Scream (4 page)

I went to the supermarket to get the hell out of my mom's house and found myself pushing a cart around, ready to go postal.

My real mission was going to the “bulk candy” aisle to get my mom the sour balls she liked. There was a man who lived in that aisle. He opened each bin, licked his fingers, touched the candy, fondled it . . . and left. Asperger's? OCD? Plain weird? I don't know, but my mom was addicted to these colored hard candies, so I had to get them. For years she had gone to the supermarket just about every day to fill a bag; she wouldn't eat the red ones or the orange ones—only the white, yellow, and green, green being her favorite. But there were hardly ever any green.

When I was still living in Brooklyn I used to have the hard candy shipped to her—five, ten pounds at a time—in between my visits every few weeks. Sometimes my mom would call me in a panic. “Where are my sour balls? I can't find them!”

“But Mom, I shipped you ten pounds a little while ago.”

I just thought: Wow, Mom eats a lot of sour balls. Or that one day I would open a closet and a vast supply would fall out. Finally my brother called me and said, “Don't give her that candy! It's bad for her teeth.”

That's when I figured out that her panic directly coincided with his twice-a-year visits. He was not only tossing the candy, but not telling her, and thereby inflicting an extra dose of dementia.

He had done the same to his own his father-in-law, who was ninety and liked ice cream. The father-in-law also had a live-in home aide, so he was well looked after, but my brother and sister-in-law went to court and got guardianship, saying the aide was a drug addict and prostitute, and placed him in a rental property. They bought ice cream and they put it in the freezer. And then they put a chain and padlock on it. I remember saying to Dad, “What bothers me is that they put a chain around the freezer to stop him from eating ice cream. I mean, you can't eat all the ice cream you want when you're a kid because you're not allowed, and then you can't eat all the ice cream you want when you're an adult because you worry about getting fat. Surely by the time a person gets to be ninety-three, they should be allowed to eat as much ice cream as they want. If he was going to die at, say, ninety-six, who would say, ‘Yeah, but he might have lived to be ninety-eight if only he hadn't eaten so much ice cream'?”

Anyway, every time I went to the supermarket, Mom had fallen by the time I came back to the house, stuck on the ground, unable to get up. Sometimes she demanded hard candy while she was lying down. “Mom! Let me help you up!”

“First bring me a lime sour ball.”

life in ithaca

B
efore my mom went into the nursing home, I would go up to Ithaca from Brooklyn a few times a month and scrape the wrappers and the old gum and the remains of anything else off the bedroom floor. There was always a layer a few inches deep. I would work and work on clearing out a space. I would put a wastebasket next to her bed. “Ma! When you unwrap a candy, can't you put the wrapper in the bin and not the floor?”

But she never did.

When I left her house the floor was clean, but by the time I came back a few weeks later the floor was covered. There was just so much stuff.

Some people maybe have a drawer where there is tape neatly organized in a box, and a drawer below that with batteries organized by size. These people do not have a drawer containing fifty eye pencil stubs, a wind-up metal chicken, a thousand free address labels with pictures of kittens from some Humane Society, and a small lead sap with a leather handle to hit someone over the head with if they break into your house in the middle of the night. The sap had belonged to my grandfather, who was a parole officer in New York City, like, seventy years ago. My mom kept it, though, because where were you ever going to find one these days? It wasn't like there was a single store where you could just go in and say, “I would like to buy a sap.” That meant, in my mother's opinion, it was a valuable collectible. This was the kind of drawer my mom had.

When I moved in I wanted to get the place cleaned up, but there was so much stuff. I couldn't get through to the bed in the room I was staying in. I had to tunnel my way. It took me three years to finally get the place cleared out.

The back door was crumbling and air was rushing in under it. For years I had been telling her to get it fixed, but she always said, “You can't find anybody around here to do any work.” I figured what she really meant was that there were people around who would do jobs, but she didn't want them in her house (even if they could get in, with the gum wrappers and half-eaten sour balls).

