Not the Problem

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_7/Richardson.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″]

Granddaughter places Grandmother in a good spot, shady but with sun streaks. She kisses her head and leaves her there, but does not forget to bring food. “This is the problem,” she says, about the grandmother just sitting there. Out in the open. In her spot. She brings crossword puzzles and kisses to the grandmother also, but it is still the problem. She buys fancy purses and runs around with young men so as to change the subject.

The grandmother becomes particularly interested in a family of spiders. Spiders are usually lone creatures, just they and their spindlies and whatever they catch. But nope, not these, they are a family. Mama Spider, Papa Spider, Baby Spider, Middle Child Spider, and Oldest Child Spider.

The web is spectacular with overlays of silver upon silver. The children dye their corners of the web in putrid colors to express their individuality, but the web gets wind blown and trampled often. This provides Mother Spider with redecorating excuses. The grandmother marvels at this web making, the beautiful tendrils. How each strand shines. Each family member has particular threads they travel upon in each new web. Their feet like accordions, their bodies strew their own patterns atop their mother’s.

Baby Spider prefers black and likes to torture his prey for an inordinate amount of time, citing despair as a condition of existence. The grandmother can’t hear exactly what he says, but she can intuit it. “Ah the futility of it all!” she hears. “The certain death!” He asks her questions like, “What would I be if I could no longer make silk?” She picks him up and holds him when he prattles like this. She feels sorry for him.

Mother Spider did not at first appreciate this behavior. She bit the grandmother’s ankle and it itched for a week and left a mark. Now she’s gotten used to it. She even climbs atop the grandmother’s finger herself when Papa Spider has disappeared again. The grandmother can see where Papa Spider goes. It’s a shame, she says and shakes her head. But she doesn’t give the mother the details. She doesn’t want her webs to come out less delicately enameled, or for her to stop visiting her fingertip.

Her granddaughter’s visits become more and more of a nuisance. She’s knocked into the web twice. When the grandmother tries to tell her about the intricate sensitivities of Middle Spider, the granddaughter only half listens and then checks her head for a fever. Besides, her guilt is annoying. “This is not the problem,” says the grandmother. But she is not heard.

Oldest Spider hears her though. Oldest Spider refuses to believe in problems. Oldest Spider runs around reciting mantras of success to himself and shares them with the grandmother. “A problem is only an opportunity in disguise/You have to visualize the future you want.” Oldest Spider trails after his father and also knows where he goes, and atop Grandmother’s finger, he will sometimes crack and shed a few tiny gossamer tears. Grandmother loves these moments. She feels she is helping.

Grandmother recalls Charlotte’s Web and asks Mother Spider one day if her time is almost up. The grandmother does not want to wind up a sad pig. Or even a radiant one. Mother Spider laughs at her. “I’ll outlive you, you old bag. That’s for sure.” This is her sense of humor. The grandmother laughs and laughs and wets herself a little. Her granddaughter brings her disposable undies all the while muttering her guilt.

Grandmother does not appreciate that all the spiders will know she wet herself, but she gets over it. She knows, for example, that Middle Child Spider sneaks her boyfriend into her part of the web at night. She knows what they do! Once she would have been appalled by Middle Spider’s morals, but she’s loosened up in her old age. You can’t control the young. Or much of anything for that matter. Middle Spider occasionally bites Grandmother too, and also bites her own arms. She is tired of living in her mother’s web. She feels her legs are not slender enough and that her face is not pretty and so forth. Spiders differentiate between arms and legs. This is all very interesting to the unsuspecting grandmother.

The grandmother does not understand where Middle Spider gets this. Spiders do not read fashion magazines or celebrity gossip. They do not watch MTV, unless they are trapped in the house of a human teenager. But even then there are seldom any spiders on MTV. She thinks of her granddaughter and inadvertently gulps. She reassures Middle that she is a lovely spider, just lovely. (Really the grandmother can’t tell the difference.) This is when Middle Spider bites her. She can’t understand exactly what Grandmother is saying, but she knows a lie when she feels one. There is no talking to Middle Spider sometimes. In these instances the grandmother will admit that she is a human and an old one. “I don’t understand about spider teenagers,” she’ll say. “I just think you are a dear and that’s the truth. And that boyfriend of yours doesn’t know what he’s missing out on.” (The boyfriend had recently stopped coming around. Why buy the cow, if you know what I mean.) To this the middle child spider would weep and weep until the grandmother’s finger was soaked and then she’d apologize and wind her silks around Grandmother’s finger to dry it. This delighted her. She felt included. Also, it tickled.

The grandmother soon took to imitating the spiders. She dug up her old yarn and attempted to weave webs of string. She felt surrounded by colorful spaghetti, but not a web. She even tucked the yarn between her legs and walked slowly around releasing string from her bottom. The spiders snickered at her broken mandala nest and so did Grandmother. Her foot had begun to bother her, though, so she stopped trying to perfect her new craft.

