— For breakfast?
Grandma said, — You are wearing a suit. We should put on long pants.
While they changed I finished with the food. I got the frying pans going again; the smell of pig meat warmed my heart. The eggs were solid; not dry, just firm. So much grease on the skillet that they floated pretty as kids in a wading pool. I wasn’t fat because of any thyroid condition.
We lived in Rosedale, at the southeastern end of Queens. A suburb of New York complete with the growls of cars leaving driveways. The sound of engines was pleasant to me.
Grandma came back first wearing a yellow housedress and black flat shoes. She walked down the hallway, into the living room, then sat on the sectional couch waiting to be served. Across the street a husband backed his RV into the yard of a home he shared with his wife. My family was middle class and I liked that.
Then, loud as the Devil in his best pink shoes, my sister attacked my mother. A blitzkrieg; bomb blasts and shouting. Lightning behind Mom’s bedroom door.
My mother came down the hallway chased by her daughter, who was swinging a hair dryer and yelling Mom’s name. Nabisase hammer-slammed Mom across the back of the skull and the dryer’s nozzle shattered into plastic chips around the room. Nabisase took two handfuls of Mom’s hair and used them as handles for pulling our mother, face first, to the ground.
Grandma tried to stand, but the couch was shaking too much because Mom had pushed Nabisase backward across it. My mother might even have strangled Nabisase if my sister weren’t scratching the skin from Mom’s hands.
Nabisase pulled the television from our gray entertainment unit. It would have made a louder crash but my mother’s foot stopped the fall. Maybe a toe was broken. I bet my sister wished that was true.
My mother had dabbled with art— dress making and sculpture to name two. The only proof of this was a horrendous statuette on top of our entertainment unit. A tiny bust meant to resemble Sidney Poitier except that both ears were on the same side of the poor man’s head. With the television crashing the small bust wobbled about to fall so my mother set it safely on the floor.
Then there was a broom against the wall, so Mom took it and gave Nabisase two baton shots in the ribs. This put my sister on the floor.
And I was the one with a problem?
Grandma yelled, — Anthony! Come. Anthony! Please.
When I stood between my sister and mother they went around me. My sister threw couch cushions over my head hoping they’d hit Mom. Not to hurt, but to annoy, which was a fine alternative.
Mom whipped a small picture frame under one of my outstretched arms and it plunked against a wall, chipping the paint. — I’m getting a lock for my bedroom, Mom promised. I’m getting it today.
At which point Grandma raised her voice. The old lady climbed on the couch. — You crazy three bitches! she yelled. You stake my heart!
She fell backward, but caught herself. The yellow housedress hung down between her thighs. With her spindly old arms and legs visible she became a giant wiry spider. Gnashing and screaming and the yellow fabric gathered below her like a dangling silk line. Loom of the dead. She scared us away.
There really were worse situations than mine. Mothers and daughters are war.
Not to seem monomaniacal, but there was still the matter of nine eggs, eight slices of toast, six pats of butter, four glasses of orange juice, two cups of tea, six sausage links and thirteen strips of bacon awaiting an eating. How could they forget that?
My mother and Nabisase went to dress; passed the kitchen like there was no food inside. This is something I couldn’t do. I didn’t understand how my mother could. She used to be weak like me, but now I was the only one who felt the pantry calling. There are people who love to eat and those who don’t. My mother might have changed, but I was still a man who found any complication less daunting after a full plate.
I took our largest salad bowl from one of the cupboards above the kitchen sink and threw in those nine eggs. I added another half-cup of ketchup and a teaspoon of salt.
I mixed the ketchup, eggs, sausages, salt and some syrup with a wooden spoon. Until there was a red-and-yellow soup four inches deep and thicker than sap. The idea was to sour mash this concoction then sink into the basement where I could eat it at leisure on my bed. When anyone decides to tell me I have a problem with food I gesture to the long line of helpful advisors forming a kissing line to the right of my ass.
And I would have made it down if I hadn’t gone back for the bacon.
Right at the top of the basement steps I realized the thirteen strips were in a bowl next to the pepper shaker. If I didn’t get them now Mom would toss them to thwart her own gluttonous tendencies. I darted into the kitchen, grabbed the bacon, dropped it into my big bowl and was set to sashay merrily away, but before I turned around Mom and my sister were at my sides.
— Oh that’s too much food for one, my mother said.
My sister put her arm on my shoulder. — You should put that in the garbage place.
— Garbage place?
Mom didn’t dignify Nabisase’s goading, but her own tone wasn’t much better. The difference was that my mother didn’t even know how to spell patronizing, so forget realizing that she was doing it.
She asked, — You don’t want to get a stomachache, do you?
I said, — Do you people realize I was the first one in this family to even get to college?
— We’ve all gone to university, Mom said. Myself, your Uncle. Even Grandma. And we got our degrees.
— But that was in Uganda. I was in the Ivy League for two years.
My sister touched my arm. — The only place you’ll graduate from now is McDonald’s University.
Mom said, — I’ll throw it out for you.
I looked at the brew mournfully. I could have fought with my mother, but why? I unloaded the slop into our garbage bin. This made my mom glad.
She was fifty-three years old with gray stubble on her chin. It was while I was away at college that Mom became beautiful by losing ninety pounds. She was sane and slim now. When I’d been walking around downtown Ithaca with cookie crumbs in my hair, Mom was jogging across Brookville Park. Seeing her again had been the hardest. Before I went to Cornell we were misfits, a pair. We’d finish an entire Louisiana Crunch Cake in twenty minutes; hiding from Nabisase and Grandma in the bathroom.
But do you believe our world is an alchemical comedy? Because I do.
Inside the house I was a twenty-three-year-old college dropout, a girthy goon suffering bouts of dementia, but when I opened the front door I was That Right Young Man Living In An Otherwise Hysterical Home.
New York City Police had been called to our address four different times in the month before I returned. Sister against Mother. Mother against Sister. Once Grandma called cops on both. No one was ever arrested, but there was a quartet of pink police reports on the fridge under a magnet shaped like bananas.
Outside, the ladies were crazy and I was brand new.
I walked down the front steps and pulled our green garbage bin from one side of the house onto the sidewalk. I auditioned for the role of conscientious new director. After putting out the trash I coiled the lawn hose by the driveway.
The man across the street, with the RV, said, — Taking care of a house is never done, is it?
His wife was next to him; we spoke from their yard to mine. — But we’re glad to see someone’s over there doing it, she said.
Meanwhile Nabisase and my mother were inside yelling again.
My sister left through the kitchen’s black security gate. When she went out she slammed that metal door and a gong sound woke Rosedale’s sleeping dogs. It was just seven in the morning and now they barked like it was noon.