Publikacija SEP 2011 - Vilenica

Around the time of the Assumption, a number of violent summer
storms struck; rain showers had cooled the sea and I stopped going to
the beach, surrendering my place to one of the beer-bellied pensioners
whose penises shrank like bashful caterpillars when they came out of
the water. I wondered if they missed me.
The stench trailed behind grandma as she moved about the house,
taking out a small comb from her little apron pocket and running it
through her greasy hair; she would make a waterfall of noodles, coated
with dandruff like grated Parmesan. When I told her she should take
a bath, she waved her hand in nervous dismissal, as if trying to shake
off the idea.
Dad’s reaction was not much different.
“Oh, come on, don’t start with that now!” he said, frowning, and
eventually went back to reading his interior design magazines. That
was his therapy: looking at splendidly decorated living rooms with a
view of the Pacific, renovated New York apartments with strategically
arranged antiques. I could relate to that; faraway, tastefully decorated
lives of other people were dad’s form of escapism, like mine were the
cheesy worlds of Daphne du Maurier.
“One of these days we’ll have to bathe her. The house stinks like
a night tram full of homeless people,” I told dad. He reached for another
magazine, an issue dedicated to rustic summer houses.
Our nights were also rough. We spent one particularly unpleasant
one listening grandma scream in panic, curled up in her bed like a tarantula,
with the sheet over her head. “They attached wires to my heart,”
she kept saying. Her knuckles were completely white from clutching the
edge of the sheet so tightly. Our every attempt to calm her down only
resulted in louder cries. In the morning, all pale and smelly, she watched
the quiz show with a blank expression on her face, quietly muttering the
right answers, before the host managed to finish the question. She knew
when Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize and what Madonna’s Christian
name was.
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