| A Trip to Queens
We were headed for Queens, where my Great Aunt Martha lived. Mom drove with Aunt Terry in the passenger seat, and me, age eight, my sister Kim, age five, and my cousins, Denise and Brian, ages eight and nine, in the back seat.
This was in the days before people made a fuss about child safety seats and such, so the four of us were just sitting and standing around in the back, playing around. It was Good Friday, and we were all dressed nicely to see Aunt Martha, whom we rarely went to see. Aunt Martha was a stickler for Catholic Rules and Regulations, so on Good Friday, you dressed up. Jesus himself didn’t dress up for the original Good Friday, he just wore a loin cloth, but we had to wear nice shoes and scratchy shirts.
At that age, an hour is as long as eternity, so this was a long, long car ride. As we bumped along on the Long Island Expressway, I played with a miniature electronic football game, which showed players as little hyphens of green light that disappeared and then reappeared in different directions. It was a “Pong”-era game, so it was getting pretty boring pretty fast. I didn’t even know how to play it, I just kept hitting buttons until I heard the little electronic song for a goal.
Kim and Denise were playing with Barbie dolls. Barbie was never attractive to me, maybe because I was a kid, but even now as I think of her naked plastic body with the fake tan lines, I don’t lust for her one bit. Brian was doing something to my right, next to one of the back windows, neither of which was openable. The car was probably designed for safety for kids who might open a window and leap out at sixty miles an hour, but it also was pretty stuffy in there.
At some point during the ride, I started to feel nauseous. “I’m getting car sick,” I told my mother.
“Don’t think about it,” she said. So I went a few minutes trying not to think of it, but there was nothing else to think about back there, besides unsexually pleasing naked Barbie dolls and an idiotic football game that was impossible to understand. So I told her again.
“Breathe in your nose and out your mouth,” she said. And I started, snooooof, puuuuuh, snooof, puuuuuh…not working.
By now, my sister and cousins knew what was going on, and soon Denise chimed in that she was starting to feel sick too, now that I mentioned it. Kim also felt sick. So all of us except Brian were starting to whine and moan and wail about how sick we were. My mother and Aunt were just chatting away up there, while we all snooofed and exhaled over and over.
Brian was actually laughing at us. “I don’t feel sick,” he told his mother, who wasn’t paying attention to him anyway. “You guys are babies,” he said, “I’m feeling fine and you’re all sick. Well, you’d better not throw up on me, because I’m in my nice shirt and pants and shoes.” He was really asking for it.
After perhaps ten minutes of ridiculing us, he stood up and leaned forward behind my aunt, and said, “Mom, will you open the window?” Aunt Terry absently opened it up for him; the conversation with my mother must have been pretty engrossing, even if it was only about curtains. Brian, from the back seat, leaned forward, stuck his head out the window, went “huuuaaaak” and started vomiting. Brian! We were horrified in the back seat. We knew, even at this young age, that nothing makes you want to throw up more than seeing someone else throw up, and we already felt sick.
Aunt Terry, still engrossed in conversation, knew Brian’s head was out the window, but not what he was doing. “Brian Holst, you bring your head in the car this instant,” she said.
Brian was nothing if not obedient.
In he came, bwaaaaaaaaaaaagh, puking all over the back of his mother’s seat, on the floor, on the football game and on MY SHOE!
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!” the other three of us screamed. NOW Aunt Terry and my mother saw what was happening. My aunt cried, “For God’s sake, Brian , put your head out the window!” and Brian finished up with one last gush onto the window and outside of the car.
Panic in the back seat! “AAAAAAAH! MOM! MOM!”
“EEEEEEEWWWW! OH NO OH NO OH NO!”
“HEEEEEELLLLLLP! IT’S ON ME! IT’S ON ME!
“STAY OVER THERE BRIAN! DON’T COME OVER HERE!”
