Playthings
by Jennifer Popa
In the South, the orange juice is so thick the pulp catches between my teeth. Every night my dogs chase the bunny who refuses his backyard eviction; they’re pouncing and weaving, always missing. Theirs is a dumb violence—a giddiness for the baby bird perplexed by flight and rooted in the garden bed. Even in daylight, it’s only detected by the newness of its feathers. Then there was the dead snake curled into an almost knot, no thicker than a shoestring, and fresh from its shell. The pool swimming frog, or toad—what’s the difference again? Fortunately, at night, the geckos, speckled and so translucent they flaunt their organs, have the good sense to climb to the porch’s ceiling and creep overhead. One less creature to maim.
In this story, my Grandma is a bird. She is a fat toad plopping in the mud, a gust of halitosis. Though for her sons, I suppose she is the sluice holding up the water. The woman who curled my hair into rags at bedtime is now the tar seeping from my greasy skin. She is the pith, bitter white, resisting my fingernails. I pick, but it only tears in sinewy patches. She was the one who told me that one day I would like boys. She let me climb into her lap with my sharp elbows and grass-stained knees, and there she whispered to me. No one had told me secrets before, but she said I was her favorite.
“Tell me about those little brown dots on the fern,” I said, “or how your hurt knee predicts the rain. Tell me the story of your best blackjack hand. Tell me how to tell Grandpa to build me a birdhouse.”
Back then, I slunk around like an apology, like an ancient mutt waiting to die, painfully shy and unable to meet any man’s eye, except my Dad’s. They stuck their tongues out, raking their eyes over me, and their flirting made me tuck my face behind my mother. I’d press my forehead into her bra strap until one eye would squint out, searching for the smirking offender.
After my parents separated, Grandma insisted I looked like my Dad. This was a lie, but she couldn’t bear to see my mother in my expressions, in a cheekbone, or the thick brow we shared. The decision to end a marriage, to reject her son all these years later was a slight against her—one she couldn’t accept.
My Dad always called her “Ma.” It’s the kind of name that feels incomplete, a wide-mouthed hanging syllable of familiarity. I remember her impossibly wide hips, the way she threw herself back, cracking the Barcalounger, the white, dead corners of her big toes where the skin hardened at the nail’s edge. Though it was shared custody, Dad was always working, so in effect, it was my mother’s custody and hers.
My Grandma was right about me liking boys someday. For a time, the mouths of bottles were my only lovers, but in the South, some twenty years later, I’ve found a cowboy. He is lean and has a sheepish smile. The first time we saw each other naked, the whole of his neck flushed as deep as a birthmark. And though he’s well beyond thirty, he looks at me like a teenage boy might.
If you’ve never seen a palm tree during a windstorm, it has these fifty-fingered fans slapping the sky. A double-jointed violence. Before I came here, I’d only ever seen palms in the single strips at Palm Sunday mass. A flock of parishioners with forked green ribbons pointing toward the heavens to mark Jesus’s triumphant return to Jerusalem.
While Grandma was not limber or particularly mobile, one Sunday when I misbehaved, she tucked me beneath a church pew at early mass, slanting her green palms over my backside. The grit of shoes and prayer ground through my tights and into my kneecaps. There was a smudge of maroon polish on her toe skin.
I learned to hold still.
Sometimes the cowboy takes me to church with his Grandma. She isn’t the kind of woman to tuck a child beneath a church pew. She makes dishes with canned fruit, nuts, and Jell-O and calls it a salad. She puts crisp bills into cards for our birthdays and thinks Pat Sajak is handsome.
When I was older, my Grandma made me paint her toes on account of her bad knee and because she could no longer reach them. I had to file her nails, breathing in the dust of her. These were inhalations for which I made no request. I sulked through the whole task and now wonder if I contracted her discontent through that dust or inhaled some part of her that was predisposed to this ugliness—predisposed to self-loathing, to meanness, to always being ever so slightly dissatisfied. By then, I knew she was two-faced: half parent, half bully, halving me and those around her.
After my parents separated, there was a sudden habit of chain-smoking and my father’s refusal to ask what dressing my mother used to put on taco salad. So we ate it his way. It was wrong. Catalina was the one we should have done, but he guessed Thousand Island, and it didn’t taste right. At each weekend’s close, they never interacted. Their cars simply pulled into the driveway or the McDonalds, and they waited until the other noticed. No one ever rang bells. No one knocked. They waited, and eventually, I shuffled between.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. After he made me promise not to tell, and still years before I discovered the electricity between my legs—which I knew by then was reserved for the darkness of my bedroom, for masturbating to encyclopedias, but never with a boy—I had the neighbor boy, Jacob, over to play. For a while, we looked for turtles at the creek, but we somehow came to play inside and decided to play our game under Grandma’s bed. I hoisted my dress over my head, and we shimmied until we were side by side under the box spring.