Winter was coming and I was panicking about the door. In Brooklyn, you have central heating. You have a super. The super may not be competent, he may not be any good at fixing things, but you have that incompetent man, who must obey your commands, as your very own—more obedient than a husband because you tip him at Christmas.

I went on local listings on the computer, and at random called a number for a handyman: Melvyn answered.

Melvyn drove a rusted pickup. He was short and weighed about 250 pounds, most of it in his center. He had on overalls. He had a beard and a red face. He breathed heavily, so heavily and slowly that he seemed to be saying with every exhalation,
I don't want to fix your door,
and with every inhalation,
I'm not going to fix your door,
like some kind of Buddhist chant or yoga breathing exercise.

But he said he would do the job.

“When do you think you can start?”

“Start?” He stood staring at the back door, wheezing. “Oh. I don't know about that.” It was Monday. “How about Thursday? I could get here on Thursday. Or Friday. Or I could come next week.”

“How about Thursday?”

“What?” Melvyn said. “Um. I'm going to have to check with my wife. She works nights as a nurse. I've been out of work. So I thought I would put up an ad. I didn't think anybody would respond, especially not so soon. I'm going to check with my wife and I'll let you know.”

You could tell he was somewhat disappointed I wanted him to do the job. And I did not think I would see Melvyn again.

On Thursday Melvyn returned. He started to work, first by looking at the back door. I left him hard at it and went upstairs. After about a half hour, Melvyn yelled, “Um, ma'am?”

I went downstairs.

“Ma'am?”

“Yes, Melvyn. What's up?”

“I don't feel good.” He whimpered and had a pained expression.

“What's the matter?”

“Did you know . . . you got a dead squirrel out there in the back?”

“A dead squirrel?”

“I had to go out back to get some air. You got a dead squirrel and it made me sick. I think maybe your dogs ate it. Something ate it. When I saw it, I threw up. You know them kids were over to the house the other day, they ate a lot of candy and they been sick. Maybe I got something from them. I'm going home.”

He had removed the back door. Now there was a big hole where the door had been. He began gathering up all his tools.

I followed him to the front door. “Melvyn . . . I . . . Do you think you could clean up your vomit? It's a very small yard and I don't want the dogs finding it.”

He seemed surprised. “What? Oh . . . No. It's okay. I cleaned it up already.”

He got in his truck and drove off.

I went to see. What had made Melvyn ill? Off in a corner was a small, decaying squirrel corpse. It was true I had not seen it before. It was very old and there was almost nothing left to it. It had dried completely and was bald except for a small strip of fur on the tail. It looked like a young squirrel that had died maybe a few years before. It was not a fresh roadkill or covered with flies or maggots.

The dogs gathered around me, but the little cadaver was so old it was of no interest to them. I grabbed a plastic bag, wrapped the squirrel in it, and threw it in the garbage. I checked briefly but I did not see any vomit.

You wouldn't say Melvyn was charming or quirky. He was just a big, fat, vomiting, gray-bearded guy. He was not an Ithaca guy.

Ithaca is an academic, university town. It has a cooperative health food store and vegetarian and vegan options. It has jazz concerts and fiber arts festivals. Ithaca is in Tompkins County. Melvyn came from another county.

a bit about schuyler county

M
elvyn came from Schuyler County, where all the men drive trucks and have facial hair, tattoos, and hunt deer. Schuyler County does not have a health food store. Schuyler County has a Cheez Doodle supply center—Walmart. Schuyler County is where, if you have an old bathtub you do not want, you throw it in the woods.

I did not know then that in less than two years I would move to Schuyler County and buy a run-down Greek Revival farmhouse that had graffiti on the wall that said
KILL MOM
, and I did not know that I would get a boyfriend like Melvyn, only a lot cuter, and I would drive around in this tattooed construction worker's truck while he showed me spots where he hunted deer up in the woods.

But I did know—even then, in Ithaca—that living in upstate New York wasn't any year in Provence with charming quirky local characters eating great French cuisine. It was barfing fat guys and bizarre supermarket managers who put insecticide in the beverage aisle.

