One of the Ugliest Things I Can Tell You

I'll tell you this about yesterday: I was awake only six hours.

I'll tell you this about Monday: I spent ten hours in the hospital.

It wasn't for me. I wasn't the one wearing the flower-patterned gown. I wasn't the one gagging into a metal pan. I wasn't the one airlifted from one hospital to the next. I wasn't the one who had a stroke, the one who had blood pooling in the back of my skull, the one whose eyes clouded over, smogged, grew filmy.

That was my grandfather.

My mother called around 8PM Monday night, told me my grandfather had been taken to the hospital, that they thought he had a stroke. I told her I'd be right there. I hung up the phone, changed my clothes, shrugged into a sweatshirt, put on some shoes, walked out to my car. I waited and waited and waited. I thought it might take a few minutes, that I might feel one way or another about the news. After all, my grandfather was in the hospital. That kind of news would make a normal person feel something, react in some way. What I reacted to was my mother. I didn't think, Oh my God, my grandfather! I thought, I should go be with Mom.

I drove the empty back roads of the country town where I grew up. My highbeams bounced off the creek bed, the pine trees, the wet pavement. I kept waiting. Nothing was coming. No sadness, no fear, no regret, no nothing. I was just a girl driving a car on a dark street.

The only thing I could really think about was what I'd heard on the radio during my drive home from work. One of the local stations had a woman on--a woman who was attending the funerals of the Virginia Tech students who died last week. She wasn't a relative, a friend, or a sympathizer. She was a member of a group who was preaching what they believed to be the truth behind the Virginia Tech shootings: that those students deserved to die. She said they were wicked and evil. She said they were shot for a reason, that God had found them to be lacking and undeserving and so he devised a way to eliminate them.

The DJs yelled and fussed. They called her crazy. They called her a heartless bitch. She told them they were going straight to Hell. Then she said most of America was, too. Most of the people listening to the radio right now, listening to their silly little show and their silly little antics, all those people were on an express train to Hell. You're evil! she shouted. All of you! Just evil!

I flicked the radio off then, but I couldn't keep myself from thinking about that lady and her thoughts about those students who died, her thoughts about all of us. I wanted to find her and hold her down, tell her that's not how the world or God works, but the more I thought about it the more I thought, What if she's right? What if we are all evil?

Several hours later, I wasn't feeling all that good about myself. I was pulling into the cratered driveway of the hospital and wondering if deep, deep down I wasn't a very good person. I was wondering if I had an evil bent to me, if something inside had gone wrong, had twisted until it was skewed and defective and not good. I figured maybe this thing with my grandfather was punishment for past wrongs I'd committed against him and my family.

For a long time my grandfather and I didn't speak. We didn't speak because of what happened on Christmas Eve in 2002. My family was gathered around the table my grandmother had prepared. My uncle was there, my mother was there. My brother and my boyfriend were also there. So was a strange pale Midwesterner--someone my uncle met at his job, a boy who hailed from Minnesota, a boy who hadn't met any of us before. His family was 1,000 miles away, and my uncle didn't want him to be alone for the holiday, so he asked him to join us.

Shortly after we sat down to dinner, my grandfather started in on his normal holiday routine: he talked about how much he hated black people. In the span of two minutes, he'd used the n-word five times. On Christmas.

This wasn't new. Not at all. My usual policy during these holiday rants was to make long ruts in my mashed potatoes, to busy myself by directing rivers of gravy through these ruts, to try to keep myself from hating my grandfather. But this time I was sitting next to my boyfriend, and I was burning with shame because my my grandfather was saying these things--awful, awful things--in front of him and a complete stranger. It was one thing for him to try to weigh us down with his politics, but to do it in front of strangers was too much. And I was sick of him.

My grandmother said his name once, a reprimand--George!--but that only made him angrier. He continued. He said worse things. My boyfriend had stopped eating his turkey. He had a hand on my knee.

And I knew this was him trying to tell me it was okay, that I shouldn't make a fuss, that I should just keep on eating my potatoes. But I was filled with a sudden rage. Just who did my grandfather think he was? I didn't want to have to sit and listen to him one more second.

So I made my voice steady and calm. I said, "Grandpa? It's Christmas. Please."

The whole table stopped moving. There was silence. Nobody breathed.

My grandfather looked at me as if he'd never seen me before. He stared at me for maybe four seconds, but it felt like eternity. Then he told me he didn't give a damn if it was Christmas. This was his house, I was eating his food, and he was going to say whatever he pleased.

I looked back down at my plate, at my mountain of potatoes, and started eating again. Around the table, breaths expelled. I swallowed gravy and the urge to cry.

An hour later we were gathered in the living room for gift opening. My grandmother's tree burned brightly in the corner. Flutes of champagne glittered in the blush of the multicolored lights. I'd steadily made my way through a pile of gifts I'd gotten: waffle maker, crock pot, DVD player.

