My Family as The Book Of Luke: Chapter 22
tyler kellogg
Judas Agrees to Betray Jesus
We call her Glam-ma, although, by blood, we’re not related to her. She married my grandfather, Papa Mike (who had two wives prior) by the pool in their backyard during the summer of ‘86. She and my grandfather both worked for Delta as pilot and flight attendant. I imagine spending that much time together, staring at clouds and square-cut pastures might make even the strongest of marriages crash and burn.
My three brothers and mother and I lived with my grandparents for a period during my parents’ divorce. My brothers and I slept in the same room, two to a twin bed. I remember the day I moved in. My mother pulled me out of my third grade English class and drove me to my grandparent’s house on the edge of Charlotte. I remember my mother’s bracelets made more noise than usual that day. I remember throwing pine cones in the the air and catching them as my grandfather rubbed my mother’s back. I remember the bags under my mother’s eyes being more black than purple.
As my grandparents grew older, shouting took the place of talking. My grandfather retired. He stopped experiencing new adventures and started retelling old ones. Glam-ma stopped cooking. She and my grandfather sat in the living room and ate canned peaches and reheated eggs for dinner. They were tired people. They went to bed at midnight and woke up when the sun was hanging in the middle of the sky.
Glam-ma reminded me of a gargoyle. She was a short, heavy set woman with long, wispy, gray-brown, dead hair streaked with honey highlights. She always wore a frayed bubble-gum-pink shawl which she was constantly readjusting and folding back into her body by crossing her arms. Her lips were always on the brink of a snarl. She was an impatient woman, especially in regards to my mulish grandfather and mother. Glam-ma wanted, more than anything, for my mother to pack her things and move out.
I don’t blame Glam-ma. My mother devolved into a Moaning Myrtle over the course of my parent’s divorce, haunting my grandparent’s house, getting up at random hours to wander the kitchen and living room, crying to herself, perpetually sniffling. Her skin turned opalescent, navy and ivory. At times, even transparent.
I rolled over in the middle of the night once to find my two middle brothers missing. During my sleep they slipped out of bed, slid their socks and shoes on and retrieved their suitcases hidden under a cattail bush in my grandparents’ front yard. They called my father, and he slinked into my grandparent’s neighborhood, cutting his headlights as he rounded Hinson Drive, and picked up my brothers. On the way to my father’s house, he made promises to take them to Carowinds every weekend, to buy them the newest phones, to order takeout whenever they pleased. He might as well have offered them a sack of silver.
Jesus Prays on the Mount of Olives
One afternoon my mother took me to Smoothie King and we ordered two Caribbean Ways with mangoes and blueberries mixed in. My mother had spent the previous night at the Novant Health Presbyterian Medical Center because Glam-Ma alerted the social worker monitoring my parent’s divorce case that my mother appeared bipolar. This was a ruse to transfer guardianship for my brothers and I over to my father. The worker took my mother, in hysterics, to get tested. My mother told me how a nurse gave her one of those thin, sky blue blankets airlines hand out to passengers. She described the mosaic heart in the hospital lobby made of purple and pink and maroon dogs, clasped hands, and Picasso faces. She loved the mosaic, hated the coffee the staff served. Glam-ma wanted her out of the house. My grandfather pleaded with Glam-ma, asked her to walk a mile in my mother’s shoes. Glam-ma said she’d rather be caught dead in a ditch than prance around in knock-off Jimmy Choo sandals.
My mother prayed and prayed in that hospital room, asked God to come and get her a thousand times, until her eyes grew bloodshot and her voice died, floated straight from her throat to nowhere as if the rasp of a smoker’s ghost took its place.
Jesus Is Arrested
I don’t remember the name of the Chinese restaurant where my father violated the restraining order my mother placed on him. I do remember ordering the General Tso’s chicken, which disappointed me. I remember sneaking bites of Lo Mein from my brother’s oyster pail. I remember there being a Food Lion next door, because it had a helium tank with two nozzles which I sucked on in order to make my voice squeak while my mother filled my birthday balloons. I remember my mother frantically reaching into her purse for her phone with one hand while she clutched her mini pepper spray in the other. I remember five or six black SUVs corralling my father into the corner of the parking lot, a man barking over a loudspeaker GET ON YOUR KNEES AND PUT YOUR HANDS BEHIND YOUR BACK. I remember how the man dropped the loudspeaker and pointed his pistol at my father. I remember blue lights circling between my father’s face, the lamppost and the other cars in the corner of the parking lot.
This was the first time I saw my father in six months. In his absence, he shaved his hair and grew a ginger goatee, which somehow made his face look like an overripe peach, fattened with GMOs. He also wore new sunglasses, thick and black, like the pair Arnold Schwarzenegger strapped to his robot face in Terminator.
In the end, my father was questioned and released because, according to the arresting officers, whether we liked it or not, we depended on him for everything—him being the sole income earner in the family. I remember feeling double-crossed. Weren’t these guys supposed to be on our side?
