Learning Something

“You learnin’ somethin’?” my grandma asks me, and I shift my gaze from the crowd to her. She’d been watching me study a couple of the guests socializing while they swatted at mosquitoes that had drifted in through the windows.

I smile at her and reply, “Always, Gramma, always,” but divert further questions and say, “Looks like they’re cutting the cake now.”

I haven’t talked to her at all tonight until now, as we sit two seats away at my cousin Holly’s wedding reception, because I can’t come up with anything to say or ask that wouldn’t require her to access short-term memory, which her mind seems to incinerate every few seconds. Ninety-six, and she fell on her face last week, though she doesn’t remember when or how. My mom tells me that every time Grandma passes a mirror she gasps in shock at the sight of her own purpled, swollen face. As she eats, she grimaces with each bite, confused at why her jaw hurts so much, but true to her character and love of food, she continues to chew through the pain.

Twenty minutes earlier, I had balked for a moment when I recognized the parents of my first girlfriend walking towards me. Mr. Evans took my hand in a warm shake and offered a genuine grin and glassy eyes, while Mrs. Evans took my hand in a brief pinch and regarded me with a tight, close-mouthed smile. Her appraising look, caked in base, seemed bent on comparing me against something, perhaps the man her daughter has now been married to for about eleven years.

As for me, I’m thirty years old and single in a culture that expects something else.

I admit that part of me hopes she’ll tell Tiffaney at the next Sunday dinner, in front of her husband, how handsome and accomplished I’ve become and brag about how I’m pursuing my masters degree and teaching English at a university.

After they both posed the cliché “How’s life?” questions, I asked how their family is doing. Following my lead, they didn’t mention Tiffaney either, praising the recent job promotion of their youngest son instead.

A few weeks ago, while reading the scene in Angle of Repose where the “gorgon” Lyman Ward bares his anguish and hurt to his ex-wife, who had cheated on him and left him for the very surgeon that had amputated his leg a couple years before, I’d bawled. If my roommates and their guests hadn’t been out in the hall, I would’ve howled too. For whatever reason, this scene had reminded me of the late afternoon when Tiffaney and I ended things.

She was sitting three steps up from me around a bend in the stairway, my left leg bouncing at Mach 1, eyes fixed on the wall. She explained that it wasn’t good for us to keep dating and that she felt like it was “the Lord’s will.” Her soft tones came off confident, like she was acting in both of our best interests, and as she spoke she watched me with softness and concern in her eyes. But these promised the imminent withdrawal of the same.

After she finished, a few minutes passed with no sound but my pulse thumping in my ears while she watched my jaws flex and nostrils flare. Then she reached out to touch my shoulder.
But I recoiled and yelled: “Don’t touch me unless you mean it!”

Now I wonder if I’ve forgiven her for what, at whatever adolescent level, qualified as “leaving me”. I’d been shocked when she’d tried to add me as a Facebook friend a few months ago. She probably has five kids by now, for heaven’s sake, I thought.

I’m not sure how long I stared at her photo, the cursor poised over the “reject” button and my index finger hovering over the mouse. But, soon enough, I pressed down, the picture went away, and it felt like a bag of warm ink had just been punctured within my chest, and the heat of it all seemed to leak out my of my ears and nose.

I rallied by telling myself that I no longer jolt at the sight of a 1992 white Toyota Corolla, the make and model of Tiffaney’s car. But now I wonder if it’s just because most of these Toyota’s are buried in scrap yards now, scabs of once white paint now boiled and flaking, cankered in rust, peaking out through the carnage of twisted metal and crushed windshields.

As I watch my Grandma eat and wince her way through an assortment of fruit on the plastic plate in front of her, her question repeats in my mind. Are you learnin’ somethin’?