O is for Orangutan, C is for Cleopatra

In the span of fifty-five years, Grandma Clou had four or five husbands. Stories were swapped like trading cards. The plumber she married at sixteen; he was thirty-two. Then there was the second cousin she met at a BBQ. They eloped in the next state over when she found out she was pregnant. The baby never made it to term, something doctors would later attribute to genetic abnormalities. My grandfather was the most normal, which is probably why she stuck around long enough to give him two daughters. The last one we called Grandpa Charlie even though no one was ever sure if they got around to marrying.

Some she didn’t divorce. She just remarried without bothering, my Aunt Nikki confided to me. Nikki had ten years to my thirteen and wore low-cut jeans and glittery eyeshadow. She bought lacey thongs at Victoria’s Secret and promised to buy me my first when mom finally stopped buying the floral cotton multi-packs. Nikki dated a guy named Steve who drove a Mitsubishi Eclipse and once let me have a sip of his beer. I wanted to ask Nikki what Grandma Clou’s marital ambiguity made us, but I knew enough Shakespeare by then to answer my own question.

Grandma Clou lived in a foreign land where her identity as a serial bigamist was overshadowed by crumbling Dodge Darts, sun-bleached lawn gnomes, and boxes of something called Melba toast. At the Magnolia Retreat retirement home, it wasn’t out of the question to see a chihuahua clad in a Hawaiian t-shirt drag the newspaper into an apartment that exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke every time the door opened. I always felt like I was going on an expedition when I set foot on the cracked cement sidewalk and caught my first whiff of muscle rub and mothballs.

We made a game of each afternoon, Nikki and I, sitting on the red shag carpet of Grandma Clou’s apartment, flipping through thirty-year-old Encyclopedia Britannicas and stopping when we came to an entry that bore a resemblance to Grandma Clou as she sat hunched over in her upholstered rocking chair, breasts blending into her stomach and thighs. 

Nikki raised an eyebrow at me one Friday afternoon and pointed to a picture of an obese orangutan. Its torso was a boob shelf, its belly button barely visible as gravity dragged its stomach to the ground. Apparently, food was plentiful where it lived. Grandma Clou made do with the Melba toast and bowls of chicken and rice soup, but the effect was still the same. 

“At least she isn’t as hairy,” I whispered, flipping through the V volume. Vasectomy…Venice...Vulture.

“How do you know that?” Nikki asked thumbing through the O volume. Osteoporosis…Otis Redding…Ovum.

We both looked at Grandma Clou. Her rocking chair was a log upended on the jungle floor. She rocked back and forth, her balance perfect, and the log followed her movement without rebellion. Wiry hairs sprouted across her leathery skin. Like a fertile grassland, they trembled in the breeze she generated as she pitched herself forward and let the log take her back. She surveyed the field, not looking for threats so much as a stimulus great enough to tempt her from the log. A squelch broke the silence. Grandma Clou looked down toward her stomach. Bingo.

“Get your shoes on, girls,” she said, grunting her way out of the rocking chair.

We looked down at our feet, my jelly sandals, and Nikki’s skate shoes. We never took our shoes off at Grandma Clou’s owing to the high pile of her shag carpet and the fear of what we might find if the dust between fibers shifted enough to let us see.

Grandma Clou insisted she walk to the lunch counter two blocks away. Nikki groaned. Grandma Clou had a perfectly good wheelchair that a social worker had brought but refused to use it, even though I once saw a man with cerebral palsy beat her across a crosswalk. We each took a side and steered her between rusting lime-green lawn chairs and piles of dog poop. One of her neighbors, a man with a wisp of white hair underneath a brown-felt fisherman’s hat, sat on his porch, naked from the waist up. 

“What’s cookin’, Harry?” Grandma Clou shifted her weight to the right, an attempt at coquettishness that had Nikki pretending to retch on the grass.

He nodded. “Clou. Haven’t seen you around much.”

“You could see a lot more of me if you put on a shirt and joined us for lunch.”

Nikki and I groaned. The last thing we wanted to do was chaperon. 

But we needn’t have worried. Harry shook his head. “Already ate.”

“Next time then,” Grandma Clou said, as we dragged her away from Harry and his saggy chest. “I’m wearing him down,” Grandma Clou said as we helped her over a tree root that had erupted through the concrete sidewalk.

I kept my head down, afraid she’d see the incredulity written on my face. I studied her white orthopedic shoes and her brown polyester pants that hovered over the Velcro straps. Every time she lifted her leg, the hem of her pants rose just enough that I could see her sparse leg hairs, fully grown out, the skin underneath dry and cracked. She would be wearing Harry down until doomsday.

“Grandma, I don’t think Harry—”

Grandma Clou cut Nikki off. “Humph. Harry doesn’t know what he wants. Good thing he’s got me to show him.”

“Are you and Grandpa Charlie even divorced yet?”

I understood Nikki’s concern. A few months ago, we’d seen Grandpa Charlie slinking out of Grandma Clou’s apartment. He blushed when he asked us how we were doing and how school was. Nikki told him she’d graduated five years ago and informed him that his fly was undone.  Grandpa Charlie had said “Well, it was nice seeing you girls,” and hurried into his pickup truck, fumbling with the zipper on his jeans.

Grandma Clou waved Nikki’s question aside. “Who cares at my age?”

