The Atkins Supper Club by Kevin McCaffrey

The Atkins Supper Club | Kevin McCaffrey

The only thing more embarrassing than getting picked up from eighth grade by my seventy-four-year-old grandmother is the seventy-four years it takes to get inside this shitbox she calls a car. I fall in ass first and swing each leg over, broken then unbroken, while holding my crutches like it’s some handicapped circus act. In here, everything’s automatic: hand visor for a cloudy day, uncomfortable smile through brand-new braces and a full-seat recline to hide from Vanessa, the love of my thirteen-year-old life.

It’s the right turn out of the parking lot when everything slows down, when I shoot up straight in my seat like I’m tied to the ceiling, when I clutch the grab handle so hard my arm starts shaking, when I start to wonder — really, wonder — if today’s the day we don’t make it home. 

Grandma Trudy cannot drive. She can go through the motions — push the pedals, spin the wheel, honk the horn — and pretend she’s not a liability to everyone else on the road stuck ten miles under the speed limit, jumping curbs and grinding the clutch with those trembling white-knuckled hands like even they know she’s getting away with something. 

She nudges the wheel now with a whole-body sway, as if she’s more looking to bail out the side door than steer us through the intersection. Her white ‘84 Ford Tempo matches this shallow dive, a sweeping left into a green-now-yellow traffic light. The car lurches forward mid-turn, mid-intersection, sinking to a dead silence. We’re now blocking the second-busiest road in northern New Jersey.

A black Range Rover barrels toward us from the other side. I’m only what I see: a wake of dust and asphalt; sun rippling over a metallic hood as it lifts toward the sky; and then a bounce, as the SUV falls back to its tires. 

The suit and sunglasses-clad driver lifts his hand off the wheel, serving up a palm like this is the dumbest way he could have been inconvenienced this afternoon. He taps the horn and mouths “move” — he’s that close. This short beep gives permission to every car in the seemingly mile-long row behind him. The chorus builds until Range Rover leans out his driver-side window for the crescendo, screaming at 12-out-of-10 volume: “What are you doing lady!”

But that’s the thing. She’s not doing anything. Grandma’s staring straight ahead with this wide-eyed look of déjà vu. She does this once a ride. It’s part of the routine. I’m not sure what she’s doing exactly, or where she goes in that dusty grey bob of hers, but I call it Back to Nowhere, because this happens enough that she must know the place by now. Usually, she freezes up on a side street and all I have to do is steady the wheel. Once it happened while turning into the driveway and she blasted through a lawn ornament. Today’s the first time in traffic. Lucky me. 

There’s no pause in the beeping now. Range Rover’s laying on the horn holding up his middle finger through the window. Grandma comes to and twists the keys in the ignition but her shaking hand only gets halfway around: She can’t complete the motion. She tries again, and this time — thank God — the engine roars back at her. 

Storefronts flash by as we flee the intersection: Blockbuster, QuickChek, the strip-mall bowling alley that’ll sometimes serve you a beer without checking ID, Marshalls where I got my first pair of baggy jeans for a couple bucks. It’s the left at Old Hook Farm — one of the few that hasn’t been parceled out into condos yet — that she finally says something: “Let’s keep that between us, Chris.” 

This is the first time Grandma has treated me as anything but her thirteen-year-old grandson. In the three months since she started picking me up from school on Wednesdays, our interactions have been a one-way street: “Do your homework”; “That’s enough video games”; “Save room for dinner”; and, my favorite, “Does that look right to you?”, when she’s peering over me at the dining-room table.

Grandpa usually picks me up — is supposed to pick me up — but after his second heart attack, he’s off doing supervised jumping jacks at Pascack Valley Hospital on Wednesday afternoons. I should be taking the bus home, like I do every other day of the week, but since Mom left Dad everything is suddenly about family — now that we aren’t one anymore. 

That leaves me with captain hard ass, chief of the no-fun police herself, who will leave this Earth without ever uttering the word “Wawa” — not due to some long-standing beef with the South Jersey convenience-store chain — but because “it’s too silly”, she says, as if anything unserious might as well not exist.

So, “Sure Grandma,” I lie, because tonight I will tell everyone what happened. At the dinner table I’ll take her hand, lower my head, and with a strength and tenderness right out of Russell Crowe from Gladiator I’ll tell her we can’t do this anymore. It’s not fair to her, or me, or Grandpa or Mom, that it’s time to hand over the car keys and that awful, stubborn stare will surrender to a nod of silent acceptance. Grandpa will pat me on the back for doing what he never could. Mom will look on with pride that her son, now a man, was the one who finally got through to Grandma and next year in high school I will take the bus home to an empty house every single day — not one soul will see my grandparents in the parking lot. 

