By Mary Cross

Featured Art by Jordyn Roderick

Sometimes in the middle of the summer when it was so hot that the tar on the road stuck, like Juicy Fruit gum, to the bottom of my tennis shoes, I’d see a mirage in front of me and think of my grandmother—imagine her a painting. She loved the heat in the summer, and she told me that she even chewed a hunk of tar when she was a little girl. I’d imagine her head was a wide stripe of white across a green-colored canvas, and her hips were shimmering shades of red and caramel; but the craziest of all were her lips—they were yellow buttons, the same kind on my spring coat. At night in our room we shared, I’d think of this painting when I’d watch her remove her Junior Petite coffee-colored stockings, rub her shins with the clinical expertise of a practiced masseuse at the Y, then rest her feet in a bucket of Epsom salts, while I studied the gap between my front teeth with her compact mirror. She’d repeat the story about her sixteen-year-old daughter who died; “Molly, there is nothing worse than losing a child.” She kept a lock of her daughter’s hair in the second drawer of her dresser, along with fortunes from Ray’s Chinese takeout. On the night table, her top teeth sat in a jelly jar painted with the outline of Fred Flintstone. Without her dentures, she sounded as if her tongue were swollen. 

My grandmother spoke proudly of how her daughter had been voted queen of her class in the seventh grade: “Only one person didn’t vote her in . . . and that’s because he was absent! The morning she died I was darning your father’s socks and pricked my finger. Blood oozed out of the top of my thumb. And I knew she was gone. They wanted me to change her nightgown because she had soiled it, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t touch her anymore. Your father sat on the end of the bed, practicing tying his shoes. He was five years old. Alice was the one who taught him how to double knot. He couldn’t stand it if you didn’t double knot his shoes. He’d throw a tantrum, spinning on his back like a top. He said to her one day, ‘If I die when I’m a little boy, then I’ll grow up in heaven.’ That made my girl smile. I think she knew she was sick a long time before the doctors did.” My grandmother retrieved a hankie balled inside her sleeve and wiped her dripping nose. I just kept seeing a little boy double-knotting his shoes at the end of a dead girl’s bed like he didn’t have a care in world. Did he know what his life would be like, that in a year he’d have earaches every night so that he’d lose some hearing in his right ear; that one summer at camp he’d write poems about purgatory asking God how he could take his sister and not him; that someday he would fall in love and have two daughters; that they’d take a trip to Florida and the youngest daughter named Molly would buy a live tree crab on a necklace at a jewelry store; that sometimes after a few yellow tumblers of Hawaiian Punch-and-whiskey he’d have to close one eye to watch TV. 

When you’re old you get to repeat stories as much as you’d like and nobody tells you they’ve heard it before. And nobody says they’re bored and nobody thumps their fingertips on a table waiting for it to get interesting, waiting for a punch line. Nobody cares if there is one. It was total freedom to be old and wear a garter belt; write down the names of movie stars on little slips of paper to be kept in your apron pocket; to smell like lard; to tape a crucifix to your chest at night; to prefer a sponge bath to a real soak; to be so terribly afraid of Judgment Day that you might interrupt a pleasant conversation about the wonderful-weather-we’re-having to interject your non sequitur, “Oh Lord let me be saved.” Being old was what I wanted. I wanted to see everything in retrospect. I wanted to hear all my sentences begin with “I remember . . .” or “You’re too young to remember this but . . .” or “When I was your age . . .” I wanted skin as soft as my grandmother’s neck or the tip of Babystray’s ear. I didn’t want to be alone. I wanted to live with a little girl too. 

I would forgive my grandmother almost anything because she was old. She was already seventy when I was born and when she’d take me to eight o’clock mass during grammar school, I didn’t care that she talked loud as we entered the church. She wanted me to know that Raymond Burr was on Johnny Carson the night before and how a monkey had peed on Johnny’s neck. 

That Elizabeth Taylor had awful looking legs. And Shirley Booth was a great lady—a real star. “She’d do your dishes for you—that’s the kind of face she has. Weed your garden, too.” 