My mom got us pulled over on some street in Queens, I don’t know how she didn’t crash the car with all the turmoil going on, and we all fled the car, gagging and yelping. Brian seemed relatively unaffected by all this, almost content. My mom had stopped in front of McDonald’s and got a pile of napkins, and she and my aunt started cleaning up. We stayed ten feet away from Brian, because who knew if Mount St. Brians was going to blow again?
Mom and Aunt Terry did the best they could with the cheapo napkins, but the car still smelled gross. We held our noses as we got back in, and mom started us off again. Ironically, we were mere blocks from Aunt Martha’s apartment.
We parked again, walked to the building, and at the door, mom pushed a button. Seconds later, the door made a horrible buzzing, and we all rushed inside. We trouped up the stairs to Aunt Margaret’s apartment. The building was old; nothing like the apartment buildings you see on Seinfeld or Friends. The halls were dim and filthy, with broken tile floors. The windows were fogged and dirty. I didn’t want to touch a thing.
Aunt Martha let us into her apartment, which she had lived in for some 30-plus years. The apartment was unchanged in that time. It was like taking a time machine back to the 1940s. Turquoise tiles and walls, the original refrigerator (the old kind that had round edges and a car-door style handle on the front) and stove. The living room walls were yellow, but had darkened with dust and dirt over the years. If you moved a picture on the wall, you’d see a bright yellow square in its place.
And there were plenty of pictures. Pictures of family members I’d never even imagined, let alone met. She had pictures hanging of every person she was related to, going back to the first bipedal hominids, 300,000 years ago. She even had pictures of us on the walls.
Of course, one person got special wall space, and there were more pictures of him than of any of us: Jesus. You’d have thought he’d been HER son, there were so many Christly artifacts around. Everywhere you looked, Jesus was watching you. It was like a savior security camera system. You couldn’t get away with a sin in here without the big JC knowing about it.
Aunt Martha was a harsh woman, thin-lipped with a grim demeanor. She didn’t seem to like children, instructing us not to touch a thing as we sat on uncomfortable, plastic-covered couch cushions. The apartment smelled musty and old. There was ribbon candy in the kitchen, turquoise-colored, just like the rest of the room! Jesus knows how long it had been there (and he really does know, since he was watching it from three angles).
Mom and Aunt Terry chatted with Aunt Martha, who was able to hold a conversation while repeatedly telling four children “Stay away from that.” I hung around the old metal water-heat pipes. Strangely, though they could have burned me if they were on, Aunt Martha never told me not to touch them.
Brian and Denise were told by their mother to sit quietly, and so they did. Conformists. Kim and I wandered around, and eventually, Aunt Martha said something she would closely repeat several times in the day: “Theresa’s children are well-behaved.”
Well, mom was just a little more progressive than Aunt Terry, letting us learn and explore. Aunt Terry still practiced the outdated “soap in the mouth” technique when Brian and Denise misbehaved. “Theresa’s children have much cleaner mouths.”
Mom did use a smack on the butt as discipline, which was still acceptable at the time and not considered horrible medieval child abuse right up there with The Rack or stoning. Kim and I were just free spirits, exploring the world, or in this case, the world of the 1940s.
Eventually, we all got up and went down the block to the very McDonald’s that had been the scene of “the incident.” Kim and I had Happy Meals with burgers; Brian and Denise were ordered to eat fish sandwiches. Yep, here it comes…
“Theresa’s children don’t eat meat on Good Friday.”
Theresa’s children would have eaten hamburgers too, if they had been given any sort of choice, like Kim and me. I never understood the meat on Friday ban. Why on earth would Jesus say, “Hey, I died today, so don’t eat any meat. Just don’t. Because I said so, that’s why.” Religion is so full of repetitions of precise actions and weird rules that it has to have been developed by someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder. “Stand, sit, say this, stand, say this, sing this, kneel, say this, all in this exact order every time or something bad will happen.” Classic OCD.
I don’t know too many people who are extremely religious any more, though a friend of mine just agreed to be the secretary for her church. I wonder what a secretary for the church does. Take dictation from God? “Take a memo, Nadia: rain in Spain, mainly in the plains, tomorrow. Also a hurricane in the Atlantic. And locusts for the Middle East, I haven’t pulled that one out of my hat for a while. They could use a good plaguing.”
