Where's My Wand?: One Boy's Magical Triumph Over Alienation and Shag Carpeting (12 page)

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Grandma replied, motioning to the food, “we’re pretty much finished here, so what’s the big deal?”

“You don’t own this house, Mother. I do,” our mother barked, dismissing Dad’s role in the family finances, which, at the moment, seemed fine with him. “And you will learn some self-control if it’s the last thing I do!”

There was a long moment of painful silence as Mother stared down Grandma. Finally, Grandma stood, grabbed her pack of smokes and turned toward the kitchen. “This, from a woman who vacuums the driveway.”

Grandma turned back to Dad. “You,” she said firmly, “are either medicated, or a saint.”

She stalked out. We heard the door to the patio open, the electrical
zzz
of the bug zapper punctuating the evening air. The door slid shut with a slam.

I was torn. Granted, I too despised the smoking—the smell, the ashtrays overflowing with butts, the choking from the thick smoke that threatened to suck all the oxygen from the house—but I also knew that Grandma couldn’t help it.

“It’s all Ava Gardner’s fault,” she had confided one day over pinochle. “I wanted to be just like her, so I started smoking, and now I just can’t stop. She got an affair with Frank Sinatra and I got an addiction. Life will screw you seven ways to Sunday. Remember that, kid.”

Late the next afternoon, I waited for Grandma to fall asleep on the couch after
Match Game ’73
(“That Gene Ray-burn is a looker!” she would announce every day, as if for the first time, and then lose consciousness), then slipped down to the basement.

Bedspread in place, I executed a spectacular Endora-inspired flourish. Within seconds, our ranch-style tract home was lifted up, like Dorothy’s in
The Wizard of Oz
, in a stormy whirl of dust and flurry, and it burst into brilliant light.

I closed my eyes to shield them from the blinding rays. When I finally reopened them, I found myself seated in the family room with Dad, Val and Grandma. In this magical moment, we were watching
The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour
, eating popcorn and singing along with “Wichita Lineman.”

Mother marched past us holding a can of Comet, eyeing us with disdain.

“Elaine, could you sit down for two minutes and spend some time with your family?” Grandma pleaded.

“Yeah,” Val chimed in. “You can scrub the toilet with a toothbrush tomorrow.”

This visual hung in the air as Mother replied, “I’m just trying to make things nice for everyone. You bunch of ingrates have no idea what I go through to make your lives easier.”

We each braced ourselves for the rant that was sure to follow. Instead, Mother’s demeanor softened. She crossed into the family room and hugged Grandma.

“You’re right, Mother.”

She sat down next to us and scooped up a small handful of popcorn. “So, how does this song go again?”

 

 

AS I FOLDED and restashed the bedspread and turned to climb the stairs, I wondered—was the spell I had cast powerful enough to restore some sense of calm to our troubled home?

As luck would have it, the answer wasn’t long in coming.

In deference to the confrontation that had occurred in the dining room, Grandma had begun smoking outside during the day and early evening hours. But at night, alone in Val’s bedroom with the door closed, she continued to chain-smoke in bed as she read pulp mystery novels.

We’d all grown accustomed to Grandma’s nocturnal habits and had resigned ourselves to the fact that she was a night owl who read well into the wee hours, choking the rest of us in our sleep as the fumes from her nonstop Winstons filtered through the house.

Thus, on the final night of her visit, it wasn’t until her mattress was partially consumed in flames that any of us was aware that she had set fire to it.

My bedroom was closest. I coughed myself awake, and, realizing that there was a slightly larger cloud of smoke hovering above my bed than usual, I slipped out of bed and padded down the hall.

“Grandma?” I knocked softly on the door to Val’s room. No answer.

I knocked again, then slowly opened the door. A small rush of heat and smoke billowed out. The far side of the mattress was merrily ablaze.

“Grandma! Wake up!” I whispered loudly.

“Whaaa . . . ?” she mumbled groggily. I yanked at her arm to pull her away from the flames.

“The bed’s on fire!” I hollered.

At that, Grandma awoke with a start. “Jesus H . . . !” She leaped up and held her finger to her lips to silence me. “Don’t wake your mother!”