She veers into the driveway with a “Here we are,” like she didn’t almost murder us five minutes ago. Grandma gets out, walks over to the breezeway door next to the garage and waves me in. I’m staring at her from the passenger seat with crutches between my legs, waiting for any sign that she might open the door for me this time, help me, do anything. She waves again more quickly, as if to say, “C’mon get your disabled ass in here.” 

You would think breaking my leg, even if it happened while recreating a skit from Jackass on my BMX bike, would earn me the smallest bit of sympathy from Grandma. Nope. It’s like this handicap is something to be ignored and overcome rather than tended to in any way. I hobble out myself to a, “Don’t forget about your homework,” as the screen door slams behind her. 

—

I’m not sure what era their dining room is supposed to be from, but it’s not this one. Wood-lacquered cabinets line its swamp-green walls and are filled with hundreds of antique glass candlesticks: clear, colored, lilac crystal Windsor-cut prism, a Sahara-yellow 3-arm candle holder, the #300 Old Williamsburg. “Heiseys,” they call them. I elbowed a long pink one off the Thanksgiving table two years ago and it cracked in half. Only time Grandpa ever got mad at me, at least that I can remember, muttering “klutz” under his breath with half a candlestick in each hand. I cried on the ride home that day and Dad tried to cheer me up saying those things aren’t worth anything anyway. They were going to drive around in the RV out back and sell them all after Grandpa retired, 25 years as buildings supervisor at the high school. They made a big deal about it, threw him a party down at the Knights of Columbus with a spiral ham and strawberry shortcake. Grandma fell and broke her arm while dancing. We thought she just tripped. Now everything’s going on eBay. The shelves empty out a little more each week. 

Grandma lays a paper plate filled with Oreos on the table and flips through the mail. Between an envelope and a glossy magazine, she nods at the bookbag parked on the table. I can tell this is fun for her, making me sit here and do my homework on the last week of school. 

The mechanized drone of the garage door rumbles beneath my feet. You can track Grandpa’s heavy steps anywhere in the house, but it’s not menacing. It’s a bounce and a thud, this jolly giant parading around his castle. 

“Hello, hello!” he shouts as the breezeway door creaks open behind us.

He’s a massive German, top to bottom: size fourteen wide black bus-driver shoes; great round belly in spite of a 6′6” frame — a testament to his appetite, not his thirst as I’ve only ever seen the man have a whiskey sour on Christmas; and at the top is a 75-year-old miracle, a full head of Brylcreem slicked back black hair with one gray strand curled along a creased forehead. His two favorite jokes: saying the wrong thing on purpose: “more gooder, more better.” Or when we get Chinese food, he’ll smash a fortune cookie on his forehead, dump the crumbs in his mouth and spit out the fortune. His favorite magic trick: he would take me up on his lap as a kid, make a fist to his forehead and flex his bicep over and over. That giant wing of flesh flopped up and down like it had a mind of its own. I’d try and copy him, but my string-bean arm didn’t jump at all. I swore it was magic. How did it move? He could do anything, built half the house with his bare hands: the garage, the backroom, the screened-in porch for the cats. When he’s bored, he takes apart his minivan and puts it back together.

“We’re in here, dear,” Grandma calls out to him.

“How was the ride home?” he says, clawing an Oreo off the plate and ruffling my hair. 

“Fine, little traffic,” Grandma says before I can get a word in.

“Stir fry tonight,” he says in a long swoon, as if I’m not about to have the worst dinner this side of the Tri-state, jiggling a tangled plastic bag in a raised fist over the table. Grandma half smiles up at him: “Great.”

An hour passes with nothing but a couple of Oreos and scribbling in my notebook. I write Vanessa in the margins over and over as if I could summon her by perfecting the slant in my V’s, creating a summer for us together before Friday comes and we go to different high schools and I never see her again. She wrote Good luck next year! on my cast two weeks ago in big cursive swoops with her purple gel pen, the exact same thing she wrote in the back of my yearbook. It’s already fading into the plaster. 

The sun is inching toward the horizon. A tangerine light pierces through the far window hitting me square in the face, extending over the table and running along the top of Grandma’s antiquing magazine, casting the room in a sickly orange hue. She gets up to draw the blinds. The steady smack of knife-to-cutting board echoes from the kitchen, sounds like someone’s trying to beat down the door. Grandpa’s go-to post-heart-attack meal is lean ground beef and sliced-up bell peppers, one of the fat-free, salt-free and taste-free recipes from his new Atkins diet book. Mom gave it to him after she ran through them all, lost 20 pounds and then gained all the weight back during the holidays. I can’t get away from that damn thing. 