Or does she write form letters for Jesus?
From the Desk of: The Messiah
Dear (name):
Thank you for your recent prayer. While we do try to answer all prayers, unfortunately, we are unable to perform the miracle you have requested at this time. However, we do encourage you to send your prayer again at a future time for consideration. Good luck with your issue and remember to tithe!
Sincerely,
JHC
CC: H. Spirit
When I ask her these things, she tells me to shut up. “Does God send you flowers on Secretary’s Day?” “Shut up.” I don’t push it, because she has the keys to the church now, and can sneak me into heaven after I die and am condemned for the hamburger I ate on Good Friday in Queens when I was eight.
Kim and I scarfed down our hell-patties while Brian and Denise nibbled on their fish sandwiches. Brian, who had upchucked less than two hours previously, was not allowed to eat french fries because they might upset his stomach. Back then, it was assumed that fish was good in all its forms, so he was allowed to munch down the fried fish sandwich, though this was clearly as bad as the fries. What, I pondered, does Jesus have against fish? No meat on Good Friday except for fish meat? Where did this implied animosity toward oceanic creatures stem from? Did a fish push him down when he was little? Was he bullied by a smelt?
Aunt Martha was noting that, in her day, it was forbidden to eat meat on any Friday. It was a mortal sin, it was. I wonder what she was thinking. Did she think that, no doubts, me and my sister were going to eternal damnation for eating our Happy Meals, with their sadly ironic name? She glared at us, a victim of the original Mad Cow Disease – she was mad at us for eating cow.
Easter was a few days away, but we got no chocolate from Aunt Martha. Easter was about Jesus, not bunnies and eggs and marshmallow peeps. Really, she was right. If you’re going to celebrate the anniversary of a holy event, you shouldn’t need to sweeten it up with bunny rabbits or jolly fat men bearing gifts. What the hell does a mutant egg-pilfering rabbit have to do with Jesus rising from the dead? What religious text orders Christians to eat the ears off a chocolate rodent in tribute to God’s son coming back to life? Maybe Jesus was so hungry after three days that he ate the ears off a nearby bunny. They don’t tell that part to little kids. “And Jesus slew the cute lil’ bunny called Fluff, and ye verily did he devoureth said bunny’s ears, and, upon finding the rest of the bunny hollow, ye did he loseth interest in it and hide the bunny carcass in some nearby plastic grass.”
My paternal grandmother used to compromise: she’d give us each a big chocolate cross every Easter. It was a little weird, eating a cross, but I got over it fast enough. I maowed that sucker down. Chocolate’s chocolate, regardless of the form it takes, much like God himself.
After lunch we walked back up the block to Aunt Martha’s building and again found ourselves in her apartment, under the surveillance of a thousand Jesus eyes. It wasn’t just pictures of Jesus, either, there were little statues and sculptures and bas relief wall hangings. Even in the bathroom. I wondered if Aunt Martha was so Biblically religious that she farted in Latin. Espirito dominae pootus. There were little soaps in the bathroom, but we weren’t allowed to touch those either – they were “for show.” Displaying soap has always been a mystery to me. It’s soap. It’s mass produced, it’s not an original Rodan sculpture. It’s what we use to clean our hands, or, in the case of Theresa’s children, their mouths.
Mom and Aunt Terry continued catching up with Aunt Martha, Brian and Denise sat obediently on the couch, and Kim and I roamed around like the two little miscreants we were. I looked at Aunt Martha’s pictures, or the non-Jesus ones, anyway. Most were black and white, and in those pictures, very few people smiled. It was in the days before someone said “I have an idea, let’s look happy in the picture this time!” Now, of course, you’re practically required to smile in photos, especially since the commandeering of the word “cheese.”
