Freedom [126]
He hadn’t expected his grandmother to die that week—she wasn’t that old. By hurling shit into the fan one day before she passed, he’d put himself extremely in the wrong. Just how wrong was evidenced by the fact that he was never even yelled at. Up in Hibbing, at the funeral, his parents simply froze him out. He was left to stew separately in his guilt while the rest of his family joined together in a grief that he ought to have been experiencing with them. Dorothy had been the only grandparent in his life, and she’d impressed him, when he was still very young, by inviting him to handle her crippled hand and see that it was still a person’s hand and nothing to be scared of. After that, he’d never objected to the kindnesses his parents had asked him to do for her when she was visiting. She was a person, maybe the only person, to whom he’d been one-hundred-percent good. And now suddenly she was dead.
Her funeral was followed by some weeks of respite from his mother, some weeks of welcome chilliness, but by and by she came after him again. She exploited the pretext of his frankness about Connie to become inappropriately frank with him in turn. She tried to make him her Designated Understander, and this turned out to be even worse than being her little boy-pal. It was devious and irresistible. It started with a confidence: she sat down on his bed one afternoon and launched into telling him how she’d been stalked in college by a drug-addicted pathological liar whom she’d nonetheless loved and his dad had disapproved of. “I had to tell somebody,” she said, “and I didn’t want to tell Dad. I was down getting my new driver’s license yesterday, and I realized that she was in line ahead of me. I haven’t seen her since the night I wrecked my knee. That’s like twenty years? She’s gained a lot of weight, but it was definitely her. And I got so frightened, seeing her. I realized I felt guilty.”
“Why frightened?” he found himself saying, like Tony Soprano’s shrink. “Why guilty?”
“I don’t know. I ran out of there before she could turn around and see me. I still have to go back down for my license. But I was terrified that she was going to turn around and see me. I was terrified of what was going to happen. Because, you know, I am so not a lesbian. You have to believe that I would know it if I were—half my old friends are gay. And I definitely am not.”
“Good to hear,” he said with a nervous smirk.
“But I realized, yesterday, seeing her, that I’d been in love with her. And I was never able to deal with that. And now she has that kind of lithium heaviness—”
“What’s lithium.”
“For manic depression. Bipolar disease.”
“Ah.”
“And I totally abandoned her, because Dad hated her so much. She was suffering, and I never called her again, and I threw her letters away without opening them.”
“But she lied to you. She was scary.”
“I know, I know. But I still feel guilty.”
She told him many other secrets in the months that followed. Secrets that proved to be like candy laced with arsenic. For a while, he actually considered himself lucky to have a mom who was so cool and forthcoming. He responded by disclosing various perversions and petty crimes of his classmates, trying to impress her with how much more jaded and debauched his peers were than young people in the seventies. And then one day, during a conversation about date rape, it had seemed natural enough for her to tell him how she herself had been date-raped as a teenager, and how he mustn’t ever breathe a word of it to Jessica, because Jessica didn’t understand her the way he did—nobody understood her the way he did. He’d lain awake in the nights following that conversation, feeling murderously angry at his mother’s rapist, and outraged by the world’s injustice, and guilty for every negative thing he’d ever said or felt about her, and privileged and important to be granted access to the world of grownup secrets. And