When Grandma’s dad died, her brothers took over everything and left the sisters in the dirt. They even stole the house that was supposed to go to the girls. They made all the workers in the factory pray together every ninety minutes and promise God they wouldn’t form a union. Grandma was fifteen years old. Her brothers sent her away to Omaha, Nebraska to study the Bible and work as a live-in maid for an American family. They wanted her to find a husband or become a missionary so she’d be taken care of by someone other than them. That’s patriarchy, Swiv, make a note. I waved my phone at her.
One time, Grandma’s brother’s wife felt very guilty about randomly having married into all the family money while the legitimate heirs, Grandma and her sisters, had none of the family money, so she wrote Grandma a cheque for twenty thousand dollars. Grandma beat a fast track to the bank to cash it before her nephew could put a stop payment on the cheque. Later he told Grandma that his mom, her brother’s wife, was not in her right mind when she gave Grandma that cheque. Whenever she was feeling generous her family called her crazy. Grandma used the money to pay off a bunch of loans and to buy a screen door so she could feel the evening breeze without getting eaten alive by mosquitoes after schlepping around all day in the blazing hot prairie sun. All her life she had wanted a screen door. A few years before that she had asked her nephews for a screen door, at cost, from the family business, but her nephews said no, that was impossible because if they gave Grandma a screen door, at cost, they’d have to give all their aunts a screen door, at cost, and where would that all end? Also, the nephews said they made high-end products and that probably wouldn’t be suitable for Grandma. What on earth does that mean? Grandma asked me.
Grandma was on her Gazelle as she was talking about this. I have a mental image, she said. She told me about one day when she was young and she was walking down the street. She was freezing to death. It was thirty below. The wind was blowing hard. Nobody else was outside. This was in her town. She doesn’t know why she was walking around outside when it was so cold and the wind was blowing so hard. I asked her if she’d been sad. She was still huffing and puffing on her Gazelle. She said maybe, maybe not. Maybe she’d been sent on an errand that day. She was walking and freezing. She was mad, she remembered suddenly. She was mad, not sad. There was no errand. Then she saw three people walking towards her in the swirling snow. They had to get close to her before she could really see them. They were an old grandma and her two grandsons. The old grandma had a lit cigarette sticking straight out of her mouth. It wasn’t dangling. The little boys were wearing one mitten each. They held popsicles in their other hands, the ones without mittens on them. They were licking their popsicles. And they were all happy. They were all smiling. It was minus thirty degrees. The wind was howling. It was a prairie blizzard. Nobody was around. Grandma got close to them on the sidewalk. The old grandma said to Grandma, who was young then and not a grandma, Not too bad out, eh? Her cigarette stuck straight out of her mouth even when she talked.
I asked Grandma why she’d had that memory right now. Not too bad out, eh? said Grandma. She said she often had that memory. It was just a regular flash.
Mom came out of her room, crying. She went into Grandma’s bedroom with Grandma and they shut the door. I put water on to boil for the conchigliettes. Then Mom came out of the bedroom and asked me if I wanted to go to the card shop with her and pick out a notebook for me and a card for the stage manager to say she was sorry for the Netflix thing. Grandma came shuffling along behind her and said she’d finish making dinner.
Mom blew another gasket at the card shop. I already knew she was mad because she called the innocent squirrels on the deck assholes. Fuck off, jerks! They had to kamikaze off the railing into the neighbour’s yard to escape from Mom. Wallenda Brothers, said Mom. They’re just squirrels, I said. Mom doesn’t care what they are. They’re mocking little vengeful creeps. They cause fires. We waited in a line-up at the cash register for twenty minutes which Mom spent writing her message in the card. When we finally got to the checkout to pay, Mom used the surface of the counter to quickly address the envelope and the shop owner guy with the gleaming incisors who was standing behind the counter asked me and Mom to please move away from the counter so that he could help ring out the other customers. Mom said she was just addressing the envelope, it would take her five seconds and then he could go on facilitating capitalism. The shop owner said they liked to encourage their customers to take the cards home and then to take their time to do something creative with them. Then Mom really started to take her time addressing and licking the envelope and sticking a stamp on it. When she was finished she looked around and said the only creative thing she could see in that pale, tasteful little shop was the markup on the cheesy inventory they carried and maybe he should create a space where paying customers feel welcome to address their envelopes, the ones purchased at a creative markup price from the store itself, and not expect people to buy a goddamn card and envelope, go home, read The Artist’s Way, get inspired, be creative with a cute message, go back out, find a goddamn mailbox that hasn’t been knocked over by meth-heads, drop the thing in the slot, slip three times on the ice, break your tailbone and go home again to find cops waiting in every fucking corner and watching your every fucking move through the fucking modern thermostats. The shop owner said that was an incredibly interesting idea, he’d consider it, but for now he had customers to take care of. Mom said that when the shop owner opened his mouth it was like when that kid in Close Encounters of the Third Kind opens the door to the aliens and is almost blinded.