Grandma’s still by the window. She’s eyeing up the cord as if she’s trying to draw the blinds down with her mind, ready to perform the lamest Jedi mind trick in the galaxy. The look extends down to her right hand, but nothing’s moving and she’s Back to Nowhere again, twice in one day, a new record. I hope it’s somewhere cool, maybe on the road in South Carolina where her hands don’t shake or freeze up, heading to a candlestick show or whatever the hell they’re called. Or maybe she really is nowhere – stuck in time waiting for another tick of the minute hand to come out the other side. I know that feeling. I know that place.

Last month the trails in Rivervale were slick and yellow from the rain and pollen. I was pedaling hard out of the berm ready for my first backflip in borrowed shoulder pads and no helmet while my so-called friends were screaming Steve-o, Steve-o, Steve-o because my middle name is Stephen and I was about to do something stupid. The bike slipped under me before the jump and everything went sideways to upside down, blue sky snaking through a canopy of oaks and sycamores into a drop and a snap and then the world got small, like all it could hold was this dull-and-sharp ache below my knee. Everyone was laughing and cursing until they came over and got quiet, and that’s when I saw my twisted-up leg in a half split under my new Haro X3. They all scampered up the hill to the road. Nobody looked back. 

“Do you need help Grandma?”

Any reason to get up from the table, get away from this math book. I pop up on the crutches and swing over to the window. Her hand’s at her side, fingers trembling, like she’s tapping away at some old tune only she can hear. No more chopping, only the hiss of bell peppers softening in a frying pan over an electric stove. Grandma turns to me with her mouth half open. 

“Trudy?” Grandpa calls from the kitchen.

“I’m fine, dear,” she hollers back.

I pull on the cord, draw the blinds and walk her back to the dining room. She thanks me softly; in such a low voice I can hardly hear it.

She steers us over to the table and the product of nearly an hour of “work”: an entirely blank notebook page except for oh my god Vanessa written sixteen times in the margins. I try to shield them with my hand as my whole face burns up and all I want to do is jump out the window into the backyard and limp the whole way home.

“Is that who you’re always hiding from?” Grandma says, but is nice enough to not expect an answer. “You’re all finished then, why don’t you go do your games?” she says so loud that Grandpa can hear it. She never lets me finish early, never tells me to “go do your games.” I pack everything in my bag and head over to the computer nook.

A maroon suit jacket and short brown hair appear in the kitchen hallway by my second game of Starcraft. Mom’s always late. It’s never on purpose, but she can never seem to peel herself away from that corporate park on time. So when she does get here, it’s like she has to make up for it. All smiles. Happy until she isn’t. She kisses Grandpa on the cheek as he’s reaching up for a serving bowl. Grandma’s sitting at the table in the back room now — a straight shot down the house from me — where we eat, flipping through that same magazine.

Mom waves me in from the kitchen: “Come — dinner’s ready. I’ll make you a plate.” 

I chug a can of soda at the table, poking at the mix of grey, green and orange on my plate. The stir fry looks like something you’d dump in a rabbit’s cage mixed with charred peppers.

Grandma’s plate is full, too. She must not be a fan of the Atkins lean-and-green special either. 

“Let me help you,” Grandpa says, turning toward her.

She bats him away: “I’m fine. I’m not that hungry.”

“You’re having an off day. Let me help you,” he says again, but this time in a hushed tone, as if we can’t hear him from the other side of a three-foot-wide table.

“How was your day?” Mom says between bites. 

This is my moment. My name is Chris Stephen Donahue, grandson to an unfit driver, son to a single mom, and I will have my revenge before high school begins: Grandma, lay down your keys.  

Across from me she’s fiddling around with a burnt green pepper on her plate, pushing it to the corners. I watch and wait for her to get a hold of it, bracing to tell the story of how we almost died on the ride home. I want her to see me, hear every word, know what it means to break your leg and never see your friends and maybe not have any friends and almost get in an accident once a week because Grandma’s too proud to change a single thing in her life, but nothing’s easy here. Her wiggling fork can’t find a way in. It’s pointless; no shit she can’t drive, she can barely eat. I shouldn’t have to say anything. Everyone knows she’s sick, and she knows she’s sick, but we still have to pretend every Wednesday like she isn’t because we’re all terrified of her. 

She finally gets a prong into the burnt vegetable. Grandma treats this heroic victory like everything else in life, with a blank stare, and maybe that’s it: Grandma’s as sick of us as we are of her. That’s why she’s off in Nowhere every chance she gets. No one will give her a second to eat her dinner, or drive the car — not me, Mom, Grandpa, Range Rover. Everyone wants everything how they want it, on their time, like “hey throw on these stupid shoulderpads and do backflips for us, Chris” and then peace out when you fall and break your leg. 

