I'm getting pretty good at this, I thought as I applied mascara from the new tube I had bought with a deft, unflinching hand. The lip liner I'd put on before my lipstick made my lips appear a critical millimeter or so plumper at the places where they seemed to need it ....... In a way this wasn't unlike those portraits I had painted for my whole family for Christmas a few years back. Each had its own unique set of criteria, which it would reveal to you as you worked on it; and sometimes you needed to fudge the truth a bit. Like softening the features (just enough, it still had to look like her...) on that one I did for my Aunt Livia, who was a dead ringer for Anthony Quinn...

There was no telling what Papa would think of my efforts this morning. As unforgiveable as Joy's crimes were to him, it was likely that no matter what I wore or did or said he'd continue to see me as having snake's eyes, horns and a tail. This mission of mine to fix his relationship with my sister by pretending to be her had a real Don Quixote feel to it. Everything I'd seen so far told me it was doomed to fail. But nonetheless I'd polished up my armor + was sallying forth once again...

PLAY . . NICE!
LAIKA PUPKINO ~ 2009
PART SEVEN: WINDMILLS 4, DON QUIXOTE 0

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. ||| TUES. OCT 7~~~

After all the difficulty I'd had getting to sleep last night (and what I did to finally bring myself to a state of contented exhaustion) I woke up late on Tuesday. Late enough that I would have to take a few shortcuts as I prepared to go out. A shower instead of the leisurely bath I'd promised myself. And instead of trying to arrange my hair like the stylist had it yesterday I just tied it back.

The single chime of the old pendulum clock downstairs told me it was 9:45 already. If I had been headed anywhere else I might have skipped the morning makeup ritual as well---it was something I'd gotten along without for 33 years after all---but since the man I was planning to visit wasn't speaking to me, trying to look grown up and normal and pretty for him was about the only kind of statement I could make.

So with some apprehension I opened the makeup box and got to work, knowing that if I messed this up I would really be screwed for time! But luckily those tips the beautician had showed me yesterday all came back to me, everything going on about like it should. It seemed weird to be developing all these skills that I would have no use for after the 31st. But I knew I would be left with a new appreciation of the simplicity and expediency of preparing for my day the guy way...

I wore my expensive new blouse again, tucking it into Joy's burgundy jeans, which together with the pony tail made for a sporty yet neat-and-crisp look, or so I thought.

There was no way of knowing what Papa would think. As absolute as Joy's crimes were in his mind it was likely that no matter what I wore or said or did he would continue to see me as having slit-pupiled eyes, horns and a red scaly tail with a barb on the end. This mission of mine to fix his relationship with his daughter by assuming her role had more of a "Don Quixote" feel to it every day- everything I'd seen so far telling me it was doomed to fail. But errant knight that I was, I once again found myself charging at them sonofabitching windmills...

Making my way up Albert Einstein Blvd. I was hitting every stoplight at exactly the wrong time, and I was nagged by the feeling that there was something I'd forgotten to do this morning. It would be an hour later when I figured out what this was, and when I did I'd be relieved to find that it hadn't been anything too boneheaded, but only that I'd completely spaced on breakfast.

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Grandma Rosa was sitting in the ground floor lobby when I showed up at the hospital at 10:30. And she had The Russian with her, who she'd waylaid on his way to the cafeteria.

When I'd last seen him in '02 Grisha's sable hair had been liberally peppered with gray. Now it was gray with smatterings of black. He got up from the molded plastic chair, fixing me with his dark and melancholy eyes. There was nothing reproachful in his gaze, only sadness for this screwed-up girl who had caused her family so much heartache. I also perceived something else in it, something that it took me a bit to decipher...

A sense of kinship. That here was a fellow soul unable to play by society's rules; who knew the dark allure of the short con and also its consequences- of never being completely trusted by those who knew you. He stooped down to wrap his arms around me, a head like a buffalo's resting heavily on my shoulder.

"Joy," he moaned, "Joy! Joy! Joy! Joy! Joy!"

"It's great to see you, Uncle Grisha," I sighed, relaxing in his powerful embrace. If Grisha had seemed big when I hugged him as Teddy, now it was like being in the arms of some loveable storybook giant. And all at once I knew something else about this man...

