In the rare event I drifted off, my dead Papadaddy Ben would roll a hot-dog vendor’s pushcart into the room and serve me boiled kielbasas smothered in sauerkraut and blood. Or a plate of steaming cat poop tapeworms smothered in marinara sauce.
As bad as any nightmare, one day my nana was sorting dirty laundry and came into the kitchen carrying something blue. I was seated at the kitchen table eating a cheesecake. Not a slice of cheesecake—I was paddling with a fork, halfway across an ocean of cheesecake, not tasting a bite, I was cramming it down so fast. Open on the kitchen table was the Bible book. I stopped reading and chewing, midswallow, when I saw my blue chambray shirt wadded in her hands, and I worked hard not to gag.
Not that I actually chewed my food. The way I ate, it was more like the reverse of vomiting.
Poised in my face, as close as the next hovering forkful of cheesecake, were the mysterious dried sputum spatters. Her face bland and guileless, my nana asked, “Raindrop?” She coughed the words, “Can you remember what’s this mess so I know how to pretreat it?”
First, I wasn’t sure I actually knew. Second, I was sure she wouldn’t want to know. Edging my tasty cheesecake away from the moldy, yellowing blotches, I said, “Dijon mustard.”
To my horror, Nana lifted the crumpled fabric near her face, peering close. She scratched at a crusted patch with her fingernail, saying, “It don’t smell nothing like mustard….” The scratched spot sprinkled down specks like powdered dust. Specks landed on my fork. On my unfinished pan of cheesecake. Nana Minnie brought the besmirched shirt closer to her face and reached toward it with the tentative point of her tongue.
“It’s not mustard!” I shouted. My fork clattered to the kitchen floor. I stood so quickly my chrome chair teetered and fell over behind me. The crash brought my nana’s full attention to my face. I said, calmly now, “It’s not mustard.”
She stared, her tongue pulled safely back inside her mouth.
“It’s sneeze,” I said.
She asked, “Sneeze?”
I’d needed to cover a sneeze, I explained. No tissues were at hand, so I’d been forced to use my shirt.
My nana’s shocked, round eyes surveyed the sizable Galápagos archipelago of stiff deposits. “This is all your boogers?” she asked, as if I were the person about to die of some gruesome cigarette-induced chest condition.
I shrugged. I’d stopped caring. As long as I didn’t hurt her, I would let her think I was a dirty, disgusting animal. I was eleven years old and bloating like a blue-ribbon sow.
As if on cue she coughed, and coughed and kept on coughing, embarrassed and hiding her red face behind the knot of blue shirt still in her hands. Coughs that rattled like Papadaddy Ben hawking the tobacco spit from far down in his throat. The veins stood out in her neck like Darwin’s maps of major river systems. These were coughs so bad she couldn’t stop even when we both saw the bright red she was coughing all over the already-there dried sputum stains.
Between wiener juice and lung blood, I’d say that chambray shirt was a goner.
What I learned is, it’s never too late to save anybody. And it’s always too late. And what are the chances you’ll make any difference? And instead of declaring to my nana that her grandbaby was a liar and that her husband was an inverted sexual pervert and that her own movie-star daughter didn’t like her very much, instead I told her she made the best peanut-butter cheesecake in the whole wide world. And I held my empty plate up to her and begged for yet another helping.
DECEMBER 21, 9:33 A.M. CST
My Countdown to Good-bye
Gentle Tweeter,
Late at night, in my upstate bed, I once again became the naturalist. Settling into sleep I sucked a sugary sweetness from under my fingernails, and stared up into the darkness where I knew the ceiling to be. And I listened. I listened and counted. I could always tell where my nana was—the kitchen, the parlor, her bedroom—by the sound of her coughing, like the regular call of a bird, but a sound both reassuring and terrible. That coughing. Those coughs. Simultaneously, they served as proof she was still alive, but that she wouldn’t be forever. Nights I learned to cling to the sound of each cough, each volley of hacking and wheezing, and to find comfort in the noise. Despite the hard lump of the Beagle book stabbing me in the back, I could eventually fall asleep with the Bible book open against my heart.
The same way people will count the seconds between lightning and thunder, I counted the seconds between coughs. One-alligator, two-alligator, three-alligator. Hoping the longer I could count the better Nana Minnie might feel. Hoping at least she’d fall asleep. If I could get to nine-alligator I’d tell myself that all she suffered was a chest cold. Maybe bronchitis, but something curable. By twenty-alligator I’d be dozing, seeing my dead, half-naked nightmare Papadaddy Ben claw at my blankets with bloody hands. But finally the coughs would come back, the choking and gasping for breath, so rapid I couldn’t squeeze even one alligator between them.
In bed, I sucked my fingers clean. My nana and I had been making popcorn balls all day, and the smell of popped corn filled the house. Did I say how the next day was Halloween? Well, this was the night before Halloween, and we’d been cooking popcorn balls to distribute to trick-or-treaters. Like offshore sweatshop laborers, we’d combined the popcorn with corn syrup and drops of orange food coloring, then shaped the corn in our buttered hands to make knobby miniature pumpkins. We’d pressed triangles of candy corn to make them orange-colored Jack-o’-lanterns with pointed eyes and vampire teeth. As packaging, we’d wrapped them in waxed paper.
And did I mention that I’d secretly laced all of our Halloween treats with my ample, unused supply of funeral Xanax? Well, waste not… I’d reasoned.
A cough came from my nana’s bedroom, and I counted: One-alligator… two-alligator…, but another cough came too fast. With the detachment of a Darwin I began to categorize the coughs by their qualities. Some rasped. Others gurgled wetly. A third type amounted to only a species of breathless hiss. It might’ve been the first cough of a baby learning to breathe, or the last failed breath of someone dying.
Listening closely, lying in bed, my fingertips tasted like buttered pancakes smothered in syrup. When the last cough came, I counted: One-Mississippi… two-Mississippi… three-Mississippi… until a new cough sent me all the way back to counting from zero.
My parents didn’t celebrate Christmas or Passover or Easter, but how they celebrated Halloween was compensation for a million ignored holidays. To my mom it was all about the costumes and adopting alternative archetypal personas, blah, blah, blah. My dad was even more boring on the subject, waxing on about the inversion of power hierarchies and subjugated children recast as outlaws in order to demand tribute from the prevailing hegemony of adults. They’d dress me as Simone de Beauvoir and parade me around the Ritz in Paris to beg for gender parity in the workplace and snack-size Hershey bars, but really to demonstrate their own political acumen. One year they dressed me as Martin Luther, and everyone I met asked whether I was supposed to be Bella Abzug. Grown-ups, fie!
In my upstate bed no coughs came for so long I’d counted up to sixteen-alligator, and I crossed two sticky fingers under the covers, hoping for luck. I considered, briefly, dressing as Charles Darwin this year, but didn’t want to have to explain myself on every hillbilly front porch in this tedious missing-link neighborhood.