Okay, could I have organized a supermarket? Probably not. I would never even have gotten a job in a supermarket. I'm just saying.

In Ithaca, there are vegetarian academics who teach morons at the prestigious university.

In Schuyler County, there are locals with guns and tractors who are mostly unemployed. The women work; they have menial positions in supermarkets and in nursing homes at minimum wage and they have unemployed husbands. A lot of the unemployed husbands have lawn tractors. You can tell they are unemployed because on any day of the week they are out there mowing a dead lawn, around and around. Sometimes I drive up the same road for a week and the same guy is out there every day.

They had some of the shortest lawns on the planet in upstate New York.

Forget Provence, this wasn't even the mountains of West Virginia, where they had local traditions like bluegrass music with men playing the fiddle and moonshine and a charming accent. Here it was Top 20 country-western radio only: in the barns, in the trucks, and at home. Country-WESTern. This was
not
the West.

Schuyler County imported everything. There was no local indigenous music. There were no shaved truffles or hearty cassoulets. The local diet is on view in the shopping carts: twenty-pound bags of sour-cream-and-onion potato chips, sodas (and also “root beer”), hot dogs, and maybe some ice cream or boxed cake, all of which might be as old as the bird's nests used in that Chinese soup, what is it, thousand-year-old soup or something? “Preservative” is the county's number-one food ingredient.

In Schuyler County, when a cupcake shop opened—a concept already at least ten years old in New York City—they baked the cupcakes using Betty Crocker cake mix. It was considered upscale.

Little did I know this would soon be the cuisine I was going to have to learn to cook. I like a challenge, though.

Schuyler County Salad

1 lb. cooked macaroni

1 2-lb. jar Miracle Whip Dressing

1 shaker of salt

The only things the men in the area actually enjoy, if they are true locals, are snowmobiling and hunting. The regional costume for men is trucker's caps and greasy Carhartts and baggy Dickies, out of which protrude their proud guts. With everybody poor or unemployed the stores are always empty until—come fall—the hunting departments of the sporting goods stores are packed. The men turn into shoppers for guns, the latest in camouflage fashion, foot warmers, portable deer blinds, and expensive soaps to wash their clothes in, so they didn't have any scent to scare off the deer.

At Mom's first nursing home there was a male nurse who told me, “I hunt for sustenance. To feed the family.” That's what they all say—they are doing it for “sustenance.” No, they are not. By the time these men buy the guns and the ammo and the night vision goggles and the camouflage to hide themselves and the Day-Glo vests so the other hunters don't shoot them, and buy gas for their pickups that get, I don't know, ten, fifteen miles to the gallon, shoot a deer, lug it to the butcher, have it butchered—forget it! You are looking at meat that probably cost ten, twelve bucks a pound—and for what? Not only does nobody need to eat meat all the time, but venison jerky, venison burger, venison steak—that stuff doesn't taste good! I don't care if you add chili and cumin or if you put it in a slow cooker with red wine and onions, it is gamy and stringy and has a metallic taste of fear you can't ever quite cover up.

an inhabitant of schuyler county

I
used to go to sleep every night and pray that when I woke I would have become vegan, or at least vegetarian. But life doesn't necessarily turn out the way you want, and I would find myself at the stove, cooking bacon again.

I can say that it is morally better to be a vegetarian since you are not making anything else suffer in order to keep your own suffering going. There are people like the Jains, in India, who eat nothing but leaves and leaf by-products and have to make sure there are no bugs on them. They avoid harming animals, even to the point of getting up to gently brush the streets before dawn so no one steps on an insect. There are Orthodox Jews so religious that all of Crown Heights was thrown into a tizzy when they realized the water contained organisms that were some kind of microscopic crustacean—not kosher.

These philosophies may be too extreme, but what do I know? Since I eat meat, I cannot tell others what to do. I do know that a cow—or a sheep—is not going to survive by itself out in the wild. The types of cows we have now are not aurochs. They need silage, shelter, worm paste. They are feeble-minded, survival-wise, or we would see cows proud and free in the forest.