She ran down the hall and came back with a water glass from the bathroom. She threw the water onto the fire. Nothing. The flames began to lick at the curtains as I grabbed the glass and ran back down the hall to refill it.

“Dad!” I yelled in a stage whisper, pausing outside my parents’ bedroom door. “Can you come here?”

A moment later, the door opened, and Dad’s eyes widened as he took in the scene.

“Mother-funhouse!” he yelled, running to Val’s bedroom. He yanked the bed linens off the bed and tried to smother the flames. “Call the fire department! The number’s on the side of the phone!”

I burst into the den where Tweeter was sleeping, completely forgetting she was there. She jumped up and flew under a chair as I grabbed the handset. I dialed the number on the sticker pasted to the side of the red rotary phone and yelled, “Fire! We’re on fire!”

A hand suddenly grabbed the phone.

“Thirty-five seventy-four Woodpath Drive, in Florissant,” Mother told the operator forcefully. “Please hurry.” She turned to me. “Go get the bucket from the garage and fill it up with water as fast as you can.”

By the time I’d managed to fill the bucket in the kitchen sink, I could hear sirens approaching. I flew back to the bedroom. Dad had extinguished the mattress, but one of the curtains was now ablaze. Dad snatched the bucket from me and doused it.

“Stay back!” Mother ordered, as Grandma held me outside the room.

Dad yanked the curtains from the rod, snapping the rod and pulling the hardware from the wall. He threw the remaining bedcovers on top and began to stomp on them.

Mother turned to Grandma. “Open the door so the firemen can get in!”

The firemen were already at the front door by the time she reached it.

“It’s the back bedroom!” Grandma hollered as they rushed past her. “We don’t know
what
happened!”

The firemen dragged the giant hose through the house, hustling down the hall, yelling orders through a chain of men to the ones remaining on the truck. With a few short bursts of water, they extinguished the remaining flames.

The sirens and flashing red lights had summoned some of the neighbors, who now crowded onto the front lawn. We heard footsteps pounding down the hall. Val ran into the bedroom.

Val gasped. “My room!”

She tore around the bedroom, surveying the damage with wild eyes.

“Bobby!” she sobbed melodramatically in front of the poster of Bobby Sherman, her idol, which was now blackened and curled around the edges, a hole burned into his chin where the cleft once was. The door to her walk-in closet stood open a crack. She yanked it open to reveal a rack of smoke-and-ash-covered clothes.

“Look,” I said helpfully, slipping into the closet behind her, “they’re not burned. Throw ’em in the washer, they’ll be good as new. And if not, you can have some of mine.”

This was, perhaps, more thoughtful than practical since Val was three and a half years older. And a girl. Mother thanked the firemen for their quick response before she turned on her heel and left the room.

One of the firemen handed Grandma a handful of soggy cigarette butts. “You shouldn’t smoke in bed.”

“I wasn’t!” Grandma announced indignantly to the assembled crowd. “This place is obviously just a tinderbox.”

Dad turned to Val. “Go back to Vicki’s. We’ll clean this up. Don’t worry, it’ll be good as new.”

Val padded morosely back down the hall as Mother was returning with a bucket of soapy water and a sponge.

“Everybody out!” she ordered, as she began to scrub one wall. The firemen carried their hose back down the hall and out the front door, closing it behind them as we heard the neighbors grilling them: “Is there anything left?”

Mrs. McDougal piped up. “Is Elaine dead?”

Grandma and I backed out of the bedroom to give Mother room to work. She tossed a sponge to Dad.

“Well, don’t just stand there,” Mother said to him. It was one A.M., but they wouldn’t be returning to bed anytime soon.

Grandma stood awkwardly in the doorway as they scrubbed. “Well,” she announced, “this is just shocking. What a way to end my stay here.”

“You certainly have,” Mother mumbled through gritted teeth.

“Have what?”

“Ended your stay here. This will be the last time you’re invited to this house.”

Grandma looked startled. “What?”

Mother continued scrubbing, rubbing so hard she threatened to break through the plaster. “I’ve had it.” Grandma didn’t offer a response, but Mother didn’t need one. “How many times have we talked about you smoking in the house? How many?”

