about catching it from a toilet seat. There were several heroin addicts in our extended network of friends and family who were HIV positive.
“That’s what he gets for being such a whore!” Nonna chastised the cat.
She would have said the same thing to any of her children had they come to her with such a diagnosis. But when her prodigal son returned mewling after a few nights on the prowl, Nonna’s eyes would tear and she would fry an egg just for him.
At this point in her life my grandmother had long since given up wearing a prosthetic breast, let alone a bra. She didn’t wear her dentures, comb her hair, or shave her armpits. Lisa and Donald had told me that all the kids on Eden Glen Avenue thought my grandmother was a witch. It was a natural conclusion, given her toothless, one-titted rants at the neighbors and the way she muttered angrily to herself while walking up and down the street. Jehovah’s Witnessesonce knocked on her door. Once. My mother and I were in the driveway next door, getting ready to go out, when we saw the two young men in crisp suits climbing the steps of her porch.
“Hold on, Nik,” Mum said. “I want to watch this.”
We saw them knock on her door and wait. A shriek and a curse later, they were running for their lives. Nothing could have made me prouder.
Living with Nonna had many advantages, the biggest being food. She had that Depression-era talent for making a feast out of nothing. One night I watched her take rotten, almost liquefied peppers and tomatoes from the windowsill where she’d left them to ripen. She cut off the green, fuzzy mold and fried the remaining bits in olive oil with meat and potatoes and garlic.
“That’s friggin’ gross, Nonna. I’m not eating it.”
“
Statta zite!
You’ll eat it, you
putan
!” she hollered, and banished me from the kitchen. After dinner I was licking the pan she had cooked it all in.
When I remember my grandmother now, I picture her sitting on her living-room couch, wearing a cheap cotton housedress, her one, lopsided boob drooping toward her hip, her wild, reddish hair sticking up in all directions, and the crooked smile on her face as she leans over to one side and waves her hands to divert a loud, rippling fart in my direction.
“You know, Nikki, every time a person passes gas invisible particles of shit are flying through the air!”
WHEN I HAD FINISHED with my homework and the horrible sitcoms I watched, Nonna would transplant herself to the living-room couch so that we could watch TV together until one of us fell asleep. We stayed up late into the night watching old movies that my grandmother called “pictures.” The spring I lived with her we watched
The Pit and the Pendulum
, the entire
Shogun
series, and Alex Haley’s
Roots
. Several other movies I sometimes think we dreamed. If imaginationscan be inherited, mine certainly was, because Nonna and I had an identical subconscious. Those months when we lived together were full of magical projection. It was uncanny the way we were always finding bits of our darkest desires being enacted on the screen. There was one movie about a lake in rural North America infested with piranhas. As shoals of bloodthirsty fish shredded the limbs of teenagers from a nearby summer camp, I imagined the kids at St. Mary’s being devoured.
“I’m rooting for the piranhas,” Nonna said, as though she could hear my thoughts.
In another of our late-night B-movie horror shows, nuclear fallout causes the few surviving men and women to roam the scorched earth with painful, lumpy mutations growing out of their bodies. “We deserve a lot worse than that, after the way we’ve treated this planet,” Nonna said in disgust.
Even nature programs revealed to us the brutal world as we recognized it: sharks leaving flesh wounds as part of the courtship ritual, procreation by gang rape, and, for the finale, intrauterine cannibalism! Shakespeare couldn’t have done a finer job.
EVENTUALLY I MOVED
“That’s what he gets for being such a whore!” Nonna chastised the cat.
She would have said the same thing to any of her children had they come to her with such a diagnosis. But when her prodigal son returned mewling after a few nights on the prowl, Nonna’s eyes would tear and she would fry an egg just for him.
At this point in her life my grandmother had long since given up wearing a prosthetic breast, let alone a bra. She didn’t wear her dentures, comb her hair, or shave her armpits. Lisa and Donald had told me that all the kids on Eden Glen Avenue thought my grandmother was a witch. It was a natural conclusion, given her toothless, one-titted rants at the neighbors and the way she muttered angrily to herself while walking up and down the street. Jehovah’s Witnessesonce knocked on her door. Once. My mother and I were in the driveway next door, getting ready to go out, when we saw the two young men in crisp suits climbing the steps of her porch.
“Hold on, Nik,” Mum said. “I want to watch this.”
We saw them knock on her door and wait. A shriek and a curse later, they were running for their lives. Nothing could have made me prouder.
Living with Nonna had many advantages, the biggest being food. She had that Depression-era talent for making a feast out of nothing. One night I watched her take rotten, almost liquefied peppers and tomatoes from the windowsill where she’d left them to ripen. She cut off the green, fuzzy mold and fried the remaining bits in olive oil with meat and potatoes and garlic.
“That’s friggin’ gross, Nonna. I’m not eating it.”
“
Statta zite!
You’ll eat it, you
putan
!” she hollered, and banished me from the kitchen. After dinner I was licking the pan she had cooked it all in.
When I remember my grandmother now, I picture her sitting on her living-room couch, wearing a cheap cotton housedress, her one, lopsided boob drooping toward her hip, her wild, reddish hair sticking up in all directions, and the crooked smile on her face as she leans over to one side and waves her hands to divert a loud, rippling fart in my direction.
“You know, Nikki, every time a person passes gas invisible particles of shit are flying through the air!”
WHEN I HAD FINISHED with my homework and the horrible sitcoms I watched, Nonna would transplant herself to the living-room couch so that we could watch TV together until one of us fell asleep. We stayed up late into the night watching old movies that my grandmother called “pictures.” The spring I lived with her we watched
The Pit and the Pendulum
, the entire
Shogun
series, and Alex Haley’s
Roots
. Several other movies I sometimes think we dreamed. If imaginationscan be inherited, mine certainly was, because Nonna and I had an identical subconscious. Those months when we lived together were full of magical projection. It was uncanny the way we were always finding bits of our darkest desires being enacted on the screen. There was one movie about a lake in rural North America infested with piranhas. As shoals of bloodthirsty fish shredded the limbs of teenagers from a nearby summer camp, I imagined the kids at St. Mary’s being devoured.
“I’m rooting for the piranhas,” Nonna said, as though she could hear my thoughts.
In another of our late-night B-movie horror shows, nuclear fallout causes the few surviving men and women to roam the scorched earth with painful, lumpy mutations growing out of their bodies. “We deserve a lot worse than that, after the way we’ve treated this planet,” Nonna said in disgust.
Even nature programs revealed to us the brutal world as we recognized it: sharks leaving flesh wounds as part of the courtship ritual, procreation by gang rape, and, for the finale, intrauterine cannibalism! Shakespeare couldn’t have done a finer job.
EVENTUALLY I MOVED
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