Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

Terrible, unutterable words: fattening, lo-cal, dietetic . And anyhow, every day Mrs. Tillman across the hall called Lisa over and fed her orange marshmallows shaped like enormous peanuts, and Pixy Stix. Lisa’s first day in Des Moines, Mrs. Tillman had knocked on the apartment door. “I have suckers,” she’d said. “You have what?” asked Sylvia. “Suckers, suckers,” said Mrs. Tillman, digging in the pockets of her housecoat. When she pulled out her hand, she’d caught a number of lollipops between her knuckles by the sticks. All yellow. Either they were cheaper to buy that way or she’d already eaten the good colors herself.

Thereafter Lisa went to visit Mrs. Tillman every morning. “She loves it here,” Mrs. Tillman always said, a note of competition in her voice. Mrs. Tillman’s late husband had owned an appliance store, and she had retained an appliance-like air, functional, awkward, a woman to be moved around on a dolly. I am the grandmother , Sylvia thought but didn’t say. That is the winning hand. That beats all other old ladies, no matter what . Then she and Lisa would go out and flag the ice-cream truck. Fudgsicle for Lisa, Dreamsicle for her.

“Why don’t you do the speech for me?” Sylvia asked Lisa now. She sat down on the sofa, her hands clasped. “Then you can just enjoy the party.”

“No, thanks. Daddy says I should save it for the performance.”

“What performance?”

The girl shrugged. “He taught me Hamlet’s speech to his players, too. ‘Speak the speech, I pray you.’ ” Another grape. This one she tossed in the air: it bounced off her chin. “Oops. Anyhow, it was his idea, when I told him about the party. So I better.”

“He doesn’t understand—”

“Grandma,” the girl said seriously. “You have to do what sick people ask.”

In earlier years, Sylvia had been a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other person. When disasters happened (her mother had taught her) you strode firmly in the opposite direction, because calamity followed catastrophe followed disaster. People who believed things couldn’t get worse were the ones who were killed, by man or nature. You had to get away.

But the Bicentennial summer, all she could think was, my fault . She could hardly move for culpability. That’s what happened when you were the oldest surviving member of your family. You could not cast blame any further back: it was yours, like your spinster aunt’s diploma. Everyone else refused it, and the only way to hand it down was to die.

She’d fed that boy, her son, too well. That’s what Rena said: she’d starved the girl and stuffed the boy. Last Thanksgiving Rena had come with her steno notebook full of all the ways that Sylvia had damaged her, as though at the end she might present her mother with a bill. Distrust of men : $9,000. Fear of living alone : $15,000. “I need to do this,” said Rena, and she flipped page after page and listed injury: how Sylvia and Ben had always taken Aaron more seriously; how in the family you had to be careful about hurting men’s feelings but women didn’t matter; how they hadn’t bought her a piano when that was all she really wanted. Aaron wanted a dog, he got a dog. Aaron wanted a car, he got a car.

“I don’t remember you ever asking!” Sylvia had said.

“You knew,” said Rena darkly. Then she added, “You never loved me unconditionally. There were always strings.”

“What are you talking about? Darling, I absolutely loved you. Love you.”

“You didn’t love me the way you loved Aaron.”

What could Sylvia say? That was true. Not more nor less but differently. If one could measure love — but even then love was too various, one love would have to be measured by degrees Fahrenheit and one by atomic weight. First born, second, boy, girl: of course different loves. To compare was nonsense. What Rena wanted: scales with packages of maternal love, finally squared — but then she’d complain about something else. You just gave me the same love you’d already given Aaron! You didn’t treat me like an individual!

A different love for grandchildren, too: unreserved. Gleeful. Greedy. Sylvia was allowed to rub Noxzema into Lisa’s sunburnt back after a day at the swimming pool. She let Lisa pick out expensive shampoo at the grocery store, something called Milk Plus that smelled like the 1930s baby soap she’d washed her children with. So what if Lisa’d fallen asleep with the bubble gum they got from the candy store, and it ended up in her hair and had to be cut out? They walked down to Sal’s salon, and now Lisa had her first real haircut from a professional. They cuddled on the orange guest bed and watched television and ate popcorn. Oh, if Rena ever found out how Sylvia loved the childish flub of her granddaughter, the dense bakery heat of her limbs, her neck like a loaf of bread — a voracious love, a near starvation though here the girl was in front of her. That was what the love of children was like, in Sylvia’s experience, and she supposed it made sense that Rena was sad that such mother love had to end, to mellow. You couldn’t bite a grown-up. You couldn’t sniff at an adult woman’s neck. If she went to Rena’s therapist — that was who had insisted on the steno pad, the formal accusation — she surely would have hated to hear what it meant, her longing to bite children. To devour them. She nibbled, she tickled, she nuzzled, she inhaled. That was the real end of childhood, wasn’t it, when you looked at a stringy kid and loved her but didn’t want to bite.

But it pained her, too, the pudge of her granddaughter’s thighs. The straps of her bathing suit cut into her shoulders, and her face had changed. She’d been so casual about the split pants, as though it happened all the time. At ten, weight didn’t matter so much, and of course, a smart girl like that was more than her body. Rena had said, You made it seem as though your love for me was dependent on my weight! No, of course not. A mother loves her children no matter what. But other people, darling Rena , she wanted to say, other people do care, other people might well love you less . Her job as a mother — she believed this then, believed it now — was to make sure that her children would be loved by the maximum number of other people. This was the source of all of her anxiety.

They would get the weight off before it was time for Lisa to go home, she’d decided. Surely that was possible.

· · ·

They were getting ready to leave for the block party when the phone rang.

“Hold on!” Sylvia called. The nearest phone was in the kitchen.

“I’m going to see Mrs. Tillman,” Lisa said, and Sylvia tried to give her a wave that said both all right and don’t ruin your lunch .

“Mama,” said Rena on the phone. “I need you to be calm. All right?” But Rena’s own voice was not calm. Sylvia took off her sunglasses and replaced them with her indoor ones. She sat at the kitchen table. The phone cord just reached.

“Mama,” said Rena. “It’s Aaron. Mama, things do not look good.”

The clock on the kitchen wall was shaped like a frying pan. Why on earth, Sylvia wondered, what could it mean, a clock like a skillet?

“He’s on a ventilator,” said Rena. “But — they’ll take him off it. This afternoon, probably.”

A heart attack, a little heart attack, like his father’s first one. A good heart attack, the kind that could scare you into behaving. Sylvia cleared her throat. “And then what happens?” she asked.

Rena let out a long rattling noise, halfway between a sigh and a moan, which Sylvia understood as another accusation of maternal crime.

“Mama—”

“What do the doctors say?”