In the eerie silence of Meemaw’s room, which smelled of White Shoulders dusting powder and seemed to belong to another century, we stood before a kind of shrine. On a small carved-wood table tucked behind a chest of drawers, Meemaw had placed Uncle Mike’s high school picture dead center, encircling it with black chicken feathers and painted bones. In the photo, a pimpled young hippie who refused to meet the camera’s eye appeared to be gazing down in bewilderment at what looked like a withered alligator foot, which Meemaw had positioned just beneath the silver picture frame. The old woman had sprinkled salt and some kind of dried herbs around the edge of the table. She’d glued various magazine shots of Uncle Mike onto a piece of notebook paper and taped the collage to the wall. Two bowls of water stood on either side of the gator claw, a weird tidbit of flesh afloat in the middle of each.
“Chicken hearts,” Brunell whispered. “The most magic of the giblets.”
Bonnie, standing there in her Garfield nightshirt, couldn’t help but giggle, even though she was scared shitless.
“What’s up, ladies?” a deep voice asked.
It was Uncle Mike, leaning against the doorframe in a black bathrobe, his hair slicked wet and glowing in the light. From where he stood, he couldn’t see Meemaw’s freaky shrine.
“Nothing,” said Brunell. “We were gonna say good night to Meemaw.”
“Ah, youth,” said Mike, looking us over, “so effortlessly ethereal. When you reach middle age, you try to look nubile. When you get old, you struggle to pass as human.”
“What the hell does that mean?” said Brunell.
“Nothing, Tinker Bell. Don’t pay attention to your uncle’s depressive rambling.”
“Are you drunk?”
“A mite tipsy. Now really, what’re you girls up to?”
“Tell him,” Bonnie whispered.
“Shhh,” hissed Brunell.
“Don’t worry.” Uncle Mike sneered. “I know all about Mama’s little art project.”
“Aren’t you scared?” said Brunell.
“I’m terrified, actually, but not of her.”
Uncle Mike tittered and walked over to the shrine. He pulled something from his robe pocket and waved it in front of our eyes like a magician: it was a Smurf pencil eraser. He placed the object smack dab in the center of the magical objects, right between the gator claw and the picture frame.
“Ogligattavato gucci Smurf,” Mike chanted.
Chuckling, he regarded us with his beautiful, exhausted eyes.
“See, girls, the spell has been broken. Now, don’t worry about me. Go back downstairs and have your slumber party. Gorge yourselves on cake while you still can. Stay up giggling until your abs ache.”
“We will,” said Brunell, “but. .”
“Shhh,” whispered Mike. “I hear the matriarch gargling her Listerine, which means we have exactly three minutes to make our escape.”
It was 10:10 PM — at least eight hours to go until the sun came up. We were cocooned in our sleeping bags, Brunell scanning The Rainbow Study Bible for the juiciest passages, namely those highlighted in gray (Sin) and brown (Evil). In her croaky voice, Brunell read choice bits aloud:
“Leviticus 20:16: ‘And if a woman approach unto any beast, and lie down thereto, thou shalt kill the woman, and the beast.’
“Deuteronomy 25:11–12: ‘When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets: Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her.’
“Ezekiel 23:19–20: ‘Yet she multiplied her whoredoms, in calling to remembrance the days of her youth, wherein she had played the harlot in the land of Egypt. For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.’”
“Excuse me?” said Bonnie.
“This is boring,” said Brunell, snapping the Good Book shut. “Let’s watch a movie on Uncle Mike’s VCR.”
Uncle Mike had a stack of videotapes we’d never heard of. We narrowed it down to the three most titillating titles—Blade Runner, Liquid Sky, and The Elephant Man—and after debating the potential of each, finally settled on The Elephant Man.
“Great,” said Bonnie when the film started up, “it’s black and white. Was this shit made in the 1950s?”
“Shut up,” I said. “Just watch the movie.”
And we did, remaining speechless as the gut-wrenching tragedy of John Merrick unfolded. Because he had a weird disease that made his head look like a giant piece of cauliflower, the world treated him like a freak and an idiot even though he was a regular nice guy inside. Underneath that cloth sack he wore over his head, underneath the deformed skull and the huge bunions that grew upon it, John Merrick was a poetry-reciting sophisticate, sensitive and gentle. Just like the rest of us, all he needed was love.
By the time he exclaimed “I am not an animal” to the homicidal mob that had unmasked him at the train station, we were all sniveling. When he collapsed in exhaustion and was carried back to his room at the hospital, we cried harder. When his best friends took him to the opera and the poor, dying man stood in the royal box to receive a standing ovation, we wept with our whole bodies. Even after the Elephant Man had died, and his soul had soared up into the starry heavens, where a woman’s floating face informed him that he would live forever, we wept. We sobbed as the credits rolled on a black background and eerie space music played. We cried after the tape had ended and the screen had turned to fuzz.
Burrowed deep in our sleeping bags, we lay in the half dark, nestled in the exquisite sadness the movie had mustered, a kind of moist emanation that hovered in the room. No one spoke. We didn’t need to: our minds had fused into a single entity.
My tears were just starting to dry when I spotted something moving in a dark corner, a small figure in fluttery clothes. I thought our strange mood had summoned some supernatural creature, and I was scared. As much as I pitied the poor Elephant Man, as much as I loved him, I wasn’t ready to look into the face of whatever being rustled in the darkness. It stood there, making a sound like crackling cellophane, which blended with the TV static. And then the creature stepped into the gray light of the television — hunched, clad in flowing nylon, lumpy-headed, its mouth open in a toothless snarl.
It was Meemaw in her nightwear, her skull mummy-wrapped in toilet paper she’d secured with a hairnet to protect her wash-and-set. Meemaw, her face shiny with cleansing grease and spotted from countless cruel summers. Meemaw, right fist lifted in wrath, clutching a rubber Smurf.
She sat down on the couch and placed the Smurf beside her on the cushion.
“Harlots,” she hissed.
Her small frame shook. She reached into the pocket of her housecoat and pulled out a penny candy, unwrapped it, and popped it into her mouth. She frowned as though butterscotch were bile.
“You don’t know what you’re messin’ in,” she said. “Powers bigger than you.”
“We didn’t do nothin’,” Brunell rasped, but Meemaw didn’t seem to hear her.
“Twelve generations,” she said. “Twelve generations brought over the sea. My daddy gave it to me and now it’s time to give it to Michael. I ain’t got long.”
“You ain’t go die,” said Brunell.
“Shush, child. Your flesh will melt like dirty snow.”
“But we didn’t do nothin’.” Brunell sat up in her sleeping bag and crossed her arms.
Meemaw groaned. She clutched her bosom and gazed up at the ceiling fan. A great shudder contorted her body. Her little feet kicked, sending one of her purple bedroom slippers flying.