Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

You— you’re— you’re just a terrible son! she sputtered and she started to cry but more from being mad than sad.

Yeah, well, that should make it easy for you to choose, I said. So who’s it gonna be, Mom? The terrific husband or the terrible son?

She wrung her hands and I knew I was totally screwing up our relationship forever probably but I couldn’t stop myself. Her face was dark red and had more lines in it than I’d ever seen before like she was aging right before my eyes and I truly wished that I didn’t have to force her to make this choice. But I felt like I myself didn’t have any choice and it was her husband, the man she had chosen to marry after my real father left, who had taken it away from me and had made it so that neither me nor my mom had any freedom to choose, and the one who had taken it away from us, Ken, he wasn’t even here.

She said in a low voice, almost a whisper, Then go, Chappie. Go away.

I’ll always remember that moment. I’ve played it back in my mind a hundred times at least since then. But not much of what came afterwards. I think I said okay. I was calm and picked up my backpack and I remember thinking about the niner inside and I remember noticing with relief that I hadn’t the slightest interest now in becoming a mass murderer.

I’m gonna go by and see Grandma first, I said. Just to tell her like goodbye. I didn’t do it before, I said. Then I guess I’ll go back to Vermont, to the organic school.

Whatever, she said. She looked definitely downcast, like her only son had died only of course he hadn’t, he was standing right there in front of her saying goodbye. But I think she kind of wanted me dead, that she actually had all along preferred me missing and presumed dead to being where and what I was now. In a sense by cutting out I was only giving her what she really wanted but didn’t dare ask for.

What a good boy am I, thought I. See ya ‘round, Mom, I said and left her sitting there in the chair behind the big green plant in the lobby of the clinic looking dreamy and sad and when I got to the door and turned she looked relieved too.

It was raining pretty hard when I left the clinic so by the time I got to Grandma’s at the Mayflower Arms Apartments down by the bridge I was soaked even though I jogged most of the way and must’ve looked like a kitten somebody tried to drown in a bag because when Grandma came to the door she didn’t recognize me at first and I had to tell her my name. It’s me, your grandson. The only one incidentally but never mind, she’s old and surprisingly self-centered for a person who doesn’t have long to live. Plus she’d probably decided right after the fire that I’d been burned up in it so I was like a ghost to her and nobody wants to recognize a ghost, even the ghost of their only grandson.

She clapped her hand over her big bosom and said, Chappie? It’s really you? My God, I thought you’d been burned beyond recognition in that fire over the Video Den. You know they found the one body, she added and I said yeah I knew.

She gave me the usual hugs and all, carefully holding her cigarette out to the side so’s not to burn me and keeping her head turned so I wouldn’t knock off these big clip-on earrings that she always wears day and night. She was real glad to see me though and liked holding my hands in her old soft ones once she’d put her cigarette in an ashtray and she enjoyed standing back and looking at me and smiling in a teary way and saying like how happy she was to know that it wasn’t me who was burned beyond recognition. I think that particular phrase pleased her because she used it a lot more than necessary especially if she was trying to make me feel lucky for not being dead which is what she told me, that I should feel lucky for not being burned beyond recognition in that terrible fire. Did I know about the fire, had I seen it? she asked like it’d been the highlight of her year.

I like my grandmother and always have since I was a little kid but I never really know what she’s thinking. Part of it’s she doesn’t either. Also she plucks her eyebrows off and then draws in new ones with a pencil or a special crayon the way she’d want them to look in a fashion magazine which is up high on her forehead practically like she’s stuck in a state of cute permanent surprise so most of the time you actually can’t read her expression very well. It’s sort of a mask. Plus she has this habit of reversing how people are supposed to ask you about yourself so that it comes out she’s really telling you about herself only you aren’t supposed to know it and most people probably don’t. Even I didn’t until I got used to it. Like once on my thirteenth birthday my mom had a special family dinner and Grandma when she sat down at the table took my hand in hers and looked into my eyes and said, Did you ever think you’d be old enough to have a grandmother who’ll be seventy-five in September?

I said, No kidding, Grandma. Happy birthday in advance then, in case I don’t make it to September, but then my mom started dissing me because she knew what I was doing even if Grandma didn’t. I was only kidding though and Grandma likes being kidded. She knows attention when she sees it.

This day she said to me, I bet you never thought you’d see your old grandmother again, did you, Chappie?

Yeah, it’s pretty amazing, I said. But I’ve been over in Vermont, I told her and added the bit about the organic school and the hippie family who were these wicked decent older people with kids and this huge farm they all lived on with some other kids like me who were like foster children and they grew all their own food and ran their own school in the barn and made all their own clothes and shoes even, I said showing her my sandals.

Those are nice, the sandals. I once had a pair that they remind me of, she said. Made by Indians from Mexico or one of those places. I got them at an Indian souvenir place in Lake George. They didn’t last though. But yours look fine, she said. I see you got rid of that weird haircut and all the earrings and that ring in your nose and so on, she said.

Yeah, I said. On account of the rules of the school and all. That’s the one drawback, I told her in case she thought I’d done it to please people like her. At the door when I took off my doo-rag on account of it was soaked she’d seen my hair and she just had to like nod with approval which’d made me instantly want to shave my head and grow back the old mohawk as fast as I could. That’s why afterwards I kind of exposed my arm a few times so she could see my crossed bones if she wanted to comment on something, but I guess she was distracted and didn’t see it or probably she just thought I’d had it all along and couldn’t get rid of it like the haircut and the rings so she’d rather not think about it and didn’t. She was like that, she could think about anything she wanted whenever she wanted or she could decide not to think about it at all and then didn’t. Grandma always had her fingernails to paint, her eyebrows to pluck, her TV shows to watch, plus church and her AA meetings. She’s been in AA for half a century or at least since my mom was a kid and her husband, my mom’s dad who would’ve been my grandfather got killed in a car crash when he was drinking, an event Grandma refers to as her wake-up call and still talks about like it happened a year ago and was a blessing in disguise.

At her weekly meetings in the basement of the Methodist Church Grandma is the one who makes the coffee and cleans up afterwards and gets to complain how they take her for granted. I knew she was the one who’d gotten my mom hooked into the AA, she’d been trying for years and it was probably an okay thing and the reason why my mom was living with her nowadays, and I figured once my mom was sure she’d be able to keep going to AA meetings on her own she’d move out of Grandma’s and back in with Ken.