“Lunch at Oldrids”

Amelia Leaphart

“I need to see your ID,” the Indian man behind the counter with a thin mustache demanded.

All I needed to do was mail my passport, which you don’t need an ID for anyway, but I complied, not wanting to be a bitch. I handed him my ugly Georgia driver’s license.

“What’s this?” He said after staring at it for ten seconds. “This doesn’t work. I need to see an actual ID.”

The man’s obtuseness annoyed me. The U.S. passport I was trying to mail for renewal expired, so I couldn’t show him that. I had a British passport in my bag, but what if I didn’t? He seemed pleased enough with that. Maybe he just didn’t want to serve anyone who offers a Georgia driver's license as their ID rather than a maroon booklet.  

“Asha?” He said, referring to my middle name.

Not wanting to have a conversation with the mildly rude man who was harassing me about an ID I had no obligation to show, I nodded.

“Asha’s an Indian name. This cannot be your name.”

I quickly explained how my mother was born in India (omitting how she was half-Indian half-English to speed along this interaction, and to avoid any unwarranted commentary on this colonial-esque relationship).

“Which part?” he asked.

“The Himalayas,” I said.

“The Himalayas are in Nepal, not India,” he said with a smug smile that almost made me resort to violence.

I paid and burst out of the stuffy post office back into a summertime rain. I stomped the ten-minute walk back to my grandmother's house. 

“That stupid girl’s done something daft with her hair,” My grandmother said when I sat down next to her. She was talking about my French braid. The evening news was on, and someone being interviewed was wearing a mask.

“What are those things he’s got ‘round his face. That’s stupid.” She never knew a single thing about the pandemic or UK lockdown (UK-style lockdown… Americans will never understand, but I digress). 

I moved into the kitchen. All the drawers were made of plastic and were all broken. The silverware felt dirty no matter how many times you washed it. Her cats would climb all over the counters, so you never knew if your coffee mug was just licked by a freaking cat. There was no dishwasher, so the washing-up would take hours after dinner (and she always expected three large cooked meals a day). 

“Did you get it done?” My mom asked.

“Yes, I paid $70, but it’s done. What’s for dinner?” I asked, looking at the bell-peppers and grimacing. 

“Baked fish and potatoes.”

The slimy fish with bland boiled potatoes was so nauseating that I climbed upstairs into the half-bedroom. This room used to be called the “cat room” as no one would ever enter here except the cats, which further rendered it uninhabitable for humans. When the three siblings decided to spend the second half of their adult life taking care of their mentallyill mother, they decided to clean up the cat room a little bit so someone could at least attempt sleeping through the night there. 

Mentally ill doesn’t mean her Alzheimer’s. She was diagnosed over seven years ago, and she doesn’t know any of our names. She never learnt her two daughters' names because she never liked them very much (I’m not exaggerating, she would always confuse them when they could not look more different), but she loved her son. My uncle, who never even did the dishes let alone give her sponge baths and change her diaper like my mother and aunt, was the favorite. He’s probably the only one getting anything in the will, but for some reason my aunt and mother don’t seem to care. My grandmother, Nellie, grew up as one child of seven in a farming family, but you would never guess that based on her work ethic. She met my Indian grandfather and quickly married him because she was already 30, dangerously close to becoming a spinster. She moved to India where she lived for twenty-years, making zero attempt to integrate herself in Indian culture and raised her children by sending them away when they were eight. I heard a story of when she attacked my grandfather with a knife—which I could easily believe after seeing her attempts to attack my mother. 

I stared at the roses on the wallpaper, germinating around a portrait of Princess Diana. The noise from the cars outside the window was endless, and the heat from the radiator pressed against the bed nearly suffocated me. I checked my phone for the first time that day: no notifications except another stupid email about move-in day and another COVID protocol.

I went back downstairs to check on dinner’s progress. My grandmother had a tray on her lap. The oily fish spilled down her whiskered chin and her cup of tea kept spilling onto her plate as she stared at the television. She kept throwing pieces of trout and potato to the cat, which of course it didn’t eat, and the pieces of food sunk into the sticky green carpet. 

