Though the phone’s new position atop the middle step seemed far more secure to me than had its position on the topmost step, I had underestimated the tentativeness of its initial position (that its safety had even been worth consideration hadn’t once crossed my mind before the fall), and I thought I should err on the side of caution and take preventive action against a second mishap. In my hurry to get outside, however, I set my tumbler of water on the table—our sliding glass door required both hands to open—and instantly forgot that I’d done so.
Also I forgot I didn’t want to hear Grandmother. I forgot it was Grandmother calling, in fact, and forgot exactly why I had rushed to the phone. I was flustered by the fall and, instead of just removing the phone from the stairway and waiting until the ringing ceased, I behaved in the way one usually behaves when after having made efforts to reach a ringing phone one finds oneself holding on to that phone: I thumbed its green button, pressed it to my face, and greeted into the larger cluster of holes.
Grandmother Magnet spoke of happiness and specialness and bloodlines and love, continuity, longevity, good health, and fond wishes. “Happy birth-hour!” she said. I asked her who she was. She said she was Grandmother. I asked who she thought she was to call me up that way and tell me she was Grandmother. She said she didn’t understand. I insisted it was I who didn’t understand. This put her on the defensive and we argued with each other until she grew bewildered, shortly after which she mistook me for a stranger, and accused me of having prank-called her. I resented the accusation, I told her.
“Plug your dirty sheeny coinslot, ovensmear,” she said.
“Ovensmear?” I said, laughing.
“Shut your chickenhole, n-word!” she shrieked, and hung up.
Within seconds, the phone was ringing again. I brought it inside and hooked it to its cradle.
I wish I could make sense of (if not excuse) my behavior on the phone by claiming I was misdirecting at my father’s mother some justified resentment I felt toward her son, or even toward Jonboat, but I can’t make that claim, at least not honestly. By the time she’d finished wishing me a happy birth-hour, my feelings of resentment, justified or not, had been wholly forgotten; I was right in the midst of the realization that not only had I gotten to the phone in time to zero its chances of falling again, but that the original fall hadn’t harmed it in the least—it hadn’t even the tiniest scratch on its shell—and a small, though potent, sense of accomplishment, relief, and good fortune roughly on par with that which might arise from scoring a crucial birdie at putt-putt had taken ahold of me. The truth is, sometimes (like this time), I enjoyed bewildering Grandmother Magnet, making her feel upset and insecure. She’d bewildered my mother when I’d still had a mother; been divisive, dishonest, and always disapproving. She’d always been…selfish. And maybe, in her dotage, she had come to regret that—atavistic and enfeebled racist outbursts aside, she’d seemed all sweetness and light of late—but I didn’t believe it. I believed she’d grown weak and lonely and dependent, too afraid of estranging the few remaining people who’d allow her near them to behave like the harpy she was deep down. Either that, or she’d forgiven herself too easily.
At the same time, however, I found repulsive the way she smelled—damp dust and old vase water—and the way the frequent denture readjustments she performed with her tongue contorted her face and produced dry pops and overmoist sex noise. This complicated matters. It could make me feel shallow, bigoted, guilty. I’d try to tell myself her physicality repulsed me only because her soul was repulsive—that had she been a better person, her mouth and her odors would have caused me no offense—but only a fool could accept that unquestioningly. Sometimes, I’m saying, I may have been a fool. Other times, I was mostly nice to her.
I couldn’t on an incident-to-incident basis, though, account for what determined my stance on the disgust—why I might feel guilty about it on the Fourth of July, say, but then, on New Year’s (or, for that matter, my birthday), feel it was justified. Not to say this was unheard of, my being unaccountable. I was also, for instance, unaccountable with houseflies; sometimes I felt compelled to end their lives, whereas other times I abided them thoughtlessly. And my behavior in cars would be a second example; back when I drove, there were some days I willfully obeyed the speed limit, other days I wouldn’t tolerate its restriction. The houseflies, true, weren’t always the same, but the speed limits often were the same, not to mention the roads and the hours I traveled them. My motivations on both scores are totally mysterious.
But those are exceptions that prove the rule. Most of the time, I knew my reasons.
* * *
Because it was my birthday, I thought I should go out and buy myself a book and maybe an ice cream cone or a shake, so I went to the living room and lifted up the porcelain bust of Marvin Hagler that sat atop the mantel of our broken gas fireplace. In Hagler’s hollow chest, I found nothing but air. My father had failed to leave me any money.
He was fishing in Michiana with friends—had hit the road that morning, before I’d awakened—and it would be another week before he came home. How he’d managed to forget to stuff an envelope in Hagler wasn’t hard to imagine. Owing to his having split town on my birthday, he’d been, I supposed, thrown off his long-practiced town-splitting repertoire such that the item “Leave money-filled envelope in boxer bust for son” had gotten dislodged from his internal to-do list (he rarely wrote down anything, didn’t keep a calendar, memorized addresses, threw away receipts) by “Leave front-page-wrapped T-shirt on table for son.” I didn’t, in any case, doubt for a second that Marvelous Marvin’s empty chest was the outcome of an oversight. My father had intended to leave me some money. At least a couple hundred. He’d merely forgotten.
Still, I hung up when his phone went to voicemail. If I left him a message and he didn’t call back, I’d hold it against him. If he did call back, he’d either tell me TBS, which stood for Tough bananas, shithead, and I’d hold that against him, or he’d say that if I thought it was important enough for him to interrupt his first vacation in a year then he’d return from Michiana to bring me some money, and I’d tell him not to, it wasn’t that important, that I only wished he had remembered was all, and he would stay in Michiana, feeling guilty for forgetting, and he’d hold the guilt against me, which I’d hold against him.
So after all it was a blessing I’d gotten his voicemail. Little good could have come of a conversation. Nor had he forgotten to stock the fridge and pantry. Money wasn’t that important. I could live a week without it. I could live on what was there.
Yet there’s living and there’s living, and for me to do the second kind necessitated smoking. I was down to a single carton of Quills, plus the eight inside the open pack sitting on my desk. So 208 or 209, depending on whether the one I had going while I did my calculations counted or not.