Teeny Grandma and Outer Space
— Winnie Faye Wolfe Thaxton, 1899-1983
She covers the bathroom floor with newspaper where her Chihuahua can shit. Just tiptoe around it, she tells me, to get to the commode. She keeps two twin mattresses on the floor in the second bedroom where we sleep when I visit on weekends.
Teeny Grandma takes me to the dump to collect frames from old lawn chairs, beer bottles, Styrofoam, Anything that doesn’t stink too bad. At Walgreens, we buy blue feathers, pipe cleaners, tiny pretend birds. We make birdcages: one piece of Styrofoam as the bottom and one as the top of the cage. We decorate the cages with feathers and silk flowers.
Teeny Grandma doesn’t allow anyone in the other bedroom of her house with the mahogany post bed, the huge chest of drawers, the nightstands. When I sneak in there to get orange thread for the purse we’re making, she tells me that if I go in there again, the ghost of my dead grandfather will come get me. She doesn’t tell me he died because he was drunk while driving from West Virginia to their new home in Sarasota.
My own house is haunted. Once when I stay home from first grade, sick, I climb through the bathroom window to get out of my house because I hear the devil moving tools around in the garage.
Teeny Grandma helps my father, her son Eddie, cut off the heads of the 2,000 chickens he bought so that we have something to do after school each day. She shows my brothers and me how to pluck feathers off headless chickens after my mother has scalded the birds in hot water. Sugar: the secret to good Cole slaw. She is proud of Eddie for having a family, a big house, a swimming pool. She pretends nothing bad ever happened to him. We never talk about his wandering away from his wife and children every weekend—the reason I stayed with her so often.
One weekend, we collect Coke bottles from ditches along the sides of the roads in her neighborhood and take them to the 7-11 in exchange for nickels and dimes.
She doesn’t tell me, or anyone, what her husband did to Eddie when he was a boy. I find that out long after she’s dead, long after Eddie drinks himself to death. That’s when I talk to cousins, aunts, uncles to figure out that her husband took Eddie in the back room while she chopped green beans hard on the cutting board so she could not hear her son beg his father to stop.
When I’m fifteen, she develops Alzheimer’s, and I disappear from her life. I prefer to keep her disease a secret—even from myself. I refuse to visit her in the nursing home. I’m afraid of anything blue or dark or unknown or anything that is supposed to be kept secret. I’m still afraid of witches and the devil.
My father cares for her in the nursing home, visits every day after work. His brothers remind him that he was the one chosen by his father to be the sissy, the scrawny kid who pulled down his pants in the backroom while she chopped green beans.
At Eddie’s funeral, even though Teeny Grandma isn’t there because she is too far gone with Alzheimer’s, another of her sons weeps and falls to the ground in regret—a deep secret being buried, a brother saying, I’m sorry, Eddie. I’m sorry. I do not yet understand.
She dies before I discover the reason my father searched for numbness, his desire for booze, his need for barbiturates. She dies before I understand her sorrow and her guilt—why she would to do anything for Eddie, for his family, for me.
But before she dies, before Alzheimer’s, while I’m still a kid, she picks me up from the dentist, heats up chicken noodle soup, makes a peanut butter sandwich for my numb mouth. NASA figures out how to get men into space, and Teeny Grandma and I walk out of the house into the front yard to see the launch, 150 miles away, the smoke among the clouds, the men inside snuggled into tight seats. I remember her pointing at the sky, and her saying, If God’d wanted us to go to the moon, he wouldda put us there. I keep looking up. She shakes her head, turns her back, and heads toward the house.