It’s funny because we had no idea what we were doing. We gave little peck kisses; we were shirtless and ran our fingertips over skin, and it felt good. Not like when our mothers would scratch our backs good, but with nervous tummies and shivers good. Our tops were identical: pale, bony, and each with two peach coins for nipples. We used material from our sneaked television shows and knew we were on a date because we held hands and had removed clothing. But that afternoon, we didn’t play for long before we were found out. We never heard her enter the room.
I am filing down nails with this memory. She grabbed me at the wrist, tugging my whole frame out from under the bed. My shoulder socket felt unhinged. I held my breath, and the carpet warmed my ribs. “What are you doing?” Grandma demanded. She didn’t release my wrist, and the cuff of her grip was wringing my skin. I waited for the smack, but instead, she jerked me from the bedroom.
I am filing down nails with this memory. She grabbed me by my ankles. Though she wasn’t agile, she was strong, and with her grip on my ankles, she lurched me out from under the bed. Her fingernails clawed my heel. I was assaulted with questions. “What are you doing? What kind of little girl takes off her clothes for a boy? What do you think your father will think of you?” When I was silent, she repeated her question, tagging on a single syllable as if this will help me find the words. “What do you think your father will think of you, hmmm?”
I am filing down nails with this memory. She tugged at my braid poking from the bed’s edge, and she yanked me from beneath the mattress. The whole of my skull fired. She may have struck me. This is a scene rigged with terrors. Her disappointment pinched my eyes. I howled as she marched me down the hallway.
As the horizon melts, my dogs trace the ground for rabbit poop, perfect miniscule planets spilled between blades of grass. I suspect the cowboy forgot their afternoon walk. I guard the bush where a bee is abdomen deep in the curling petals of a rose. The cold is coming. There’s an honor in this kind of end. He chooses to spend his last mortal moments face first inside these heady petals, with the bristle of his thorax peeking at the thin lip of the flower. Darkness thickens between the two of us, but the breath we share is holy.
I wept like a child when the puppy found the baby chameleon. So new, and before it knew a thing, he’d hewed its tail and mashed the soft creature into the concrete. Or as southerners call it: sea-ment. The tail severed entirely from the body, and it flicked and waved not two inches away. Even once the body went still, the tail twitched. It was a muscle memory from a life not so long ago.
The dogs were originally for companionship and protection. It’s possible they were just warm bodies on the nights the other side of the bed was vacant, though it’s clear now, they’re more of the sort who provokes rather than protects. They always go for the babies. And afterward, into these crumpled bodies, I mouth apologies for their might. For now, their trophies are the feathers of birds and odd-legged spiders, but every night as they bound into the dark, I hold my breath and listen for cracked vertebrae.
This is the part I remember most. For the first and last time, Grandma tossed me into the foyer coat closet. And when I couldn’t be still, she used her foot to wedge the doorstop beneath, shutting me inside. Then my wailing really began. On the backs of my eyelids, she always slams the same door, says the same thing. Her Lifetime movie is always the one about the gymnast or the bulimic. The closet’s contents both smothered and hid me: a flock of winter boots, loose mittens, a busted vacuum, an abandoned dirty hankie.
My long torment slipped beneath the door.
After a time, she rattled it and told me she’d give me something to cry about, but by then, I couldn’t stop. No shame could prevent me from cleaning my eyes. Wails tumbled throughout the house, filtering beneath doors, clinging to swollen curtains, before surging through open windows.
I paused when I heard her send Jacob home, when she said, “you’re all done playing today,” and pushed him toward the door. I pressed my cheek to the cold tile, and from the strip of light, I watched him stuff his feet into his shoes. He didn’t bother to tie them and walked with his shoes’ heels collapsed. But he wasn’t punished, and his blood didn’t flush his skin the way mine did.
A minute later, she opened the closet door, tossed my dress inside, and I was drenched in light. She slammed the door again, and the light snapped shut before she repositioned the doorstop. I had no authority over my own nakedness. While I could dress and undress my dolls, she cured me of any control I had over my own skin. I cried, envisioning her with feathers in her teeth and drinking deeply in her victory on the other side of the door. We conceived of each other in our darkness and light.
For a time, I pleaded. I promised to be a good girl. I told her I was sorry. I said it was Jacob’s stupid idea. I hiccupped, tugged the dress over my head, continued my pleading.
