my grandmother

Teresa turned off the radio. Moments before, waves of oldies music had woven through the air. Now, in the silence, she pulled a thin white finger of tobacco out of a slender silver case and struck a lighter.

Teresa, wearing a faded pink satin dressing gown, sits at the kitchen table with an old Bible split down the middle on the table in front of her, psalms out. It is eight o'clock at night. The time is all wrong.

Cars pass by her small apartment, which is modestly decorated with holy crosses. Each headlight makes her perk up, prepare for the return of her son from the grocery store.

She imagines him walking the aisles, his fingers on the boxes of different products, the colors in his palms as he picks out ripe pears, apples and plums. She wrote the list with great care, her handwriting sloped and clean. She requested things like chicken, snow peas and spaghetti sauce. Potatoes, crackers, hunks of cheese. Her stomach began to churn at the thought of the dishes she could make once he came back with the brown paper bags bursting.

The hands on the clock were unfairly clicking forward and the hunger was sliding up into her head. She poured herself a cup of coffee and figured if she had made it this long, she could last another hour or so. She lit another cigarette and consulted the New Testament, her favorite. She liked a little kindness in her religion, a little leeway.

At nine o'clock, she padded into the living room, which was a few short steps from the kitchen. The green carpeting had been very fashionable in the late sixties but now it looked dingy. She clicked on the old television set. Jeopardy blared to life and she sat quietly, perfectly, like a young girl on the first day of school. She watched the questions and answers with great interest. She particularly enjoyed the host of the program, that Alex Trebec. He was, she thought, a gentleman.

When the questions were all answered, the clock had turned to half past the hour. She walked slowly, her old bones, down the short hallway to the bathroom. Once there, she pulled a box of hair curlers from beneath the sink. She began to wrap her thin white locks around and around the cylinders, the way she had done for years. She slid bobby pins through the ends of each curler to secure the hair. Methodically, she covered her head. At the end, she looked a little bit like someone else, maybe a movie star. She tugged her robe tighter around her aging body.

The clock had pushed past ten, now. She began to feel a rage push up through her frail ribs and made her way to the kitchen table to consult the Bible again. She slipped another cigarette into her lips, once so plush but now aged, wrinkled, shriveled into long prunes. She lit the cigarette carefully and took the hymns down like painkillers, settling the acidic hate rising up in her blood stream.

The moments seemed frozen then, as she spent the next minutes clinging onto cigarettes and psalms. When the anger became brutal, at half past midnight, she removed a photo album from the dark wooden bookcase.

She settled herself back at the table and slid the bible over, reverently. She opened the pages of the photo album and the faces of dozes of children stared back up at her, their skin foreign and their eyes wide. She had adopted them all off of late night television after she saw them living in dirt huts. She spent plenty on these little charity cases, the kind of purchases that would keep Sally Struthers in cheesecakes for years to come. She had adopted little boys and girls from countries she had never heard of, sent off the checks every month. She told her grandchildren they had cousins from far away, and showed off the photo album with pride. The children believed her.

After paging through the pictures, Teresa stood up abruptly, her red rage returning. She stepped into the kitchen and opened a cabinet door, tugging a bottle of whiskey from the back of the shelf. She had not had a drink in ages, but tonight she fixed herself a whiskey and water and sat back down at the table.

Another forty minutes had passed and she was feeling flushed from the alcohol working through her empty system, right into her veins to quell the anger. She was languid, lovely, half-drunk. She patted her curlers and made sure she hadn't drunkenly ruined her hairdo. She wanted to look her best in the morning, for the services. Rhonda would be picking her up at nine sharp.

She glanced up when she heard the doorknob turn, her eyes turning to heat and bouncing between the door and the clock. It was close to two o'clock in the morning, far too late for a lady her age to stay awake. She thought of the bags she would have beneath her eyes at mass tomorrow and felt indignant.

Her youngest son, Chris, stumbled in. He was pushing forty years old but he lived there, down at the end of the hall, a small little bedroom meant for a desk or a computer, not a grown man. First she noticed the wild look in his eyes, his ricocheting pupils. Then she noticed his empty, thin arms. There was no food. Her stomach ached.

