Somewhat recently, my family made a trip to North Carolina to pay a visit to my dad’s side of the family. When I was younger, I never really knew that much about them. It was always my mother’s side of the family we had Thanksgiving dinner with, always my mother’s side of the family we would call first when I received all A’s on my report card, and always my mother’s side of the family who I thought of first when it came that time for my mother to chide me about purchasing cards for my grandparents on Mother’s and Father’s day. Nezzie and Bopper (the names I gave to my mother’s parents) were all I knew and all I needed throughout my childhood, and I was perfectly content without knowing much about fifty-percent of the blood that streamed through mine.
I did, however, remember Aunt Kate, my great-grandmother on my father’s side. I remembered her withered bow legs, the mint green, polka-dotted dress she would wear every time the few instances we would come for a visit, and how she called the refrigerator an icebox. She pronounced it ahs-bawx. I remembered the craft jewels she would glue onto her bobby pins after suppertime, and I remembered how in that icebox there was always a round of cheddar cheese that was larger than an overdue infant.
I didn’t remember my grandmother at all, though. My dad’s mother, Lurli, had died of stomach cancer when I was barely two years old, and when shown pictures of me sitting on her lap years later, I had to ask my father who that old, sad looking woman was. Well Savannah, he would say after a few moments, that’s your grandmother. She was my mother. I remember him taking the picture soon after and tucking it into his shirt pocket, messing up my hair with his hand and then walking out of the room. Only now do I realize how my words must have affected him.
My grandfather may as well have been dead to both me and my father, too. When he would come to Florida for visits when I was a little girl, he would speak of three things: cloud formations, niggers, and his Honda Goldwing. He didn’t know how to interact around me, nor I around him, and I grew to fear looking him in the eye. I referred to him meekly as Grandpa Bill when forced to address him by name. My father called him Dad, but each time that simple word escaped his mouth it seemed as if it were laced with acid. Years later, my dad would tell me that he called his father Bill for the majority of his childhood. Never Dad. He couldn’t tell me why.
Anyway, Grandpa Bill is a tall man of around 6’’5 with watery blue eyes and pocks on his head from where he once had hair transplants. Bill enjoys being a Democrat, but only because they did not want to free the slaves. Since Lurli died, he has dated many ‘bitties,’ including her cousin, Viva. His current girlfriend is called Susan, although he refers to her as Lil’ Susie. They collect copper pennies together, and she thinks that cumulonimbus clouds are just the cat’s pajamas. They look like those extra stuffed marshmallows you can buy at Harris Teeter, she’s told me. Susan is a retired nurse who enjoys artificial flowers and the color beige. Susan is also two years younger than my father. Her hair is dishwater blonde with dark roots. She has a porcine face and wears metallic fuschia lipstick that runs off into the cracks of her lips like a faulty pipeline. Her breasts are the size of size-12 bowling balls, and they must weigh close to the same considering their tendency to drag to the floor. Once, when describing a Hispanic driving a motorcycle very fast and nearly causing her to veer off the road, Susan used the words mexi and crotch rocket in the same sentence. I hate Lil’ Susie.
Knowing that these two were in store for me, I was not greeting the decreasing mileage on the highway signs with a grin. Neither was my father. Why are we even going then, I muttered into my magazine, if you hate them?
From the front seat, he turned his head toward mine. Look, Savannah, he said, you’ve got to see your grandfather. He’s not been doing so well lately.
I rolled my eyes and continued reading. They were playing the death card, which is one of only tricks an old person can turn toward the end. I had to comply or else I was condemned to Hell. And I couldn’t go there because that would mean an eternity of Bill and Susan discussing coins and clouds.