In the back of my mind I'd always sort of wondered if Grisha was harboring lecherous feelings toward my sister. Or not always; these suspicions first surfaced around the time of my twenty-first birthday, so I'm not speaking of the unspeakable here. But this was about when I started noticing the way he'd cover her hand with his when they sat together, and that he seemed to want a LOT of hugs---spontaneously, in mid-conversation---grabbing her and not letting go.

And while Grisha wasn't anywhere near as graphic about this as Il Vesuvio's walking penis of a cook Spanish Eddie, he did tend to go on at length about how he loved the ladies. Tall ones, short ones, fat, skinny and of all ages and ethnicities. And then there was his bizarre fixation with television's Judge Judy (which may have been some weird judge-as-dominatrix thing he had going...). So with Joy being prettier than most of the women that he pointed out as being desireable, I figured he was at least "copping a feel" whenever he could, if not secretly pestering her to make it with him...

But now that I was Joy as far as he knew, I could tell---could sense in his touch somehow---that there was nothing at all prurient about his affection for her. In his heart he was simply her loving uncle. And now I was ashamed of these suspicions of mine, unconscious as they had mostly been. Disturbed by their resemblance to the dirty-minded accusations that my father would to conjure up out of thin air, his paranoid take on people's motives.

And if those Russian bear hugs Grisha had given me as Teddy were somewhat briefer and less frequent, I knew it wasn't homophobia exactly (To my astonishment he'd defended me when I came out as a teen, likening my being gay to a case of albinism. Maybe not "normal" or what they had hoped for but nobody's fault really, and nowhere near as bad as certain other mutations I could've been stricken with...) but more likely that he had wanted to avoid stirring up any lustful impulses in his sexual albino of a nephew...

"I love you," I whispered, squeezing him back even harder, and then by some unspoken agreement we both let go.

Grandma had been smiling at our reunion with dreamy tenderness, but now became businesslike, "So. Are we ready to go do this?"

Meaning was I ready for this. I nodded, and we headed for the elevators.

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Papa was sitting in bed staring at the t.v., which was off. He was as much of a wreck as the last time I saw him, and for a long while I wondered if he wasn't paralyzed from his neck down and neglecting to mentioning this fact to us. Arms lying limply at his sides, not moving and inch from his slightly lopsided position but making Grisha and Grandma lean in to kiss him. And although he grimaced like I smelled bad as he recieved my own quick peck on the cheek, he didn't pull away.

They talked. How the restaurant was doing, this continuing heat wave, the Mets' latest victory, and about some two-year-old quarter horse that a racing columnist my father and Grisha both swore by expected to perform phenomonally next season.

Thinking he was being helpful, Grisha grabbed the tethered remote on Papa's bed and turned the t.v. on, turning it up so we could hear. It was the final half hour of one of those a.m. news/weather/celebrity-recipe programs; a human interest piece about a pet that had showed up at his former home after being missing nearly a year and making some impossibly long journey. Just the sight of this wholesome family fussing and cooing over this dog like a happy little feather duster sent a tear sliding down my cheek, then another in its wake. Oh great! The last thing I needed during a visit with my dad was to get my tear ducts stirred up.

Grandma cocked her head at me, grinning, You always did have a soft spot for animals, Teddi...

Uncle Grisha noticed my moist eyes too and seemed puzzled. If my sister had seen this segment she likely would have made some crack about America's excessive devotion to its pets "when there are so many starving humans in the world"; and if it had been one of the family's humans that had gotten lost like this she would've found some other reason why it sucked, because Joy hated morning shows like this. Their middle-of-the-road upbeat blandness offended her. She didn't get that this blandness was their main appeal, that people didn't care if it was "phony"; they wanted something comfortable and unchallenging at this hour, not strobe lights and screaming heart attack music. Grisha might not have known Joy's every little like and dislike but he did have a good general sense of her. There was something very different about her today, but what?

In all this time my dad hadn't said a word to me. I knew he wouldn't, and I preferred this to how he had reacted the last time I tried to visit him. But I could tell my uncle was getting ready to say something about it, and my amateur attempts at telepathy ("No Grisha- DON'T!") had no effect on him. He asked pleasantly, "Aren't you going to say hello to Joy?"

"No. I'm not."

"But Joe..."

