Video Camera (cgw - Chapter 2)

CAMERAMAN: “Grandma, look at me.”

GRANDMOTHER is a tall, severe woman with a long plait of silver hair. She turns her head away. Her mauve sweater is the only flash of color.

CAMERAMAN: “I can’t follow you into the kitchen. I’m stuck to the wall.”

GRANDMOTHER: “Does that mean I’m safe?”

CAMERAMAN: “Sure, you’re safe.”

The camera pans to the leather sofa.

CAMERAMAN: “What is that? On the couch?”

The camera zooms in further, revealing an adult diaper.

GRANDMOTHER: “It’s for your uncle. He’s getting to that age where he’ll need it.”

CAMERAMAN: “You shouldn’t be so hard on him.”

GRANDMOTHER, cackling: “He needs to toughen up.”

CAMERAMAN: “You should wear it on your head like a hat.”

GRANDMOTHER: “I’m not doing that.”

The camera shakes and a YOUNG MAN with wavy brown hair enters the frame. Only the back of his head is visible in a shag of hair. He sits on the left side of the sofa, pulling the adult diaper onto his head like a hat, then turns over his shoulder so his face comes into view. He has a charming smile.

YOUNG MAN: “Bridget, quit making so much noise.”

CAMERAWOMAN: “The resemblance to your grandfather is uncanny.”

YOUNG MAN: “Bridget, get over here and try on this hat.”

***

It had been so long since there was good news to share with my grandma that my nerves were racing off the charts. I had planned to just stop by—maybe sit on her back porch in the sunshine to enjoy the surprising warmth on an early spring day—but then she welcomed me in and that was that.

Despite my convictions, I couldn’t reject her to her face.

All I had to do was let her know I was engaged. I didn’t even have a ring yet, but we were engaged.

She would know why. And then my point would be made.

I knew without even having to tell her that she would pick up on the subtext immediately. That damn court case out of Indiana. It made the news a couple of days after I saw it online, so of course she would be aware of it by now. She liked to pretend that she no longer kept up with the news, and yet she was completely locked in with every right-wing conspiracy.

Add to that the fact that my mom never talked about Eddie or that I was seeing anyone, and then suddenly here I am. Engaged. Right after you heard about that court case on the news.

Of course she would know.

We were too similar, too spiteful, too stubborn. I think I got it from her, really. The stubbornness, at least. The sharpness.

She invited me into the kitchen where I sat at my usual spot. She turned to the sink, her long silver plait as loose as ever, and cut me a bowl of strawberries like she used to when I was a child. Then she apologized for not having a scoop of vanilla ice cream. 

The kitchen was beautiful. Growing up, they lived in a squalid old country home, saving every penny. Not that they needed to, because they had made investments since before they even had children. I never understood why they stayed there, in squalor, especially after it started affecting their health. They couldn’t drink the water or flush the toilet more than once a day.

I asked her about it once after my grandpa passed, and she said she would have left decades ago, but he was too stubborn. Then when he was ready to move, she was too stubborn.

So yeah, I think it runs in the family.

I didn’t want to be that way with Eddie. Even though what he and I had wasn’t a real relationship—just a marriage of convenience. But still, the point stands. I didn’t want to be that stubborn, pig-headed, never-give-any-ground-to-a-guy person. He didn’t deserve that treatment. He was too successful, too kind, had too much to offer for him to be that… I don’t know. Taken advantage of, I guess.

I didn’t want to be like that with him.

But I am stubborn.

Can’t say my grandparents gave me nothing. So good on them, I guess?

We spoke about almost nothing as we sat there at her modern kitchen island with a simple granite countertop, eating strawberries like we did back in her old cramped kitchen with the hand-painted cabinets, stove from the fifties, and linoleum floor. 

There was nothing really to talk about other than the engagement; nothing to look at other than her house plants, but that conversation only took a minute. I guess I didn’t want to bring up Eddie. She had this game she played on her little Alexa device. Her niece had delivered this device as a housewarming present several years ago when my grandparents bought this place at the height of Covid. 

We played the game together. She had over a year streak, giving her five hundred extra points a day.

Wow.

“I’ll give up when I hit three million,” she promised. But she had claimed that at the one million milestone and the two million milestone—and then the game gave her a bunch of extra points, and she found she couldn’t give up. What else did she have to do?

When they first moved to this house, I used to come once a week to keep them company and really just to entertain my grandma while she dealt with the harshness of Grandpa’s exacting personality. She was easy to please. Easy to laugh. She’s pretty much the only person in my family who gets my sense of humor.

It killed me when I broke off those meetings with her. She was happier after my grandpa died, but I didn’t get to see too much of it because after the election, she was so annoyingly pro–Elon Musk I couldn’t stand it. Even as I sat there eating the strawberries, one of his satellites made the news, and it algorithmically scrolled past on her device screen. She couldn’t resist talking about it.

“Elon this and Elon that.”

After months of knowing how much this talk annoyed me and how insulting it was, she still could not stop herself. So I sat there in silence. When she was done, it was time to do my business.

“So I’m engaged,” I said.

“To be married?”