Like Shirley Booth in the TV series Hazel, it never occurred to me to actually want a husband; but playing a husband for my best friend Simone in their basement was fun. And I was the unruly type, with demands for the newspaper and supper. Sometimes I’d even hammer my fist on her papa’s worktable and ask for dessert. At night we would walk the beach and ride Papa’s moped, dodging the sewer holes on the bluff, and taking sharp turns around the World War II army man statue. He was this life-size bronze statue standing on the top of a hill of red impatiens. The city had put up this miniature white picket fence around him, thinking that would be a big enough deterrent. Who were they keeping out? Turtles? Somebody said Billy Axel from the public school stole the veteran’s gun. And “What’s a Soldier Without a Gun?” the headline read in our local newspaper. 

Simone liked my grandmother but always asked why she talked to herself so much. 

Sometimes Grandma would talk out loud about people and then pretend like she wasn’t doing a thing. It was a habit like biting your fingernails or cleaning between your toes while talking on the phone. Pure excellence, I thought. I wanted to be old. I wanted to eat eight gin soaked raisins a day for arthritis, not seven or nine, but only eight. I wanted to be able to deny things convincingly, and go on with my business as if the accuser were the crazy one and not me. 

One night I heard my grandmother wrapping up the garbage in newspaper and tying it with twine, when she said, “Damn girl. Why does she leave her things on the porch? Damn slob.” She was talking about me. The summer I was eleven I’d taken to decorating the guest room with mobiles, and I was working on painting peace and love signs on a large ball made of my dad’s shirt cardboards from the cleaners. I had left the extra cardboard sheets in a pile on the porch. 

“Who are you talking about?” I questioned. “Oh, sha sha sha shush . . . nice color.” 

“No, Grandma, who were you calling a slob?” 

“Sha sha sha shush. Now put this in the alley,” she instructed. Without looking me in the eye, she handed me her neatly wrapped garbage. 

“Forget it. You’re nuts too,” I mumbled under my breath and took the garbage. 

Simone called from the backyard and I snuck out the alley and went to check out her remote control plane she had built with Papa. Her parents worked night shifts sometimes, so those evenings were great at their house because they left her older sister Charlotte in charge. 

We could sneak away from her quite easily, especially when she was entertaining her boyfriend. Simone grabbed the control box and I carried the blue plane to the bluff. Having had more practice with navigating its flight, Simone could maneuver the two-foot long plane around street lamps with the precision of a pilot. She hogged the controls, and that made me mad, but I couldn’t complain too much because it wasn’t my plane. It was wonderful to watch it soar down, almost like one of my pigeons rocketing to the sidewalk from the edge of a gutter for a few crumbs of a sandwich or somebody’s stale Danish. All I kept thinking was that mankind owes so much to pigeons and sparrows and crows and robins for teaching them aerodynamics, how to design a plane that could actually fly. 

Before we knew it, the plane was flying into darkness, except for the light in the library parking lot and a few street lamps that lit a path. The plane was independent, without parents or grandmas or sisters, without boyfriends or husbands or wives, without city and the tiny gnats that fly around porch lights in the summer. It was its own important vessel. 

“Let’s pretend we’re going on a trip to Paris or Bolivia in the plane. And you can be the husband,” Simone said. 

“Honey, look out the window. See those girls with the plane. Aren’t they sweet? Whoa. Watch out. It’s coming toward us. Holy Shit. Honey, come closer.” I put my arm around her neck. Simone motioned for us to go over to the stairs to the beach where there was a public restroom. She landed the plane down near the curb. 

“Simone dear. Watch out. Duck!” 

She pulled me into the stall and pushed her lips into mine like they do in the movies. I could feel the smooth enamel of her front teeth because she was still laughing. 

Someone started knocking on the door of the bathroom. “Hey, who’s in there? It’s past curfew. How old are you?” 

Simone jumped off the rim of the toilet seat and pushed me first out of the stall. The door hit my funny bone. “Ouch,” I yelled. “You A-hole, Simone.” When I glanced in the mirror, my mouth twisted to the side resembling my grandmother’s and all I could think about was that I was getting old. 

A cop with a gun in his holster, a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket, and a blond Fu Manchu mustache asked, “What are you girls doing in there in one stall?” 

