Old Lady (1)
“—and when I heard the news on WERT, I said to myself, ‘That was the bitch who fired my Anna’.”
Anna toyed with the piece of tasteless, boxed pumpkin pie the old lady had cut for her, mashing the crust crumbs into a flat little cake off to the left side of the china plate. Ma had told her how bad the old lady had become in the years since she and Anna had left, but even with the proof of the old lady’s deteriorating voice over the phone, Ma’s powers of description had been sorely limited.
It didn’t help that Anna knew exactly when the old lady had really been born. When it came to the old lady, sixty-two going on sixty-three come late December was an abstract term, as meaningless a measure of age as saying the universe was older than time, or that hell is forever.
Anna’s grandmother was an old, old lady, of seemingly advanced physical age. Oiled parchment and wrinkled tissue old, with dots, splotches, stiff short whiskers and age warts liberally covering her sagging skin. Her cheeks hung like empty purses beneath her high Czech cheekbones. Lank, almost indifferent strands of gray-white hair sparsely covered her domed, slightly shining whitish scalp. Her nose had ballooned with the years, to match basset-lobed ears, and she had a turkey wattle under her weak chin. Her lips were obscene, thickly protruding and shiny purple-wet, like the skin of a blood-engorged vagina. And her slightly nearsighted eyes resembled those of a doll that had been left outside too long in the sun and mud and snow, an abandoned plaything whose time spent in the open had leached the color from its irises, until only the pupils remained, a dark, hypnotic pair of disembodied dots in a sallow sea of red-veined off-white.
But the old lady’s hands had to be the worst part, Anna decided as she reluctantly swallowed the cold pie.They were puff-knuckled, twisted, with nails the color of margarine gone bad in the wrapper, lined with something faintly transparent yet dark, like ancient scalp oils or raked-up dead skin—yet oily, with dark dappled blotches across the metatarsals, like the underbellies of some spotted hunting dogs.
And if the way the old lady looked wasn’t awful enough, she smelled, a rancid, slightly fulsome odor not unlike wet mold or slimy, ripe, worm-pocked meat. The old lady had emitted that stench long before her formerly thin lips sprung, or her skin went slippery-crepey. Anna remembered how Ma refused to wash any of the old lady’s things along with the old women’s garments. If Ma threw in as little as one pair of the old woman’s socks or panties, the whole wash smelled gamy, like an ill-dressed deer carcass hanging in the sun.
The fights they’d had over the wash had helped bring things to a head the summer before she and Ma left the house, even though Ma had offered to do a special load of the old lady’s things. But the possibility of not being part of the “family” had freaked the old lady out, made her rage, teeth bared, and throw things, like a caged monkey in the zoo, shouting, “I already lost my other family; now I’m losing it again!” And not long after that, Anna had vowed that she would never look the old lady in the eye again until the latter’s eyes were closed for good. Yet here she was, heart aching because being here, in the house where she’d grown up, which contained such mixed memories, reminded her of just how little she had at the house she and Ma had shared on Wilkerson Avenue. And she’d flinched inside when the old lady had opened the door, staring dumbly at Anna before sputtering without preamble, “My little Anna’s hair was blonde—you’ve got dark hair,” before letting her into the house, blithely ignoring Anna’s protest, “But I’m almost thirty now. As I’ve grown older, my hair darkened.” And her reunion with the old lady had deteriorated from there, until Anna found herself sitting at the old-fashioned five-legged white enamel kitchen table, eating a miserable wedge of pie she didn’t want, listening to the old lady rehash yet another of Anna’s past job failures. Thanks a lot, Ma.
Anna had worked for Norm Hibbing all of three days before his skunk of a wife Inez had fired her, for “gypping me.” What had actually happened was that Anna had been framed. Inez hadn’t been able to stand it when Norm spent coffee breaktime talking to Anna about books and writers. They discovered they shared the same alma mater and had both studied English literature under the same professor. On Anna’s last day, of employment, Inez had made a phone call to a friend of hers—a blue-eyed Indian woman named Sharon.
As soon as Norm left the store later on, Sharon showed up, a ten-dollar bill in hand, asking for change, singles; Inez was too “busy” unloading a shipment of dirty pens (click the top and the man’s shorts fall off), so she let Anna handle the transaction. And then, as soon as Norm came back from the post office, Sharon returned to the store, saying that a mistake had been made—she’d only handed over a five-dollar bill, not a ten, and that Anna had given out too much change.
Inez—ugly, ignorant little Inez, with her miniskirts, pinched iodine features, and filthy, filthy fingernails—had squeaked, “I don’t want no college-educated dummy” manning her till, and same alma mater or not, Norm was forced to give Anna the boot.
Anna had been so ashamed of the incident that she never mentioned it to anyone except Ma, nor did she list the novelty shop on her later résumés, even though it was most likely a violation of some law or another. She already had so much going against her....
“Yes, that was the bitch. Nobody in town seems to be broken up about it,” Anna remarked, forcing down another bite of the pie, nearly gagging on the mealy crust.
“They shouldn’t be,” the old lady pontificated, cutting herself a second slab of pie. For a woman only five feet tall, and not exceptionally fat, the old lady packed in a prodigious amount of food.
“Because when I heard it on the radio, I told myself, ‘Mark my words, that bitch is getting hers for all the bad she did.’ Like my Gramma always said, ‘The evil get theirs.’ She had trouble with the scum-bums, too.”
“Yahoos,” Anna remarked absentmindedly, as she forked off another piece of gelatinous orange but didn’t eat it right away.
“I beg your pardon?” The old lady was in her coquettish mode again—Ms. Imperious. It was her only standby when she hadn’t the foggiest what someone was talking about.
“Yahoos...from Gulliver’s Travels. Book Four—the part about the country of educated horses.”
“I only remember the little people who tied him up.”
“Those were the Lilliputians. Gulliver met up with them on his first voyage. We only studied the fourth voyage in World Lit. Anyhow, Gulliver is washed up in this country where the intelligent beings are horses.”
“I saw a horse once, on the TV, that could count with its hooves.”
Anna nodded, trying to ward off a complete recitation of the show her grandmother had seen. She had already heard what was on People’s Court the afternoon before, down to every word Judge Wapner uttered.
“Well, the horses were like people, while the people—or what Gulliver eventually discovered were the people—were called Yahoos, They were very hairy and dirty.”
“Like those scum-bums who drive up and down the street at night, honking to beat the band?”
Anna was pleasantly taken aback to hear the old lady echo her own thoughts. “Scum-bums” was an apt expression,especially for people like Zack Downing and his brother-in-law Elmo Effertz (the Effertzes—a farm family from out past County Trunk QV to the south—had a penchant for weird names. Zack’s zit-faced wife’s name was Irma), who spent half the night gunning their engines, shouting obscenities, and slamming their car doors while she tried to sleep,
A couple of years back, Zack and Irma moved into the very small frame house next to the Sudek house. The couple used to wait until well after sunset to begin work on the tiny addition they were building onto their house, Not that they weren’t home from their respective jobs at the Red Owl and Ewerton bakery (he cut meat, she arranged bakery on plastic trays) hefore sunset—they only worked part-time, and got home by three at the latest. They simply seemed to like making noise at ungodly hours. And to pile on the insult, they’d taken out their old bathtub and just left it sitting there, next to the rough-looking little barn-shaped