Nikki opened her mouth to protest, but Grandma Clou continued. “It’s just details, Nikki. No skin off anyone’s nose if a seventy-year-old lady needs more than one man to clean her clock. Amount of my life I’ve spent worrying about what people say is proper, what’s right and wrong. Do you know I once had a neighbor, Mrs. Johnson, or Phillips, something like that—head of the PTA, led the women’s bible study, you know the type—tell me I was bringing down the tone of the neighborhood when your mother’s dad and I fought the front lawn? We didn’t even throw anything at each other; it was just words. You should have seen the look on her face when I brought home Ray, the one after your grandpa. Her bottom lip stuck out like a dead fish.” 

Grandma Clou’s chuckling caused a phlegmy coughing fit, and I patted her on the back, afraid to pound and knock her off her orthopedics. She spit into a stained handkerchief that she stuffed back into her shirt pocket. The damp handkerchief was a bulge where her breasts probably hung forty years ago. 

“Men are like ice cream flavors,” Grandma Clou said, voice hoarse, “and damned if I don’t try each one before I die.” She pushed open the restaurant door with more force than I would have expected, mumbling something that sounded like “Mint chocolate chip…butter pecan…”

The three of us balanced on the chrome stools. Grandma Clou’s cheeks engulfed the stool so entirely there wasn’t a glint of chrome to be seen. Nikki ordered a chicken salad and diet coke. I ordered a half salad, soup, and chocolate milk because mom wouldn’t let me drink diet coke, even though Nikki always gave me a can when I was at her apartment. A frothy aspartame treat that would probably give me brain cancer one day, but it seemed too grown a treat to refuse. Grandma Clou ordered a double cheeseburger and a chocolate milkshake. She was supposed to be watching her cholesterol, but it was like she was in a private contest with herself, seeing how high she could get her LDL before her chest seized. I watched her down the entire meal, burger grease pooling in the space between her thumb and forefinger. She licked her lips and muffled a burp with the crook of her arm. I was caught between disgust and wonderment, disgust finally winning out when the aroma of her digestion drifted over to me.  

She flagged down the waiter and he brought our bill. Grandma Clou pulled two warm twenties out of her back pocket. When the waiter reached for them, she let her fingertips linger over his hand until his face turned red, and he looked to us for help. Neither of us tried to stop her. We had full bellies and had spent the entire afternoon attempting to stem Grandma Clou’s libido. He was on his own.

When he brought back change, Grandma Clou smiled. “Keep the change, honey.” She had a speck of lettuce between her teeth and wobbled as she dismounted the stool. The waiter looked down at the $1.35 and frowned. 

When we got back to Grandma Clou’s apartment, Nikki’s boyfriend was parked on the street, leaning against the hood of his Eclipse. “It’s past two,” he said, staring at Nikki.

Nikki hurried over to him, leaving me to balance Grandma Clou as the saturated fats hit her brain. Raised voices drifted over from the Eclipse and Nikki’s boyfriend tried to grab her arm. 

Grandma Clou bit her bottom lip. “Oh girl,” she said, and I knew she didn’t mean me.“You don’t have to go, Nikki,” she said when Nikki finally extricated herself and came to tell us goodbye.

I’m not sure Nikki heard her, because she was already halfway to the car. Her boyfriend gave Grandma Clou a suspicious look before peeling away from the curb. 

Grandma Clou was slower as we navigated the cracked concrete path. Harry, still sitting in his lawn chair and cradling a bottle of beer between his legs, looked up when we passed, but Grandma Clou didn’t notice. She trudged beside me until we were in her apartment, and she was once again ensconced in her recliner.   

“Gerald was my first husband,” she said when I brought her a glass of water and an aspirin. The orthopedics helped her balance, but they didn’t stop the gout flare-ups.

I sat down on the carpet, feeling exposed without Nikki there to act as a buffer. 

“Now I know what everyone says, but I was eighteen, not sixteen when we got married in the courthouse. He was older than me, but he had a good job and had managed to avoid the draft, which was more than could be said for all the boys my age who had signed up to be killed on some desert island in the middle of God-knows-where. It seemed a good idea at the time; I even convinced myself I loved him. But after the war, when his government contracts ended, he changed. One morning he came home reeking of beer and urine. When I asked him where he’d been all night, he grabbed me by the shoulders and started to shake me. He said he’d shake me until I stopped nagging and if that didn’t work, he’d find another way. I didn’t wait around to find out what that way would be. I took the train back to my folks. When he sobered up and came around, I was sitting on the porch with Dad’s shotgun across my lap. I’d rather kill someone than let them treat me like that.”

Grandma Clou downed the rest of her water and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She began rocking with more speed than before. Soon, she was generating a breeze that was not unwelcome in the warm apartment. I regarded her sagging middle, the dimples in her knees visible through the thin fabric of her pants. I could see the little hairs on her legs again, raised static-straight from her cracked skin. The orangutan from earlier was still there in the crease between her eyebrows and the way her breasts, stomach, and thighs seamlessly blended into each other.

But there was something else there, just under the surface, competing with the orangutan, and sometimes breaking through when Grandma Clou paused in her weather generation. At that moment, I couldn’t put my finger on it, so it remained as insubstantial as the breeze mingled with the scent of Grandma Clou’s lunch. But on a later Friday afternoon, sitting by myself on her floor since Nikki’s visits had become a relic of the past, I found it.

In the C volume under Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, I read about a woman who was much like Grandma Clou. Driven and unapologetic. Uncompromising, though callous. Always approaching every situation with hard-learned tenacity. A picture of a sculpture accompanying the article showed a woman with large eyes, nose, and brows. I studied the marble likeness searching for a resemblance to the woman rocking back and forth in front of me. Maybe it was there, in the set of her lips, in the way the right side was fractionally higher than the left, appraising.