“I’ve been going out to the patio ever since your little hissy fit over dinner!” Grandma replied. “Never mind the fact that I’m gonna die of some mysterious disease from that damn bug zapper shooting out electricity.”

Mother practically pounded the wall with her sponge. “Do you think for one moment I believe that this wasn’t the result of you smoking in bed? How stupid do you think I am?”

“Well, if you didn’t make me feel so bad about smoking in the rest of the house, I wouldn’t have
had
to smoke in here!” Grandma hollered. “If you weren’t such a crazy neatnik, none of this would have happened!”

Mother stood up, brandishing her sponge at Grandma. “Don’t you dare blame this on me, old woman,” Mother said evenly. “Let me tell you something: you are in my house. How I want to run things is my decision and you have no say in it!”

“Well, someone should!” Grandma retorted. “If Ray won’t stand up to you, somebody has to!”

Dad, who was just trying to keep his head down as he scrubbed the soot, seemed to sink farther into the wall. Standing in the hall, I took another step back to stay out of the line of fire.

“I’m just trying to make a life for my family that’s better than the one you gave me!” Mother shouted at Grandma. “I don’t want my kids sleeping in dirty sheets surrounded by empty beer bottles!”

Grandma looked down. “Stop it. They’ll hear you.”

“I don’t want them to wonder where their mother is when they get home after school!”

“That was a long time ago!”

“I don’t want them to get phone calls from strangers to come pick their mother up because she’s drunk at a bar!”

“Your father had just died!” Grandma shouted, her voice breaking, her body now slumped as though she had been physically beaten. “I was scared! I didn’t know what to do!”

There was a long, shocked silence. Mother dropped her sponge and sank to the floor. I stood behind Grandma, unseen, unsure what to do. Grandma turned unsteadily and left the room, her face flushed. I quickly slipped down the hall and into my bedroom, hoping they hadn’t known I was listening.

 

 

A LITTLE WHILE LATER, as Dad helped Grandma settle into the family room for the remainder of the night, I made my way to the basement, hoping to make sense of what had just transpired.

I had never known any details about my grandfather’s death, only that he had died when my mother was a teenager. Suddenly, so much of who she was—and who, in turn, Grandma was—seemed to make sense. Mother had grown up in a world she could not control, because Grandma had lost control of hers in midlife. While the ways that they dealt with these feelings of abandonment and fear seemed somewhat extreme to my eleven-year-old awareness, I wondered, as I sat fingering the tattered chenille of the bedspread, if I would have handled it any differently.

 

 

THE NEXT MORNING was uncomfortably quiet as Dad loaded up the car so he could drive Grandma back to Kansas City. The only sound was that of a yowling Tweeter, as Grandma attempted to force her back into her travel carrier.

“She just doesn’t like being pent up,” Grandma explained as Tweeter hissed. “She’s a little feline athlete, a regular O. J. Simpson.”

“Maybe you should put some raw meat in the cage,” I offered helpfully as I stood listening from the other side of the door.

Once Grandma succeeded at her task, and we had finished bandaging her wrist, she was ready to go. Dad was waiting in the car with the cat, playing the radio loudly to mask the lyrical sounds of Tweeter’s rage.

As Grandma and I stood alone in the family room, she hugged me tightly. “I’m gonna miss my pinochle partner.”

I hugged her back. “Me too. But you’ll be back next summer.”

I smiled winsomely, trying my best to sell this line, knowing in my heart that it probably wasn’t true and that, perhaps, it shouldn’t be. The magic that I had invoked to anesthetize her and Mother’s relationship had resulted in just the opposite. But maybe, somehow, that was a good thing.

Suddenly, we heard the master bedroom door open. Instinctively, I pulled away and tried to bum-rush Grandma to the door.

“Better get you on the road,” I said nervously, “before Tweeter gnaws through the bars of her cage.”

Mother walked into the family room, bobby pins still in her hair, looking tired and strangely puffy. She stood a few feet away, her arms crossed.

“Do you have everything?” she said to Grandma.

There was a détente in her voice.

“Yes, I think so,” Grandma replied softly.

“Okay.” There was another pause, as if neither of them knew what to do next. Then, Mother crossed the room and put her arms around Grandma. They stood for a moment in a rather tentative embrace. A much longer one than I had ever seen.