Page 45 of Mazywood

“Was there even a bed?” Tasha asked.

He pointed to the corner, where a cot was still stashed beneath the slanted ceiling. The piles of magazines and newspapers he’d moved in order to sleep on the cot had been returned, perhaps untouched in fifty years. “Oh, Johnny…” Tasha sighed. “That’s awful.”

“Later, Uncle Ricky told me this was her ‘punishment room,’ ” Johnny said. “But I hadn’t done anything except show up. It was like she was pissed at me because she hadn’t seen me in so long. But she knew damn well why Mom kept her distance.”

Tasha’s expression told him she was eager to ask questions, but she remained silent to let him find his own pace. He looked at his watch: 4:27. The girls would be coming back soon—they’d better be, anyway—and he wanted to put eyes on them the minute they were late. If not for two winters of watching them navigate bigger slopes, he wouldn’t have left them alone.

“We have time,” Tasha said.

“I’ll start with this…” Johnny said. “First night, I’m in here, miserable as hell…”

He could almost hear the Duke Ellington Orchestra playing from the living room and the sound of laughing adults oblivious to his misery. They had all been fooled by Mazelle’s performative acts of grandmothering, her perfunctory hug, her constant corrections that her guests had viewed as love rather than pure power. But he had seen how much she hated him from the time she first looked at him. His only solace had been the flashlight he could read his Spider-Man comic books by and his cassette player and headphones that helped him escape to his own bedroom again, to a world where Mom was only a few steps away.

“… I’m listening to the Jackson Five on my tape player, grooving to ‘ABC’ or whatever… and I must not have heard Mazelle knock on my door. The next thing I know, she’s standing over me like some kind of bird of prey, those robe sleeves fanning, this ugly look on her face… and she snatches the headphones from my ears. Scared the shit out of me.”

Tasha rubbed his arm, encouraging him to go on.

“… On the surface, it’s all love, like ‘You need to be sure to get your rest, sweetheart,’ and all that bull, but she took my player. Took my music. She never gave them back either. I lost three of my best tapes. This is a testament to the way Mom raised me, but it was the meanest thing any adult had ever done to me. I’m in shock. I’m in here sobbing and crying and I touch my ear… and I see…”

Blood. A dot of blood as wide as his fingertip when he touched his ear, monstrous in his shaky flashlight beam.

“… She’d scratched me with her long-ass nails when she snatched those headphones off my ears. First night and I’m already bleeding. That was exactly the shit Mom was afraid of. My grandmother drew first blood the minute she got the chance.”

“What do you mean… ‘first blood’?” Tasha asked in a voice unsure if she actually wanted to hear his answer. He had never felt a need to discuss his visits to Bear Creek Lodge outside of therapy, and he certainly never wanted to poison his daughters against a great-grandmother they would never meet. But he hated to tarnish Tasha’s admiration of Mazelle Washington too.

“Excuse me,” Johnny said, and he eased past Tasha to move farther into the room, close to the cot. He leaned over to be sure he would fit, and Tasha had to shift until she was midway outside. He checked his watch again: 4:29. The girls should be back any minute.

But it was time for Tasha to know.

The cubbyhole door was still there where he remembered it. It looked like an elf’s door.

When he was thirteen, the small door had been paint-stuck and he had worried with it for a while before it opened, his project to stave off boredom and anguish. But now it wasn’t fully closed, revealing a fragment of pure darkness inside. Hollman had found the one-sheets he’d used to decorate the hallway buried in the cubbyhole, he remembered, although he had left the rest of the room undisturbed. At least Johnny had the satisfaction of knowing that Mazelle was restless in her grave with those posters on display for anyone to see.

“Since I didn’t have anything else to do… I ended up looking in there,” Johnny said. “You want to write a book about Mazelle Washington?”

Tasha didn’t blink in the vanity table’s light, looking as if he’d caught her doing something she shouldn’t. “Yes, I do,” she said. A ring of defensiveness.

“Well, everything you need is in there—probably some of her old reels too.”

Tasha couldn’t hide the flutter of excitement in her eyes.

“Anything Mazelle owned is yours for your research. But I want you to know this: When I found her reels in here, I put them on. They had played a tribute to her in the living room, and the projector was all set up. But she didn’t play a single frame from her movies. Instead, it was people fawning over her and how great she was. So after everyone was in bed, I snuck out there to see her reels. I was just curious, to be honest…”

He remembered padding quietly across the floorboards, freezing when they squeaked. Fumbling to thread the film. His delight when images danced on the flickering screen. And that title, appearing like a magician’s illusion: LAZY MAZY GOES TO NEW YORK. He had no idea who “Lazy Mazy” was—until he saw her appear on the screen.

Johnny told Tasha how his grandmother had been a young woman, in her mid-twenties, dressed in a maid’s uniform. And how she was sitting at a kitchen table, stirring a large mixing bowl—all while she was nodding off, half asleep. And when her two white employers caught her sleeping on the job, she jumped up and did a flip, somehow timing it so well that the mixing bowl landed on her head and spattered her head with batter that dripped down her face.

“Tasha, it was the funniest thing I had ever seen,” Johnny said. “I couldn’t believe it was her. That she could contort her body that way. That she was so full of energy and fun. I laughed so hard… that she caught me.”

That robe again, its sleeve folds opening as if she were literally flying toward him and could swallow him like a wicked grandmother in a fairy tale.

“I was such a little fool, I didn’t even know enough to be scared,” Johnny said. “I was just like, ‘Grandmother, is that you? Are you Lazy Mazy?’ Her face when I said that name…”

Tasha’s phone alarm sounded. The girls were supposed to be back by now. But Tasha was so rapt that she tapped the buzzer to silence the phone, her eyes immediately back on his. “What did she do, Johnny?” she asked.

Johnny sighed. Now he would be exposed as a liar.

“I’d better go check on the girls…” he said.