34: When we returned home . . .
34: When we returned home . . .
Little Follies, “Do Clams Bite?” Chapter 16, complete, and Chapter 17, the beginning
16
WHEN WE RETURNED HOME, the house was full of the smell of the coconut candies that Grandmother often made. They were spheres the size of marbles, made of a butter-and-powdered-sugar concoction that was more buttery than sweet, and they were covered with strands of grated coconut. That smell lingered in the house long after Grandmother died.
17
AT DINNER, my father kept up a rapid chatter, yakking with unusual enthusiasm about this and that. My parents rarely ate dinner at Grandmother and Grandfather’s, and their presence made the evening seem a little like a party or a holiday gathering.
May Castle, a longtime friend of my grandparents who was friendly with my parents too, had been at the house when we returned from the bay, and Grandmother had invited her to stay for dinner. May had insisted that she would stay only if Grandfather made cocktails, Manhattans. Everyone was in high spirits by the time we sat down, but my father talked and laughed most and loudest. I had caught his volubility, and I filled any gap that he allowed me to fill with stories about my playmates, stories that included plenty of sawdust. These stories rarely went very well at the dinner table at home, since most were of the you-had-to-be-there type, but they were enjoying great success here, especially with May, who laughed uproariously at some and squeezed and tickled me after each. Since that time, I have seen other survivors of near-disasters react as my father and I were reacting that night to our having survived the clamming expedition. They go on and on in an uproarious manner. We were eating the clams that Grandfather had gotten, fried.
“You know, we ought to sell our house and buy something closer to the water,” my father suddenly said to my mother. Eyebrows went up around the table. “I really miss it.” Grandfather snorted and went on eating. My father got up to get another beer.
He usually drank a beer called Bendernagle’s Old Bavarian, a beer widely advertised on billboards that depicted a smiling blond barmaid with breasts like prize-winning cantaloupes, wearing a Bavarian costume, leaning toward the potential Bendernagle customer, and pouring a can of Old Bavarian into an enormous crockery stein that, miraculously, she was filling to overflowing, foam sloshing over the lip and dripping onto an invisible floor. This woman played a prominent role in a series of dreams I had begun having. You will probably not be surprised to learn that in these dreams I was wearing my little woolen bathing suit, stuffed full of clams, and that I was quite uncomfortable.
“If only Fat Hank hadn’t sold Leroy Lager,” I said, or, in my enthusiasm, shouted, “we’d be rich, and we’d be driving around in a white Packard, and we could buy Small’s Island and fix up the hotel and live there.” I beamed around the table, expecting that people would jump into my fantasy, and that we’d spend a happy hour rehabilitating the hotel and assigning rooms to one another, but only May had any enthusiasm for the idea.
“I’ve spent many a happy night there,” she said.
“May—” said Grandmother. May raised her glass to Grandmother, as if she were toasting something, and said no more. From the expressions on the faces of the others, I saw that I had said something wrong.
“Peter,” said my mother, “you shouldn’t talk about things that you don’t know anything about, and even if you do, you shouldn’t make fun of people who are dead, and especially not your ancestors.”
I wasn’t quite sure where I had gone wrong. I had supposed, when I made the remark, that I was on safe ground with Fat Hank, and that the only risky part was my desire for the island.
“What do you know about Fat Hank?” my father asked me. The table was quiet now, and I had everyone’s attention. I swallowed once.
“Well, he was the only child of Black Jacques, the dashing and swarthy Algerian, who invented beer.” I waited the briefest of moments for a laugh, but I could see quite quickly that there wasn’t going to be any. “Not beer, but Leroy Lager. It was a really great beer, sturdy and honest, not like the insipid pisswater that they try to pass off on you now—”
“Peter!” interjected my mother.
“—and there was a poem on the back of each bottle,” I said, trailing off at the end to a whisper.
My father burst out laughing, but not as he had been. This was a dark laugh.
“Where did you get that?” he asked.
“From Great-grandmother,” I said.
My father made a sober face and rumpled my hair. “Don’t believe everything you hear up there,” he told me. “You know, Peter,” he said, “your great-grandmother is pretty old.”
“I know,” I said. Of course I knew. Everything about Great-grandmother was old. The paint in her rooms, the curtains, and she herself were yellow and brittle with age; the paint cracked in intricate networks and curled away from the wall in places, stiffly, in one spot forming the shape of an owl that watched and listened to the talks we had together; the threads in the curtains had grown so brittle that they had cracked in the breeze, and Great-grandmother’s hair had become as stiff and brittle as the hair on a coconut. I worried every time she shifted in her chair. I was afraid that she would break and I’d be blamed for it.
“Well,” he said, speaking as slowly as Great-grandmother herself, picking each word carefully, “she doesn’t remember things quite the way they really happened. She, uh, changes things a little.”
“You mean she makes things up,” I said.
“Not on purpose. She just doesn’t remember the way they really happened, so she says what she thinks should have happened or what she wishes had happened—”
“Or hadn’t,” May mumbled.
“—instead of what she remembers. Understand?”
“Yeah,” I said. I didn’t believe a word he was saying.
May leaned toward me and whispered through a mist of Manhattan, “She’s not the only one—I do it myself,” and kissed my ear.
“May—” said Grandmother again.
You can listen to this episode on the Personal History podcast.
Next episode:
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?” and “Life on the Bolotomy,” the first three novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.