Read Joy School for Free Online

brown eyes, focused on us like magnets to metal. She is wearing a brown plaid flannel shirt open over apale blue nightgown, and she has one of those knobby chests, mystery bones sticking out all over the place. She has many rings on her fingers. I see a square blue stone, a round yellow one, some diamonds.
    “What’s-a matta?” she yells. “Who’s-a this?”
    “It’s my friend Katie,” Cynthia says.
    “Come over here,” the old lady says, quieter, and I step a little closer.
    She slams her hand down on the bed, mutters something at the ceiling in Italian. Then she looks at me and says,
“Here
, scaredy girl! Little wa-wa! Come here so I can-a see you!”
    I move closer and she sits up, leans forward, cranes her skinny neck out like a mean bird. She stares at my shoes, and then her gaze travels slowly all the way up to my face. Then, as though exhausted, she leans back against her pillows, closes her eyes. “She’s-a nice,” she says, nearly in a whisper. “It’s okay.”
    “In school, we have history together,” Cynthia says.
    Her grandmother nods, then opens her eyes wide. “What’s-a the clock?”
    “Four-fifteen,” Cynthia tells her.
    “Put him on! Put him on!” the grandmother says, and Cynthia moves to a television positioned on a nearby dresser so that it can be seen from the bed. She turns the knob and a soap opera comes on. You can spot them a mile away. All the people with the same kind of face, kind of secret and like they’re playing a joke on themselves. Like when the director says “Cut!”they’ll all explode laughing. Cherylanne used to like soap operas. Once she dreamed what was going to happen the next day and it did. She was hard to live with for awhile because she thought that was such a big deal. She said, “This dream has told me that I could be a writer. That is now one of my career options.”
    The soap opera Cynthia has turned on is a famous one that takes place in a hospital, I forget the name. The old lady holds out a trembling finger, points to the screen, at the doctor and nurse who are standing beside each other in a patient’s room. The patient has about nine hundred bandages on. The doctor is talking to him and the nurse is watching the doctor.
    “Ha!” The grandmother says. “You see her, that nurse, she’s-a stand by the doctor?”
    “Yes,” I say.
    “She’s-a fuck him.”
    “Nona!” Cynthia says, and then starts laughing. And so do I.
    “Yes! That sullamabeech, he’s-a sleep with everybody! And one woman, Susan, he’s-a marry her
twice! Che puzza!”
    “What’s that mean?” I ask Cynthia quietly.
    “‘Disgusting,’” Cynthia says. “Once she got mad and threw her shoe at the TV. It broke the screen.”
    Well, this visit has picked up. I’ll come back here.
    Nona pulls a bag of hard candy from the drawer in her bedside table, pops a piece into her mouth. Without taking her eyes from the screen, she offers the bag to us. Even from where I am, I can still see the lint all over the colored balls. “No, thank you,” I say.
    “She has a dentist appointment,” Cynthia says.
    “Sssshhhh!” Nona waves her hand at us. We are dismissed.
    On the way downstairs, Cynthia says, “She’s always like that. You can’t control her. She fights with my mother all the time. It’s kind of embarrassing.”
    Zipping up my coat at the door, I say, “I like her.”
    “Oh. Good,” Cynthia says, and relief is there, soft as a leaf that falls at your feet.
    “Are you
leaving
already?” I hear from the kitchen, and Cynthia’s mother appears. She is wearing an apron with a built-in towel, and holding a potato peeler. Cynthia and I have already made up about my going. I don’t know why her mother has to butt in.
    “I have a dentist appointment,” I say. I am sort of starting to believe it. I have a smell in my nose of dentists’ hands. “Thank you for having me.”
    “Well, you’re
welcome,”
Mrs. O’Connell says, and I can tell from her tone she