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LORI JAKIELA

I worked bingo nights at the Trafford Polish Club Mondays and Wednesdays. I was seventeen and worked for my grandmother Ethel, who ran the kitchen. Ethel was 230 bad-tempered polka-loving pounds in a housedress and slippers.

“I don’t need to impress anybody,” Ethel said. “I don’t gussy up.”

I’d been working for Ethel since I was twelve. I liked the money for clothes and books and music. Ethel paid me what she felt like, depending, but there were tips and everything was cash, wads of ones that, on a good night, made me feel stripper-rich.

I could pocket bills, but a lot of the senior citizens at bingo tipped in change, and Ethel made me put the coins in a jar that she tallied every night. She called change-tips “found money.” Found money, Ethel claimed, was lucky. She traded in the change for instant bingo tickets, the kind where you pull the paper flaps back to see if they spell out “Bingo” or the message, “Sorry You Are Not an Instant Winner.”

We were supposed to split the tickets, though I don’t remember every agreeing to that, and Ethel always took more than her share. She thought I didn’t notice. I think she hit a few times but kept it secret. I’d win a dollar here or there, but never enough to make back what was in the jar.

“You weren’t born lucky like me,” Ethel told me more than once.

“We’re family,” Ethel said as she’d dole out my pay from her apron pocket. “And family is more important than money. Family is more important than anything. Remember that.”

And so I didn’t count my money in front of Ethel because it seemed disrespectful to do so. I didn’t count it until I got home to my room, where I closed my door and spread it out on my bed and sorted it into piles and tried not to do the math when I knew my grandmother shorted me.

“Be grateful,” Ethel said about everything. “You kids today are never satisfied. You’re always looking for the easy way out.”

I wasn’t satisfied, but most days I worked hard for Ethel. I wanted her to love me. I was OK with the smell of grease and fish. I was used to Ethel’s habit of eyeing up my boobs to see if they were growing. I was used to the way she’d make me turn left, then right, then left until she got a good look.

“You been letting boys play with those?” she’d say until I felt myself curl into my self like one of the ingrown toenails I’d clip for Ethel because she couldn’t bend down to reach.

Safe sex, Ethel said, meant never letting a boy get on top of you. Safe sex, Ethel said, meant staying away from boys, period. Ethel seemed obsessed with talking about sex and had been like that long before I knew her. For years, my mother, Ethel’s daughter, thought girls got pregnant if boys’ tongues got into their mouths. My mother would grow up to become a nurse. My mother would believe in science. When I asked her how she ever bought the idea of spit sperm, she said, “Your grandmother is not someone to argue with.”

“They’re only out for one thing,” Ethel said about boys.

Ethel said, “They can’t keep it in their pants.”

Ethel said, “That’s how you happened, probably.”

Ethel said, “You don’t want to end up like her,” meaning my birthmother, who’d been pregnant and alone and, as Ethel told it, a great source of shame for her family. My parents adopted me when I was one year old. Ethel loved shame as a weapon most of all.

I never knew Ethel’s husband, my grandfather. He died the year before my parents adopted me. He was an orphan, too. I’ve seen pictures—a tall thin man with dark eyes. He looked sad in his suspenders and fedora. His orphan story was different—his mother dropped him off at an orphanage when he was 10 because she couldn’t afford him anymore. No shame in that, Ethel said.

In pictures, my grandfather looked plowed over by the world, like Ethel gave him a go, too.

“Maybe he would have known what to make of you,” Ethel would say.

She said, “I think he would have loved you.

It wouldn’t occur to me until years later that my adoption might have been a problem for Ethel, who was old-school, a first generation American who believed in blood.

“Your mother couldn’t have children of her own, so we got you,” Ethel said about my arrival into her family.

I didn’t read anything into that for a long time because I was used to Ethel’s gruffness, the way she hit me with the wooden spoon she kept near the stove, the way she’d try to chase me around the Polish Club kitchen and pull my long blonde hair. Sometimes I’d hit back. I’d joke about how I’d love to see her in a bikini, or about how many boys must have played with her boobs over the years because they were so big she could rest a tray table on them. “Must be convenient on vacation,” I said about her boob tray.