So I complied. I never much respected the man, though, especially when I learned from my mother all the things he had done in his younger days. He never spoke to Lurli, never once played a game of catch with my father in the yard, and although he was a pilot earning a high income, he would never support Lurli financially. And so, as a Sunday school teacher, she had to buy her car completely on her own. My dad told me a story about how once he had driven from Florida to North Carolina to visit him for Thanksgiving dinner, and when he arrived after his 13-hour drive, Bill had already eaten. He suggested instead that the two make a quick trip to the gas station to pick up ham sandwiches and some chips. They were out of ham. And so my father spent his Thanksgiving in a Speedway, chowing down on a pre-packaged cheese sandwich and Ruffles.
My heart sank when the highway signs began to include Raleigh. That was where Bill and Susan lived. Apparently my displeasure had a sound, because moments later my father told me not to worry, my slow and painful death would not be coming today, but rather tomorrow. Today, he said, we were going to visit the country, the place where he spent many summers of his childhood. We were going to Rolesville.
Initially, my dad couldn’t get over all of the subdivisions with faux-rustic names that had sprouted like wild mushrooms over the past forty years, replacing the hills and farms with identical, 4-bedroom 2-bath homes. How sad, he said, that this kind of shit’s made its way here, too. I thought it would just stay in Florida.
It’s all over the place in Kentucky, too, my mother chimed. You just can’t escape it anymore.
Growing up a generation or two after my parents, I couldn’t really understand that wistful longing for a yesteryear filled with fields of wheat, or since we were in North Carolina, fields of tobacco. True, suburban sprawl did spread like a disease and was a homogenizing factor that made place hard to discern, but the majority of the fields they replaced, in Kentucky, at least, had been out of commission for years, harvesting more weeds than they did product. Different kinds of weeds to replace older ones, I guess.
Once we drove through the identical strip malls and shopping centers that appeared to be the heart of Rolesvillian culture, we began to see more signs of gentle pasture that my parents seemed to love. The clouds seemed to hang low in the sky, as if suspended by an invisible string that God himself did hold.
The innumerable crosses and Jesus Saves! billboards only confirmed this thought. The six-lane super pass had now narrowed down to two, and farm fields were beginning to replace the once-bountiful drug stores and discount shoe outlets. We drove for some time longer, and all the while you could see mules so skinny that you could mistake their sides for xylophones, just staring blankly at the few passing cars. It was sad, watching them watch a dilapidated road and all the cars that passed as if it were a Sunday feature.
But before I knew it, the car stopped. We’re here, Dad said.
Aunt Kate’s house had burned down a few years ago, he told us. The people who moved in after her death ran a meth lab there and well, accidents happen. All that remained were a few, charred cement porch steps that led to nothing. It was hot outside and I was sweating like a menopausal woman in a sweatshop. Oh my, I said, this is where Aunt Kate used to live. Can we go now?
He pretended not to hear me and my mother responded forlornly, shaking her head at me. This is important to your father, now shut up and deal is what her eyes said.
I watched my father as he continued on the path beyond where the house once stood. Above, there was a kettle of vultures circling and I wondered what the hell they had found to scavenge all the way out here. He stopped in front of a small pond. And I, in turn, stopped a few feet behind him and listened.
Wow, I heard him mutter, it still looks the same. I watched my father closely as he put his hand to his forehead, the other raised to his side. He stood there for a few moments until he took a stone from the ground, examined and dusted it off, and then tossed it into the water. It made an eerie plop sound that made the hair on my arms stand up. My father watched the pebble as it hit the water, standing there in silence until it was no longer visible among those cattail-filled depths.
(I later asked my mother why the he spent so much time at such an indiscriminate pond, only for her to tell me that this pond was where my father’s cousin, Michael, had died when he was thirteen. One hot summer day, Michael dived into the water and hit a rock smack on his head and drowned. One second he was flying like a bird, my mother said, the next he was dead. Apparently my father had been behind him, eagerly awaiting his turn to jump.)
My father left the pond relatively quickly after watching the stone sink to the bottom and then called my name. Scamp, he said, come over here. I wanna show you something. Over the years, I had grown weary of whenever my father would say this to me (especially outdoors), because it usually meant looking at a dog turd that bore a strange resemblance to Mother Theresa or watching pigeons fuck. Swallowing my breath, I meekly followed.
