Old People Can Sometimes Be Wicked Treacherous Bitches
Teaching E____ today and grandma came in. Mom and dad were both out of the house. I should explain a little, actually. Dad is, like me, of foreign extraction, a human being who comes from “the outside world.” Thus his customs and ways are different than everybody else’s. I come from Uhmerrruhkuh, but he comes from some land with a funny name. Anyhow, his daughter was born in that country, and since they moved here to continue their happy family life together, his wife and her mother have decided life would be better without him, chiefly because he fails to bring in piles of cash even though he works 12 hour days six days a week (he’s not of blonde, blue-eyed, tall, really-uhmrkin looking extraction, so he can’t get a high paying job as some joker that hangs out with kids and pretends to teach them English), so that the grandma of the family who I have never actually met has always been a shadowy and evil figure to me.
She comes in with a tray of corn chips and coffee (the usual fare at the O____ house). Smiling sweetly, ingratiatingly, bowingly and all that, she places the tray down, smiles big with jagged crocodile teeth protruding from her rotten lips and says,
“Here you go and I hope you enjoy them… little E____ only gets a little because she eats too much snack food and doesn’t have room for dinner… but here you are, this one’s for you…”
I look at the scaly skin hanging off her arms and her deep, dull eyes, and her smile seems nicer to me than I first thought. In fact, she seems downright kind to me. Her husband died ten years ago, and here she is with her daughters family living all over her in her tiny house. Poor woman. The whole living arrangement is a stress to her.
E____ rolls her eyes in a granddaughterly way, grandma snickers at the child’s cute display, and she backs out of the room bowing and smiling. I said “Thank you” to her for some reason, instead of “arigato.” She responds by doing nothing but just keeping smiling.
The lesson we are doing is “Greg is taller than E____” or “A gorilla is stronger than E____” etc.
Pretty soon I hear the front door, and it’s Mr. O___. The odd man out. The outsider, the one getting booted from his family, the one who smiles and crackles dryly “I’m okay, you?” everytime I ask him nervously “how’s it going?”, nervously because I’m expecting an earful from him about it, but he always just does the smile routine.
I hear him come in and in a second the old bag is on him. She’s saying something about, “gomen nasai, desho?” She’s scolding him for not saying he’s sorry for something. She’s made his life a living hell this last year since he’s had to live there. I know because I’ve heard about it. She thinks she’s “teaching” him probably, educating the primitive foreigner on the elegant ways of Japan’s arbitrary manners. (sorry, not picking on Japan, but all manners are arbitrary. Something is polite or rude just because everybody agrees it is, not because anybody thought about it and used any common human sense) She scolds and scolds him, and we can hear it as loud as if it were going on in the room. It makes me sick to even be there.
E____ rolls her eyes again, this time in a more serious way. Then, she gets it, looks at the cards, and says to me, “Grandma is louder than we.”
“Us.” I say.
“Grandma is louder than us.”
That warranted a high five.
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