This is how it was between us.

Ethel was my only living grandparent and I had a lot invested in our relationship. I loved her and believed, in her way, she loved me back.

Or that she would love me back if I just worked harder, if I was a good granddaughter, if I complained less, if I made others happy, if I didn’t fight so much.

“Lori baby.”

She called me that.

Even a meteor of a woman like Ethel has a nemesis, or at least a foil. For Ethel, it was Fanny.

Next to my grandmother, Fanny looked like a toy person, something made of pipe cleaners and worn-out felt.

“Old Piss and Moan,” Ethel called Fanny.

Every Wednesday, Fanny would come to bingo night and order her usual—fried fish sandwich, half a bun.

“And blot it good,” Fanny would say, meaning she wanted the grease from the fish sopped with a paper towel before I served it to her.

“That Fanny gets my goat,” Ethel would say, her face turning red as the roses on her housedress. “That Fanny can go to hell.”

Why Ethel was so furious with Fanny, I didn’t know. Maybe there was history there, maybe not. Whatever it was, neither woman ever talked to me about it.

“Let sleeping dogs die,” my mother, who mixed her metaphors, said about the two of them.

Ethel and Fanny were neighbors. Ethel lived in a yellow house with two windows on the second floor and a white porch awning that made the house look like a duck. Fanny lived in a lopsided white box of a house that seemed about to collapse down the ragged little hill it was built on.

The houses, like the women themselves, seemed like something from cartoons. Ethel the fat spastic quacking duck, Fanny some sad thing a wolf started to blow down but gave up on because it wasn’t worth the effort.

Ethel cranked up Frankie Yankovic’s “Beer Barrel Polka” in the kitchen and laughed loud enough to flip gravity.

Fanny complained. About everything.

“That’s noise pollution,” Fanny said about Ethel’s music.

“B-12 never comes up,” Fanny said about the bingo. “They pump it full of lead so it don’t float. They don’t want me to win, that’s why.”

Fanny said about the fryer, “When is the last time you changed the grease?”

“Oh piss and moan and moan and piss,” Ethel said. “Why don’t you drop dead already?”

Every Wednesday when Fanny would show up, Ethel would say, “You again,” and Fanny would glare.

“I don’t know how you can stand her,” Ethel would say to me about Fanny. She said it like a challenge, like she was testing something, loyalty maybe.

At seventeen, I didn’t mind Fanny. I thought I knew something about sadness. I was drawn to it like a mirror.

Ethel believed in blood. I believed in bonds between strangers, my fellow oddballs. I romanticized every hurt, real or imagined. I read Vonnegut, who taught me both world-weariness and its opposite.

“Be kind, babies,” Vonnegut said, his only advice about living.

I wasn’t born kind, and most of the time I fought with everyone close to me, but kindness to strangers was easier. I practiced on people like Fanny and worked my way up, to my mother and Ethel. It didn’t always go well.

“And so it goes,” I’d say, Vonnegut’s line, something to wield like a sigh.

I never thought about what it would feel like to be Fanny and know I was someone’s test subject. I never thought about the difference between genuine and practiced kindness.

“You people are trying to kill me,” Fanny said, and she meant Ethel and me and everyone else.

I don’t know how old Fanny was but she seemed ancient. Her unhappiness carved her face and hands into canyons, things that take centuries to form. In all the time I knew her, she never smiled.

“Give me one thing to smile about,” Fanny said.

I took it as a challenge. I’d tell Fanny a funny story from the news, some neighborhood gossip. I’d share the latest good-luck bingo trick I’d overheard, usually some new troll doll or a prayer to an obscure saint who specialized in bingo players and lost souls.

