My mother called me at the Boys & Girls Club to tell me Grandpa would be picking me up, which he did from time to time to help her out. Usually, I loved that call. It meant I'd get to stop at McDonald's on the way home, and he'd let me order my own large value meal. But after we scooped up our fast food, Grandpa told me my mother would be a little late, and we were going to hang out at his house. I fixed my face to hide my disappointment. He didn't have cable, and instead of Punky Brewster,I'd most likely end up watching him.
Grandpa sat at the table, sorting the edible parts of an almost-dead frog. His fingers bent and popped its sinewy limbs, separating the muscle from bone. The nearly departed performed a table dance for me. I was unimpressed. I wanted to be anywhere else in the world.
The kitchen walls were smoker's teeth. Age and negligence caused them to sweat a yellow film. I stared at them, doing my best to ignore the small splashing sound coming from an old white bucket next to the refrigerator. He'd caught a catfish earlier the same day. It had not wanted to be caught. My grandpa started talking to me.
"Don't trust them boys out there, little girl. They ain't worth shit, and they don't know shit." He spat the words onto the twitching frog's half-open body. If it had been even a little more alive, I wouldn't have been certain he was speaking to me. I nodded. Nodding was always the right answer, even when no one asked you a question, and especially when you hadn't really been listening. My grandpa loved to tell me stories about his past exploits, his current exploits, and the exploits he planned on having in the future. I was not afraid of him, but his wild tales made me uncomfortable, so when I could, I tuned him out. I wasn't allowed to say that because it might hurt his feelings. But it was true.
It was clear that he didn't really know what to do with children or what was appropriate for them to watch, see, or hear. How would he know?
Though he'd lived in the same city as his children, he hadn't had much to do with the upbringing of any of his four daughters with my grandmother.
"You think you got it so bad with your daddy being away?" my mother once said to me. "Your dad wishes he was around. He'd give anything to go back in time so he could be here with his family. My dad didn't live five miles away, and I didn't see or speak to him for weeks and months at a time. I didn't even know if he cared."
My grandfather had only recently attempted to become a more consistent part of his daughters' lives. We would all go out to a lake as a family, and my grandpa would teach all of us how to fish or catch frogs. Sometimes, the grandkids would run off into the woods or fields near wherever we were playing hide-and-seek. My mother and her sisters would stand around with their father, talking and laughing. Despite his absence in their childhood, they all seemed to enjoy his company enough now. Even my grandmother would sometimes have him over to watch boxing. He was the only person she knew who enjoyed it just as much as she did. He even started to have his grandkids, like me, over sometimes just to hang out. We were all getting used to him.
It never occurred to Grandpa it might be a little too much for a kid to watch him cut up living frogs, or that I might have been too young to sit on the couch and watch From Dusk till Dawnin the middle of the day as if it were a family film. He was doing his best, what he knew how to do. I was usually happy to spend time with him, but more and more, I just wanted to be home. I wanted to be with my mother and brother and sister. I wanted to watch TV in my bedroom, and read, and draw, and be surrounded only by things I could anticipate. Ever since I learned my cousin's secret, a secret she kept but hadn't chosen, I lost something that made me feel generally okay. It was replaced by the steady drum of fear that made my heart race and my stomach drop. That feeling happened less when I was home, and so I almost always wanted to be home. I was desperately trying to feel generally okay again.
School had been a safe place for me, until my teacher suggested that my advanced reading level required me to be moved into a second/third grade split classroom. My new teacher seemed nice enough, but a few of my classmates didn't like me almost immediately, which was fine. Though I spent a significant amount of time trying to figure out the best way to be good, I didn't spend much time at all, outside of with my immediate family, trying to be liked. Some people liked me, and some people didn't, and that seemed okay. Until one boy, Ty Applegate, zeroed in on me as a target. He lived in my apartment complex, he was a lot bigger than me, and he beat me up every time he saw me playing alone, as I preferred to do. Eventually, my mother told me if I didn't hit him back, then she would hit me for not protecting myself. The next time I saw A. J., I threw a rock at his mouth before he could hit me. He fell to the ground, screaming in pain, and I seized my chance to hit and hit and hit and hit. As I attempted to drive this boy into the sandpit beneath his writhing body, I remembered my grandmother telling me, "I never lost a fight in my life, because I never stopped fighting until I won."