“Of course to be married.”

She offered no support and could barely contain her disappointment. “Have I met him?”

“No, but you will if you like.”

She didn’t reply. “Elon Musk—”

She continued talking about Elon, completely ignoring the fact of my engagement. The gulf between us was almost too big to bear. Or maybe it wasn’t the gulf of who we were in that moment, but who we had been. She couldn’t even bring herself to pretend to be that earlier version of herself.

In our old relationship, even if she disapproved of something in my life, she would have asked questions about it—simply to hear me voice them in my own way. But here, she had her own answers. And she knew the reason why. The stories in her head were stronger than the reality sitting beside her. And she didn’t want to talk about it beyond that.

Eventually, my mental timer went off and I couldn’t take any more of her nonsense, so I got up and excused myself.

“Before you go,” she said. “Go down basement for me. There’s a box of old camera equipment that I’m giving to Goodwill. See if you want any.”

“Grandpa’s cameras?” He had an antique collection of Nikons down there.

“No, not those. His video cameras. I can't get them to work. I don't think they work, so if you want to give them a shot, go for it.”

I did indeed go ‘down basement’ as her and my mom call ‘going downstairs’. I will never say it that way. Eddie has a house and I apparently told him to store something ‘down basement’ once without meaning to. He laughed his ass off. I didn’t realize I spoke like that… so never again will I say it that way.

I think we might need a place without a basement.

Really, I kind of get it. From the second floor you go downstairs. From the first floor you go down basement. That doesn’t make sense, does it. I need to not say it that way again or he’ll laugh at me. I like making him laugh, but only when I do it on purpose.

I left Grandma in the kitchen so she wouldn't have to navigate the stairs, and I could get a break from the Elon madness. The best thing about their move to this ranch-style home was she never had to go into the basement and there wasn’t a second floor. 

The basement had basically become Grandpa's domain before his passing, and he had each wall lined up like a museum from his life. Straight ahead and to the left were Grandma's things, like antique flower vases and other random knickknacks that he didn't care about. But starting in the center of the east wall and working its way all the way to the long north wall towards the sump pump, it was all meticulously organized into a sequential museum representing all of his hobbies. Film. Engineering. Projectors. Vinyl records.

The video cameras were on one of the old folding tables he used for organization, which had been empty every time I'd been down there in the past. So Grandma had been going through his stuff.

I could see where she’d been busy: there were a few open boxes in the center of the room that Grandpa had never bothered to organize. They must have been his junk boxes, and now she was getting ready to dump them.

The video cameras were from the '90s up until maybe the early 2000s, with a small palm-sized dedicated handheld being the last one. The big one caught my eye. It was lengthy—about two feet long and maybe ten inches high—with an attachment on top for a speaker. There was a case of blank tapes next to it.

I had never seen anything like it before in my life. I tried to turn it on, but it didn't. I took it upstairs along with the tapes and the power cord. The others I didn't care about at all.

“Where did this come from?” I asked.

“Your grandpa used to do weddings,” she answered. “He was the photographer and at one point had a video service as well.” I vaguely remembered that about him. I mean, I knew he did photography and had a semi-professional business with it, developing his own photos and all that stuff. There wasn't a dark room in this house, but he had one at the old farmhouse in the basement. I don't think he’d developed anything in decades.

After he retired, he didn't do much of anything for decades. None of his hobbies seemed to interest him. He must have been a tough guy to live with. 

I didn't want to be like that with Eddie.

I tried plugging the video camera into the outlet and turning it on. It worked. There wasn’t a tape in the machine, so I stuck a blank one in and hit the record button.

Grandma bustled out of the frame, and I teased her, training the camera on her back. All I got was the silver plait over her pink sweater and then she was around the corner and out of sight.

Grandpa must have given her PTSD.

Smiling, I rotated through the room, recording everything. It felt kind of cool to have an actual camera on my shoulder instead of a smartphone—like the physicality of it was novel, and I think I fell in love a little bit. It was a weird feeling, that’s for sure. The physical-ness of holding it.

Also, there was something on the couch next to Grandpa’s divot, and I zoomed in through the viewfinder but couldn’t really tell, so I had to pop out and look with my eyes just to make sure. And yeah, it was a diaper. Like an adult diaper. Like a Depends brand, but the ones that look like actual baby diapers.

I asked Grandma about it, and she claimed it was for my uncle, but that just meant she was using it to taunt him and make fun of him. I used to be her target for that energy, but my uncle got it after I stopped visiting her.

That had to be hard on him. He didn’t understand our humor. If you could call it a sense of humor. Really, it was just biting commentary and observational wit.

So instead of worrying about my uncle, I taunted her to sit on the couch in the frame and put it on her head like a hat. “Oh no! No, no,” she said. “I won’t do that.”

So I did it. And we laughed the entire time.

When I finally laughed myself out, I pulled it off my head, walked to her, traded the camera for the Depends, and pointed to the couch. She sighed but followed along, sat down, and began mimicking how my grandpa would call over his shoulder, complaining about every little thing to her.

We had a good laugh.

I hadn’t laughed like that with her since the election. 

I missed it.

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