HUMOR
Nana Vs. The VagrantsLOS ANGELES 12 December 2007 |
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Before my grandmother was too crazy to be trusted, my parents used to leave us with her when they went out of town together.
My father was a retinal surgeon, so he and my mother often used the Vitreous Society as an excuse to get as far away from their children as possible. It was absurd, but they thought we all believed them when they told us that they “just really wanted to go to that eyeball conference.”
If anybody had bothered to sneak a peek at the airline tickets, we probably would have discovered that their destination city was nowhere near the Vitreous Society conference. We all played along just because we knew that we’d get away with much more when they were gone.
Nana didn’t care about schoolwork like my parents did. She didn’t care if we didn’t drink a glass of milk with dinner. She didn’t care if we even ate dinner. As far as she was concerned, with all of us older than three, we were ready to be shipped off to some textile factory to earn our keep.
My mother used to force us to ask Nana questions about her childhood, perhaps as some form of punishment.
“Nana, what was your life like when you were a kid?” I’d ask.
“You have to be more specific, Sara.” She never knew which one of us was which. “It was like a lot of things,” she’d tell me.
I’d be getting ready to go, but then I’d see my mother, sliding her finger across her throat in the “ask-more-or-you’re-dead” gesture.
“What was your mother like? Did she ever threaten you?” I asked.
“My mother had me working with the sheep when I was three. There was no time for nonsense. All those sheep, and I was supposed to be a boy so I could help out with the animals. But I was a girl. All those sheep.” My grandmother’s childhood was similar to The Silence Of The Lambs.
“That’s fascinating, Nana.” I’d look up at my mother, and she’d shake her head. You’re not finished yet.
“What about, um, school?”
“Why are you badgering me? School was school. It was snowy and cold all year round, and school was far away. I didn’t get home early enough to round up the sheep and I’d get whooped. My father wasn’t there, but my brothers used chains to set me straight,” she’d ramble.
“Sounds delicious,” I’d say.
Having previously demonstrated her unique bond with her grandchildren, Nana was a shoo-in for the babysitting position.
When Nana was watching us, everything moved slowly. Nothing happened at a reasonable speed. We spent hours of each day waiting for Nana to shuffle from one place to another. She seemed to be weighed down with fifty pound necklaces and jewels. Then, when she was finally ready, she’d accuse us of not being prepared to go.
“Now, have you taken a BM? Because if we get going and then you need to take a BM, I won’t be pleased,” she’d warn.
“No, Nana. My B works for me. It only M’s when I want it to,” I’d tell her.
I used to think BM stood for Butt Movement. Same basic principle.
When she was in charge, Nana would enforce illogical rules, claiming she had her reasons and that we’d understand when we were her age. One of these rules that we’d apparently come to appreciate in a little under a century was the “bedroom rule.” This law dictated that Benjamin and I were to sleep in the same bed.
In retrospect, it seems obvious that Nana only created this rule so that Ben would be my problem if he awakened with a nightmare instead of hers. Since Ben had a twin bed and I had a queen, we slept in my room.
I was a good sport about the sleeping situation until I opened my eyes in the middle of the night to Nana wiping a clot of vomit off of my pillow. I sat up to find an entire puddle of puke seeping into my bed. Nana was wiping it off with a paper towel, and Ben was standing next to her, looking guilty.
“Ben had an accident. Go back to sleep,” she said to me.
Go back to sleep? She wanted me to go back to sleep? The bed was hard to find beneath all that vomit. All Nana had done to ensure that the problem was fixed was scoop some of Ben’s barf off of the sheets. That was nice, but there was still a big wet stain on the bed, and the smell certainly didn’t disappear with the scoopable chunks.
Go back to sleep? I didn’t think so.
Ben, on the other hand, didn’t see the problem. Nana lifted the covers and he started to get back into bed- directly on top of the vomit patch- to go back to sleep.
I had to change the sheets that night. I had to get Ben a just-in-case basin, and I had to spray generous amounts of air freshener in my room to mask the evidence of Ben’s throw up. Nana went back down to my parents’ bedroom to dream about sheep herding.
When my parents came back from their fake conference, they brought tote bags for each of us. The bags had the Vitreous Society logo on them- a little eyeball-man. Mom and Dad thought we’d believe them if they got us little eyeball tote bags, but we knew they had probably ordered them from a catalogue.
I ignored my agenda of outing their real vacation, and pulled my mother aside.
“Nana tried to get me to sleep on Ben’s puke,” I told her.
“What can I tell you, Lenore? Your grandmother doesn’t always have her wits about her.”