“She was throwing up, and I . . .” Simone flicked her hair away from her face like Bonnie Parker from Bonnie and Clyde. With the confidence of a real criminal, she opened a pack of gum and put a piece in her mouth and started to chew. 

“A real smart aleck, huh?” The first cop said. 

For a moment I could hear my ears ringing in the silence. As I moved toward the wall I accidentally stepped on a damp brown paper towel that stuck to my shoe. 

“Where do you girls live?” asked the second cop. He was older, with a receding hairline and gray hair. He was nicer, I thought. 

“Up the bluff. Over there,” I pointed. 

“Get in the car. We’ll take you home.” While the second cop opened the door, I noticed a big dent in the back of his head and I wondered if he was wounded in the war, if he knew who stole the army statue’s gun. 

When they brought me home, my parents were on the porch and I hoped my father wasn’t too drunk. Sometimes in the summer he would get Babystray to try and play fetch with a wad of paper, especially after several Hawaiian Punch-and-whiskeys. Babystray was pretty good as long as she didn’t notice a squirrel or a bird or a lightning bug. The first cop said he heard some noises coming from the bathroom and went to investigate, when he found me and my friend crammed into a stall. “Together,” he emphasized. “You know, Sir, ” he said to my father, “it’s after curfew.” My father got up from the swing, set his drink down on the porch railing, nodded to the policemen and went inside. Upstairs I pressed my ear to window screen in my grandmother’s room to hear them talking. She was in her chair, rubbing her legs until the dry skin peeled off like confetti in her hands. Without having any idea what was going on, she said, “Don’t give it another thought. Keep stepping up the stone path.” 

“Shhh. Be quiet,” I told her. 

“Yes officers,” my mother said, “she won’t be out after curfew anymore. We didn’t know she was gone. Thank you for bringing her home.” 

My grandmother handed me a jar of Ponds cold cream. “Will you rub this on my feet?” 

As I sat on the floor, I knew it wouldn’t be long until the story of Alice would erupt from the silence. “She didn’t ask for a thing,” she’d say. “So I asked our Lord to take away her suffering.” 

“And wipe her eyes with his shroud of—” I slathered gobs of cream on her feet.

“Do you know what he said?” 

She was testing to see if I was listening.

“Yes,” I answered. “Ask and you shall—”

“No,” she interrupted. “He said his head—” 

“What?” I was listening now to see where the detour was going.

“Itched something terrible.” 

Holding my face in her hands, she laughed. “From the thorny crown, silly!” 

She crossed herself and looked up at Jesus. Lightly, she patted the top of my head and began our nightly ritual: “Still my girl?” she asked. 

“Yes Grandma.”

“For life?”

“Yes.” 

I never told my grandma what happened that night, nor did my parents ever mention the experience with the cops again. It was as if it didn’t occur, although I did wonder if the first cop was peeking through the window of the restroom. It wasn’t too long after that incident that I saw the first cop coming out of a house down by the beach, in his regular clothes, holding hands with one of Charlotte’s friends from the high school. Everybody knew that the houses down by the beach were filled with either juvies or pregnant girls having to quit school to have their babies. 

That Saturday I got my sentencing: I had to accompany my grandmother on her annual bus trip to Chicago to visit her daughter’s grave. I asked if Simone could come too. “Keep your business private,” my grandmother said. I knew that the matter was closed. 

In a Goldblatts shopping bag, my grandmother carried plastic red roses, three tiny cartons of yellow geraniums, and Swedish meatball sandwiches suffocated in Saran Wrap. It was only a day trip and the 4:15 bus was going to take us home again. We took a cab from the bus station downtown to Graceland Cemetery on the north side of Chicago. The sidewalks were wider than those in Southport and completely dotted with people carrying briefcases and department store shopping bags, holding down their hats with one hand as they walked against the wind. Last Christmas my sister put together a three-dimensional puzzle of the John Hancock building, with its 100 stories of black windows. How many gulls or crows had flown smack dab in the middle of some of those windows, slightly dazed afterward, only to catch a crosswind above the lake and survive? 

