Free The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo by Darrin Doyle

kill you.
    She was also a liar. Her eyes and mouth, without a doubt, lied. She never awarded a single silver train for finishing two hot dogs. She’d never been on a death march. Death marches were for POWs, not for the children and wives of private citizens. Probably her mind and soul lied, too. To herself.
    She’d lived in a jungle, all right, which is where she absorbed all the compelling chimpanzee and bat details that she would later use to give nightmares to her gullible grandchildren. The truth was she was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1935. When she was four years old, her father took a job as a maintenance superintendent for a mining operation in the Philippines. The family relocated and lived happily for two years. Then the Japanese invaded. She and her mother and sisters were placed in a civilian internment camp in Los Baños. Her father was captured as a POW and sent to do forced labor. His family never received communications from him, never knew if he would die on any given day. So okay, her life was no picnic.
    I’ve probably given you the impression that Grandma Pencil was some kind of ogre. If not, I’ve failed.
    However, the truth is she wasn’t an ogre—not as a child, anyway, and not while McKenna and Toby were in elementary school. Sure, she lied about the death march, but who doesn’t lie now and then?
    Visualize a face staring straight ahead, wearing a blank look. Expressionless.
    Now position a light directly below the chin, shining upward: that face will appear ghastly, frightening.
    Now reposition the light so it shines down from the top of the forehead: the person looks sad.
    Same face—the only change is how the face is shown.
    That’s what Grandma did. She moved the light when she thought it might do some good.
    She truly cared about the twins. Her heart was very nearly in the right place; it just happened to be in her stomach.
    And this makes sense. The internment camp instilled in Grandma Pencil a deep, debilitating terror of hunger, which lead to a profound understanding of the way our souls and sanities are bound to our appetites. For Grandma Pencil, love, trust, and security were all attached to food. Food represented the potential to fill, in some way, the gaping emptiness of the self.
    She was stern and grumpy with Murray, but that attitude wasn’t her fault, no more than a cornered raccoon can be faulted for swiping at your eyes. With the twins and with baby Audrey, Grandma was a load of fun. She picked up the considerable slack left by Misty’s malaise and Murray’s self-centered belief that he could hammer, solder, sand, and jerry-rig a happy life.
    Grandma laughed with a whistly “Hoo hoo hoo hoo.” The “hoos” were so clearly enunciated that they sounded phony. Her laugh annoyed Misty and Murray. McKenna and Toby loved it. The twins did everything they could to hear that laugh. Toby did pratfalls off the couch. McKenna did impressions (the mailman yelling at Snoodles to “Keep away, Mister Pesky!”; Bob Hope saying, “
This
is what I get for fifty dollars?”). McKenna sang the “A-B-C Song” using all “oo” sounds: “Oo boo soo doo oo oof joo, ooch oo joo koo ool oom oon oo poo, coo oor oos, too oo voo, doo-booyoo oox, woo oond zoo. Noo oo noo moo oo boo soos. Nooxt toom woont yoo soong wooth moo?” The twins danced with Snoodles, lifting him by the front paws and jiggling him until great ropes of drool swung from his mouth. They tickled Audrey. They tackled Audrey. They tackled each other. Grandma laughed. Grandma played records. She showed the twins the cha-cha and the fox trot. She helped them build a fort out of couch cushions. When the air was unbreathable from the stench of burning paper or formaldehyde, Grandma took the kids into the backyard, where McKenna and Toby kicked the basketball, and Audrey crawled in diapers across the grass.
    That’s where Grandma first saw Audrey eat something that wasn’t a food item. Audrey was eighteen months