We continued for some length until we stood in front of this twisted and decrepit frame of a house that looked like something out of a Faulkner novel. Ivy had slowly taken over the walls of this home for what had to have been at least 100 years, and there were few remaining walls. A single shutter dangled from one of the window frames, screeching like a dying bird with the occasional gust of wind. I was afraid to go further, for with all of the weeds I couldn’t even see my own two feet, let alone the venomous snakes that were bound to be lurking below. What is this place, I asked, wiping sweat from my brow.
This, he said, drawing closer to the would-be door, is where you come from. This house has been part of the Hagwood family for years. No one’s lived here, obviously, but man. Isn’t it cool?
Not really, I muttered.
I heard that, he said.
I took one more look at that house, haggard and haunting, before turning around and heading back to the car. I didn’t know if I wanted this place to be where I was from.
Later that evening and back at the hotel, we all got a bit liquored up. My parents sat me down at a table far away from the bar and returned with what they thought was a real delicacy: a single beer. They eyed me, grinning, as I took my first sip from the bottle. I feigned a slight ‘this-5%-alcohol-beverage-is-just-too-much-for-these-virginal-tastebuds’ face. I’m sure that with my underage years they considered themselves ‘modern’ and ‘progressive’ parents. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that this same girl had recently fallen into a glass table and shattered it after a deadly combination of bad pop music and tequila.
There was a wedding about to be held in the atrium of the Holiday Inn where we were staying. My father, a cynical man and an even more cynical drunk, began his rant on the many joys of marriage, one being starting off in immense debt thanks to weddings. All marriages are bound to fail, he said, and it’s all the sooner with these goddamned things. ‘Hey honey,’ my dad imitated, ‘let’s take a big leap together and fall into an infinite pit of loss just so we can eat a fancy cake!’ That remark made my mother uncomfortable. She took another swig of her beer.
I couldn’t help but respond, commenting on the badly-recorded Pacabel Canon that resounded about the lobby, reverberating from the fake palms in brassy pots, and aired my disgust with all the snot nosed children smearing up the glass elevator with their boogers and grime. Par for a great wedding and life together, eh? I said. How long, I asked him, do you think it will take before the music stops and these people see each other without all the mist and veils and for the imperfect people they really are?
He stared down into his now-empty vodka sour. A year, tops, he said. He swirled the ice in the glass and then shoved it down his throat, chomping on it vigorously.
My mother stood up from the table. Well, she began, I’ll leave you two alone to talk. I looked up at her, hoping that I hadn’t offended her, and she waved her hands and smiled. And then she left. My parents had been divorced for years, I thought to myself. What did it matter anymore, anyway?
My father and I stared into our empty bottles for a while until he finally stood to order more. Now, he said, smiling, what do you really want to drink?
I ordered a screwdriver.
Once the vodka had nestled happily inside both of us, my father got to talking more about his mother.
Do you know, he said, that before she died she made me go coffin shopping with her?
What’s so weird about that? I asked.
Well, he began, that’s not so strange in itself, but when she started climbing into every goddamn coffin, seeing how it felt and how comfortable it was and talking about how she wanted her dress to match the bedding, I felt like I was watching her die over and over and over again. I asked Mom why she was doing that, and all she did was smile and say that I would understand someday. Well, it’s almost twenty years later, and I still don’t understand. I still don’t fucking get it and I don’t know if I ever will. He took another swig of his drink. She was an odd woman, your grandmother.
I didn’t know how to respond to that. It was clear to me that my father was a human knot when it came to love and death. I wanted to ask about his cousin, but I was scared of creating more mess in this veritable Pollock painting of a mind. So I didn’t. I wish I could have known her, I said.
He stared down into his drink. I wish you could have too, Savannah. I wish you could have, too. All she wanted was to see you go to school. She thought you were the brightest and strangest thing. She loved you, though.
After a few moments of silence, Mom called, asking where we wanted to go for dinner. Mexican, my father said. Let’s have Mexican.
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