Our grandparents’ house was like Caligula’s palace, as my grandfather was too distracted by being indignant at the existence of cats (which he trapped in his backyard and sent home with us), and my grandmother was too sweet to say no to anything. Sharp knives, chocolates, small fires, late-night cable television . . . nothing was out of bounds here. Lunches would consist of fried eggs floating on syrup, mashed potatoes mixed with whipped cream, and homemade French fries dripping with lard. For dinner, Grandlibby would make a few pans of half-baked brownies, resulting in a mushy brownie-salmonella-pudding concoction that could only truly be enjoyed when eaten with the fingers . . . rolling the doughy mess into large chocolate speedballs.
After every bite Grandlibby would repeat her mantra: “Now, don’t tell your parents about this.” I would mumble a quick assent, too jacked up on a syrup high to do more. My sister managed a nod as she sucked down a pint of ketchup straight from the bottle. Grampa would wander in, muttering disapprovingly about our poor food choices, and my grandmother would look straight at him in wide-eyed surprise and then agree sincerely, as if she had never considered that an all-taffy breakfast would be an unhealthy idea. Then she’d sweetly thank him for his good advice, and go make him comfortable in his easy chair before returning to the kitchen to quietly suggest that we make peanut-butter-and-sugar-cube milk shakes. Inevitably, my grandfather would return a half-hour later and demand to know what the hell was going on, and my grandmother would look clueless and adorable as she pretended to understand for the first time that sugar cubes weren’t a garnish. Her innocent face was irreproachable and he’d sigh deeply, walking away, while muttering that she was becoming senile. She wasn’t. She knew exactly what she was doing and had perfected the art of doing whatever she wanted to do in order to make life happy, while avoiding the kinds of arguments that led to nail attacks.
As the night progressed, my grandfather would go to sleep, and we would sink further into our own childlike brand of debauchery. Our cousin Michelle, who was a year younger than me, would come over, and the night would turn full-force into the type of self-harm affair that only imaginative children with limited supervision can ever fully achieve.
In spite of the fact that the entire house was rigged with safety in mind, we were able to turn this to meet our own needs. Whereas some grandparents would lay down those plastic mats in the bathtub to keep from slipping, my grandparents had taken this a step further and had covered all usable walkways in the house with a thick yellow, plastic covering for the carpeting. We’d discovered that what kept the plastic mats so well anchored to the floor was a sea of one-inch spikes on the underside, jutting down into the gold shag carpet. Once we had reached the highest plane of thought, reserved only for yogis and children deep in the throes of a sugar overdose, we would turn the mats upside down and practice walking over our homemade bed of nails. Being younger, Michelle and Lisa were required to carry large plaster urns or heavy furniture to compensate for their smaller frames. I was allowed to walk without added weight in light of the fact that I’d had both of my big toenails sheared off by broken glass while wading barefoot in the swollen storm drains only hours earlier. “Tell your parents you fell while I was reading you the Bible,” Grandlibby suggested helpfully.
In the morning we would go swimming. My grandparents weren’t poor, but they were the type of people to save and reuse tinfoil, always certain that another depression was looming around the corner, so they met the challenge of creating a pool for their grandchildren by salvaging three fiberglass bathtub shells that someone was throwing away. We would plug up the drain holes and fill the tubs with the garden hose outside. Grandlibby would subtly suggest that we allow the sun to warm up the frigid water in the tubs, but after a night of overindulgence and general debauchery we could not yet begin to temper ourselves. We entered the tubs, breaking the thin layer of frost that was beginning to form on the top of the water, our lips and fingers turning a faint blue, assuring one another that even if this did lead to pneumonia, it would most likely strike later, during the school week.
Regardless of how dangerous the activity, Grandlibby would always be standing nearby with a cherry Shasta, a first-aid kit, and a loving look of panicked resignation. As I prepared to leap off the roof of their house onto the couch pillows below, it occurred to me that this might not be a great idea, but I knew that I’d be much more likely to hurt myself climbing back down the rusty barbecue-pit chimney pipe that I’d used as an impromptu trellis. Grandlibby murmured something in Czechoslovakian that sounded suspiciously like cursing. Lisa’s advice was much more helpful. “Tuck and roll!”