Her foot was disturbing her actually. When her granddaughter came around she would hide it under a pillow. What was disturbing about her foot was that there was a hole in it. Each day the hole seemed to grow. It began like a dime, then it was a nickel, then a quarter, then a silver dollar, and now she avoided the topic.

Mother Spider asked to look at the wound. She’d spied limping. She began to weep when she saw it, which made Grandmother even more nervous. Nervous Nellie. She played solitaire to relax. She said to herself: old age is weird. All sorts of strange things happen in old age. But then a hole began to grow on her hand, too. Terrible, the grandmother thought. But busied herself cooking up schemes that would make Middle Spider’s boyfriend jealous, or give Baby Spider a dose of optimism (just enough), or allow Oldest Spider to be more honest and forgiving with himself.

The family was acting strange with her, she noticed. Perhaps it was the stench? The grandmother had begun to smell. She felt awfully embarrassed about it. She bathed herself with baby wipes, but to no avail. Worse, it seemed that every time she struck up a conversation with one of the spiders they began to weep. Even Papa Spider, who wasn’t much of a cryer. And when she accidentally bumped their web, they rebuilt it farther away from her chair. They’d never done that before! She could hardly hear their conversations now. It stunk worse than she did, quite frankly.

The granddaughter came on a Tuesday. The pillow was over the foot, and the hand was stuffed into a spool of yarn. Air freshener had been spurted. Perfume had been spritzed. The grandmother concocted a most innocent face. The granddaughter clicked around in her heels murmuring. She knew something was up.

“Why is your hand stuffed in a spool of yarn?” she asked.

“It’s like a fancy baseball mitt, isn’t it?” the grandmother replied innocently. The eyebrows shot up. Oh brother she thought and said: “I just like the way it feels. Warm.” Eyebrow release. Close one. The grandmother hated hospitals. She hated them very much.

“Grandma, it smells weird.”

“New air freshener,” she said and swatted her mit in dismissal. The yarn spool slid off a little. She hurried to secure it and in her flabbergasted state she stood up. The pillow slipped from her foot.

The granddaughter vomited on the ground when she saw the hole. It was the size and color of a hamburger patty. She barely missed baby spider with her throw up. He leapt out of the way just in time and blinked all of his eyes, gasping.

“Ohmygodohmygodohmygod!!!” the granddaughter said.

“No hospitals. Please!? No hospitals,” said the grandmother.

“I’m sorry Grandma, but you have to go. That’s disgusting! What happened to you?”

“I don’t know! I hate the hospital! Can I go see Dr. Rob?”

“NO! He won’t have the equipment for something like this. Stay here I’m going to pull my car up.” The granddaughter left, shaking her wrists and cursing.

The grandmother returned from the hospital a week later without a finger, but the doctors were able to save most of the hand and the foot with up-to-date packing materials. The spider family stared at her. All five of them in a row. The grandmother stared right back.

“You’re supposed to be reclusive!” the grandmother shouted.

“I know,” Mother Spider said with shiny eyes. But no tears slipped out. “We were trying something different,” she said.

“Oh, like biting old women who are supposed to be your friend!” The grandmother turned her head and jutted out her chin to show the family that she was inconsolable.

“We have no control over the poison! Please believe us!” Middle Spider said. But the grandmother started humming and held her dramatic chin position.

“Lets look on the bright side,” said Oldest Spider, true to form. “You didn’t die, and you didn’t lose the foot.” He attempted a smile. The grandmother glared at him. It was progress.

“I had to spend a whole week with a dying woman who smelled even worse than me! I probably caught a terminal illness!” retorted the grandmother. “And I’m missing a finger!”

Baby Spider said, “I for one never bit you.” The grandmother nodded but then repositioned her chin.

Middle Spider said desperately, “I think you’re a dear, and that’s the truth.”

“Come here, you little wench!” The grandmother said. “You see how it feels!” She’d had enough. She picked up Middle Spider and brought her to her mouth. Middle Spider started screaming and so did Mother Spider. Baby Spider was cracking up laughing. The father and Oldest Spider paced. The grandmother swallowed Middle Spider without crunching down and then burst into tears. Middle Spider had been her favorite, the little hussy. The rest of the family crawled up her legs and began biting with abandon, except for Baby Spider, who just watched. Grandmother didn’t even fight it. She would become an old piece of Jarlsburg. It was better than cancer. She would finally be rid of that annoying granddaughter. Perhaps there was an afterlife. Maybe she’d see her husband again, or at least her cat. Not that she deserved it. She began to drift off. But then she felt a biting sensation in her esophagus. Middle spider was still alive!

“Middle spider?” the Grandmother said as if putting her ear to a closed bedroom door.