Here was a photo of Aunt Martha’s husband, who had died long ago, after some years married to her, probably because he wanted to. Here was a photo of Aunt Martha’s sister, my grandmother, who had also died young. Here was a color photo of Brian and Denise, posed on a plush brown rug, a Sears photo. A similar photo of Kim and I was around somewhere, but at the moment I couldn’t locate it in the gallery. Eventually, I made my way to the living room’s only window, which was warped and melted with age, and spotted with grime. I looked out. All I could see were a few rooftops and, a bit further on, the side of another building. It was a terrible view, all tar and brick. I felt bad for the Jesuses (Jesi?) who faced the window. It was so boring. Then again, he was tortured and crucified, so a little boredom might have been just what he was looking for.
My mother and aunt are real talkers. Throw Aunt Martha into the mix, whom they hadn’t seen in a while, and you had the makings of a long day for the kids. I’d already done pretty much all there was to do in the living room, and I wasn’t allowed in any of the other small rooms alone, so boredom was starting to make its presence known. At least I wasn’t Brian or Denise, sitting on the uncomfortable couch, blood congealing in their lower halves while they listened to stories about…you know, I don’t even know what they talked about. I was that disinterested.
Kim was playing with a Barbie doll. She had Barbie’s hair pulled tight into a pony tail, which, for some reason, always exposed the holes in Barbie’s head that were holding in the fake hair. I assume it was fake hair, anyway. For all I know, it was made of asbestos strands to fireproof her head; asbestos was still a safe product at that time.
Barbie had the teensiest feet. She looked like one of those poor Asian women who have their feet bound at birth so they’ll grow up with itsy-bitsy little feet that are considered attractive to local men, but make it impossible for the women to even stand. Even though she owned things like a dream house in Malibu, Barbie could not stand on her own. Barbie’s Dream Wheelchair probably wouldn’t have been a big seller. It would have been pink, of course.
Unlike Kim, I had nothing to play with. I’d brought the little football game on the trip, but it had lost its appeal, not only because it was a dumb game, but also because Brian had thrown up on it, so I’d left it in the car. I made the rounds of the photos again, noting that several of them had prayer cards stuck in their corners – those were the ones who’d died. The prayer cards had their names, their years on earth, and a prayer printed on one side, with a holy picture on the flip side, usually Jesus or Mary. They’re like souvenirs that are given out at funerals. Personally, I’d rather have a more useful souvenir, like a T-shirt printed with something: I went to Kevin Weston’s funeral and all I got was this lousy T-shirt. Or Teddy’s Wake – It wasn’t just something he ate after all. Or Marion Jones: selfishly keeping her organs to herself.
We’d been there a couple of hours. I wanted to leave, and there was only one way to get my mother and aunt to feel like maybe it was time for us to go. I had to break something.
I didn’t want to break anything holy, I was already in enough trouble for digesting that beef, and, certainly, the questions I asked myself about Jesus hadn’t been improving my chances for eternal bliss, so that left a limited selection of objects. I also had to be out of range of Aunt Martha’s radar, so she couldn’t say “Don’t touch that” before I had a chance to knock it over. And it had to look like an accident so I wouldn’t be in too much trouble afterward.
Hummel it was.
Everyone Aunt Martha’s age collected Hummel figurines, or at least figurines that resembled Hummel, ones that were very Hummelesque. Usually very banal subject matter, these figurines were of little girls in raincoats, or a boy fishing, with his dog secretly stealing the fish he’d caught. Kind of an attempt at Norman Rockwell in ceramics, but nowhere near as well executed. A little boy and girl kissing. The boys were often barefoot, wearing tattered straw hats, and very Huck Finn-ish. It was sort of a celebration of the ol’ simple country life, only it omitted things like polio or the unanesthetized sawing off of injured limbs. There were no arthritic, starving, desperate, contagious, filthy, freeloading, dangerous bums – they were hobos, portrayed as gentle, introspective, gentlemen with hearts of gold, a small bindle to keep them going, and a resigned attitude that said, well, that’s just the way things go. I still see these figurines for sale today, in particular the Emmett Kelly hobo clown collection, which are apparently keeping the business going. Why anyone would want a small statue of a sad homeless person as decoration is beyond me.
