta’s oldest sister. She moved into town and married a fireman. But she ran off Uncle Gary before long and most people think it was because of her miniatures collection. She loved the miniature people sitting on miniature chairs on top of miniature doilies perched on miniature shelves inside of miniature cupboards. You couldn’t take one step without running into them. Uncle Gary was
a big, clumsy man and he kept knocking them off the shelf. Finally, he left and went back home to live with his mother so he could put his feet up.
You couldn’t tease Launa about the miniatures. She was one of those people with no sense of humour. We went to her house years after Gary had left, and some of the little baby dolls had fallen over in a little bowl of blueberries. Launa fiddled with them so much that the lunch she was serving got cold. Mom finally asked if the dolls would like to have lunch with them and Launa shot her a look like Medusa.
Alberta asked, “What are you going to do to me, Launa? Turn me into one of your porcelain entities?”
Launa still hasn’t changed much. She got herself a new man who she meets in a motel room once a week, a man who told her off the top he would never leave his wife which she said suited her fine. She doesn’t have to worry about him tramping through her housebreaking anything.
Nana kept up the tradition but she didn’t run too far, just across the field to our house.
After she got into her new house, people thought she’d settle down. It had brand-new everything. The kitchen had an island and a new olive green fridge and stove.
JD and Nana were fine separately but together they were miserable. All they did was fight. In the old days, Alberta used to go over to their place to referee. “What is wrong with you two?” she’d ask.
“I asked him to take me into town tomorrow to do my shopping. But he won’t stop watching Gunsmoke.”
That made JD grunt and turn the TV up even louder. “Miss Kitty never bothers Matt Dillon for money, does
she?” JD would say this as if it was proof of something. “It’s my egg money, old man,” Nana retorted and hit
him with her broom.
“She takes my money and goes to the track,” JD snapped
back.
Boots had taken her once years ago before he lost his
license, and JD still wouldn’t let it go. Nana hit him again. “Mother, stop it,” said Alberta. “When are you two going
to get along? Eh?”
Nana looked at JD. “Well, answer her. She asked when
you’re going to get along with me, old man.” At this point, JD would do something ignorant like lifting his leg and let go a crackerjack of a fart.
Nana would then pitch a hairy fit. “That’s it. Alberta, take me to the bus station.”
She had never learned to drive so she spent more time in the back of a bus than most people. In the early days, she’d go to stay with her brother, Father Don, or go down to the States to see the two American sisters. Over the years, they got sick of her bellyaching so after a while, she wasn’t welcome there anymore.
“Mother, you’re not going on any bus,” Alberta would object every time like this was the first time she had ever heard of her mother doing a crazy thing.
“Well, I’ll go to town and stay with Launa then,” said Nana. But she hated Launa because she was mealy-mouthed. Being pale and scrawny like a tomcat didn’t add to her good qualities either.
“Or I could go to Berle’s.” Nana would never go there because that house smelled. Every house had a distinct odour. Ours smelled like coffee. Nana’s smelled like Glade. Elaine’s smelled like raw meat. Berle’s house stank like wet hound.
Berle’s kids were encouraged so much that everybody was sure they’d turn out to be criminals but despite the excessive praise, they were actually the nicest bunch in the lot.
That’s how Nana always ended up with us. We annoyed her least. When you’re running away, you want less stress, not more. Every few weeks, I’d wake up and she’d be lying beside me in bed snoring. I stared at her when she slept. You could see a young person trying to escape from behind the closed eyelids. The red lipstick was never cleaned off her lips. There was a permanent curvy line painted above her lip, slightly off the mark because she used a wooden match to apply it.
She wore plastic shoes with hot pants and black pantyhose to the church where she’d accuse the men taking up the collection of wanting to pinch her backside. She looked older than Jesus. One time in church, I thought she was wearing knee- high pantyhose so I went to pull it up, but it was the skin on her leg.
She had no hair to speak of so she bought a batch
of wigs, which she called Zelda – after the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife. She never read any of his books but she said she liked the sound of the letter ‘zed.’
If you went into her walk-in closet, you would see the wigs lined up in a row, perched on Styrofoam heads with no eyes or lips. It was a terrifying sight, especially when we were stoned. My cousin Elaine and I smoked up once and we were sure that they were talking to us.
Nana put a piece of pantyhose on her head so no stray hairs would peak out, then she’d place Zelda on top. It was not a subtle wig. There was a lot of hair on top of her head. She was about three inches taller when she wore it When she took it off, her head looked too small for her body like you’d put a Barbie doll head on a baby doll’s body. I have one picture
of her looking like that from when she was in the hospital. Alberta gave it to me and said, “This is what she really looked like. That’s my real mother. If only she had just once tried being herself.”
“You got any titties?” She pinched my chest.
“Ow.”
“Stop your hollering. There isn’t anything there to be screaming about, yet. They’re mosquito bites. When they start sprouting, you won’t know what hit you. I was musical before I had breasts. I played the piano which kept me out of trouble until I was nearly nineteen.”
“You didn’t get breasts until you were nineteen?” I asked.
