My day started, like it usually does, with a phone call. It's a de facto alarm.
It's usually for Grandmother, but I need to make sure something hasn't happened -- like, she fell down the stairs. Normally I hear her say, "Hello?" just as I open my door. But today, she kept saying, "Hello?" but the phone kept ringing. My God, I thought, either something's happened to the phone she's trying to answer or she's gone nuts. It's 50/50 these days.
She did the same thing three or four times before I reached her in the dining room and before the phone stopped ringing. She didn't answer using the main phone in the dining room but her own phone, which is usually in her bedroom but for some reason she brought it with her while she walking around. It was dead; don't know why.
Still, after the phone stopped ringing, she took the other phone, our main one, turned it on and said, "Hello?" I almost ripped the phone out of her hand, but I told her to stop doing that. And for some goddamn reason she put the phone down -- not in its cradle, which was right in front of her, but on the counter, right next to her own (dead) phone, and walked away. What?
While I was putting her phone back on its cradle in her bedroom to recharge, in case that was the problem (it's an old phone, so it could be something else), Grandmother asked me, after she toddled back from where she went after just leaving the phone on the counter, "Why?" I told her that I don't know. "Could it be ..." blah-blah-blah, she continued, and that's when I get really frustrated with her. Not only do I not know, when she asks a follow-up question she uses Chinese words I don't know. It's useless to reply to her when I can't understand what she's saying on two levels.
After I head back into my bedroom to sleep some more, for some goddamn reason my Grandmother fools around with the main phone again. She didn't answer it, thank Buddha, but I had to turn it off, or at least make sure it was turned off.
---
I have shit to do before I have to leave at 1. But of course, Grandmother has guests. I sit down to start work just as I hear the doorbell.
It's one of Grandmother's friends, a male friend who's almost half her age, and could be younger than I am. To this day I don't know how and why she knows her. I speculate sometimes that they have sex. Ugh.
Anyway, he drops by every Saturday for some reason. This time, Grandmother warned me, he was getting Burger King for ... us or her. I was going to eat at the GameWatch party downtown at 2, but I guess this is free, so I mentally redid my plans.
The guy, however, got McDonald's, not Burger King. "Probably didn't know where Burger King was," Grandmother said. She wanted him to go there -- OK, I have no idea whether he volunteered to pay for lunch or if she asked him to get it -- because she saw BK on a commercial. It upset her a tad more than, uh, normal people would be.
Hate the fact that she changes her mind based on things I deem inconsequential. He got a drink, Sierra Mist. I didn't want it all, so I volunteered to share it with Grandmother.
OK, she said. I grab a measuring cup; we usually drink out of measuring cups, don't know why. "No," Grandmother said, and instead of using a perfectly fine vessel, she goes all the way to her bedroom to get her cup. And then when I open up the Sierra Mist to pour it out, she recoils. "Ooh, so much ice!" she exclaimed, "No, I don't want it. You take it all." Goddamn finicky old people.
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I want to keep the lines of communication open with her because she doesn't have anybody else in the house to talk to. But not only is it difficult to understand what she's saying in Chinese, what I do understand doesn't make any sense.
During this lunch I turn on the TV and go to the only sports that was on at the time -- the golf tournament.
She says, "Do they get paid?"
I understood this, I think: "Yeah."
"Who pays them?"
Wha-wha-wha?? Who asks that? Why would anyone care?
I told her I didn't know. Even if I did know, I wouldn't know how to say it in Chinese. It's such an inane question, anyway.
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I didn't want to eat before I left because I knew I had a bowel movement coming, especially after eating fast food. But thar I blow, and so I left a half-hour late because I needed to take a shit.
I did the right thing and let my Grandmother know I'm taking off.
"Hey, do you have money?"
"What?"
"Do you have $20?"
"Why?"
"Just because."
Wha-wha-wha-wha?!?!?! Why does anybody fucking ask for walking around money? She's 84, she doesn't "walk around." The fuck kind of question is that?? Seriously.
I gave it to her because, in all honesty, she gave me extra money to buy raisin bread, Febreze, melatonin and her medications. I have the change, I just haven't sorted out the money and gotten it back to her, but I know she's owed at least $20. That actually is her money. But still. ...
She infuriates me sometimes. She really does.
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