I pulled Mom by the hand and told the shop owner very quietly that Mom was pregnant. Mom shouted, This is not about being pregnant! She tried to rip the tinkling thing off the door when we left. Everybody was quiet in the card shop. Mom huffed and puffed all the way home. She couldn’t stand how tasteful the shop was and how white the shop owner’s teeth were. I started to say, And you really hate modern thermostats, don’t you? But by then Mom was off in a world of her own, softly growling and trying to lower her heart rate with her precious Alexander technique.
Grandma had the conchigliettes ready for us, with her Guatemalan woven placemats and candlelight and special blue glass candleholders that Auntie Momo had given her two weeks before she died. Grandma tried to get Mom to relax by making her laugh or at least move her lips into the shape of a smile. She asked Mom if she knew about positions to have sex in when you’re pregnant. Her friend Wilda said her daughter was teaching a pre-natal course at the Y and it was just amazing what the body could do and accommodate. Mom said oh god, Mom. Who am I having sex with? Grandma said no, of course not, she knew that, but just in general. She started listing positions that were comfortable to have sex in. Stop! I said. Ho! said Grandma. Why not talk about this? I said, Because it’s not funny. Funny! said Grandma. It’s not supposed to be funny! Mom sat with her arms crossed. Her head was tipped way over to the right. Okay, said Grandma. You want Grandmas to be funny history lessons all the time, not the Kama Sutra. Well, I had one dress made out of branches to last me for eighteen years and no shoes or cellphone when I was your age, Swiv. Is that better? When Euripides, Zapata, McClung and I were young we had to eat trees and drink our own urine to survive. Luckily we had two sets of sharp teeth, like sharks. Our grandparents were sharks. We had to visit them at Christmas and Easter underwater. They loved us so much. They made us eat so much. They didn’t speak English. They were so slippery and it was hard to hug them goodbye. We’d laugh and laugh about how slippery Grandma and Grandpa were. People hibernated back then, not just bears. We all fell asleep in the fall from late October to early April.
No! I said. That’s not even true. We had gills, said Grandma. Mom interrupted. Grandma and I smiled because we were so happy Mom was finally saying something. Why don’t you tell her about the time you stole a car, she said.
Ah! said Grandma. Now we’re talking turkey. I stole a car once accidentally from the Penner Foods parking lot and when I called Sobering the cop to report it, he asked me if I planned to return it. I said yeah and he said okay, good, not a problem. I told him that before I returned it I’d just quickly use it to run a few errands around town. Yeah, that should be fine, he said. Then I might drive to the city and catch a movie, I told him. Hmmmm, well, he said, that oughta be okay. And then, I said, it’ll be late so I might just drive home and return it in the morning, if that’s okay. Sure, said Sobering, sounds good. The real owner of the car will be asleep anyway. Oh, I said, I just remembered that tomorrow morning I’ve got a driving test. I had my driver’s license taken away six months ago for stunt driving and I have to re-do the test to get it back. Oh, said Sobering, right, you better do that first. You don’t want to be driving without a valid license.
Grandma was in fine fettle. She’d had a little bit of the Canadian rum from the Italian bottle but believe it or not for once she didn’t talk about the doctors murdering everyone. She got so carried away that she forgot to take her meds after dinner. Then she remembered. Her pill box was annoying her because the plastic lid of one of the days of the week was broken and pills kept falling out of it. Bombs away, Swiv! She yelled at me while I crawled around under the table looking for them. This one is tiny, white and round! This one is oblong and pink, with an indentation in the middle! This one is I don’t know what, it’s a pill! And don’t tell me it’s time for the blister packs! After her pills, Grandma made me go to her bedroom and get a box of photos. She showed me and Mom a photo of her old Russian ancestors. None of them were smiling. It looked like they were arranging themselves to be executed. Grandma said the names of each of them and how they were related to us. Mom was getting bored and texting with someone but also lifting her head quickly in between texts to look at the picture for one second. This one with his hand on the old woman’s shoulder is her son, said Grandma. He’s old, too. The old woman was the only person sitting in a chair. The rest of them all stood around her or behind her. This young girl with her hand on the old woman’s other shoulder became my grandmother, said Grandma. At the end of her life she was enormous. We used to float around together on Falcon Lake. I really loved her. This boy here had problems with his blood. And look at the old woman in the chair, said Grandma. I poked Mom so she’d stop texting and look. She’s dead, said Grandma. What do you mean? I said. Mom said, Let me see that, and she picked up the photo album and held it closely to her face. Well, she’s just dead! said Grandma. That’s how it was done then. Photos were forbidden but sometimes, especially after somebody had died, people regretted that they had no picture to remember them by, so they quickly got a photographer to come and take a picture before the person was buried.