My father's nebulous smile hardened into a sneer. And now he did move, jerking his arm in my direction, "You can say hello to her, you like her so much. Hell, do whatever you want with her. You got twenty bucks? She'd probably let you fuck her in the ass for that much."

"Joseph Bodhidharma Farranino!" cried Grandma, genuinely outraged, "That was uncalled for!"

He held her gaze. "Was it?"

"You know goddamn well it was!"

He seemed pleased that he'd upset her. "If you don't want me talking like that, don't bring the girl here. But if you do, then I'm gonna say what I think. Which is that nothing she did would surprise me. And really I don't care. What she does, or whatever happens to her..."

"Yet she is here for you," Grisha gently reproached him.

"Bullshit. She's here for her. She wants back in the will."

I hadn't heard about Joy having been cut out of his will, but it sure made sense that he'd do this. For me to protest too forcefully would just sound like some ploy to him, so I simply said, "I don't care about the will."

He answered me by telling his other visitors, "She lies. That's what she does. And I don't care how much you two gang up on me, I told you what the deal was! And yet here she is again. You know it's funny, I was under the impression you were coming here to see me. But so far this whole visit has been about her. That's something else she's good at."

"This visit is about you, Caro. But you're a part of this family, and so is she."

"So you keep saying. You act like I'm the one who did wrong here. Seems like you can forgive anything but someone saying: 'No! This is wrong! I WON'T go along with this!' To you that's 'intolerant'. God forbid anyone should ever take a stand on something!"

Grandma cleared her throat, displaying the nasty jagged scar on her forearm where the police down in Birmingham Alabama had set their dogs on her and her fellow freedom riders. The smaller one from the handcuffs that had deliberately been put on tight enough to tear into the ball of her wrist at the Chicago Democratic Party Convention later in that tumultuous decade.

"Okay so maybe you can. But so can I. And this is me taking a stand."

On the television they were wrapping up the story of Snookie the Schnauzer: "So please folks, get an identification chip for your pet. They're usually less than $25, and to show you it really doesn't hurt them, GOOD MORNING USA's own Tim Ziffhart has volunteered..."

"But Joe," crooned my uncle, "she's your daughter!"

"Goddamn it Grisha, this doesn't concern you! This is between me and my family."

"Then maybe I should go," muttered the Russian, wounded at being so curtly reminded that he wasn't really part of our family.

"Maybe you should. Maybe you both should split, since you're both on her side."

"Nobody's taking sides here, Jojo."

"No? You bring her in here, after I told you I never want to see her! I said this way before I got sick. I said it that day you dragged her in here, and then on Monday after she came strutting in here all dressed up like she thought she was somethin' so special," wheezed Papa, sounding like he was on the verge of one of his horrible coughing fits- "But who the hell cares what I want? Huh? And don't you give me that look, Grish! I haven't heard one single word of support from you about this. It's all been poor, poor Joy! Well if this is how it is I don't need none of youse comin' round here..."

Grandma Rosa frowned, "So it's either her or you, is that what you're saying?"

"That sums it up pretty good."

"Fine then," she said, snatching up her big macramé tote and shooting to her feet.

"No Grandma! I'll go. Papa needs you here. You don't have to do this because of me."

"Yes I do! People who issue ultimata like this need to be called on them. They should have to live with the consequences," she stated, her expression cold and intractable even as her right eye (the one that my father couldn't see) winked playfully at me. "Just remember Josepho. It was you who who wanted it this way. If you don't want me here I have better things I can be doing with my time. I'll be praying for your recovery. Come along Joy."

"Me too," I said as we headed for the door, "I mean, uh ...... Get Well!"

"Damn my nose itches!" announced Papa, and I wondered if this was some allusion to Pinocchio's lying. But no, his nose was itching. He clawed at it and the bruised flesh around it.

Uncle Grisha did a confused little vacillating two-step then moved closer to his pal. Before we were out of earshot the two men were talking in there, cautiously reconnecting as friends...

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As we made our way through the maze of corridors I said to Grandma, "You winked."

"Yep."

"So then you're coming back here?"

"Of course I am. You were right when you said he needed me. We all need visitors when we're in a place like this," she said with a circular sweep of her hand, "But I want Josepho to realize this too. I'll only be staying away and not calling him the rest of today and tomorrow, but lying in bed like that it'll seem like a week to him. He deserves worse than that after that crack about Joy being a twenty dollar whore, but if he died while I was off proving a point I'd never forgive myself. One day though, I'll risk that."