My mouth moves like the words have been wound up in my throat all afternoon, waiting to shoot out the first chance they get. The worst part of the story spills out onto the table, no strength, no tenderness, less Russell Crowe, more Joaquin Phoenix: “Broke down in the middle of Kinderkamack road,” I say, like I was talking about homework, or the weather, or their neighbor’s weird gnome lawn ornament.

Mom and Grandpa lock onto me, empty forks hovering above their plates. Grandma’s sitting up straight with this heavy, spiteful look that cuts right through me, as if even this half-truth is less than she deserves. 

“Chris, what happened today?” Mom says, leaning into the table towards me, like she didn’t hear me, but I know she did because she’s already pissed off. 

“Nothing happened. Grandma’s car stopped…working in the middle of Kinderkamack and this guy almost hit us.”

“Almost hit you?” Mom says, looking over at Grandpa, as if she’s accusing him of something. 

“I had the Tempo inspected last week,” Grandpa says. “Kinderkamack’s a busy road, Trudy, let alone with a stick-“

“I’m fine,” Grandma says in a gravelly tone. She forks up a wad of bell pepper, holding it up above her plate for a moment like it’s the easiest thing in the world, this charred-green-pepper-on-a-fork fuck you; watch me. It’s shaking all the way to her mouth, this liver-spotted arm fluttering out of a white short-sleeve polo. She furrows her brow, reminds me of the way she looked peeling out of the intersection this afternoon, as if she’d rather drop dead on the table than admit she can’t do something, and the fork pops into her mouth.

Grandpa throws up his hands and turns to Mom. She lets out this long, very specific exhale, the kind that means she’s hit her breaking point and the other side is sheer exhaustion or a foul-mouthed explosion.

Everything’s quiet after that, save the clinking of silverware, the sip of a drink. Grandpa’s a clean-plate clubber for the millionth night going. Grandma chews through her big bite, half Nowhere, half Somewhere. Mom shovels down what she’s got left, like she can’t get out of here fast enough. Tonight, no one will pretend anything will change. There will be no fighting at the table, or pleading, or half-hearted attempts to solve a problem that not everyone believes is even a problem. Grandma will keep driving. I’ll wake up tomorrow with the same scribbled-on cast over my shin. Stir fry will be served even if no one likes it. The Atkins supper club will meet again next Wednesday and appreciates your mandatory attendance.

I try to force some more down, give up and let Mom take my plate. My bookbag is all packed next to the door, ready to go. It’s almost dark out. I would usually go back to playing games while Mom hangs back here for a bit, but I don’t want to be here any longer than I have to. 

Grandma walks over to the kitchen sink next to Mom like they’ve been waiting for this moment. Mom pulls both faucets and waits a minute before flicking her hand at the stream. The water comes out hot here, so you learn to let it cool off. Grandma hangs her head over the sink gripping the countertop with both hands. Mom pulls the nozzle off the faucet and the water sprays left, right and all that dusty gray hair goes from dry to damp to drenched, matting against her scalp. A squirt, then lather worked into soft circles of foam and gray wisps and through it all, something happens: Grandma’s shoulders sink; her hips level out; the weight tilts from the balls of her feet back onto her heels. A glimpse of a smile underneath all that soapy hair, one she can’t keep from us any longer. She says something mom-to-daughter, so low it can only be for one person. The nozzle falls to the sink. Mom envelops her. Grandma lifts her hands from the countertop, slow and shaking, and grabs hold of the arms tied tight across her chest, pulling them into her, like she doesn’t want to be anywhere else.  

Mom rests her head against the wet, gray tangles and turns to me, mouthing slowly: “I’m sorry.” 

I shake my head because I want her to know it’s not her fault. It’s no one’s fault, but I can’t get the words out, and isn’t that how everything’s going around here. My eyes start to burn and I turn away.

Grandpa’s looking out the window at the backyard, in that way people in old movies sit on their porch and stare out at the road like they’re waiting for the sun to go down. I tilt my head to see what he’s looking at — maybe a squirrel tearing apart the lawn or a cardinal on the bird feeder — but the only thing out there is the RV.

Tan beige fitted into the dusky green grass. A faded-red line cuts through the middle, front to back. It’s blocked up at the corners — takes the weight off the tires — but they’re shot anyway. The paint’s peeling off the door, a marigold rust curls around the handle. Crinkled foil covers the windshield, and the two captain’s chairs behind it. Sunlight’s slipping off the hood now, nearly run out the yard, and then all at once, like someone flipped a switch out there, everything fades into the early summer twilight.

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