GRANDMOTHER.

(from At Home With the Pumpkin King)

Suicide is a tradition in my family. Of course it is not required. Nonetheless we pretty much abide by it. My father’s mother killed herself on Leap Year Day. (We also possess a doomed fondness for theatrics.) Unfortunately she was caught in the Leap Year Effect, still little understood in 1964, and got persephone’d into the situation she’s in now, three-quarters dead, or nine months of the year. The other three months she spends with us.

March 1st she appears at the door, fresh from death, in her gray cloak smelling like the wet sheep of the afterlife, and her pockets full of candy skulls. My darlings, she says, and one by one picks us up and enfolds us in her cloak so that we will not be so afraid when death comes for us.

Grandmother seems very much to enjoy her time with us. All day she sits in the same corner, humming a song I can never remember when she’s not around.

My father remains formal; he’s never gotten used to having his mother around. The gunshot had seemed so irreparable. Now she only has a small scar on her temple, though she gets headaches sometimes and my mother makes chamomile tea. Apparently suicide is not something you just get over, especially not when it’s your own.

Grandmother doesn’t often speak about death. She spends enough time there as it is. Sometimes she admits it is dreary. Of course it is different for her--she’s still commuting. She’d like to move to a different neighborhood, but first she must finish here.

“There are things that need looking after,” she says and smiles upon her four grandsons: the one who cares only for books, the one who loves dirty pictures, the one who only does right and resents it, and the one who is always drunk, as she was, in her first life.

She admits she is not sure what comes after death. Death is all she’s seen so far. But nonetheless she expects we’ll visit her, not in the dreary suburb of death where she is now, but in the life after. “I intend to race camels,” she said. All of us laughed; she wasn’t kidding.

“You are so lovable,” she says “And at the same time full of poison.” She claps her hands. “Come sit with Granny, my dears. I am the anti-venom.”

To one grandson she says, “Forgive” and, to another “Buckle up!” How stern she looks when she orders me, “Do not remain on the periphery of life!”

There is no question that my drunk brother is her favorite. I remember him as he was then, a boy, his forest full of birds still visible, the forest he would clear-cut and then tar over.

In her chair in the corner, she holds him, rubs his back and coos to him until he begins quietly to vomit. In her white tea cup she catches this and cheerfully she drinks it.

My father leaves the room and all the grandsons cry and only my mother remains at the stove. My sad-eyed grandmother continues calmly to sip her teacup of vomited poison. The scar on her temple, her elderly throat, turn blue as a late summer evening.

She does not allow the cup to be pried from her hand. She says, “I am your granny from death, my dears, and this is what I am here for.”