“sdjkhfa anwupfhuawlfkjh!!!” was all she heard.

“Mother Spider, she’s alive!” the Grandmother said. “Come here!” She plucked Mother Spider from the place where she’d been biting and brought her to her chest. Mother Spider conversed with her daughter through the Grandmother’s skin and ribcage. The grandmother tried not to overhear, but no she didn’t try.

“She’s drowning!” said Mother Spider. “I can barely understand her!”

“Tell her she must find someplace dry!” said the Grandmother. “Heart,” she thought.

“I’m going in after her,” the mother resolved. She stuck the end of her silk to one of Grandmother’s molars and descended into her throat. The father and Oldest Spider moved up to the grandmother’s chest and tried to hear what was going on over the thunderous heartbeat. The grandmother didn’t close her mouth. Her attempted murder had erased her anger. She was going to die anyway. But maybe she could save her friend. She just let the drool pool and spill and held her head back.

“Oh for the love of God!” the granddaughter said, wielding a can of Riddance. She just shows up like that sometimes, it’s terrible. She started spraying right at Grandmother. Grandmother cupped her wet hand around the boys.

“Why is your mouth hanging open?” the granddaughter asked.

“I ono,” the grandmother said without closing her mouth.

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“I ono!!”

“Does anything hurt?” She patted her grandmother down and checked for fever. Thank goodness she was wearing a long skirt to hide the fresh bites. It was a terrible moment for Mother Spider to emerge from the grandmother’s throat triumphantly wielding her daughter. But this was the moment that it happened. It was nearly impossible not to cough, but the Grandmother was strong. Her face turned red.

“Eh, Eh!” the Grandmother warned. If they stayed in her mouth the granddaughter might miss them. She felt them crawling over her tongue. They didn’t know what “Eh, Eh!” had meant. The grandmother gently closed her lips leaving a hollow in her mouth. This understandably freaked the spiders out. They would start biting in moments, she knew. She waved her granddaughter away.

“I’m not leaving until I know you’re safe!” the Granddaughter said.

The grandmother kicked a nearby bucket to create a distraction and in the instant that her granddaughter turned her head, she coughed Mother and Middle Spider and a big puddle of drool into her right hand. Her left hand was still cupping Father and Oldest spider to her chest. God knows where Baby Spider was, likely spinning silks in her wounds like Sisyphus again. The doctors had found the soft remains of his previous attempts. Her granddaughter turned back to her and put her hands on her hips. This didn’t even annoy the Grandmother because she was so happy her plan had worked and she was even more happy to be able to swallow again. She swallowed and swallowed and swallowed and smiled. She cupped her two hands together to reunite the family. The cup had a hole in it where her pointer finger was missing.

“What is the matter with you?” the Granddaughter asked.

“Nothing. I’m fine. What is the matter with you?”

“Me? Nothing I’m fine.”

“Fine. We’re all fine here. Are you done spraying? Because I was about to take a nap.” She yawned.

The granddaughter thought a nap was a fine idea. Healthy. Something had been up, but all seemed well now. She sighed.

“Oh, alright. I guess you must be tired.” She said this in a poor baby voice, which revolted the grandmother, but the revulsion stirred itself quickly into pity for the young woman’s problem.

“Oh yes,” the grandmother said and stretched. The granddaughter turned, reluctant to leave. She looked back and said I love you and Grandmother winked at her. She loved her too, even if she was annoying.

When Grandmother heard the ignition she opened her hands. The spiders sprinkled out. They were moving all slow.

“What’s the matter?” Grandmother asked.

“My legs hurt and my eyes are burning,” Oldest Spider said. The others mumbled agreement.

“The Riddance!” Grandmother said. She started to cry. What a pity that after everything they would die anyway. She hadn’t realized it would be powerful enough to get past her hands. “We’re all going to die!” the Grandmother said.

“Told you,” said a voice in her eardrum. Baby Spider!

“Where are you!?” said Grandmother. “You missed everything!”

“No I didn’t, I’m right here.”

“I don’t see you.”

“In your ear.”

“My ear?! Hahaha, it tickles.”

“It didn’t tickle until you knew I was here.”

“Hahaha!”

The rest of the family lay dazed on her shirt. They looked up at the sound of their son/brother’s voice. They seemed to understand something. The grandmother didn’t feel so well either. Her face was burning and she was shivering. Time to go, that’s all. At least she wasn’t alone in some horrible hospital. But what about Baby?

“What will you do when we’re all gone?” she asked him.

“I will go on,” he said. “Trap flies and avoid birds.”

“How will you avoid the Riddance?” Grandmother asked. She was getting sleepy.

“I’ll stay in your ear for awhile, I suppose.”

“Oh that’s nice,” Grandmother said. “That’s very nice.” But she was only half listening. Baby Spider hummed.