I’ve always wanted very badly to be a knight. There is perhaps no accolade so impractical, rendered so useless by time’s ruthless passage, as that of knighthood. If only I could manage to circumvent the tawdry assignments of “dame” and “knight” and their respective gender pairings, skirt around the politics and the issue of notoriety, and just be knighted already. To be addressed as “Sir” is perhaps my greatest desire, if only for my own amusement. I want to stare down the 21st century armed with a title because it would be funny, dammit. Me, a dirty-kneed, weak-ankled teen with a strong proclivity for baseball hats and an unwieldy sense of inferiority, knighted?
It is for the same reason, “because it would be funny and why do you care, anyways,” that I also want very badly to be an Olympic figure skating judge, or a librarian, or a haggard waiter at a five-star French restaurant—a spy, a zookeeper, or an experimental archaeologist. As they say: a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker.
“Because it would be funny and why do you care, anyways” is also the same reason I pulled an obnoxiously bright beach chair into my grandmother’s kitchen on the night of January 2nd, 2020 and sat, just to sit, my fists buried in its mesh cup holders. It also happens to be what I said when I was discovered, cradled pitifully between its stained polyester arms.
My younger brother was the first to stumble upon me in this weakened state. I should not have been surprised at his appearance: evenings are hard to face, and, like his sister before him, he incessantly self-medicates. I had unfolded my beach chair in the safety of the kitchen, where the munchies and alcohol traditionally reside, to wallow in the soupy darkness of a new year. Brooding, after all, is an activity best savored in the dark. It follows, therefore, that he was the first, given his late-night wanderings and my disguised position, to stub his socked toes on my chair. Hoarsely, he whispered, “What the hell are you doing?”
All I could summon was an irritated grunt.
Then, “Is that a beach chair? Bro, why?”
Why, indeed.
The easiest answer to his question was a pale blue oxygen tank. It was here when we arrived, plugged into the wall. I was sitting in the dark in a stupid tie-dyed folding chair because of that oxygen tank, because of the services it rendered: oxygen for butterfly lungs, fuel for a rebelliously beating heart. The harder answer is that Mimi, my chain-smoking powerhouse of a grandmother, has two types of stage four cancer, both of which were bearing down at an unfortunate speed. This trip had been an emergency one. A panicked drive and pitiful attempts at normalcy.
The loathsome thing rolls on four wheels, a gloating marker of life’s slow deterioration. I hated that it was in my grandmother’s house, I hated its squeaky approach and the fine tube that snaked from its ironclad stomach. I hated its unblemished surface, the false cheer in its blank face. I hated that Mimi, who mercifully referred to it as “this goddamn machine,” hobbled and wheezed and faded. I hated that pale blue oxygen tank because I knew what it meant. It placed time on a sliding scale and fixed it evenly, stapled heavily on the walls of my stomach.
The only answer to his question, then, is that pale blue fucking oxygen tank. I was sitting in the dark because of that diabolical piece of plastic: mechanized foreshadowing.
My brother left, satisfied with my non-answer, and went downstairs. I sat and worried and chewed my fingernails in my stupid folding chair, bare feet clammy on the cold floor.
It was right around then that my grandma, nightgown clad, stepped into the kitchen. Her deep voice cut through the intervening space, rumbling through the darkness:
“Is someone there?”
Flicking the lights on, she pulls some cheese dip from the refrigerator, swollen fingers faltering past half-empty ketchup bottles and mottled New Year’s leftovers. She has this fantastic growling voice, one that rises over crowds and cuts right through them, knocking people aside. It seeks out the stale, the pointlessly preserved; it has a way of cramming itself into spaces it shouldn’t fit—between the floorboards and into the rusty mason jars, into the places we hide our secret hurts.
“Kid, you scared the shit out of me.”
Mimi often starts her sentences like this: “Kid, listen to me.” That rueful “kid” is not nearly as important as the comma that follows— heavily pronounced, decibels sagging, a pause burdened with a host of lit cigarettes, a whole lot of knowing. Seeing my stupid tearstained face in that stupid chair, she lets that “kid” hang in the air. The comma unfolds slowly in the sudden light. I watch it stretch, counting the Marlboros and the Parliaments.
Knowingly, she shoves the cheese dip into my lap and turns the lights off. Deftly, she opens the liquor cabinet and pours two heaping glasses of Baileys. We sit for awhile like that, Mimi on her stool and I on my stupid fucking Tommy Bahama, drinking in the darkness, serenaded by the gently malfunctioning dishwasher.
“You know what, hun?” she says, chuckling, “Everything is so messed up, I sometimes laugh myself to sleep.”
I start to laugh. “Mimi, how can you say that?”
I guess most things are funny if you squint. Why do you care, anyway?
Pandemics | October 2020