Alice’s grave was situated off by the pond that had a wooden footbridge. “Don’t step on the dead,” my grandmother admonished. “The dead have no recourse.” I didn’t know how long the dead were, so I was never sure whether I was on stepping on them or not. I leaned against a mulberry tree and my feet landed on top of a flecked gray marble marker. Etched in the middle of the slab was the name Maud Butsback, 1875 to 1875. I wondered if she lived at all. If she breathed. The swirling roots dug into the ground, splitting the middle of the trunk into a hollowed belly, like the shell of peanut. Inside were empty bottles of Coke and Nehi grape soda, gum wrappers and cigarette butts. I wanted to steal a few long butts for Simone and me, but I knew my grandmother had eagle eyes, so I stopped to watch a redheaded squirrel nibble the remains of a hamburger bun on top of the Griffin family plot. As we walked up the blacktop road, we were bombarded by the sound of crows and I wondered how far their caws carry. I knew a lion’s roar could be heard up to five miles away. But what about a crow? I had let one neighborhood crow wake me each summer morning since I can remember. I swear it was the same one. He must be old by now. 

The biggest crow I had ever seen cawed from the top of a maple, then waddled across the stone markers labeled MOTHER, HUSBAND, SISTER, and DAUGHTER. Pennies and dimes rested on the bronze foot of a gigantic statue of a man in a hooded robe, the color of seaweed. 

As my grandmother trudged forward, the ripped lining of her lavender raincoat swung like a hammock against her thick calves. I grabbed the dimes and slipped them into the key pocket of my cut-offs. 

“Get me some water,” she instructed, handing me a plastic beach pail. 

In my peripheral vision, I saw her Alice. The marker was flat against the grass, and my grandmother had to pull away some overgrown weeds so we could see her name: Beloved Daughter. 1910 – 1926. Alice H. Coburn. The H was for my grandmother’s mother, Halley. 

Next to her were the Finleys, Ruscos, Schmidts and two markers with the names Mutter and Vater. I repeated it over and over again: “Mutter and Vater, Mutter and Vater.” I kept thinking of the way Simone’s papa, in his French-Canadian accent, said, You gurds, instead of girls. 

“Quit dawdling. Get the water. It’s over there. I’ll get started digging. When I finish here with Alice we’ll go over there and put some roses. They oughta have some. Somebody oughta remember them,” she announced. “Somebody.” 

My grandmother took the trowel and stuck it into the ground, right below the flat tombstone that reminded me of Black Jack gum. The sound of cicadas completely filled my ears and after awhile they sounded like a billion whistles being blown in a gym. Simone caught a cicada once and put it inside a Silly Putty egg. She forgot about it and found it weeks later all dried up. She said we should melt a Hershey bar, pour it on the critter, and eat it. She swore that in Spain they were delicacies. The one thing we both loved to do was catch a fly, tack it to Mama’s pincushion, and pull off the wings. 

I spotted a couple of spigots and headed off for water. I was surprised my grandmother didn’t bring it in a mason jar. She always brought her own popcorn in a paper bag to the movies. As I walked toward a faucet I came upon a section of mausoleums, row upon row of little houses built into a mound of earth like a secret fort, places for me and Simone to listen to her transistor radio, fly her plane, smoke Winstons, while sipping Papa’s homemade wine we’d stolen and kept in an aspirin bottle. We could kiss here without ever getting caught. 

Graceland was much bigger than the cemetery at home with the black angel. There were a million angels, life-size, with noses chipped, or hands broken off, even some wings cracked at the shoulder blade. We could have our own house with huge columns like the Parthenon. I could hold her hand, outline the exact shape of her fingernails, count the little clouds on her nails that Mama said were bruises. Here we were in acres of rolling farm land, set up like a miniature board game with the tombstones placed strategically as chess pieces; it was an authentic Midwestern village with a little chapel like the one in Bower’s Toy Store constructed around the train track. I imagined the water faucet as the switch to turn on this wonderland. No luck. No water. I looked for another spigot and finally spotted one in the distance. 