Aunt Martha had one such hobo figurine. He was sitting on a tree stump, his head in one hand, a sandwich in the other, staring miserably off into oblivion, contemplating either the meaning of life and his sad lot in an infinite, complex, universe that he realized he could explain with a simple, six-number physics equation, bringing the world into a new era of understanding that would delineate our place in the cosmos and the mind of God which would enhance humanity immeasurably, yet force him to give up his simple, wretched life of wandering the rails, or possibly just that he wished he had a pickle. It was a little hard to pin down, exactly.
I figured no one would mourn the loss of one nameless hobo.
This hobo was meticulously perched on a big doily on top of the old television. The doily would make things easier – I could yank the doily off the television and claim that it had caught my finger or something and the hobo would come a’ tumblin’ down. That would make a good song: “And the Hobo Came a’ Tumblin’ Down.” I moved casually toward the television and took my position by it, strategically.
Aunt Martha was in mid-sentence when everyone heard the crash. All heads turned – to Brian. I hadn’t even reached for the doily yet. Brian, sitting on the couch, had somehow managed to elude detection and, in reaching for a box of raisins on the end table, he’d knocked a music box onto the floor. “Edelweiss” clinked slowly from the broken music box.
Aunt Terry leapt into action, swatting Brian on the hand and angrily snapping, “Brian Holst, what on earth are you doing?” He was a goner for sure. Aunt Martha had killed for less, I was sure.
But Aunt Martha just shrugged. “It’s all right, I don’t like that song anyway,” she said. I couldn’t believe my ears. I wondered what her reaction would have been to the death of the hobo. “Theresa’s children would have destroyed something I don’t like.”
Aunt Terry said, “I guess we should be going, anyway,” and she and my mother rose from the couch.
It was too bad Aunt Martha didn’t like “Edelweiss,” because the music box had broken in such a way that it wouldn’t stop playing. Aunt Terry offered to buy Aunt Martha a new one, but she refused. We said our good-byes and all gave Aunt Martha a peck on the cheek, coming away with the taste of makeup, and headed off to the car. No one threw up on the way home.
I didn’t see Aunt Martha much after that, until years later, at Denise’s wedding. Now in her seventies, she looked quite different from the woman who had hated me nearly twenty years earlier. Her demeanor had changed drastically – her eyes were wide open, almost with wonder, and she looked as though she was seeing everything for the first time. She literally had the look of a little baby on her face. The years had taken some of the bite out of her, and the old joke about people becoming children again in their old age looked to be absolutely true. I decided to approach her.
She was standing with a cane, looking at the crowd gathering in the reception hall when I came up to her.
“Hello Aunt Martha,” I said. “How are you doing?”
She looked at me, and it was obvious she didn’t know who I was. I’d become an adult…physically, anyway. I looked nothing like the Scott she had known.
“It’s Scott,” I told her. “Marilyn’s son.”
Her eyes lit up in recognition and she did something I never thought I’d see her do: she smiled at me. “Yes,” she said. “How are you doing? I haven’t seen you in a long time!”
I chatted with her for a few minutes before letting her go to her table. It was very strange – it was like I’d gone to talk with Lucifer and ended up with Elmo from Sesame Street instead.
Having demonized her in my mind for years, I felt a little bad now to see this nice, old lady. It was a Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde thing. “She had a very hard life,” my mother told me. I’d spent years judging the poor woman, who had a lifetime of personal tragedies, based on one day with her. Was that fair? True, she had been less than kind to me that day…but maybe that was because my shoe smelled like vomit. Or maybe she just liked me less than Brian and Denise. Being liked less than other people is nothing I don’t experience daily, so why be mad at her for it? This year, I’ll take a step toward reconciling with her by buying her a new music box, even though I didn’t break the one she lost. The hard part will be finding one that plays “Edelweiss.”
© 2005 Scott Teel
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