“What do you bloody want?” She said and spat at me. 

Grossed out anyway, I picked up a copy of the quasi-fascist tabloid The Daily Mail that my grandmother had a lifelong subscription to. I liked to read their stories about blind dates and their nasty, gossipy coverage of the Royal family and ignored their articles on Brexit. 

I put Downton Abbey on after getting my tray and bitchily turned the subtitles off so my grandmother wouldn’t watch it and read everything out loud, until my mom came in and told me to put them back on. She sat on the couch next to me and said we’ll go to Oldrids tomorrow. Oldrids, the department store like Macy’s but smaller and never attached to malls. There was a cafeteria there, and the vast spaces and things to look at was a classic way we manufactured outings for her. 

After a restless night of cars swishing past my window, my grandmother bursting into my room everytime she got up to use the bathroom, and not knowing how to turn the radiator off, I remained in bed, procrastinating the laborious practice of getting ready. I reached for my phone, needing to stretch off the bed to grab it from the charger. 11:30—when we didn’t have plans to go out, I would take as many Nyquils as it took to sleep until 1:00 to minimize the amount of time I was conscious. I would drown out the sounds of my mother in the bathroom with my grandmother, her spraying her down and her calling her a bitch in return. I rubbed my legs against the linty sheets, sweaty, and my head hurt from staring at my phone. I opened Instagram and saw pictures of people at national parks or moving to Manhattan (somehow with their art history degree). I thought the reality of my surroundings was unbearable, but this was somehow worse. My email made me angry—somehow every University email felt facetious and infantilizing—which is true but why did I feel so angry about it when no one else seemed to care?

We got in the car (which was unbreathable because there was no air-conditioning and I wouldn’t bother rolling the windows down). I actually sometimes enjoyed myself on these drives. Turns out, it’s actually quite pretty here. The lush green felt more muted here than in the southeastern U.S., like an impressionist painting. Poppies and wildflowers dotted the highway instead of kudzu and other invasive vines like in Georgia. My headphones drowned out my grandmother backseat driving my mother: 

“You think you know everything don’t you? Driving my bleeding car around. Who do you think you are?”

 We pulled into the parking lot and spent 30 minutes trying to figure out how to get her wheelchair out of the trunk of the car. It was folded in but the trunk was still too small. Despite everything, my mom and I were always patient in these situations. I think it’s because we realized in these moments all we have is each other. 

Wheelchair finally ready, I pushed my heavy grandmother through Oldrids automatic doors. My mother trailed behind me, looking at the delicate china and old-fashioned quilts on display. A father getting frustrated at his toddler son in the aisle looked at us and softened his face. He smiled, and stepped to the side. I was used to this, and sometimes enjoyed how people were so endeared to see three generations of women who appeared to have all taken care of the other at some point in their lives. 

After half-an-hour of watching my grandmother grab clothes indiscriminately from aisles, my mom let me go look at the younger women’s section. I found a pair of black boots on sale for fifteen pounds. Snagging these to ask my mom if she could buy them, when I returned my mother and grandmother looked like they were playing tug-of-war over a black, satin top. My mother’s face looked less angry and more on the verge of tears, and my grandmother’s penciled on eyebrows furrowed cartoonishly on top of her eyelids. Shoppers stopped and stared for a second—but it was more upsetting to watch than entertaining—and they quickly dispersed to other aisles they pretended to be interested in. 

“It’s too small for her,” my mom said. I didn’t really see what the problem with this was, because we always let her buy some thing she’ll never use, because it’s her money.

“No it’s not you daft woman. It’ll stretch in the wash,” she barked.

“It’s too expensive, it’s inappropriate, and you can’t even wear it,” my mom whispered this more to me than her.

My grandmother stood up from her wheelchair and slapped my mom with the shirt.

“Nasty piece of work,” she muttered.

She proceeded to walk through the aisles herself, now clutching the black, satin shirt in a crumpled ball. She could still walk easily, but refused to because she knew we could push her in the wheelchair. Ever since I knew her, whenever she saw an actually disabled person being pushed in a wheelchair, she would comment on how it was so selfish that we were not doing that for her. We still needed to follow her around the store, so we awkwardly tailed behind her.

