It was Sunday and I was dreading school the next day. School probably isn’t the appropriate word; I liked to call it work. I was dreading work the next day and if grownups could dread work on Mondays, I could dread school just as much. It was my father’s weekend to have me and I couldn’t wait to go back home to my maternal grandparent’s house. If I was going to waste my time worrying about school, I’d rather be fussing about it while I was sitting on my own couch in front of my TV. Well anyway, I got into my dad’s car and I thought I was headed home.
I was planning the rest of my day. It was actually pretty early, around eleven in the morning, and it almost seemed strange he was taking me back. I thought it would be great if he did this every time because hanging out with him was, for the most part, about as fun as wearing a wool sweater with no t-shirt underneath. Like I said I thought I was going home and I said, “Where are you going, you should have turned back there, that’s the way home.” He gave me a stern response and said, “We’re going to grandma’s house for Sunday dinner, and you are going to see your grandparents and your aunt so and so and I think your cousin will be there too.” Oh my God, the torture of it all, I thought. They weren’t all bad; his family; but it was so uncomfortable over there because I just didn’t fit in. I twisted my head around to catch a fading glimpse of the street that I hoped we were going to take to my house, and there was no turning back.
Everybody was greeting me and some hugging me and I gave a fake smile the ones I didn’t really like. I was sort of glad to see them, I felt as if I blended in for a moment or two but usually I was the odd ball. I would spend a great deal of time saying absolutely nothing but I did spy on all of them. I tried to be invisible and listen to their stories and I was always watching their body language. This would continue until the moment one of them would stop and look right at me. There would be a dead silence that kind of hung in the room and instantly I was exposed. I was all of a sudden the center of attention and would freeze with mortal fear. Someone would inevitably ask me a question or make some comment and my mind was blank. I couldn’t say or do anything and this sort of reaction had a detrimental effect on our relationship. They thought I thought I was better than them. This was one of the reasons, obviously, why I didn’t always like them. It was kind of a vicious circle and I was too young for this sort of thing. They always insinuated that my other grandparents made more money than them and I was an ungrateful rich kid. They would always say, “Well, around here things are different!” I was never sure what I said to cause this response and it made me watch my every word. It was easier not to say a freakin thing than risk persecution. It was time to eat.
My grandma’s house was rather small so when a group of people got together things would sort of get cramped. The dinning room and the family room were connected. When we would get up from the couch and so forth, we had no choice but to kind of arrive at the dinning table at once. There would always be a few stragglers but there we were, all together. The dinning table took up the majority of the room and we all had to shuffle around its perimeter. My grandma always had a white tablecloth set and all kinds of casserole things were brought by the family members. The selection always mimicked a buffet at your local feed place and the women took a few moments to remove the sea of tin foil that covered everything. The time was approaching. Everything was ready, and then nothing would happen. It was customary for everyone to just stand there and look at the food. Nobody wanted to move, and everybody seemed a little uncomfortable. They all were getting a taste of what I always felt. I was always puzzled by this ritual because I knew why I was uncomfortable, but I didn’t know why they were. Maybe it was me, I would think, Maybe THEY can’t relax and be themselves because I am here. Or maybe it was my grandfather; who nobody really felt comfortable around. At least I thought that, because he and my father always fought, and my dad’s sisters would act as though they were going out on a limb to break up the fights. He always got the better of my dad, and I sure as hell didn’t want to be the one to sit by him. But, as I was saying, everybody just stood and looked at the table. It was kind of like being at a funeral or something; you might as well of thrown a sheet over a casket, put food on it, and sat down. It was enough to make you cry and get sick at the same time. Besides, the grease was starting to appear on the surface of these casseroles and I didn’t know if I could even taste any of this stuff. One of my uncles would eventually come through and be bold enough to grab a plate and dish up some food. He wouldn’t look at anybody in the eye while he was fixing his plate because he didn’t want to see everybody’s look of shock; it would have stopped him in his tracks, and then we would never get this thing over with.
We were all done. The dishes were being scraped and the dish water wash running and some of the people were going their separate ways. I was sitting in the family room waiting this out. As usual I was trying to be invisible and this time instead of observing everybody, I decided to daydream to make time go by quicker. I don’t know what my father was doing, but my grandma called me into the kitchen. She wanted to show off her newly decorated kitchen and wondered what I thought. For God’s sake I already saw it and I didn’t like it one bit, but I didn’t want to offend my grandma too much so I walked in there. She expected some sort of positive reaction, and I was going to have pull this off without hurting her feelings. My father and I had entered the house through the kitchen door when we first arrived and I had seen the remodel job then. Luckily, I new what to expect. I don’t know what my grandma was thinking, but she painted the whole kitchen orange. Not a good orange, but a deep rusty red orange that might be appropriate for an engine block in your average hot rod. It was worse than any casserole imaginable. I stared at the walls with the bug eyes of a zombie and keep saying it was a nice improvement. She then pointed out the plaster cornucopia wall hangings that she hung in a staggered pattern above the stove. What else could I say? I felt like a real jerk because my grandma was one of the people on my dad’s side that I liked. I wanted to get out of there but she made me stay and sit at the kitchen table. The walls felt like they were emitting radiation, enough so that a cancer patient could have sat down and been cured in the time it took to finish a cup of coffee. But my grandma liked it, and that was O.K. I guess. She was proud of it.
My father appeared from outside and informed me that we couldn’t go yet because he was going to change the oil in his car. I was going to die in that orange kitchen. He took about forty five minutes to change the oil in his car because every little last drip drop of oil had to make its way out of the bottle and into the car. That is another topic I will discuss later, but anyway, I got out of his car and walked into my house a full hour later. I remembered that I had school, or WORK, the following day, but I could finally feel good about feeling miserable because I could sit on my couch and watch my TV.