I was seven years old. The country was celebrating one of those patriotic holidays like The Fourth of July. There wasn’t a cloud or a different shade of blue in the sky. The treetops were hardly moving. I counted rows and rows of manicured lawns as my parents and I went over to my cousin Teddy’s house for a porch visit.
Daddy always drove his ‘79 Coupe deVille Phaeton, so all the windows were rolled down, letting in the warm breeze that felt cool whenever I’d stick out my hand and let it ride with the wind. His Caddy was a goldish-brown color called “Western Saddle Firemist.” The interior looked like someone’s living room with polished wood trimmings, boxy backseat windows, and tan leather covering every surface – save for the chrome ashtrays on the armrests. I liked pushing down on them so they’d pop out, and then I’d get to pop them back in again and again and again.
The grassy fields along the way to Teddy’s were all fresh and soft looking – so different from the rowhouses and concrete where we lived. In the air was the scent of burning charcoal, which belongs to summer, as burning firewood belongs to winter. The ashy scent made my mouth water. I knew later on I’d get to have a hamburger or two, or as many as I could eat, before the fireworks started. I could already taste the cheese, onions, pickles, and ketchup!
The turn signal was clicking, and then Daddy veered down a shady dead-end street. Tall and tangled tree branches made it look like we were driving into a cave. From inside my booster seat (yes, still – don’t make fun of me), the road ahead looked covered with dead leaves and pine cone ashes. Daddy drove all the way down until he reached a winding driveway that led to a clearing where I could see the roof of Teddy’s house. It really belonged to my grandmum – though I never saw her in person in all my seven years, not even once. Her house looked like a castle, though – with something Mum called a “pitch gable roof,” brown bricks, wooden shingles, and a stone chimney covered with ivy.
My dad pulled up behind a rusted Ford pickup truck. That was my cousin Teddy’s; he was in construction and even drove a forklift. From my wee booster seat, I spotted him sitting on the front porch under hanging baskets of a red flower Mum called “Cypress vines.” She told us that Grandmama must’ve planted them in the spring, that she was sure to grow these flowers each year, and that Mum had memories of helping her plant the cypress flowers. Of course, those memories were just that. Grandmama hadn’t spoken to Mum since she married Daddy at City Hall and had me. Even as a child, I knew to let my mum’s comments about Grandmama die in the air like Daddy’s cigarette smoke.
That day, Teddy had on his Pabst Blue Ribbon t-shirt and a Yankee’s baseball cap on his head. He was in his thirties with jet-black hair and bright blue eyes and stood over six feet tall– easily the largest person in the world to me then. His wife had died from “the bad kind” of cancer way before I was even born. They were high school sweethearts who thought they were having a baby, but it turned out to be a tumor instead. He moved in with Grandmama afterward and never left.
Once Daddy finally unleashed me from my booster seat, I rolled out of his Caddy and started for the porch. I was a frail girl with frizzy brownish hair, and that day I was wearing a red summer dress. The front door to Teddy’s house was open for once, so I could see straight through to the kitchen as I got closer. We weren’t allowed inside, not even for a pee. As I ran across the soft green lawn to Teddy, I had these white packets of gunpowder with me. Daddy had gotten them off “some bloke in Pennsy.” Two hundred and fifty tiny white sacks came in a red box with a boy throwing one to the ground on the cover, where it went “POP!” As soon as I reached Teddy in the wooden rocking chair, I opened my hand, revealing several of these little packs. He examined the assortment of white paper rocks in my palm.
“Whoa! Whatcha got there?” he asked me.
“Poppers!”
“Oh, boy! What do they do?”
I clutched my hand, giggling.
Mum strolled onto the porch in her denim dress and then plopped into a deck chair near us, looking tan and exhausted in a straw hat at four in the afternoon. She already saw how the poppers worked. The numerous jolts I gave her were triggering the little vein to throb on her forehead. Daddy walked up behind and lingered on the stairs in his white suit with his dark hair slicked back, so he looked like he was in Miami Vice.
“Well, go on, lassie,” my dad said after I showed Teddy my packets of gunpowder; “Let ‘em off on the sidewalk there!”
I skipped past Daddy and down the front steps, then threw the little white packet onto the concrete. POP! Mummy crossed her legs and leaned back on the chair. Daddy and Teddy cheered! I did it again! And then again! Each pop was magic. POP! POP! POP! It was a fantastic noise– a superhuman power was flying right out of my little hand like I was a faerie! POP! POP! No, even better— I was a great sorceress with limitless powers! POP! Unspeakable, unconquerable power! POP! POP! Pop… pop…
Grandmama appeared at the screen door to her house then. It was the first time I saw her for real, in the flesh. I imagined she’d be like the Godmother from Cinderella. Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo. I was dead wrong. Grandmama’s face was cucumbers and cold cream; her mahogany hair was peeking out from inside a pink turban that matched her bathrobe. The sun was still beating brightly on her lawn. The sprinklers were making a rainbow as they misted over her grass. And yet, there was a black hole behind Grandmama inside that house. It was absolute, total blackness, and ice behind each window.
She glared at me and then at my dad. Teddy said nothing; Mum said nothing. I hid the rest of the white packets inside my mini panda bear purse. Daddy lit up a cigarette. Ready-for-bed Grandmama lingered like a bathrobed specter in the doorway; the uncomfortable moment passed.
“Oi! What’s this?” Daddy said with a spark in his red-brown eye, blowing hazy smoke from the side of his mouth. “Fancy a wee chat– Queenie?”
Without a flinch, without even tightening her arctic expression, Grandmama stepped inside the blackness of her castle, gently closing the heavy wooden storm door as she went. I never feared another person more than I feared my grandmum right then.
I hoped that when I grew up, I’d be just like her.