It’s possible she had no way of knowing it was her youngest son, my uncle, who had shown us kids the difference between a man and a woman, a boy and a girl—who had slipped his hands into my shorts once, twice, three times. He was always the first to volunteer to babysit my cousins and me when the adults went to the casino. It also often happened when she was at the salon, refreshing her perm. Though she called it a “permanent.” She knew. Of course, she knew. Years later, when it came out, her face went so white, it very nearly matched her hair. She couldn’t meet my eyes and instead opted to scrub the sink.
But we choose the truths we wish to hear. This one, not that one.
I can’t say how long I was there—maybe a half hour or so. It felt like it stretched on for a thousand games of gin rummy, a whole day of school, or a month’s worth of Sunday masses. The tread of the winter boot embossed geometry upon my cheek, even as the tears flowed. Then my breath turned ragged, and for a time, I grew quiet. I thought if I held still, like under the church pew, that she might let me out, might let me be forgiven. My silence was a prayer for my grandmother’s absolution, the thing my cousins and I all sought, but none of us got.
I heard the knocks on the screen door before she did. It was the single time a parent ever knocked. My mother had come to take me home.
Before Grandma hobbled to the door, I started crying to my mother. I whimpered for her from behind the closet door. The screen door squealed open while Grandma hoisted herself from the Barcalounger. My mother released me from the closet.
I don’t remember their fight precisely, but I do remember their faces. I remember the way my mother’s jaw flushed as my Grandma turned white and shrill. I remember the yelling and my mother calling her a bitch, a word I had only ever heard her say when she thought I was out of the room. I remember Grandma retreating down the hallway, wagging her hand in my direction, telling my mother, “Get your daughter out of here. Tell her to keep her filth at your house.”
With her jurisdiction belittled, she walked back toward her bedroom, leaving us. My hair stuck to my cheeks, my dress was inside out and soiled with dust. I rubbed my face on the stomach of my mother’s shirt and clung to her, hoping she’d pick me up, though I knew I was too big for that. “Get your things,” she said, shaking. I ran around the house grabbing my overnight bag, a deck of cards, my pillow, and I slid a drawing I’d colored from a refrigerator magnet.
Mom moved to the front porch but waited, watching me through the screen. I was still tear faced but vindicated. As I buckled my jelly shoes, I realized I’d forgotten Peter, my raggedy stuffed elephant in the bedroom. I couldn’t sleep without him. I set my bag on the porch and took short steps down the hallway. While holding my breath, I snuck into her room. Her back was to me, but I knew she knew I was there. I waited for her to say something, but she was silent. I moved across the carpet to the opposite side of the bed where I’d dropped Peter near her slippers. I bent over carefully to retrieve him, and as I stood, I met Grandma’s eyes. She had turned to face me, and I stiffened. I was folded over but paralyzed, wondering if I was in trouble again.
It was then that I saw she’d been crying. The sunlight struck the gossamer curls of her hair and her fat cheeks. They were streaked with tears, like mine. With Peter in hand, I bolted toward the door. I darted down the hall, into the living room, into the foyer, not stopping until the screen door slammed behind me.
In the car on the ride home, I stopped my crying. I released all the words collected on the back of my tongue until they tumbled like water. I learned what it meant to tell on an adult—on a Grandmother. I was brimming with it. Once I had my mother’s attention, knew I was revealing something true, something of value, I couldn’t stop. It was the egg I couldn’t uncrack at a time when I wasn’t able to talk about my uncle.
I gave platitudes about how I’d never go back and pushed my face out the window until I cooled, until my bangs stood on end and the highway air whipped the afternoon from my skin. I’d uncovered some well of validation in my mother and was delighted with this victory. I was breathless. We stopped for a chocolate milkshake on the way home. This slowed me, forced breath between long cold slurps.
I asked my mother, “Are neighbors allowed to marry each other?”
“Sure,” she said.
“What about cousins—or an uncle?”
“Never family.”
I said nothing. It would be another decade before I told her about my uncle’s hands; by then, he’d have moved onto the younger cousins. But on that day, my grandmother’s cruelty was a fully formed injustice. It was the one I had language for, the one which pricked sharpest—the kind of hurt which would wallpaper the insides of my skull. When we were back at home, my Mom was on the phone within minutes regaling Aunt Jean with the story.
That’s what family is all about. That’s what family is for.
