Bodies Hit the Floor

From the day I was born, my grandmother went out of her way not to walk through the living room. After witnessing my delivery from the open space of a designated area, peering through the foggy window of my mother’s hospital room and clutching her carton of Pall Malls close to her chest, she finally decided that she was fed up with fresh air and family life, and retreated back to her garage in the heart of Kentucky.

There, she spent most of her waking life, chain-smoking cheap cigarettes and effortlessly chugging six-pack beers, all the while thinking that the tar-coated walls would certainly collapse before she would ever feel the extent of her decay. As she listened to her favorite talk show on her hand-held radio, we drew pictures on the walls with colored chalk, hiding the layers of dirt beneath them and holding our breath.

On occasion, she would sober up for long enough to cook a decent meal- familiar but still impressive, from meticulous recipes that she had stored in her head. The entire family would join her in the kitchen, always ignoring the perfectly suitable hardwood table in the room next door.

Dinner would be served on her 30-year-old china and a fold-out card table. When we would laugh, because we could find humor in the little things, my grandmother would entertain us at times with a lowered smirk, and that would give us some satisfaction. But when we disagreed, she would interrupt with a monotone, “Well, anyway,” and we would continue clanking our forks up against the second-rate kitchenware. My grandmother never had anything really to say, except when she thought we deserved it. Then she would pick us apart with her words- one by one- but would always neglect the full plate of food in front of her. And she wouldn’t stop until her remains turned cold and she had ordered us off to bed, if she had not already locked herself back up in the garage, her safe-haven, alone.

With hopes to win over her love, I would sometimes hide variety-pack plastic bugs along the path between her permanent lawn chair and the bathroom down the hallway. But instead, I would only win her terrified scream and a long, lonely stay in the corner of the room. On my ninth birthday, I made a list of what I wanted most. When my grandmother asked me for my number one, I said, “For you to quit smoking. Just for me,” but she told me that was something that she just couldn’t do.

Maybe that’s why I didn’t shed a tear when her beloved vice offered her cancer and only 6 months to live. That’s also why, 10 minutes after she died, we were all laughing as the seven of us, through laughter and tears, crowded onto the bed next to her, and it suddenly collapsed, sending her limp body jolting and crashing to the ground. That night, we drank Bloody Marys until the break of dawn.

On the fifth anniversary of my grandmother’s death, my sister and I drove to the graveyard, winding through the rows of headstones, listening to the only radio station we knew, and singing, “Let the bodies hit the floor,” over and over. If my grandmother had known, she would have sent us straight home, after, of course, at least realizing the terrible irony of it all.