“Well, I was a late bloomer. The music was good for me. I started to go into the town Furlong to play for the Catholic League’s Socials. Reach there in the cedar chest for my smokes.”
“Mom doesn’t want you smoking in here.”
She ignored me and reached her hand out for her Peter Jackson’s, pulled one out and lit it.
“I had gone down to Furlong playing piano at the priests’ social for St. Patrick’s Day.”
Nana could play a mean piano, had learned all the jigs everybody wanted to hear. Even though she only played at church socials, on the night she and JD met, everybody was drinking green beer. JD walked in.
She took a drag off her smoke and exhaled the same story. “That Man was young then. He looked mysterious and messy, like an Italian, but he was an Irish through and through. Hair all-greased back with bear wax and way too long in the front. He had to keep flipping his head back to keep it out of his eyes.” She growled like a tiger.
“I sat there playing the piano wearing one of those shirts. What do you call it? Right there. I was wearing it in that picture.” She pointed to the photo sitting on the bookshelf, the picture was taken when she was sixteen or seventeen.
“A peasant blouse,” I responded.
“Yes. Look at me there. I acted like I knew something. I knew nothing. I liked the attention from the men, but I never did anything to encourage them. I felt safe inside myself until I saw That Man. A feeling came over me up from the roots
of my being. It was like everything was slowed down, and suddenly I was an ornament on a mantle.”
I imagined a halo around her piano with a light streaming down from heaven. There she was, playing like an innocent cherub until That Man entered the room. That Man changed her in That Way that made her thin fingers become fat and clumsy.
With the cigarette hanging from her mouth, she sucked the smoke in deep until it reached down to the bottom of her slippers. Slow plumes of smoke wafted through the room and hit the window. Dormant flies stirred from their sleep.
“John Daniels had come down from the north to make his way in cattle.”
“Who’s John Daniels?” I asked.
“That Man never held my hand, never kissed me, or looked into my eyes the way you hear how some men do. One night he drove me back to our farm and walked me to the house. Before I knew it, he’d pushed me up against the door. I could feel his heart beating. It was all hard in his pants, and I could feel myself go damp down there.” She pointed to down there, and I quickly covered myself in case she was going to do more pinching.
“I didn’t know what was happening to me. I wanted to kiss him. I’d never kissed a man before. But when I brought my lips up to his, he said if I ever made him do anything before we got married, he’d never respect me. See, with him, it was all or nothing. You know what I mean?”
“No.”
“You only knew Grandpa for a week?” I was taken aback.
“It’s like living in dog years when you’re in that way.
She leaned toward me blowing smoke in my face. “I’m talking about spontaneous combustion. Of course, I had no idea what I was in for. I waited until we got married, but still, I got no respect. He’s always treated me like I was dirty. If I made any noise or laughed when we were in the boudoir, he’d tell me I was a….”
Alberta’s shadow in the doorway stopped further explanation. Nana quickly handed me the cigarette; I butted it out against my shoe.
Alberta asked, “Telling you, you were a what, Mother?” “Nothin’.”
“Oh something, Mother, it’s always something. What
were you telling the girl?”
“I don’t remember,” Nana said.
“Yes, you do.”
Nana glared at Alberta. “No, I don’t. Maybe I have crème dementia.”
“Cripes, you’re too young for dementia. …. And what are
you doing sitting around in here in the middle of a beautiful sunny day.” Alberta had turned her attention to me.
“I’m entertaining her….” I stammered.
“Tammy, if you have time to be entertaining someone, you have time enough to go hang out the laundry.” That was Alberta’s logic. She hated seeing anyone sitting around enjoying themselves.
“Mother, how many times do I have to tell you not to smoke in the good living room?”
Alberta quickly left and went out to the kitchen to get the Glade air freshener. She started spraying it at her mother until she had no choice but to call That Man to come and get her.
When she’d dial JD would answer on the first ring. Neither one of them ever said hello to each other. “Yeah, it’s me. Yeah. Have you smartened up yet? Uh-huh? Uh-huh? I don’t know where it is. Are you blind, old man? Use your eyes. Look in the larder. I cooked it before I left. Honest to God. Hurry up and come and get me before you starve to death.”
There was a long pause.
“Do you know where I am?” Nana asked.
This cracked me up. Of course, he knew where she was.
He could probably see her from his front step. He walked out to the verandah, got in the car and drove down his driveway and up ours. I’d be standing outside looking like I was doing something useful when he put the car in park and gave me a salute.
“How you doin’, Suzie?” He called all of his granddaughters Suzie. We were interchangeable to him.
Then he’d honk the horn. Nana appeared in the doorway with her oversized sunhat, holding Zelda, the wig, on its white Styrofoam head like it was a child being dragged between homes. Even though she was walking right towards him, he’d lay on the horn again. “Come on, I haven’t got all day,” he yelled.
“Hold your horses.” She turned to me and winked like she’d won some kind of battle; then she would kiss me on the top of my head and said words that baffled me. “Don’t be a stranger, pet.”
“I won’t,” I said.
How could I be a stranger when she never stayed at home?
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