Lately I’d been seeing St. Expeditus around, on glass candles and necklaces. Sometimes he was brunette, sometimes blonde, sometimes bald with a silver bowl balanced on his head. No one was sure he’d ever been a real martyr. His backstory was fishy—Roman soldier martyred in Turkey, beheaded, set on fire, fed to lions, drowned. One story went, the devil came to Expeditus disguised as a crow and tried to delay the would-be saint’s conversion to Christianity. The crow cawed “tomorrow, tomorrow” over and over until Expeditus, in a hurry to save his soul, shouted “today, today” and stomped the crow to death.

I told Fanny that story.

“They call him the Saint for Real-Time Solutions,” I said. “Expeditus. Expedite. Clever.”

I said, “He’s the go-to guy if you’re desperate.”

I said, “You have to run something in the paper for it to work.”

Fanny looked like she needed to spit. “Everybody has a gimmick.”

About me, she said, “They see you coming.”

I didn’t know who she meant by “they.”

Everybody, probably.

“Leave it be,” my grandmother said. “That Fanny loves to hang on her cross.”

Every Wednesday, Ethel would pretend Fanny wasn’t standing in the Polish Hall kitchen, ragged wallet out, demanding Ethel serve her. Every Wednesday, Fanny would inch closer to Ethel, two planets bent on collision, until I put myself between them and took Fanny as my responsibility.

“All yours,” Ethel would say when she saw Fanny coming.

My grandmother would bow a little and say, “Be my guest.”

One Wednesday, Fanny came in. Her dyed black hair curled like a raccoon on her head. Every week she seemed a little shorter and this day the top of her head hit where my boobs would have been if I had them, if boys really had been doing the job my grandmother believed they were born to do.

I had to stoop to look at Fanny. Her eyes, as usual, were red and runny, like she was allergic to the world and everyone in it, like she spent most of her downtime weeping.

But today there was something charged about her, too. She looked alive. She shifted from side to side, like she was revving up. She ordered her fish, half a bun. Then she added, “And you. Stop pussyfooting around.”

She said, “You know I can’t have the grease.”

She said, “You people are trying to kill me.”

I must have somehow botched the grease-blotting last time and Fanny thought I’d screwed her over. I was therefore responsible for a week’s worth of burping and indigestion and all the unhappiness in Fanny’s world.

Or it was more than that. It was probably more than that.

Here’s the thing: I didn’t know anything about Fanny’s life. I didn’t know if she’d ever been married, if she had kids, if she did have kids where were they and so on. I didn’t know what music she may have liked beyond polka noise pollution, or what the inside of her sad little house looked like or if she had cereal in her cupboard or what toothpaste she used or if her teeth were mostly her own. She may have had doilies on her tables. Her house may have smelled like lemons. I didn’t know and I didn’t care, not really.

All I saw in Fanny was a generic sadness I thought I could connect to and fix. She made the world simpler that way. She made me feel useful. She offered me her sadness, my sadness; her outsider-ness to pair with my own.

St. Expeditus, help us.

St. Expeditus, get us the hell out of here.

People serve us in the way we need them to serve us.

By us, I mean me.

“I’m on it,” I said about Fanny’s fish, and turned back to the fryer.

Most days, I spent my downtime lying on my pink-shag bedroom rug, head wedged between two stereo speakers. I played Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town” over and over and pondered how to get out of Trafford, this rusted mill town with its Big Bang Bingo Jackpots and these fish sandwiches and a creek so polluted it turned everything it touched—rocks, tree roots, skin—orange.

Trafford—home to churches and funeral homes and dive bars with clever names like Warden’s Bar and the Fiddle Inn.

“Get it?” my mother said. “You fiddle in and stumble out.”

Trafford—home to my grandmother and my mother and Fanny and me.

“You’re going to go deaf,” my mother said when she found me lying with Springsteen like that.

She said, “Get up already and make yourself useful.”

She said, “Don’t you want to be somebody?”

I said, “Doesn’t everybody?”

I said, to my mother who’d given up a nursing career to raise me, “And who did you want to be?”

“anyone lived in a pretty how town,” e e cummings wrote.

“I’m nobody,” Emily Dickinson wrote. “Who are you?”

“Temporary,” people say about lives they’re born into and plan to fix.