"So I should stay away tomorrow too?"

"It would help. I just hope my hunch about him is right."

"Hunch?"

"That his attitude toward her is starting to change."

"You're kidding!" I gasped, "You mean for the better?"

"I think so. Your father's got quite a mouth on him, and a real mean streak, but when it comes to hate he's more of a sprinter than a marathon runner. He paints himself into a corner with all that talk, but after a while if no one lays down any fresh paint---confronting him, bringing it up---he'll start to feel he can modify his position without losing face."

"Like he did with me," I said, brightening as I remembered how futile that situation had seemed, until one day he started talking to me again. (He'd been watching STAR TREK as I edged past his chair in the living room to get to the stairs---the one with the blobby monster attacking workers in that mine, until Spock mind-melded with the creature and found out that she'd only been protecting her babies, the eggs that the miners had been collecting as gemstones---when out of the blue he said, "Hey sit down, this is a good one!"). And it had only taken a year...

"So hang in there kid," smiled Grandma, patting my shoulder reassuringly, "You hangin' in there?"

"It wasn't too bad today. Maybe because you and Grisha were there. Or maybe I just know about what to expect now. You can only shock someone so many times with the same routine."

"Righto!" she chirped, all Julie Andrews brightness. "Say I know it's a bit early for lunch, but you hungry?"

"Now that you mention it I'm famished! I guess I'd forgot all about breakfast today..."

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The Gyropolis was an old favorite of ours, a dumpy little takeout joint with chipped formica tables and randomly mismatched chairs that was clean where it counted and had incredible Greek food. We split a #12 souvlakia-and-Greek-salad platter and a side of stuffed grape leaves.

We found a table that was out of the fierce sunlight pouring in through the big front windows, and right in the path of the box fan on the floor. We expected to be called up to get our food, but Mr. Stavros himself came out with it, bringing it right to our table. I was surprised that he'd even remembered us. He'd heard about Papa and offered his sympathies, wanting to know how he was doing and if he'd be out soon.

When we admitted how little was known he assured us that Josepho was in God's hands and would be fine---the sort of things you pretty much have to say, ignoring all the times when God decided He had other plans for someone in Papa's position---and on his way back to the kitchen he tore up our check and told the girl at the counter to keep our iced teas refilled.

Souvlakia is barbecued pork, so not every little gyros stand has it on their menu. When the flames kiss the marinated meat, magic is born. Grandma speared a chunk of it with her fork, inspected it, and popped it into her mouth, sighing, "Poor little fellah..."

"I know, we're murderers," I pouted, and as I followed suit I bleated pitifully, as if I was speaking for the pig, "W-w-why are you e-e-e-e-e-eating me-e-e-e-e?!"

The quasi-masochistic humor of lapsed vegetarians. Hers had been an eighteen year stint and mine about that many weeks. Maybe Grandma had had an actual reason for giving it up but I hadn't. Just your basic teenage sloth and lack of commitment, all my teenage Buddhist karuna for our animal cousins proving to be just so much lip service.

Grandma grabbed another piece, then a slice of cucumber and a tomato wedge, building a little shish kebab on her fork. "Oh well, it's their own damn fault for tasting so good. But still, 'He who durst to harm the fly shall risk the spider's enmity...'"

"Just remember when you've scarfed me down, that's only half of the merry-go-round!" I shot back.

"What is that? It sounds familiar."

"You're not the only one who can quote William Blake," I said loftily, and snagged the next-best-looking piece.

She frowned, her brow all hunched up, "No really. What's that from?"

"You mean it's not Blake? I thought it was from-"

"Cut the crap, Missy!"

"It was? I thought Cut the Crap Missy was by John Donne- Okay, okay! Put the fork down!" I said hurriedly as she hefted it like a weapon. "It's from one of those old 'underground comics' you gave me when I turned sixteen. The one where the guy's in a diner about to eat a hamburger, and the burger and the mustard and ketchup bottle all get up and sing him that song. But he eats it anyway, and a second later it's like the whole world is attacking him! Gas mains blowing up, falling pianos, out of control missiles from the test range-"

"I remember that one. And then after all that he picks himself up and goes, 'I know what I need ...... ANOTHER HAMMMMMBURGER!'; like he hadn't learned anything!" she laughed. "I hope you took good care of those. Most of them were signed."

