Chelsey Hartupee
In Excess of Age
If it were up to me, I’d drink wine from a box and smoke cigarettes hour after endless hour. I would tear off this murky brown, balls hot bear suit covered with more than thirty-two sickeningly sweet flavors and tell all those kids to save mom and dad’s five bucks for good music, save their souls. I’d put on “Young Turks” and put these shitty, faded Nike Terminators through hell trying to keep up with the clumsiness I call dancing. And to finish, I’d grab the old man’s hand and let that same synthesizers-and-Rod Stewart combo do its best to make him and me forget he’s so much closer to dying than I am.
But rent’s due in a week, and that old man is sitting in an avocado plastic chair waiting for my shift to end. His own clumsiness is hindering his ability to flip through coupons as he licks another two fingers to help him grasp “2 for $5 Cheerios!” He piles the essential coupons on his right leg and the unwanted on his left. A small stack of bills is peaking out of his sweater pocket, and when he shifts slightly his pant pockets rattle with more copper than silver. I sit next to him, shoving “Half-price sundae Sundays!” flyers into sticky hands and raking up papers immediately discarded with my bear leg.
I have watched Shaun Cassidy play a Hardy Boy more than I’ve seen girls my age. I’ve eaten cold spaghetti and kept score for Scrabble instead of attending classes. I wear this damn bear suit to afford to fill the cupboards. All this for a man that insisted I be named Rivers and hides my cigarettes and peanuts in his sweater pockets.
“This one’s a good one,” he says as he presses the flimsy coupon straight onto my bear costume eyes.
“You’re right, Maurice. That one’s perfect,” I say in approval.
He smiles, and I am glad to have given him some feeling of satisfaction. He has saved us a whole fifty-cents on a pack of paper towels we already have sitting on the pantry floor. He will remind me of this coupon as we roll past them in the store, and I will be unable to convince him that we don’t need them. “The coupon, the coupon,” he will repeat. “We don’t want to waste it.”
However, it’s perfectly acceptable to tack on a superfluous five dollars (no, four fifty thanks to him) to an already lengthy grocery receipt. That’s at least half an hour of passing out flyers. Half an hour of watching proud parents dispense dollar after dollar to already sugar high kids that make me wish this bear suit was a little more terrifying. Thirty minutes of getting requests and shoving a thumbs-up into the face of every camera.
‘I don’t hate him for this,’ I remind myself as I pull another squirming child onto my lap and set the flyers aside for a hang ten. It’s not his fault I hide in a bear suit.
I don’t even hate him for my name. I despised it when I was younger, but now that I’ve grown I’m sort of glad I’m not another product of eighties soap opera inspired naming. I could actually have the name Trevor or Sean, and not sound like a super cool Indian.
I take another glance through these bear eyes, and watch him stare at the paper towel coupon. He flips it over a couple times between his thick fingers. He holds it close to his eyes and looks at the picture.
“We already have these, Rivers. They’re sittin’ at the bottom of the pantry. I thought all you did was look atcher feet!” he said as he shifted the coupon to his left leg.
It is his disgusting yellowed nails and heroin-addict veins grabbing my hand every time I leave the room that I hate; that grasp burns with backwardness. I hate having to keep clothes shoved into entertainment center drawers and under coffee table tops; sleeping in the living room night after night just so I know if he’s going out the door at 3 AM. That couch I call a bed is scratchy and its bland, oatmeal coloring matches his skin. I sometimes dream that it is his age I am sinking into instead of a lumpy couch.
This was the man who held me up by fingers, shaking me to Stevie Wonder to make my mom forget the stack of unpaid nursing home bills. This forgotten forgetting man still insists on shaving himself even though it leaves him scuffed. The adult sympathy and childish incomprehension that gushes when we enter a room floods all of that away and reduces us to two numbers: twenty-three and eighty-six.
As children run by us with melting cones leaving trails, he smiles. “I remember bringing you here.”
“Yeah, that was a long time ago.”
He scrunches his face trying to make top and bottom meet. “Not so long, you ran like them. With a little less grace, of course,” he says with an airy laugh.
“We’re both clumsy now.”
He nods slowly but still holds a smile. He pulls his cane slightly closer to him, hugging it like a favorite toy. How long has it been since someone has wondered his name? How long since a woman wished she could sit next to him?
“You’ve still got time. That will grow out, all that ineptitude you got from your mother.”
I pull his wristwatch towards me and check that yes, my shift has been over for ten minutes and no, no other employee of Extreme Freeze has come to aware me of this. I rip off the top part of the costume and give Maurice a thump on the shoulder as I shuffle inside, struggling to keep my bear bottoms up.
“You know I can’t keep him waiting!” I yell, tugging on those Nike Terminators. My manager twists his comb-over around the corner, and gives me a shrug as he hands me a trivial pile of tips.
I kneel in front of Maurice and stuff his coupons in separate pockets. He grabs his cane and pushes himself up. I grab two cigarettes, leaving one hanging loosely in my mouth and the other twirling and tapping between my fingers. He tenderly pats my unshaven cheek and pulls the cigarette out of my mouth.
“You know you can’t do that,” he says as he snuffs it beneath his chunky shoes. “I won’t letcha!” finishing with a smiling grimace.
I inhale and nod. He is still Grandpa. That man is still more than sagging skin and a history book. I bear an entire burden yet he manages more care in one simple sentence.
I grab his hand and we begin our trek to the grocery store; Maurice’s cane sucking concrete and my shoes shuffling a clumsy dance beside him.
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