It was several weeks or months—I’m not sure which—before I was allowed to go back, and only after Mom and Dad wounded each other through the telephone lines. And I knew things were different. I was no longer permitted in Grandma’s bedroom, and each weekend my Mom sent me with a stack of books to keep me busy. I also was no longer welcomed into Grandma’s lap. I determined that she didn’t love me anymore, not like she used to.
And like how my childhood home is a canvas for every living room, every story’s home in every book, she is the not-dead ghost in mine, forever the witch of my fairy tales. In my head, she lives in a lived-in crease. If it’s the attic, then she is the squirrel nesting, scratching about, wiggling loose the downy insulation, and triggering migraines. She is the kaleidoscope’s sharp light, colors swirling on my closed eyelids, and she is the caw that pinches my throat.
Even the squirrel tires of lines like these, of always being someone’s metaphor.
While I can pretend that the snowbanks I scaled as a child never carried my prints, at night, I am forever zipping and unzipping her memory. I mistake satellites for stars and pray into Orion’s belt like a coward, like a woman looking to the middle of a man for some answer—like that’s what’s going to save me.
Tonight the puppy graduates to larger victims. He bites into the toad, tearing its front leg until it releases its toxin. He foams at the mouth. Froth slicks his beard, tightens his throat, and his licking turns constant. For a minute, it appears as though he can’t breathe, so I scoop him, tuck him into my ribs and run toward the house. I take him to the tub, and slosh water over his head while the other dog looks on. He gags and protests a little but mostly paws at his eyes. The splatter of the toad’s defense hangs on him.
I’ve heard about toxic toads killing a dog within minutes. I thrust all nine pounds of him under the faucet. He is drenched, flailing. His limbs paddle and reach for anything they might grip. I release him from the stream and bring him up for air. He returns to his hurried licking and rubs his dew claws at his snout, at the corners of his eyes. I hold my hand to his nose and detect a faint puff of air.
I feel his heart, a rapid thumb within the cage in my hand. Is this a symptom—is he just excited, or is this abnormal? I douse him again just in case. Lukewarm bathwater rushes over him, parting his fur along his spine before coursing to his hooked tail. I’m soaked alongside him. My pajama’s sleeves cinch my forearms. He is panicking again. I climb into the tub, fully clothed, to sit with him. I stop up the drain and place him on my belly. I cup handfuls of water over him, slowly now.
“We need to leave toads alone,” I say.
He teeters at my middle and shakes his whole body. The wet sprays the walls and dampens my forehead. The other dog places her paws on the tub’s edge, whimpers, and leans over to sniff the puppy. She licks him.
“He’ll be okay,” I say.
I strip off the wet pajamas and slip into one of the cowboy’s t-shirts. He won’t be home for a few more hours. With him I am learning to retrace my skin, but once I fall asleep, he is lost to me. Are dreams a haunting just like any other? It’s a fool’s errand to ask a ghost for answers, even more so when that ghost isn’t even dead yet. The cowboy knows of my uncle and of the misshapen, broken thing that is my family. When I wake in the night sweating, inconsolable, he sweeps the wet hair from my neck onto the pillow and pulls me into him. He is troubled by the sudden closeness of my suffering, which inserts itself at random, and I am wary of sharing its weight. He asks questions sometimes, though I rarely answer. I suppose if he met her, he’d know she is the kind of woman who made a person wonder what could have happened to make her this way? I can’t explain it to him, not really. And I’m not even sure I want to. Just because a thing’s invisible doesn’t mean you can’t see it.
The wish to shunt one’s family doesn’t begin with me. If I start from the beginning, list and classify each hurt, reconfigure the past, or roam between past and present tense—even now I want to crawl into her, to tuck myself into the heat of her armpit and let her tell me secrets, to know she could save me, or that she even wanted to. But I came to know something in the closet, to know that her love for her sons superseded her want to love me or see beyond my mother’s face reflected in mine.
When we return to bed, the dogs collapse at my feet. They fall asleep in a handful of breaths. They will dream of bunnies, and though some twenty years have passed, when I dream, it will be in the shade of box springs and coat closets and church pews. There will be my Grandma cutting the sole of my foot, a single clean slice into the arch. While I bleed, a bee will try to enter. I will swat, try to cover the gash, but like always, she will hold fast to my ankle.
Jennifer Popa is a short-story writer, essayist, and occasional poet. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate of English and Creative Writing at Texas Tech University where she’s working on a collection of short stories, serving as Managing Editor at Iron Horse Literary Review, and teaching literature. Some of Jennifer’s most recent writing can be found at KestreI, Pithead Chapel, Juked, decomP, Berkeley Fiction Review, and Colorado Review. She can be found at www.jenniferpopa.com.