As I continued walking I noticed the life-size statue of a girl, probably a teenager, wearing a shroud like St. Agnes, with her right arm raised to the sky—her toenails matched the shape of my own. I took off one of my shoes to see if her foot was larger than mine and it was. White roses lay on the grass below her name. I pinched a few petals, wiping the wetness on my shorts. 

Everywhere I gazed there were white concrete and marble statues of people and angels with their mouths or noses worn away, as if they were washed too many times by rain or snow. I could barely see my grandmother’s outline near the pond. There were tombstones after tombstones for what seemed like miles. I even spied two dog statues; one with a missing head, the other’s front paw crumbled into sand. I filled the bucket, felt the cool water rush through my fingers. It was getting hotter in the midday sun and I remembered how my mother used to say, ‘If you want to cool off fast, sprinkle cool water on your wrists.’ I drenched my whole hand and arm in the graveyard water. 

Standing above Alice’s grave, my grandmother was clearly agitated; her hand swung down on my shoulder like a downtrodden maple branch. “Go look for them!” 

Her lip was puffed out in a pout, swollen and bleeding. I could see her nylons were ripped at the kneecap. “Look for who? What happened?” 

“I’m fine. Go look for them,” she demanded.

“Who?”

“NO, Dammit. Go look for—”

“Who? Did someone grab your purse, Grandma?” Across the road, the caretaker turned on an electric hedge trimmer, and I knew my grandmother would never be able to hear me, so I mouthed the words this time, Did someone rob you? Which way did they run? I could see she was physically exhausted; her cheeks caved in and pulsing like a goldfish breathing. 

“My TEEF. Go look for my teeth! Over there.” She pointed down the road toward a concrete tomb shaped like a pyramid. “I was planting over there. I tripped coming back to Alice.” 

It didn’t take long to spot them on the blacktop, broken in half and pink like some kind of ocean creature washed up on volcanic sand. Using my forefinger and thumb, I picked up the broken denture as if it were a drenched rag. 

She cupped the teeth in her hands, examining the crack, “No one should outlive their children.” She held her teeth with the same tenderness as she had once held a cicada that flew into our living room. She brought it, delicately cupped in the palm of her hands, to the side door and let it go, way up into the Michigan sky, into the clouds that looked like mountains. She told me that the adult cicada only lives for about a week and they wait in their shells before they can pop out; then, she added, “they cling to them. Like humans.” I knew better than to ask her what the last part meant. Her quarter-sized chestnut eyes locked onto my face declaring this was a universal truth as true as one of the seven wonders of the ancient world and I better just accept it, without question, as I would a ride home from a policeman. I thought about the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, how my grandmother said they were nomads with nowhere to go. “What a waste,” she gestured as she dug into her Vicks Vaporub jar and slathered a gob under her nostrils. I would have been afraid to jump from that canyon into the river, but maybe I would have done it anyway, like Sundance. And he didn’t know how to swim. 

While we sat in the grass, I watched her wrap her teeth in Kleenex and place the remnants in the inside zipper of her beaded purse. What would she do now? I wondered. Eat only what she could from a straw until she got some new teeth? Would she live on milkshakes and frozen squash? Get so small she could barely carry her own body? Use a cane? Maybe a walker on wheels? Or ride around on a three-wheeled bike like our former mailman Tony who had multiple sclerosis. Would she stop eating all together and shrivel up like Simone’s voodoo doll? Would she keep getting old? Would I have to bring her the TV Guide, only to have her get mad when she found out we actually had missed Ironside? Would I rub her calves? Tell her the story of her daughter who died? Cut her toenails with my mother’s big kitchen scissors because she couldn’t bend over anymore, and the yellow crudded nails had curled? 

If I could stop right now, I would be Inez Clarke, over there up on the hill, the six- year- old from 1880, encased in a glass box. I would sit in a sculptured chair made of simulated tree branches, just like her, wear a lace dress and patent leather shoes, a locket around my neck with Babystray’s picture inside, clutching a closed parasol in my left hand, staying the same for centuries. 

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Mary Cross teaches in the MFA Writing Program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “Flying into Darkness” comes from her manuscript of linked fictions Do-Sa-So the Corner Girl. She is currently working on a hybrid memoir titled Brown Street.