Grandma's Hygiene

"You've gotta squat honey. No telling what germs are on that seat." A puff of smoke puttered its way out of my grandmother's lips and up to the ceiling.

"Grandma, that's how pee gets on the seat." I lifted myself off the toilet, commode as she would call it, and hovered awkwardly over the aqua, plastic seat that was trying very hard to look like marble.
She watched me from the doorway with the cigarette twitching in her mouth. My thighs ached because I had to go really bad. My arms kept slipping from my knees, all because she was giving me a hygiene lesson. What did she know about hygiene, I wondered. She sets her hair once a week so she doesn't have to even brush it for seven whole days, seven whole days. It doesn't even look that great, just like someone had built a series of mountain ranges, one after the other, along her scalp and painted them red. It wasn't the type of red that's is so precious in little kids, but the kind of red on whores. The kind of red your father warns you about, even if it's just nail polish. Her ice cubes sit on a plate in her freezer, disguised in taste by the rotten jungle of food around them.

"I'm done, grandma. Hand me some toilet paper please." I reached out to grab it myself, but my thighs were overcome with cramps.

She handed me the toilet paper and flicked her cigarette in the toilet. Pulling my pants back up, I felt the pain in my legs, debilitating for a moment. I followed her back into her kitchen. My parents had wallpapered over the summer. It was white with little rosebuds on it then. Now it was yellow, jaundice yellow. The smoke is there when she goes to bed at night, and still floating around in the morning. She cooks with a cigarette, eats with a cigarette, drinks beer with a cigarette. Not much else to her life really.

In the kitchen, her bloated poodle is whimpering at the chair. The poodle is the same yellow as the wallpaper. The dog, Lisa, is blind, deaf, and has cancer. She whimpers and grandma puts her in the chair. In several hours Lisa will whimper again and grandma will carry her into bed with me. I guess she warms my feet. Her other dog, Bambi, is black and yellow. My mom says the dog has some sort of hyperactivity or something like that, but she just can't stay still. Makes me nervous. Bambi will run across the room and back and forth for hours. Sometimes if grandma gets really annoyed, she'll feed Bambi some beer and that'll calm her down. Grandma thinks beer cures everything. When she was younger, she went to a doctor for insomnia and he told her to drink a beer a night to get to sleep and well, from then on, it was two beers a night and three, and four. Well, anyway, she drinks, a lot. On a few occasions she has given me beer.

"I don't have trouble sleeping," I tell her. She doesn't care. At twelve years old, I'm sipping beer with my grandma out of a Styrofoam cup with liver tasting ice cubes that are bigger than my head. Her ice cubes were so big because she had a tray made out of metal and to get all the ice cubes out, you lifted up on a lever. Our ice cube trays were plastic and we had to twist them over our knee and run hot water over the bottom to get them to come out. Her ice cube trays were more fascinating to me than how beer made me fall asleep In addition to watching Moonlighting and getting me drunk, every night my grandma made food for the dogs. She would feed them chicken, not chicken-flavored Alpo, just chicken. She would roast it and stick it in the refrigerator all day. She would then pick it apart with her fingers. She'd have greasy and slimy chicken all over her fingers so when she handed me my beer for the night, it smelled like liver ice and chicken fingers. The dogs loved it.

When I finally dozed off, usually face down on the plastic mats on the table, grandma would lead the dogs and me into her room to sleep until morning. Morning wasn't that bad, though, because it meant breakfast, and breakfast meant french fries.