The box is filled with old photo albums. It’s pretty clear to me that this is my grandmother’s stuff, and that my father must have decided, upon moving in seven years ago, that everything should be put away and tended to at a future date that never quite arrived.
The top one is a wedding album. I flip through and the photos are all black and white — more like black and yellow, really — and the setting is some sort of banquet hall, in some town where smiling was illegal or at least really frowned upon. Of the posed shots, not a single one is even a little bit joyful. A few show strangers on the dance floor having maybe a moderate amount of fun. In one shot, my grandfather appears to be smiling as he dances with my grandmother, but she’s glowering up at him. When I get married, I probably won’t keep any of the glowering shots.
My grandfather looks even more like me than my dad does, which is weird because he’s, like, a missing person. His face is long and thin like mine. My dad, with his rounder face, looks a lot more like my grandmother.
“I wonder how long these have been here,” I say, closing the box and then placing another on top of it. Aisha doesn’t respond. She’s busy scrubbing a dirt stain off the carpet near the stairs.
I open another soggy box — the one marked with the “4.” Unlabeled folders are stacked on one side, and on the other, random trinkets have been tossed in together. I pick out a wooden cross with peeling green paint, a lone turquoise earring that appears to be rusted, and a jewelry box. Inside the jewelry box are four baby teeth. Someone has written, on a small piece of paper thrown into the box, “Matthew’s first teeth, 1971.”
“If you were wondering where my father’s baby teeth are, I found ’em,” I say.
Aisha laughs. “Mystery solved.”
“You think there’s a good baby teeth market on eBay?”
“Probably Craigslist,” she says.
I grab one of the files, sit down, and open it up. The front page is stuck to the file, and as I pull it back, I can see that blue and black ink has tattooed the inside of the folder itself, creating blurred backward words, unreadable. The top page of paper is illegible, and a few more pages are stuck to it. Some of the inside pages are readable, though, and I flip to a form called “Petition for Dissolution of Marriage with Children.”
“More workin’, less sittin’,” Aisha calls over.
I ignore her and turn through to the final page, and there, under the title “Petitioner,” is my grandmother’s name, Phyllis Helen Smith, and her gritty, harsh signature.
Across from it, under the title “Respondent,” is my grandfather’s name, Russell Alan Smith. In his more animated autograph, the letters seem to be battling for attention.
There is also a witness’s signature: John Francis Logan. Everyone’s favorite pastor slash neighbor. The date is listed as May 23, 1983.
I’d never heard anything about my grandparents getting a divorce. I mean, according to my mom, my grandfather just up and left one day, never to be heard from again. I guess not. I wonder if my dad knew that they were having trouble, and that they had gotten divorced?
I riffle through the trinkets. Other than the baby teeth, most of the stuff is religious — crosses, a little round thumbnail picture of blond Jesus on a silver necklace, a cracked picture frame with an embroidered angel inside bearing the phrase, “With God all things are possible.”
I roll my eyes. Yes. All things. Like happy marriages and well-raised children. All possible.
I GET BACK to cleaning, and soon I have the boxes stacked neatly against the wall and Aisha has the room smelling a little less musty.
We go up for a snack, and my father is sitting in the kitchen in a pair of tattered blue shorts and a ratty white T-shirt, eating frozen waffles with Aunt Jemima syrup. His legs are pasty white and skinny, and I’m a little embarrassed to have Aisha see him like this. Dad smiles when he sees her. “So you’re the lesbian in the basement,” he says.
I blurt out, “Dad!”
But Aisha laughs. She walks over and sticks out her hand. “Thanks for letting me stay here,” she says. “Really.”
“No sweat,” he says, smirking as he shakes her hand, and I realize my dad is a bit of a charmer.
“And yes, that’s how I like to be known. As the lesbian in the basement.”
Dad laughs and takes a chomp of his waffle. “Good, ’cause I’m bad with names.”
She says, “And what should I call you?”
My dad thinks for a bit, and then he coughs a couple of times into his hands and wipes them on his T-shirt, leaving an amber smudge. “The drunk upstairs,” he says.
She nods like this is normal fatherly behavior. “Nice to meetya, the drunk upstairs.”
“Nice to meetya, basement lesbian.”
I want to play with them, so I find myself trying to come up with the funniest thing I can, but nothing comes to me. “So Grandma had quite the collection of religious things down there,” I say. Dad looks at me blankly, and I add, “We did a little box organizing.”
He nods. “Oh yeah, all sorts of shit.” He turns to Aisha and says, “That religion crap gives me serious butt cramps.”
Aisha laughs. “Butt cramps. Thanks for that … image, Mr. Smith.”
He shrugs. “What can I say? I’m a poet.”
“I’m not a fan of religion either,” Aisha says. “I mean, I only became the lesbian in your basement after my Bible-thumping dad threw me out.”
My dad shakes his head. “That’s rough,” he says. “A guy shouldn’t do that to his kid.”
I feel my jaw tighten. Have another drink, Dad. Maybe you should choose that over your son?
Aisha sits down next to him. “He was all about the Jesus,” she says. “I guess the Jesus told him to do it.”
“Oh yeah. Jesus tells people to do a lot of shit, seems like,” my dad says, chewing with his mouth open. “You have no fuckin’ idea how much I hate those Jesus people. Act all holier than you and then do all sorts of crap. Your religious dad kicked you out. You know what mine did? Left us. No note or nothing, just left. Man of God.”
“Wow,” Aisha says, looking at me. I shrug. “I didn’t know that.”
“And then my mom, she goes and gets even more religious on me. After he leaves, suddenly she’s the fuckin’ church lady. I don’t have time for that crap. None of it.”
“Amen to that,” Aisha says. “If I never see the inside of a church again, it’ll be too soon.”
I sit there thinking about the construction of that sentence. If I never, it will be … When I don’t do something, it will be … It’s a sentence that means nothing. I’ve never noticed that before. My dad gets up and ambles over to the refrigerator. I sit down across from where he was sitting. He takes out a Coke bottle, swigs from it, puts it back in the fridge, and sits down again.
“So a priest and a rabbi are walking down the street,” my dad says. “They pass by a schoolhouse. Priest says, ‘Hey, let’s screw some kids.’ Rabbi says, ‘Out of what?’ ” He leaves his mouth open after, like waiting for the laugh.
Aisha snorts, which is more than I can do, because as much as I like a good joke, I’m not sure this is one. This one just seems like it’s in bad taste.
“Ahh!” he says, pointing wildly at Aisha. “You get me. You’re not so butt-scared all the time like someone I know.” He looks directly at me. “You’re like the son I never had.”
I cross and uncross my arms, stung. I count by thirteens to 273. He puts up his hand for Aisha to high-five. She just gawks at him.