My mother acted cool and pretended not to be bothered by the fact that she’d just left her children with a demented old lady for an entire week, but it was clear that she knew it couldn’t happen again. We wouldn’t stand for it.
So, the next time they went out of town, they hired an entire family of demented people to watch us.
There was a husband and a wife, and their two children. The kids were about our age. One was a boy and the other was a girl. Apparently my parents had taken notice of the children, and that they were still alive, and based on that information alone they decided that these people were qualified to move into our house while they were gone and take care of their children.
We had never met this family before they came to baby sit. They weren’t relatives. They weren’t friends of the family. They weren’t friends of friends. I’m not sure they’d even show up with the six degrees of separation. To this day, I still can’t get either my mother or my father to admit to me where they found them. I have determined that the most likely place is the side of a highway in central Illinois.
“This is, um, Barb and, um….” My mother was waiting for one of them to mouth the name of the husband to her so she’d get it right.
“This is Barb and Henry,” she told us. “They’ll be watching you this week while we’re at the Vitreous Society conference.”
“We’ll bring you tote bags,” Dad said.
“Make it key chains this time,” I challenged.
The new babysitting family was strange from the very beginning. For dinner the first night, they fed us casserole. We’d never had casserole. Our mother cooked meat and vegetables. She cooked with spices and there were usually at least four different dishes on the table to choose from. But this family made a giant, quivering mold called casserole with potato chips crumbled on top. It was the only thing on the table.
“Where’s the first course?” I asked.
“Eat your casserole,” Barb instructed.
“What’s for dessert?” Tim asked.
“Potato chips,” Barb answered.
“But there’s potato chips on top of the castle roll,” Ben whispered to me.
“I know.” I rubbed his back empathetically.
After we spent dinner cautiously picking at the casserole, Tim unburdened his heart to me and Ben, revealing that he had a crush on Barb. We’d never seen Ben so angry. He was positively appalled.
“I’m telling Mom.” He declared.
“You can’t tell Mom,” Tim said. “She can’t know about this. It’s not like I’m going to move in with Barb and Henry. I still want to live here. I just kind of like Barb.” Tim explained.
“I don’t care if you love New Mom. I still love Old Mom.” Ben wasn’t having any of Tim’s excuses.
Luckily, Tim’s sordid affair ended promptly at nine o’clock that night. Barb and Henry decided we were ready for bed.
“We’re going to come by each of your bedrooms to make sure that you’ve said your prayers,” Barb said.
None of us said it aloud, but we were all thinking the same thing: What the hell are prayers?
We had never heard of them, but we were sure that they couldn’t be good. If our parents didn’t have us saying prayers, it wasn’t unreasonable to think that the babysitters were trying to manipulate us into something terrible. It all seemed very devious.
Tim, Ben, and I were all in my bedroom when Barb and Henry knocked on my door that night.
“Why are you all in here?” Henry asked.
“We were just getting ready to say our prayers,” I lied.
“You say them together?” Barb asked.
“Don’t you?” I asked.
“Well, go ahead. Say your prayers, then,” Henry demanded.
We were caught. None of us knew what to do.
Then Ben got a look about him. He always got a look about him when he was forming what he thought was a good idea.
He got up and stood on the bed. He put his fists on his hips dramatically.
“Boom boom boom boom, dubby dubby dubby dubby!” He shouted.
Quickly, Tim and I caught on.
We didn’t know what the hell he was doing, but we figured whatever it was, it was just as likely to be saying prayers as anything else.
We both stood up next to Ben and repeated after him.
“BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM, DUBBY DUBBY DUBBY DUBBY!” We yelled. We jumped around the bed, holding hands, screaming our prayer at the top of our lungs.
Barb and Henry didn’t know what to think. They just quietly backed out of the room and shut the door behind them.
We got away with it that night, but for the rest of the week, we were punished. There was more casserole, there were more potato chips for dessert. We had to play with their children, who were basically like a couple of wet rags. Catch the ball, we’d tell them before throwing it, but it just bounced off of them and then they’d cry.
By the end of the week, Nana was sounding like a gift from the babysitting gods. It didn’t matter anymore that she might make us sleep on vomit. We didn’t mind. Just so long as she wasn’t so evil as to feed us casserole and make us say our prayers.
From then on, Nana watched us when Mom and Dad went on their Machiavellian vacations. She even watched us after she got half of her leg amputated.
She’d wag the stump at us like an index finger. “If you have to take a BM, take it now,” she nag, stump flopping up and down.
But we never complained about her again. To us, our lunatic grandmother was always better than the vagrants Mom and Dad found along a highway in Central Illinois.
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