Grandpa didn't have to tell me not to trust boys. I already knew I couldn't. And men. Especially men. At that point in my life, Grandpa was one of the only adult men who didn't make me nervous. Even my uncles, who had never done or said anything to make me question them, caused me to feel nauseous at the thought of being alone in a room with them. That was because of what had happened to my cousin. Ever since I found out that her stepdad had touched her, I hadn't felt right around most boys, and any men at all. The fear that bloomed in my center was foreign to me, unlike any I'd ever felt before. It was the kind of fear that made you cry before anything even happened. And I did. I started crying myself to sleep again. I didn't tell my mother that. Nothing pissed her off more than my tears, and I couldn't see how these would be received any differently from the ones that came before.
My mother had become obsessed with making sure that what happened to B wouldn't also happen to me. Whenever I went to someone else's home to play or spend the night or anything, my mother would grill me as soon as I walked back into her house.
"Who was there? Did something happen to you? Did anybody touch you? You better not lie to me!" My mother's face would stare down at me angrily as if I had done something wrong, as if she knew the truth and was just waiting for me to confess. Her words terrified me. I became afraid such an event was inevitable. Why else would my mother be so insistent I not lie to her about these things? Why else would she seem so mad at me? I wasn't sure I could protect myself physically if someone did try to touch my body, and so I thought it best to hole up in my bedroom. Hadn't that been what my mother was trying to teach me? That being touched could happen at any time with any man? Even if I hated the way she spoke about these things, I was made properly afraid by her warnings. Protecting my body became my number one goal. My grandpa didn't have to convince me that was necessary. If a man spoke to me while I was alone, I cowered in fear. I tried to see them all coming, because in my child mind, they were all coming for me.
Grandpa told me stories that would get hung up old, useless, and dry against my ribs, marking me as his kin. My brother and grandmother were the only ones ever interested in anything Grandpa had to say. My brother wanted the laughs. My grandmother wanted confirmation she had done the right thing by walking out on him decades earlier.
I knew he used to hit my grandmother and that she used to hit him right back. I knew I wasn't supposed to talk about that. If I closed my eyes when he told his version of some old story, I pictured my grandmother wielding a cast-iron skillet in one hand, a pot of boiling water in the other. I saw Grandpa running away from the water only to be bludgeoned by eight pounds of Calphalon weaponry. I thought of my mother in her room sleeping through the noise, or maybe huddled against her sisters, all of them afraid, but for whom? Their mother? Their father? That the house would come falling down on all their heads? Questions I couldn't ask about stories I wasn't supposed to hear.
"She'd knock me on my ass then yell at me for making too much noise." Grandpa let out a small laugh and flung another leg into the pile. His fingers were strong and quick. The frogs seemed to appreciate this about his process. He whipped a frog's torso through the kitchen window, out into his backyard, and chuckled again. I laughed but didn't get the joke. I rarely did. But I knew he liked me better when I laughed.
Just then, the white splashing bucket in the corner turned itself over. Its gaping maw fed the floor lake water and the one live catfish. The water raced toward dirt-filled crannies, places no one else could reach, or no one else had tried. Grandpa and I watched the catfish struggle for oxygen, spastically flipping from side to side, end to end. When it stopped moving, gills still fluttering, Grandpa picked it up with both hands and slapped it down on the table in front of me.
"I wasn't no good. Men ain't really no good." When he worked with his hands, he muttered to himself this way. Mostly about his regrets. He bent the fish into itself until there was an audible pop. I continued to hear the phantom splash from the bucket lying on its side. I couldn't get the sound out of my head even though the fish lay broken before me, and the water was beginning to pool around the bottoms of my feet.
"You'll learn to gut a fish like a man. Then, you won't need one."
I looked up at my Grandpa and felt angry with him. These frogs and fish had eyes, and as far as I knew, ears. Why did I have to listen to his rambling? I thought Grandpa broke and ate everything that might love him. I didn't want to sit here and learn to do the same.