"Um..."

"You didn't!" she groaned.

"It wasn't me, Mom threw them out," I said around a mouthful of lettuce. We'd already polished off the souvlaki and the grape leaves and were now descending on what remained of the salad. "Or I'm pretty sure it was her. They just disappeared one day."

Coming into my room to put my socks away or something, stopping to leaf through one of her "Little Man's" wacky comic books, which she must've assumed would be about on par with MAD magazine, and instead seeing page after page of drug abuse, kinky sex, splatterpunk violence, and humor that she would not even recognize as humor...

"I guess she would've found some of that in there rather shocking," Grandma tittered, "Elizabeth was a sweetheart, and confrontation wasn't her style, but I can see how she might have considered me a bad influence on you kids. Too bad she did that though, you could've made a nice chunk of money putting those on e-bay!"

"Mmmmm," I agreed, spitting out the pit from the last succulent olive.

The counter girl---about my age and with skin even worse than mine, her hair piled and sprayed into a New Jersey Marie Antoinette---came by to top off our drinks and then gathered up our plates, amazed to not see a speck of lettuce, a crumb of feta or a smear of tzatziki sauce left on them. As if we had licked them clean, although we'd managed to stop short of doing this. "Didja say ya wanted a hamburger?"

"No we're good. That was, uh ........ a joke," I explained.

She smiled uncomfortably as she left us, like she thought we were weird but was trying to not show it since we were friends of the boss. Were we really that weird? Maybe we had been kind of loud. Carried away like Grandma and I sometimes got, shouting about hamburgers and William Blake...

Grandma Rosa shook her head. No Teddi, we weren't doing anything wrong. It's her. Some folks just have an abysmally low weirdness threshhold.

We seemed to be having more and more "conversations" like this. Maybe this was that business my neighbor Elsa had told me about; how women tended to be more attuned to subtle cues regarding the moods of others than men were (an observation she had made after living as a man for fourty years and then since February as a woman)- something I hadn't really been privy to until recently. But maybe there was something else to it...

I finished off my iced tea. Said, "Do you really think Papa's feelings about Joy are changing?"

Grandma thought about this a bit and said, "On the surface it's still all the same old bluster, but he's done what he needed to according to his beliefs, making his disapproval known. How much it hurt him. But he knows he can't bring the baby back, and he misses what he and Joy had, even if it wasn't the warmest, most sentimental kind of relationship. So I'm pretty sure that wall of his is crumbling, although he himself doesn't even know it yet."

He himself doesn't even know it yet. Was this just astute observation? She did have a degree in psychology. But then again she was a witch and could yank people's minds clean out of their bodies.

After all my skepticism about the paranormal I still found it a bit embarrassing to be saying something so preposterous, but I had to know. "Grandma, can you ......... Are you telepathic?"

"Sometimes. Your grandpa I had a remarkable psychic connection. We got busted one night playing charades with Bill Buckley and his wife Pat---back before he got famous---one of us shouting the answer before the other even did anything. And it seems like I'm starting to develop one with you," she grinned, shaking her head 'yes' as if to things I hadn't asked aloud, which suddenly made me feel all witchy and special and good. "And there are times when I even luck out with total strangers. But then there's times when I'm just BS-ing myself, not reading anything but my own little imagined voices. Which is why I call this a hunch."

"Whatever it is, I hope you're right. I hate being the cause of you guys fighting like that."

She frowned, "You're not the cause of anything! It's not you who your father's mad at, it's Joy. Joey..."

"Yeah, but Joey's not the one who keeps going there the day after day, when we know that Dad'll just get bent out of shape. When he's made it so clear he doesn't want me there! The fact that I'm not who he thinks I am, in a way it makes it worse. Like I'm showing up there in a devil costume, just to torment him. I wish just once I could visit him as myself, without all this drama!"

"Well If you wanted to you could tell him about the body swap."

"I can?! I thought we weren't supposed to talk about magic around him."

"He had just been admitted when I said that. I was playing it safe. His condition does seem to be getting worse, but gradually, and I don't think the shock of learning something like this would do him in. After living with me for the past year he knows a lot more than he lets on. One day back in June he was about to to go water his dichondra and it started raining. He muttered something to me about not needing 'that kind of help'. Like he thought I did it!"