“What are you two doing? Leave me alone,” she said. 

One of those thirty-year-old, uptight looking couples witnessed this comment and gave us a nasty look that said “why are you harassing this poor elderly woman?” I suppressed my desire to punch them in the face. I was also convinced this couple locked their parents up in a nursing home.

“I’ve come here with my son,” my grandmother said, turning to my mom, “and we never have one cross word. Not one. And you know what? You’re a slut.”

Neither of us were surprised by this.

“I have my husband, and you don’t. And you know why? It’s because you’re ugly,” she said.

“You treat him like shit,” my mother said breathlessly. Not to mention the fact that he didn’t even live with her, not even in the same country. 

“You’re ugly,” my grandmother said again, waving the shirt threateningly. 

“I… I never even wanted to be here. How could I have found someone to marry when I’m here taking care of you?” my mother said.

“I never wanted you here, you’re a bloody nuisance you are. And I don’t know where you got your looks from,” she said. 

My mother walked away and sat on one of the stools in the shoe section. My stomach started hurting. I walked over and sat hunched over, like I had period cramps, across from her. 

“It will.” she said.

“What?” I said.

“Like you said that one time. It will be a relief when she dies.” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “It will be.” Because that was the kindest thing I could say in the moment.

“She was never a good mother.” she said, before crying, bent over like myself. 

My grandmother walked over.

“I’m going for my lunch now,” she said and waddled away. We had forgotten about the wheelchair at that point, and I went to grab it. Some kids were playing on it while a store-clerk glared at them. 

We rode a few steps behind my grandmother up the escalator. She kept muttering, “Nasty, ugly piece of work… and that daft girl who’s with her.” Tears welled in my eyes the whole way. I just wanted to go home. Where that was, I didn’t know. 

The unpleasantness failed to ruin my grandmother’s appetite like ours. We stood in line with two full-sugar cokes. My grandmother sat at an opposite table with her tray, probably the first time she ever paid for a meal out herself. 

I don’t even remember how we got back in the car. How we were able to shepherd her out of the store. How we followed her around, whether she even bought anything. A cashier who witnessed the whole drama gave me the boots for free. She wanted us out of there as fast as possible.

Tucking my grandmother in the car and putting her seatbelt on, my grandmother said, “I want a nice cup of hot tea when I get home.”

My mother didn’t reply.

“What’s the matter dear?” she asked.

My mother shut the door and got in the drivers’ seat, sniffling but not crying. It felt like watching a kid with divorced parents just get passed off to the other in the parking lot, and the inevitable silence in that car ride. 

“Let’s just forget about it,” my grandmother said. “Let’s watch the television when we get back, it’s nice to see things on there.” 

We pulled out of the parking lot and were stuck in traffic at a round-about. A car pulled next to us, with a little blond, blue-eyed girl pressing her face against the window. She was smiling and waving at my grandmother and smearing snot everywhere. 

“Look at her! She’s lovely.” My grandmother pointed and waved and smiled back at her in return. 

My mother and I remained stone-faced, again trying not to cry. My grandmother continued to try and get us to wave to the girl. We drove away when cars started moving. 

“You know what? You lot are so selfish. I’ve always been kind to children,” she said. “I have,” she assured us. 

The rest of the car-ride was in silence, the car didn’t have a radio. I didn’t listen to anything with my headphones in the backseat. When we got back, I made a cup of tea for myself and my grandmother, my mother didn’t drink the stuff. I put on Downton Abbey with the subtitles, and my grandmother sat where she always does. It was the episode when Matthew finally proposes to Mary, and my grandmother didn’t talk the entire time. She didn’t understand anything that was happening on the screen, but she still didn’t say anything. During the commercial breaks, I talked to my mom about another op-ed in The New York Times. After dinner, I cleaned up, went upstairs and sat in the cat-room. I opened my purse and took out the crumpled black satin shirt that my grandmother ripped the security sensor off of in frustration. I’m not a shoplifter, but I wasn’t going to leave this shirt in the store for someone else to buy. I needed to keep something for myself.