"Christopher," she said through clenched, holy teeth. "Did you go to the store? I had asked you to go to the store. The store, for the food. I gave you a list?"

She said the last phrase like a question. She held out hope that the trunk of the car was overflowing with vegetables, fruits, and lean meats. She thought perhaps he had just come up empty-handed to take a rest, prepare to carry a bounty into the house in just a minute.

"Ma, get off my goddamn back" he said. His voice sounded tense and tired at the same time. "I'll get the damn groceries tomorrow."

"You said that yesterday, Christopher" she said. "You said it last week and the week before. I haven't got any food. Nothing to eat, and how do you expect me to survive?"

"Those communion wafers seem to be tiding you over" he said, laughing cruelly at his own joke.

She felt something crack in her chest.

"I gave you all that money," she said, quietly, dismayed. "I gave you money last week and the week before that and the week before that."

She thought of the checks she had written, seven of them, each for one hundred dollars. She thought of the money her husband had left for her after he passed away. At the thought of Howard, she blessed herself and thought of the dwindling bank account, of all the checks with her loopy signature. Then she thought of the six cigarettes left in her pack, the last pack she had.

"Christopher, answer me. You know I can't drive myself to the store, where have you been? With the money, the food?"

"I don't know Ma, I don't know where the money went" and then a giggle rose up out of him as evil as anything she'd ever seen. He rubbed his nose and laughed, and sniffed, kept laughing, sniffing.

"Christopher, I'm your own mother. Your own mother with no food, no cigarettes, nothing but some stale coffee. Are you on that meth again? Is that what this is?"

The laughter rolled out of him as mean and clear as broken shards of glass.

"Are you on the meth again" he said in a falsetto to sound like her. "Praise Jesus, you better not be on that meth again. Pray to the Lord you aren't on that meth again."

She felt tears pushing at her eyes. She dipped her head down and left her slender hand against her forehead. Age spots were creeping across her skin, her fingers speckled. She felt her shoulders shaking as the sobs came, her frame crumbling down into itself.

Her silence triggered something in him and he sat up straight.

"Come on Ma, I just forgot to go to the store," he said. "I'm sorry, you know I'm sorry. Here, I've got a pack of crackers here, the ones you liked last week. The peanut butter ones."

She felt weakness through her limbs and knew that if she did not eat the crackers she would faint, like the women in old time movies. She thought of communion wafers and the peanut butter. In the pantry, she knew, there was one bag of rice. She had been eating the rice for weeks, plain. She had run out of butter and salt long ago. She felt something like a pioneer surviving the plague or the flu. But these were the modern days, she reasoned. She should not have to go without.

"Yes, the crackers," she said, thinking of the Bible. "The crackers."

He slid a plastic package out of his pocket and pushed the crackers across the table at her. Her thin fingers grabbed at them faster than she thought she could move. She pushed the orange squares into her mouth, chewing quickly and swallowing, the dry flakes and peanut butter sticking to the walls of her throat.

"Can you get me a cup of water?" she asked him. He jumped up and took the task on with a feverish pace. She watched him flit about the kitchen, filing the cup with ice cubes, refilling the ice cube tray with water from the tap. He sat the glass before her. She drank from it and finished the crackers.

After her feast, she lit a cigarette.

"This has to stop, Christopher" she murmured. "This can't go on. You're going to break my heart or starve me to death. One way or another, I'm done for."

He thought of the 70,000 dollars he had withdrawn from her bank account. He thought of the four dollars he had left in the checking account. He was careful not to overdraft anything, didn't want letters sent home from the bank.

He thought about the piles of speed on the table that night, his nose navigating the hills with grace and delicacy. He thought of the gun next to the stacks of powder and all of the dollar bills he had placed next to the gun. He thought of the giant plastic bag in his jacket pocket, a quiet tumor waiting for him to return. He thought of the car on empty, the gas light blaring the whole way home.

"The cabinets," Teresa said, "Have never been this bare, never in my whole life so bare."

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