“What the fu—the heck are you talking about, Victor?” My father didn’t let her curse around us, but I knew she could swear like a Geiger. Instead, my father would make up his own colorful exclamations and vociferations on every stubbed toe or bitten tongue: “Maanuggia!” “Your mother-in-law!” “Jiminy Cricket!” to name a few. I swear, the man could be getting his arm sawed off and he still wouldn’t say “Fuck!” or “Jesus Christ!”
“I’m going to die!” She got up from her rolling chair and checked the TV as I continued my tirade. “And you’re going to die and Tony is going to die…”
“What were you watching?”
“And Britney is going to die and Dad is going to die.” She grabbed the remote and pressed rewind.
Mum Mum and her friend Bill Clinton (not that Bill Clinton—he was from Philadelphia, and a Republican) came down the basement steps, cocktails in hand.
“And Mum Mum is going to die!”
“Victor!”
“Oh, am I, now? Then at least let me top off my Rob Roy first!”
Uproar.
“Mom, did you bring him this tape?”
“Yes, I sure did.”
“Well what the fu—heck was on it?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Dinosaurs! That’s what he loves. Remember how he used to carry around those…”
“Well the poor kid is screaming bloody murder over here. You didn’t check it? Maybe you accidentally taped some Dateline episode or something. I’m rewinding it now, trying to figure it out.”
“Oh, you and your sisters think I’m so helpless with technology.” She handed her drink to Bill Clinton. “Just the other day, your sister came over to check the desktop…”
“I’m not saying that, Mom. All I know is that Victor—Victor, why are you crying? He just started screaming about all of us dying out of nowhere. I almost had a heart attack.”
“Don’t say that, with the way your father passed and all,” she said.
“Alright, well, I can’t figure out what he’s screaming about. There’s nothing here but dinosaurs.”
“Oh, he’ll be fine.” She grabbed her drink back from Bill Clinton and sat on the couch next to me. When she spoke, the whiskey odor smacked me in the face, forcing my lips to curl and my eyes to water. “I don’t know what it is that is making you cry, but listen up, sweetheart, because I’ve seen it all.” She took a sip from her drink and closed her eyes, savoring the whiskey like the water of life. “The world is a cruel and nasty place. I worked in Pennsylvania Hospital during the height of the Mafia Wars…”
“Mom, he shouldn’t be hearing this.”
“It’s fine. So sweetheart, I worked in Pennsylvania Hospital, where I met your Papa Ben, during those… tragic times, and I believe it was Hell on Earth.”
“So, Hell is in Pennsylvania Hospital, not Penn Station?” I said, calming down, rubbing my nose with the blanket.
“What’s that? Oh my, look at the time. We better get over to Nancy’s before she begins to worry. Bill, be a dear and grab the Dewar’s from the wet bar. There should be plenty left to get that old bat flushed, ha! Anyway, Victor, my dear, what I am trying to say is that one day I will die, you’re right. But if you’re so”—she seemed to finally realize that she was speaking to a seven-year-old—“sad about everyone dying, you won’t ever enjoy life. ‘A day without joy,’ or is it ‘laughter’? Bill, dear, what’s that saying? ‘A day without something is a day wasted?’”
Bill Clinton was analyzing a bottle of Chivas 18 Year my dad only drank after PTA meetings and hadn’t been paying attention.
“Never mind all that. Here is what I’ve learned after my too-many years than I’d like to admit.” Mum Mum had stopped having birthdays in 1987. “The world is as dangerous as it is dark, so sharpen those horns, little devil.”
It had snowed eighteen inches and we hadn’t had school for two days. I didn’t even like the snow, but sometimes I guess a release from Pierce Stone was worth shoveling the brown slush. We always had to shovel Mrs. Bailey’s driveway also—Nancy Bailey, the woman who lived a few houses down and was always drinking with Mum Mum. My dad would say that we had to take care of the elderly, that it was the right thing to do.
After Tony and I helped my father shovel the driveway and the path leading to our front door, and after we shoveled Mrs. Bailey’s driveway and the path leading to her front door, we went to the Geigers’ to hang.
Karl and George hadn’t changed out of their pajamas all day. The Geigers paid a guy with a truck to plow their driveway. We went to the side door and threw off our wet boots and ran through the kitchen, where Mrs. Geiger was making raclette that stunk up the whole house. We descended the creaky steps into the basement, and Tony grabbed two Stewart’s Root Beers from the fridge.
“Awww, man, what do you two idiots want?” said George, flipping through channels aimlessly.
“Happy to see you too, slut-face,” said Tony as he handed me a Stewart’s.
“Ya know, there isn’t shit on TV. Do you idiots want to do something?”
“What the crap can we do? There is a crap-ton of snow and it’s getting dark.”
“I don’t know, but if I see this corny Maxwell House commercial one more time I’m gonna break something. Hey Karl…” Karl, again shirtless at the computer, even in the dead of winter, was deep in an orc campaign. “Karl!”
“What do you want?” he said without turning around.
“Well, shit, what do you wanna do? We gotta do something. You’ve been playing Warcraft all day.”
“Hey George, ya know what we could do?” Tony started, muffling his laughter. “You know we…”
“We could go look for weapons up in the attic!”
Uproar.
“I’m still going to murder you two for that,” said Karl, without taking his eyes off the screen.
“Vic was crying!”
“What an idiot!”
“Fuck you guys,” said Karl as he turned off the computer. “Hey Vic, wanna go