"Well it is sort of confusing. I'm not real clear on what you can and can't do myself. I almost think you like it that way. It keeps you mysterious..."

She offered me her 'mysterious' smile and said, "So go ahead and tell him. He'll be mad at me for practicing witchcraft but he'll stop treating you like something he stepped in."

"I'll think about it. It's a big change in how we're playing this!"

"It's up to you," she shrugged, and started to slide her chair back, "You ready to go? Or did you want more tea?"

"Oh no! I'm just about tea'd out," I said, chewing on the straw in my plastic tumbler. (While this whole 'Abracadabra, you're a girl now!' situation was starting to seem more and more normal, there were still odd moments of disorientation. Like wondering how the hell my straw had gotten lipstick on it, and then a heartbeat later remembering it was my lipstick...)

Grandma Rosa scribbled FOR 2. ANYTHING + DRINKS. -ROSA on an Il Vesuvio business card and as we left stopped by the counter and hollared back into the kitchen, "Hey Nicky! I got something for you."

He came to the little window behind the counter and the cashier passed it to him. She was clearly relieved to see us go.

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"Somebody sure has a stick up her butt!" opined my grandma we climbed into Papa's Lincoln Continental. She found the controls for the AC and put it on full blast, and pulled us out into the narrow streets of Geek Town (the R in the sign having been painted out for the umpteenth time), heading for the hospital where my truck was...
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"You know, if you did decide to tell your father about your 'secret identity' you should do it when I was there, so I could back up your story. Because if it was just you, well he wouldn't believe Joy if she said the ocean was wet."

"Do you think we should?"

"Like I said, that's up to you. But I know he'd be glad to talk to his son, since Joey doesn't seem to be visiting him. Although seeing you like this might take him a bit of getting-used-to. Or hell, he might think it as an improvement. This is one way of turning you straight!" she chuckled, "Assuming you still like boys."

"I do," I told her, "The other night I ........ I thought about Ricky."

"I would imagine you think about him often. So what you mean is you masturbated."

I nodded, looking downward, suddenly childlike in my embarrassment.

"And how was it?"

"Pretty fucking great!" came out of my mouth while my brain was searching for a more seemly way of saying this.

"Yeah?"

"Um, yeah," I said, my head still bobbing, like that flocked plastic boxer dog sitting in the Lincoln's back window. While hardly a prude I really didn't want to get into all the juicy, drippy details of that experience with my dear old white-haired granny.

"Well that's good," she said simply. Inviting me to change the subject.

"Anyway, I'll keep telling Papa about the body swap in mind, as an option for later. But to do it right now, it would feel like I was giving up on this too soon. On trying to be 'good Joy' for him, to show him I can take whatever he dishes out."

"Spoken like a true martyr," she teased, "Like mother like daughter..."

"Oh fuck you!" I giggled, "And how would that explain Joy?"

"That should be obvious."

"My God," I groaned, "they do seem to have a lot in common, don't they?! No, I'm doing this because it's the last thing Joy would do. He's got to notice that eventually, the way his daughter's changed. I mean even if he thinks she's conning him, to get written back into the will, she'd never put up with all that! It's like she can't think that far ahead. We've seen her walk away from money before, if it meant a little work or-" Suddenly something she'd said a while back clicked. "Oh shit!"

"What? Did you leave something back at the restaurant?"

"No. Nothing like that ......... What did you mean when you said Joey isn't visiting Papa?"

"Well he's not. Not since that first visit with us on Saturday."

"You sure about that?"

"I sure haven't seen him. Unless he's been sneaking in there after hours. Why, did he say he was?"

"Sure did! And he was real specific about it. This whole story about you and him visiting, and you saying Papa was doing better because of how his aura looked-"

"That never happened."

"Goddamn it!" I exploded, "Didn't he think we would get together and figure this out? He lies so damn much, and yet he's not even a very good liar!"

"Don't sell your brother short. I'm sure he could be an excellent liar if he put his mind to it..."

This latest bit of jocularity fell flat with me, and I rode the rest of the way back to my car in a grim silence, not hearing much of what she was saying. 'Orgone theory' or some silly thing...

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Oh damn it, damn it, damn it! If Joey was lying about this then what else was he lying about?
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To be continued . . .

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