From: 23x12c@gmail.com   
      
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   My Grandma the Poisoner    
   October 27, 2014    
   by John Reed    
        
      
   Illustrations by Matt Rota    
      
   When I was four or five, sometimes I'd walk into my grandmother's bedroom to   
   find her weeping. She'd be sitting on the side of the bed, going through boxes   
   of tissues. I don't believe this was a side of herself she shared with other   
   people; she may have    
   felt we had a cosmic bond because I had her father's name as my middle name   
   and his fair features. She was crying for Martha, her daughter, who died of   
   melanoma at the age of 28. Ten years later, after Norman--her youngest child,   
   my uncle--died, also at    
   28, she would weep for him.    
      
   People were always dying around Grandma--her children, her husbands, her   
   boyfriend--so her lifelong state of grief was understandable. To see her   
   sunken in her high and soft bed, enshrouded in the darkness of the attic, and   
   surrounded by the skin-and-   
   spit smell of old age, was to know that mothers don't get what they deserve.   
   Today, when I think back on it, I don't wonder whether Grandma got what she   
   deserved as a mother; I wonder whether she got what she deserved as a   
   murderer.    
      
   Continued below.    
      
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   A few months ago, I loaded the wife and kids into the car and went out to   
   visit Grandma. I hadn't seen her in more than a year and a half, and in that   
   time she had moved from her house to an assisted-living place to another   
   assisted-living place. There    
   was no good excuse for my lapse--I guess I couldn't quite deal with the way   
   we'd left her house. A catastrophe. Full of stuff. The buyers said they'd take   
   care of it, and they did; they tore the whole thing down. My brother had a   
   friend from the    
   neighborhood (out on Long Island, a.k.a. Lawng Islund) who said it was the   
   scandal of the year.    
   That house, where I spent so much of my childhood visiting Grandma, was   
   disgusting. In the late 90s, my brother and I dedicated three days to cleaning   
   it up. Joe, my grandmother's last boyfriend, had died, and his stuff was   
   there. He was one of five dead    
   people whose stuff was there, was everywhere. My aunt's stuff, my uncle's   
   stuff, my grandfather's stuff, and Grandma's second husband's stuff filled,   
   I'd estimate, about half the total volume of the house. Driver's licenses and   
   important papers and half-   
   finished projects and mementos like the rusted bolts my uncle Norman, on his   
   diving trips, had dragged out of sunken wrecks. In the basement library, we   
   uncovered a vial of red viscous fluid. The vial, sealed with a hard wax or   
   plastic, was handblown and    
   quite beautiful, and the box was neatly jointed hardwood. We thought the thing   
   might be valuable. It could have been old--we weren't sure. So we tried to   
   sell it to an East Village curiosity shop, which advised that we dispose of it   
   via the Poison    
   Control Center.    
      
   In the basement's woodshop we found a sprinkling of half-melted heroin spoons   
   (Grandma had let some pretty questionable characters crash with her), and in   
   the backyard we found a big black garbage bag full of dead animals. You could   
   tell it was animals    
   from the outside of the bag; you could see the shapes of the corpses. We both   
   peeked in but were so quick about it that all we confirmed was the presence of   
   dead bodies, not what kind. My brother says he saw turtles, which seems   
   likely, since my mother    
   had owned half a dozen turtles that all perished in a sudden, inexplicable   
   cataclysm. I saw an owl, which is less likely, but also possible, since there   
   are owls on Lawng Islund. Most likely, we decided, the bag was full of cats   
   and raccoons, which were    
   always getting into Grandma's garbage. She'd yell at them from the back porch.   
   The last time I saw the bag it was on the lawn waiting for the trash pickup.   
   In the shining black plastic you could still see the rounded shapes of   
   haunches.    
      
   In that house, even the stuff worth keeping was depressing. Once-beautiful oak   
   rocking chairs and cherrywood secretary desks had been covered with white   
   porch paint. Bookshelves were lined with mouse-eaten library cast-offs. The   
   carpets were thriving    
   with mold. Dishes were stained or flecked with dried food. The toilets were   
   full, unflushed, and dusted with baby powder. Grandma would say not flushing   
   saved money, but really, she just wanted to remind you that everything was   
   about saving money.    
      
   In Grandma's defense, she came to consciousness during the Great Depression   
   and never mentally left the era. When the economy turned sour, in the 90s and   
   00s, she would point out the cultural similarities, laying it all out: During   
   times of scarcity    
   there's a turn to mystical thinking, self-help, and the occult, she'd tell us.   
   I have no doubt that she was right. Even in her old age, she was insightful   
   and informed. She'd rattle around her disgusting house with public radio   
   blaring in every room. She    
   knew everything, for instance that prune juice could be employed as hair dye   
   (to this day, her hair is prune-brown). She had heard a dentist advise on NPR   
   that it was very important to rinse your mouth out with water and to floss,   
   even if you didn't have    
   a chance to brush your teeth, and as of this writing she's 94 and still has   
   all her teeth in her head. Only now they're all loose. Her whole jaw looks   
   like it's loose in her mouth.    
      
   When we went to visit her at the assisted-living place, I fixed her hearing   
   aids, and my wife went out to get some adult diapers. Grandma barely knows who   
   I am, and when I asked her about her children, she didn't remember Martha at   
   all. I hadn't exactly    
   missed her during those months of not visiting, so I didn't expect the visit   
   to upset me. But Grandma not knowing Martha's name, Grandma lying in bed   
   sucking on her unmoored jaw, Grandma with all of her teeth about to fall   
   out--I almost lost it. The kids    
   sat there, unblinking, their mouths hanging open in stupefied horror. For   
   them, the last year has been a tour of deathbeds: Gigipop. Poppa. Abuelita.   
   Granmaman. And now Grandma. It was obvious--she was next.    
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)