Family Secret (excerpt)
by Jessica Mesman
from Dirt
His room had no television, and the double bed was made up with a polyester bedspread that held on to my hair when I slept. It was the worst place to sleep in my grandmother’s house. The walls were blank except for a crucifix, which hung over the bed’s headboard and reminded me of the one in A Nightmare on Elm Street, the one that keeps jumping off the wall right before Tina dies. Our uncle slept in this room when he got weekend passes from the VA Hospital. Otherwise he spent most of his time sitting at the kitchen table, staring and smoking.
from Dirt
About once a month, my sister and I took turns riding with my grandmother to Biloxi to pick up our uncle, a real chore because Biloxi was two hours away and our grandmother chain-smoked Kent 100s with the windows rolled up and listened to 1450 AM the whole way, old-people music, Glen Miller and Nat King Cole, tapping her perfect fingernails on the steering wheel and singing along at random, sometimes the lyrics, sometimes her own hypnotizing “Choom, choom… Choom, choom... ” as she shrugged her shoulders with the beat.
I was in it for Sonic burgers with mustard and a stop at the bookstore for a couple of new editions of Sweet Valley High. We worked on this kind of reward system: stop biting your nails and I’ll buy you a ring with your birthstone; ten dollars for every “A” on your report card. I had few friends and no plans to interfere, so I often took my sister’s shifts too. My grandmother liked this about me, and I milked it. I liked playing the martyr. This was around the time that I started wearing my sweater and jacket all day long at school to see if I could stand the heat.
The drive was boring, but the hospital was painful. It smelled like pee. Murals of weapon-toting soldiers in fatigues covered the walls. The residents looked dirty and vaguely criminal; they scared and embarrassed me when we walked past the rooms where they watched TV and they nodded in recognition, or worse, shouted out “Hey, Ms. Frances!” to which my grandmother smiled and responded, “Well, hey!” and waved back with big, gracious flaps of her wrist, as if to fans beyond a velvet rope.
She liked to make a lot of noise on the way to my uncle’s room—typical showboating on her part, I thought. This was the woman who called the gas station to let them know that Frances Arnold was coming in to fill up the tank. The woman who had two mink coats in a city where, for 25 years, it had not snowed a single flake. She liked big entrances.
Or maybe she thought it was best to warn my uncle of her arrival. Maybe she was afraid of what she might catch him doing in there.
I don’t know why she worried because every time, we found him sitting on the edge of his bed and waiting for us with his overnight bag at his feet, as if he’d been sitting there and waiting for us since we’d dropped him off a month before. He would be dressed in one of those all-in-one jumpsuits from Sears. I’ve never seen anyone else wear one in real life—only characters in movies who are supposed to be appear hopelessly out of step with time, like Samantha’s grandpa Ed in Sixteen Candles. His hair would be neatly combed, his shoes shined. He’d smell of Old Spice.
Recognition took a moment. For a long time, my sister and I thought he was retarded, but now I know it was the Thorazine that made him slow. Despite all my grandmother’s hooting and peacocking and the overnight bag packed at his feet, he always looked surprised to see us.
She’d knock twice on his open door and call out, “Hey my baby!” She called him baby and Deedle and Bubba, which is what we called him, but never his real name, Cyril, which she hated. Cyril was my grandfather’s name. Bubba was the oldest child, older than my mom by seventeen years, and my grandmother’s favorite because he needed her the most.
My grandparents had a rocky marriage, lived out in separate bedrooms on opposite sides of the house. He referred to her in conversation as “the ol’ bitch.” My sister says she once saw my grandmother aim for his head with the old rotary phone that sat on their kitchen counter. What I remember is this: an old picture I found in her bedroom of him pinching her boob. They were both laughing, something I don’t think I ever saw them do together in real life. And I remember this: When he died, my grandmother stood in front of the mausoleum wall, shaking her fist at his grave like a soap opera villain and yelling “I can’t believe you beat me to it!”
Bubba would laugh a weak, slow laugh as she kissed his cheek and announced too loudly, as if talking to a foreign-exchange student or a child, “Look who came to see you!”
My cue: a weak smile, a tense body offered up for a hug.
“Well, look who it is,” he’d say, thick-tongued, and pat me lightly, robotically, on the back. He called my sister and me “the girls,” not Jennifer and Jessica, which is a mouthful even if you aren’t drugged.
“That’s swell.”
On the way home, we drove down the Gulf Coast while Bubba smoked his Pall Malls and my grandmother her Kent’s. I moved to the backseat and cracked the window every now and then, but if my grandmother noticed she’d yell, “Don’t let that Gulf air blow on you,” and roll it right back up. Bubba’s ashes dusted the Cadillac’s white upholstery. He was a sloppy and forgetful smoker. All my grandmother’s cars were dotted with constellations of scorches and deep, black pits.
He called her “Mama.” His was a different accent than my parents and mine; our words were less elegant, more guttural. New Awlins. Pecawn. Dawlin. He was raised in Georgia, and I imagine that he started out with that pretty, sprawling southern accent of my grandmother and her sister and brother. But the drugs distorted Bubba’s baritone drawl and made him sound like a caricature, a dumb cracker. “Mawwwwma.”
All these things together: the slow, thick, speech and retarded delivery. The dopey nicknames. The hospital. They overshadowed the stacks and shelves of books, the philosophy and literary theory, the theology, the science fiction, the Faerie Queene and the collected Dickens, that filled the shelves in his old bedroom. The saxophone and clarinet in the closet and the piano in the den that he’d once played. Despite it all, we actually thought he was dim.
My grandmother encouraged this: better to be stupid than schizophrenic; better to be physically ill, with “ulcers” and “bad kidneys” than a head case. Nobody talked about the letters he sent home decoding the patterns in our names and birthdays, patterns that revealed our family’s connection to the civil war. He started with his own name, Cyril Solomon Arnold—CSA: the Confederate States of America. We couldn’t listen to the radio or watch TV because it made Bubba “nervous.” TV characters would tell him to crush his eyeglasses under the soles of his Hushpuppies. I never told my grandmother, but when I slept over, I sometimes woke to him sitting on the edge of my bed, watching snow on the television, the sound turned down low. This is the sort of behavior that would land him back in the hospital with no weekend passes.
Read the rest of this piece in Dirt. Order your copy now.