I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to go to New York and Paris. I wanted never to stumble out of The Fiddle Inn or work bingo night in Trafford ever again.

What I thought Fanny wanted:

To be somebody other somebodies would listen to and care about enough to give her food the way she liked it.

To believe her health mattered to someone, which meant her life mattered, too.

To believe that someone would notice some Wednesday if she didn’t show up.

I took it on myself to be the person who would listen to and notice Fanny’s presence and absence.

What I wanted: for my life matter a little, too.

Sometimes I still think about my Uncle Milton, the retired banker, who died alone in his house in Braddock. I was young when he died, maybe ten or so. He was my dad’s brother. I saw him at funerals, the occasional Christmas. He wore nice suits and smelled clean.

What I knew: Uncle Milton was a bachelor. He loved money and the stocks and had a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, which my father said was expensive and something only a jackass like Milton would spend money on.

Uncle Milton was dead for more than a week before anyone noticed. The newspapers piled up on his porch. The mailman called the police to check it out.

I’d been in Uncle Milton’s house a few times. It was dark, the furniture heavy and expensive looking, the curtains heavy and expensive looking. A gold-framed picture of Jesus’s sacred heart hung on the wall. In the picture, Jesus’s chest was split open. He held his heart in one hand. The heart was on fire. The heart was crowned with thorns. His other hand made the sign of peace, two fingers together, pointing up.

“All that money and he dies alone like that,” my father said about his brother.

“Do you know who you have in this world?” my father would ask, and most times he’d let the question hang like that, a blank to fill in, something obvious.

“one day anyone died I guess,” e e cummings said, “and no one stooped to kiss his face.”

Vonnegut said, “And so it goes.”

If you want St. Expeditus’s help, you must present him with an offering.

Pound cake, for instance.

Back at the fryer, I worked Fanny’s fish as she stood by and watched. I made a big deal out of lifting it from the hot grease and letting it drip. I put it on a paper plate and let it rest there a bit. I took paper towels, a wad of them. I blotted. I blotted again. I blotted again. I worked like a surgeon trying to stop the bleeding. I took my time because so much depended on me doing so.

Fanny watched. I could feel her watching. Over on the stove, a pot of hot dogs boiled down. I tried not to think of Fanny like that, withered and curling into herself, the smell of old hot dog water on her breath.

In the background, I could feel my grandmother watching too. I knew if I turned she would look disgusted. I knew she’d have her hands on her hips.

“Pain in my ass,” she said under her breath, and then, louder, “That Fanny is a pain in mine.”

I turned. I looked at her to say, come on, let it go. I looked at her to say, Fanny likes to hang on her cross let her hang.

This got my grandmother going. Her laugh bounced around the room like a bullet.

“Get it, Fanny?” she said. “You’re a pain in my ass.”

She said, “Fanny is a pain in mine.”

Then my grandmother slapped her own huge ass and held a pose, The flesh underneath quaked. Fanny looked like she might cry.

“It’s o.k.,” I said. “It’s done.”

I hurried things up. I tucked the fish onto its bun and handed it over. Fanny inspected it. She pulled it close, then held it at arm’s length, then close again.

“That’s more like it,” she said.

Then she tipped me a quarter.

This was 1982. A quarter could buy a phone call or some gum and Fanny could pretend she didn’t know but she did.

I could tell by the way she gave it to me, like she was pinching my palm, like she hoped maybe the quarter would turn into a razor and make me bleed a little so I could know how it feels.

This made my grandmother laughed louder.

“Cheap is as cheap does,” Ethel said as Fanny waddled off, holding the fish on the paper plate in front of her with both hands, like it was something holy, an offering on fire.

I put Fanny’s quarter into Ethel’s found money jar. I hoped maybe it would be lucky this time.

Saint Expedite, do this for me. Be quick.

As Fanny made her way out to the hall, I could hear her talking to everyone and to no one. She said no one knew how she suffered. She said she checked all her cards to make sure B-12 wasn’t on them. She said she couldn’t bear it. She said if she wasn’t careful, the grease would keep her up all night.

She said it was about her heart, which of course it was.