Dorothy

by Ryan McGeeney

 

When I was ten years old, I asked my grandmother what my name was.

She leaned forward, put her hands on the knees of her polyester slacks, and peered into my eyes, her bottle-bottom-thick lenses between us.

“Omarosa Pizza Pan,” she said.

Our mouths were flat lines, a silence hardening between us.

“Millenia Trashcan Biscuit Basket,” she said.

My lip quivered. An eyebrow raised.

“Arsenio Fargleswap,” she said. I gave my head a single, curt shake.

I cleared my throat.

“Deprock Kegglebate,” I said.

Her septuagenarian face. A withered, immovable rock.

“No, no,” she said. “Don’t believe that’s right.”

“Maxamillian Farkletwerp,” I said, just a hint of a question mark.

“Mmmmmm, no,” she said. She straightened her back, stretching her hips forward a bit.

Gazing at the horizon above my head, she took in the full lay of the Kansas land before bringing her foggy gaze back down to me. Like the Hubble telescope hammered into the Rock of Gibraltar, that face.

“Ah,” she said, lowering her face back into mine. “Now I remember.”

“Go on,” I said.

“Lazarus,” she said. “Lazarus Gorthmorkin the Fourth.”

Pause.

“Forkin.”

And I lost it. The woman had done it again — chipped away at my bearing until I stood no chance of keeping a straight face.

This was a ritual between us, and we found ways to execute it all throughout our summer days, when I spent large swaths of time at her house, as my parents did whatever it is they did in the intervening years between their wedding and their divorce. Helping my grandmother bake cookies, I would pass her a scoop of kooglebarter fappleschnitz, after being directed to pull out the Skaarsgarten mufflestomp from the drawer of baking pans. It’s a wonder we never poisoned anyone.

The game, such as it was, had grown out of my first conscious memory. I was five years old, and had simply “come to” in my body while standing a few feet away from her, looking into those foggy, rheumatic gazers of hers. And when I’d asked her my name on that day, I’d honestly had no idea.

And so she told me. Even as a small child, I was skeptical about many things, but the name had the ring of truth. Going forward, no one disagreed with it. Had she been a woman of greater guile, she really could’ve gone with anything. Missed opportunity for both of us, I suppose.

And that was Dorothy. The first woman I remember. A child of the Great Depression, rye from morning into night, but forthright enough not to leave you completely unmoored in your more vulnerable hours.

Skepticism notwithstanding, I wasn’t especially insightful as a child, and ardently self-absorbed as an adolescent, so I never really discovered that much about her in life. “Discovered.” As if I’d have had to interrogate her. All I really would’ve had to do, more than likely, was ask. But I never did.

For shame.

Whatever became of Dorothy? Why, she died, of course. Some 20 years after letting me in on the forgotten secret of my own name, she’d faded rapidly in her final years, succumbing to Alzheimer’s or dementia or some other disease of forgetting and dysfunction.

I traveled home for her funeral, but regretted not having been available to her when she, perhaps, might have needed someone she could trust to simply remind her of her own name.

“Gorgonzola Moonraft,” perhaps.

 

Ryan McGeeney is a writer and carpenter living in central Arkansas. His work has also appeared in The Bleeding Margin. His forthcoming novella, “The Merciful Thing,” will be available from Ruadán Books in 2027. His woodworking can be seen at https://www.instagram.com/the.occasional.woodworker/.

 

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