Devil's Plaything - Matt Richtel [25]
I examine Vince, whom I’ve privately nicknamed the Human Asparagus. He has a ’70s hairstyle, puffy and curly on top tapering into his neck, and a thin torso that widens out slightly through his hips. When he walks, he looks like a single shuffling stalk. His skin has a dark hue that suggests a lineage that is one-quarter Asian or southern European. He’s got a perpetual light cough that provides me mildly entertaining internal debate. I vacillate between thinking the cough stems from any number of disorders—from hay fever and postnasal drip to reactive airway disease—to instead thinking it’s kind of somatization: in other words, a deep-seated psychological tool used to communicate his sense of being put-upon and always under duress.
“I’m kidding,” I say.
“About what?”
“About your dedication to cleaning under beds.”
“Meaning what?”
“It looks to me like you’re snooping around Lane’s room.”
He turns his head, and I follow his gaze toward the edge of the bed, where he’d been kneeling. Nestled between the bed and the nightstand is a white space heater.
“You need to cool down, Mr. Idle.”
“You need to stop treating me like I’m something you found in a bedpan.”
“No wonder Lane is agitated,” he says, then adds after a pause, “given the attitude of her visitor.”
I let go of Grandma, and I step toward Vince.
“Please go,” I say.
He pulls his lips into a tight smile, then looks at Grandma.
“Are you okay, Lane Idle?” he asks. It sounds genuine and tender.
“Not too bad, Mr. Van Gogh.” She’s long since nicknamed him after the painter.
Vince looks at me like he wants to say something. But he shakes his head and leaves.
“That one would never cut off an ear,” Grandma says. “He likes to hear himself talk too much.”
It’s a rare moment of lucidity. Maybe I’ll be able to get Grandma to tell me about the man in blue or about someone named Adrianna.
I guide her to the bed, where she sits, mute, hands folded in her lap. I look around the antiseptic room. It’s tiny enough to make me wonder if society, through our boxy retirement rooms, is preparing our elderly for the comfort of a coffin.
On the wall across from Grandma’s bed is a framed poster of a train from the 1950s winding through snow-capped German Alps. Grandma loved trains. She said that train travel made it feel like the world was standing still so that you could, for a few moments, catch up with it.
On her dresser sit three small silver picture frames. One image shows me and my brother in matching overalls, taken when he was four and I was two. A second shows Grandma in her mid-fifties, wearing her karate gi, the ceremonial uniform. Grandma once confided in me that she disliked hitting things but she loved the focus the discipline gave her. And she said she liked the idea that karate taught her how to fall down with grace.
A third photo shows Grandma Lane and Grandpa Irving on the deck of a cruise ship they’d taken in the early 1970s to Alaska. Grandpa wears his prototypical near-smile, a look that says: “I like this place well enough.” His hair is short, face round but lean and closely shaved. He looks like he could’ve been the extra in a movie about a gang of likeable toughs, but not the lead. I imagine that anti-war protestors at the time would’ve mistaken him for a Nixon man, when he was a left-leaning guy unperturbed by dissonance or different tastes but didn’t like to stand out himself.
I look under her bed where Vince had been kneeling. I see nothing but floor and space heater, as advertised.
On the nightstand is Grandma’s long-kept unabridged dictionary and a copy of Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales. Something about the fairy tales stops me; the edge of a piece of paper sticks out from inside the front cover. I open the book and pull out the piece of white paper.
“Nathaniel,” Grandma says.
“Yes.”
“You know the difference between ‘lay’ and ‘lie’?”
She’s a big fan of grammar niceties, and likes to test me.
“I won’t lie, I still have no idea. Or should I say: I won’t lay?”