Boys, boys, boys

My grandmother loves when I read to her. I think it started when she and I spent the summer living with my aunt in Japan. I was there to nanny the children, and she was there to baby my aunt. I spent the days when the kids were in school wandering Tokyo alone, but as a 17 year old, there wasn't much for me to do at night. This meant a lot of evenings at home with the family, and somehow, I ended up reading out loud to my grandmother. When I was in college, my grandfather was still working and would be gone a few evenings a week. I would go over to my grandmother's house and keep her company and read to her.

There were several years when I didn't live in Utah. I would make certain to spend an hour or two at my grandmother's house while I in town. Before I would leave, she'd always pull out a book of poetry, religious stories, or inspirational essays and ask me to read to her. During graduate school, I was too busy to do much besides study and work. I felt like a terrible granddaughter and family member. In order to redeem myself, I recorded myself reading out loud for my grandmother. I made the tape during study breaks, with excerpts from books I happened to have on hand. One of those books was The Best American Short Stories for 2003. (Or was it 2002?)

There was one short story in that book that I particularly love. It's format is unusual and rather than a straightforward story telling, the author, Rick Moody, writes with a rhythm that is as compelling as a song, or the sound of a train, pushing constantly forward. The phrase "Boys enter the house..." repeats like a bass line throught the story. Through this image of entering the house you watch the boys grow up, reach middle age, and develop new relationships as old ones fall apart. The final part of the story ends with their father dying and as they leave the house with him on the stretcher, they are no longer boys. I read this short story to my grandmother, but, since she is religious and the author is a little straightforward about ALL the activities boys participate in as they as they are growing up, I did a little editing. For example, sentences like this one, "Boys, trailing after their father like he is the Second Goddamned Coming of Christ Goddamned Almighty, enter the house, repair to the basement to watch baseball," received a little editing. I felt guilty for tampering with a work of art, which I find more blasphemous than a curse, but I figured, it was for grandma, a very good cause, and no one would ever know.

The next time I came home to Utah my uncle told me, "You know, Grandma and Grandpa loved that tape so much. Particularly the story about the boys. They loved it so much, they went to the library and checked out the book."

"Oh no," I said. "Did they read it?"

My uncle smirked, "Not only did they read it, Grandpa loved it so much, he read it out loud to me!"

"Oh no! All of it?"

"All of it. He got to the sentence, 'Boys enter the house, having masturbated in a variety of locales' and sort of stumbled and said, "Oh, Linsey must have edited a little here." So he skipped to the next sentence and started there, but they are still masturbating, so he sort of mumbled for a little bit and turned red until he found a safe place to start again." My uncle punctuated this sentence with a guffaw.

"Oh no! Was he mortified?"

"Not really. He still loves the story. And you know, it's actually the only time I ever heard my father say the word 'masturbate'.

"I do what I can," I said, shaking my head.