Savannah often vanished, which gave him a queasy feeling, both in regard to what she got up to and the fact that she wasn’t there. Everything about the girl should have grated. She was prissy and pointlessly resentful. She acted above it all, and lounged listlessly around the house when she could at least be stealing something, like a productive member of society. Yet she had a secret life, and that was irresistible. She was pretty, and it made him feel weak that this made any difference. Whenever he came home and she was gone, the air went flat. Helplessly, he sympathized with her perspective. She was supposed to be in college. She should have been leaving her stuffy parents and annoying brothers behind for a new life. Learning the hard way not to drink too much tequila, switching her major when she figured out that she wasn’t interested in fabric design after all, falling for the wrong guys. Instead she was stuck with her family, in the crowded home of relatives, like a frat house without the booze. It must have been hateful. No wonder she barely spoke to her mercurial fifteen-year-old cousin.
So he was excited when the two found themselves in a rare moment in the living room with no one else around. Any small intimacy in a house so packed was to be cherished.
“We’re fucked, you know,” Savannah said, lolling on the sofa. “For our whole generation, it’s over.” She lit a cigarette. A real cigarette.
“Why don’t you use a steamer?” he asked tentatively.
“Because they don’t kill you.” The world-weariness was affected.
“The smell will give you away.”
“What will they do, send me to my room? What room? Refuse to pay my college tuition? Put me to bed without dinner? With the slop we’re eating, that would be a mercy.”
She was beautiful, but a hollowness in her eyes made her less so. He wondered where she got the money for the cigarettes. She was wearing makeup, too—a profligacy most women went without. Willing accepted that he didn’t interest her. But it was upsetting that a promising girl of nineteen was not interested in anything or anyone else, either.
The hardest of Willing’s duties fell to him because no one else would do it. The others said they were too busy, or they’d go next week, or they wouldn’t want to intrude at an inconvenient time. But the truth was that they didn’t go because they didn’t want to: cognitive dissonance. Not Nollie, who claimed she wasn’t welcome, not his cousins, neither Avery nor even his mother, which was especially strange. Except that the situation at the shelter was so grim: the job at Adelphi, she said, was mostly about protecting the legitimate residents from the crowds camped on the sidewalk who wanted in. The homeless with an actual room had become the elect; these days, she said, “no one complains about the view.” Still more grimness probably presented itself as out of the question. In a moment of honesty, she’d explained, “I can’t take care of everybody.”
So every couple of weeks, Willing mounted his bike, loaded with a few choice comestibles that the neighbors had contributed for the care of the elderly, and cycled to Carroll Gardens. He sometimes used these rides to contemplate how being encouraged—nay, commanded—to call his grandparents “Jayne and Carter” might have affected the way he saw them. More sharply, but less generously—as if warm-and-fuzzy generic monikers might have offered a form of protection. He saw them more clinically. More as separate real people like anyone else, and all this clear-sightedness was not necessarily in their interests. Everyone else at school called their grandmothers, for example, Nan, Nanna, Gran, Gramma, Abuela, or Yaya. When he referred to his own as “Jayne” in an essay assignment to describe your family tree, his classmates found the usage both bizarre and pathetic. Perhaps irrationally, he felt a loss, as if deprived of the traditional terms he didn’t actually have a grandmother and grandfather, but two older acquaintances with whom he had little in common.
In any event, they were not doing well. After enough visits, he’d passed through the phase of everyone pretending to be fine, though he sometimes wished they’d go back to putting on a brave show. The biggest issue was Depends. They long before ran out of adult diapers. While Willing often brought old sheets, bedspreads, and worn-out clothes from the trash of people whose houses had been foreclosed upon, the scrounged fabric was limited. His grandparents had inevitably to wash and reuse Luella’s swaddling: unpleasant.
Jayne and Carter kept Luella tied up—either lashed to her chair or on a short leash anchored to a table leg. When Willing mentioned the trussing to his mother, she was aghast. But he thought the policy sensible. On a tear, Luella could wreck the place. Not that you could tell, now—that is, whether it was wrecked or not.
It was as if the dementia were contagious. No one made beds, or picked up, or took out the garbage. They hardly cooked, and there were no mealtimes. Someone would idly open soup and eat straight from the can. Of course Luella had lost the ability to use silverware, but now the other three often ate with their fingers as well. Worse was the loss of the concept of conversation. Dialogue had become a series of random iterations: “There’s a new camp of nursing-home refugees on Smith Street,” Carter would say. “We’re down to our last few smears of cortisone cream,” Jayne would say next. Then Great Grand Man would declare, “If Alvarado keeps digging in his heels on the bancor, he’s going to forfeit the ’32 election.” So when Luella chimed in, “My husband will pay whatever you ask!” the disjunction fit right in.
Luella was convinced that she’d been kidnapped—as in a way she had been—and that Great Grand Mimi had plotted the abduction. They must have tired of putting her right—“No, honey, this is Douglas, remember? And this is his son Carter, who’s my husband, and you’re staying in our house…” So instead they played along. It bordered on sadistic. Jayne might say, “We’ve delivered our demands, but your husband is broke. You’re on your own.” Great Grand Man would toss in playfully, “No, no, ransom’s on its way, my dear. Four fat Social Security checks, thousands apiece! Each of which will buy a sandwich.”
Willing still liked talking to Great Grand Man (or “GGM,” which the paterfamilias had taken a shine to; it wasn’t easy to score a hip sobriquet at ninety-nine). But he preferred their discourse by fleXt, in which assertions tremulous in person came across as robust. That spring, their ongoing dialogue had addressed the pervasive view that the “American experiment” had failed. So on a visit in June—which no one called “unseasonably cold” anymore; one advantage to checking up on his elders was getting warm, because with those “four fat Social Security checks” they ran the central heating—Willing resumed the discussion. He felt it was therapeutic to force his three marginally with-it relatives to engage in focused interchanges, the way a clinician might ask them to count backwards from a hundred by sevens.
“But you can’t close a country like a business,” Willing submitted. They were sitting around the kitchen table, covered in sticky stains and littered with dirty dishes. Imposing implements from the Mandible silver service were tarnished and smeared with butter. His glass of water having a slice of lemon in it meant Jayne had gone out of her way to be hospitable. “You can’t throw up your hands and say, too bad, guess ‘the experiment’ didn’t work. People my age have a long time left to live.”
“It’s up to your generation to rise from the ashes,” GGM croaked.
“I’m fifteen. I can’t invent a new country from scratch.”