I felt a little better, but I should've known it wouldn't last for long. The gift opening continued. Each person had a turn, and we kept circling the living room that way. When the next turn fell on my uncle, he bent to select a gift from his pile. His pants rode up with the bend. His ankles were suddenly visible, and they were outfitted with a bright holiday sock--a sock that was most likely worn to please my grandmother, who hoarded and handed out holiday-themed socks with unparalleled glee.

My grandfather, upon seeing those socks, gasped. "Did you steal those socks off a dead nigger?" he asked. As he said that last word he turned to look directly at me. See? his look said. See? I can say whatever I want, and I don't care what you think about it.

I said nothing. His look was already too smug, and I didn't want to give him more occasion to look that way. I turned to say something to my boyfriend. I leaned up against his knee. I rested there and tried to ignore my grandfather.

This didn't work. The gift opening had passed to my uncle's wife, and she was ripping paper to reveal a set of ivory combs my uncle had gotten for her.

My grandfather raised his voice and stared right at me. "You know what kind of hair that comb wouldn't work with?" he asked. "Nigger hair."

What happened next was ugly. I don't know what happened inside my brain--I don't know what fired or burst into action--but I do know what I felt was something snap. Something unraveled and I lost all control. I was on my feet. "I can't believe you!" I was yelling. "How could you do this? And in front of strangers! My boyfriend! A guest in your home! I asked you nicely! Politely! I said please! It's Christmas!"

That's when my grandfather started thrashing in his armchair. Wrapping paper flew into the air. The chair rocked noisily on its hinges as he struggled to get the footrest down. I thought for a second maybe he was going to come after me. He thrust a finger at me. "You!" he howled. "You are nothing but a spoiled brat! A little know-it-all! Well, you don't know anything! You don't know shit from shit! I am seventy years old, and no little bitch is going to come into my house and tell me what I can and cannot say! Not you, not anyone! I could care less who is visiting! Do you hear me?"

I heard him. I heard him loud and clear, which is surprising because I was crying by that point. It was a hard crying--loud and jagged. He kept yelling, kept saying what an awful girl I was, so spoiled and so inconsiderate, so stupid. But I couldn't hear it all anymore. I was out of the room, running down the hall, running into a bedroom and throwing myself on a pile of coats. I cried in that nest of down and zippers for a few minutes until my boyfriend came after me, told me to put on my coat. He said he wasn't going to sit in a house where people treated people like this. He said, "Come on, we'll go home."

And I was putting on my coat and asking him why my grandfather would do something like that, say those things, treat me that way. I was ready to walk out. But my grandmother appeared in the doorway. My mother, too. They made me sit down. My grandmother told me I had to go back out there and apologize. She said, "He'll never change, Jess. He'll never change, and you have to accept that."

But even back then I knew there was a difference between asking someone to change and asking someone to respect you. If he wanted to go on thinking that way and saying awful things, he could go right ahead and do so. But to deliberately make everyone around him uncomfortable because he thought that was power--and that's what he loved more than anything--that wasn't right. And I wouldn't apologize for asking him to stop. I would never apologize for that.

But my grandmother pleaded. She said I had to, I just had to apologize. I had to be the one to make it right. She wrote me regular letters up until her death, letters that kept begging for an apology from me. He's family, she argued. I wondered what I was. What made me less worthy of receiving an apology?

I didn't apologize. I didn't the night it happened, and I haven't since. My grandfather and I didn't speak until after my grandmother died, and those first few conversations were fueled by guilt. Every conversation after that was fueled by another type of guilt--this one not by death but by my mother. I don't want her to have to deal with it anymore.

And so that is what I was thinking about when I sat in the room with my grandfather, who had started losing his eyesight at noon but hadn't thought to call anyone about it. By the time his girlfriend called for an afternoon chat, he was several hours into a stroke and the doctors couldn't do anything but wait and wait and wait.

I was thinking what a shitty person I was. Here was a man--my own grandfather--who was almost in tears because he couldn't see anything or anyone, and he was saying, "What am I going to do? Oh Jesus Christ, what a thing to have happen. What a thing. How will I live?" And I didn't feel much of anything. I did what everyone did--I put on the good front. I did schtick with my family to take his mind off of it, I told stories, I nodded and said yes, yes, yes when people would say, "It could be worse. It could be worse." I drove to the next hospital after they airlifted him to Buffalo. I stayed late into the night. I went back and forth from his curtain in the emergency room to the waiting room, where my mother and uncle were sleeping. I stayed up with his girlfriend. I waited with him until he went for his MRI. Then I went back to the waiting room and tried to fall asleep, which I couldn't. I stayed at that hospital until 6:00 AM, and then I followed everyone into the parking lot so we could go eat some food, take a shower, get some sleep.

And I did sleep. I slept a lot. I went to bed at 7:30 AM and didn't wake up again until 4:00 PM. I spent the rest of the day wandering through the house like I wasn't quite sure where I was or what had happened or how to feel. I bumped through the next few hours before falling asleep again at 11:00. Sometimes, I guess, it's just easier to sleep than it is to think about things.