After the crowd dispersed, my grandfather took me to Cinebar, a movie theater/restaurant in the Arboretum. We watched Wreck-It-Ralph and I ate grilled cheese with tomato soup. He slept through the whole thing, his chin tucked in and his hands folded on his lap. I watched the reflections from the movie curve and bend and jump in my grandfather’s aviators and thought about giving him a wet willy. Then I thought about cutting off my father’s ear and how stupid he would look with one ear and how, if he couldn’t hear me, I could call him all sorts of not-nice-things.
Peter Disowns Jesus
I was eight years old, clomping around my grandparent’s living room in Walmart brand black basketball shoes when Sheila, the social services woman, came and collected me. Sheila was a thin woman who wore her blonde hair in a bob. She was fragile and did not want to take a woman’s child from her.
I had twenty minutes to pack. I started with the blue glow-in-the-dark jellyfish snow globe my mother gave me for my birthday the previous year. I wrapped the snow globe in paper towels from the bathroom and placed it neatly at the bottom of my suitcase, leaving room for my boxer briefs and books.
I did not want to leave. I wanted to continue staining my grandparent’s carpets with mud I tracked in from the front yard. I wanted the place to look like a murder scene. It was not until years later I learned my oldest brother, a person whom I would trust to shoot an arrow through an apple on the top of my head, made the call to Sheila, telling her he didn’t think my grandparents’ house was a safe environment for a child as young as me.
The Last Supper
I ordered the lobster. This was three years after my parents’ failed divorce and by this time we were living in the northwest corner of South Carolina, surrounded by tall pines and the piedmont. My parents chose to remain a couple, living in the same house, for the sake of my brothers and me, conjoined in their cold hatred of each other like one of those horrible Hallmark-movie ice sculptures of two swans forming a dripping heart.
Before we left for the restaurant my grandparents arrived and wiped their feet on our doormat. My mother asked if they cared for anything to drink (some Pinot Grigio, a Yuengling perhaps). Five-foot-tall Glam-ma asked my mother where she kept the Grey Goose.
We lined up in the living room and took pictures: brothers, brothers and mother, brothers and father, brothers and both parents, brothers and grandparents, grandparents, grandparents and parents, and finally, brothers, parents, and grandparents. We ate at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Greenville. My mother picked out my outfit: khakis, blue and orange plaid collar shirt. There was garlic mashed potatoes and grilled asparagus. I slipped and slid in my seat the entire dinner and laid down in the booth afterwards to sleep off my food. I was hounded by my mother for this.
At the end of the dinner, my grandfather cloaked my mother in his sports coat (my father drank too much and told her she should’ve brought her own damn jacket). I felt as if I caught a glimpse of my mother’s childhood. My grandfather, warm and patriarchal, chomping on a cigar, messing with my mother’s hair, telling her if any hot shot ever messed with her, they’d have to answer to him.
A week later my mother headed to the Novant Health Presbyterian Medical Center for surgery to remove the baseball sized hernia embedded in her stomach caused by poor clean-up after numerous c-sections. She suffered an aneurysm following her surgery. A blood clot had found its way into the forever contracting and expanding arteries leading to her heart. She was found folded like a lawn chair, mouth agape and full of soapy shower water.
I remember my mother jokingly demanding hugs from my brothers and me “in case she didn’t come back” before she got in her minivan and left. We all laughed knowing—thinking—of course she would come back. Still, the hair on the back of my neck stood up as I imagined a life with no mother. No late nights impersonating the church lady from SNL, no more bowls of bananas and blueberries randomly delivered to my room, no dancing to Prince in the car, and, worst of all, no one willing to listen to me complain about my father.
People always ask if my mother’s death was expected, as if knowing or not knowing the precise date of a parent’s passing softens the punch. As if my mother’s Houdini-style vanishing into the afterlife was somehow less painful than the comfort of watching a body decay into a shriveled leaf after months of chemo.
I dreamed about my mother after her death. Sometimes we met in a small, yellow cafe in south Florida and she would be wearing the most extravagant clothing, the clothing my father forbade her to wear, claiming they made her look like a slut: a navy blouse featuring long peacock plumes on it, open-toed designer sandals, a short, white, tennis skirt, marbled turquoise earrings or some variation of this outfit. But always, always lots of jangling bracelets.
I asked her why she didn’t come around anymore. She grew silent and evaporated into the dream cafe room, a puff of her floating up to the pendant lights above me, and I woke up. More often than not when I dreamed about my mother, my father was there too. I was usually a spectator to these dreams, watching the dream play out through a sort of kaleidoscope dome. If I was present in the dream, I took the form of a sniveling toddler, incapable of defending my mother. I would hide in some nook of my dreamhouse and peek through my fingers at my parents’ shadows throwing themselves at each other against a dreamwall.