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Shenanigans

By Heather Norman Smith

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Lavinia Lewis’s oversized leather bag was a hodgepodge of geriatric necessities and schoolboy gags. Next to the Rolaids was a box of snap pop fireworks. Underneath the black eye kaleidoscope was the medical alert necklace she refused to wear, much to the dismay of her daughter. But Amy Lynn worried too much.
The bag sat in the passenger side floorboard of her Buick, cradled between the sneakered feet of her grandson, Dylan, whom she gave full reign of the radio on the way to the dentist’s office. The nine-year-old pushed a different preset button every minute, bouncing from Talk to Oldies to Gospel to Reggae. She stopped him only once, to listen to the end of a Ray Stevens song. Dylan giggled as she belted out the chorus with the passion of a debuting artist at Carnegie Hall. That was the only way to do things—all in, or not at all.
Lavinia sang about a crazed squirrel in a Mississippi church and waved one hand about wildly like a conductor. She stopped as a faint ice cream truck melody came from the depths of her bag, the vibration of it dulled by the cushion of the rubber chicken. She turned the radio down with her conducting hand and leaned far to the right to dig out the phone, searching blindly. But as the car hit the shoulder, the bump and rumble of gravel under tires served as a reminder—Bluetooth could answer instead. Wonder of wonders, this modern technology. She righted the wheel and studied it, searching for the button. Another ring later, she’d found it.
“Hey, baby,” Lavinia said. The glowing blue numbers on the dash display told her it was Amy Lynn, but she already knew.
“Hey, mom!” Dylan said.
“Mama, are you letting him ride up front?” Amy Lynn’s voice was fierce through the car speakers.
“Did you call just to ask me that?” Lavinia said.
“Of course not. He just sounds really close to the microphone.”
Lavinia glanced around the car. Was the microphone somewhere in the dash or in the door like the radio speakers?
“Is he in the front seat, Mama?”
Grandmother and grandson shared a mischievous glance. “No, dear. I know you prefer for him to ride in the back.” She hoped her tell—a slightly higher pitched voice—was covered up by road noise and the air conditioner at full blast.
“Okay, well…thank you for picking him up from school for his appointment.” Amy Lynn’s tone was softer. “I thought I would be able to meet you at the dentist, but now I’ve got a parent conference and the principal wants me to meet with the new student teacher for second grade. Do you mind taking him home? Lucas is there, and I should be home by four thirty.”
“Of course, I don’t mind!” Lavinia said in her normal, non-lying timbre. She held onto the privilege of driving like a winning lottery ticket.
Amy Lynn acknowledged her son, saying goodbye to both of them quickly, and the car beeped to signal the call had disconnected.
A gnawing sensation then worked its way from the middle of Lavinia’s throat down to the top of her stomach. It sat there and churned until she coughed it up as an admonition to Dylan.
“Baby, promise me you won’t ever lie to your mother like I just did.”
Remorse always made Lavinia’s southern drawl sugary like cotton candy. She dropped the last half of the ending r’s and made the long i’s say their name twice.
Dylan pointed his face toward the ceiling then brought his chin to his chest with two big nods.
“I’m afraid I’m not a very good influence,” Lavinia said.
“You’re cooler than Mama, though.”
Lavinia’s heart swelled. She tried the compliment on proudly, but it wouldn’t be right to keep it.
“Why do you say that, baby?” she said.
“‘Cause she says I’m not big enough to ride up front. But I’m taller than Jackson in my class, and he always rides in the front seat. He made sure to tell me so.” He rolled his eyes, chestnut brown and nearly covered by a swoop of wavy brown hair with the kind of sun streaks women pay good money for.
“Not big enough? Why, you’re practically grown!” Lavinia gave an indignant, lip-rippling horse snort. “But your Mama is pretty cool, too, baby doll. She just worries about you. Because she loves you. She’s a mama. That’s what mamas do.” She reached over and patted Dylan on the knee, and the car veered again, this time only slightly.
“I know.” He paused. “And she worries about you, too, Nana.” He fiddled with the straps of Lavinia’s bag in her peripheral. “I hear her and Dad talk about stuff. They don’t think I can hear ‘em, but I do.”
“About me?” she said, feigning surprise. “Why would she possibly worry about me?”
Lavinia steered the car onto a side street, a little too fast, and Dylan fell into the car door.
“She says you’re gonna get yourself in trouble playing pranks on people,” he said as he righted himself. “She says you’ve made some people mad.”
It was a rhetorical question.
Lavinia let out a quiet huff. She caught a glimpse of her annoyed expression in the rearview mirror and forced herself to get rid of it, replacing it with a smile. A smile was a woman’s most important accessory, after all, though the chunky strand of pearls that only left her neck at bedtime was a very close second.
“Oh, it’s just harmless gags,” she said. “I like to have fun. They don’t hurt anybody, and I make plenty of old people laugh. It’s good for them. For all of us.”
Lavinia balked at the idea of getting into trouble. She wasn’t a child, for Pete’s sake. Sure, the director of Cypress Shores had threatened to kick her out if she didn’t quit playing pranks. But he hadn’t meant it like that. Marvin was talking about the big stuff. Like when she threw all those Tootsie Rolls in the swimming pool and when she switched the signs on the doors of the men’s and women’s restrooms. And when she toilet papered his office.
A grin crept across her face at the memories. But she kept it much simpler now.
They’re all innocent, little jokes. Who gets mad about a little joke?
“You can tell your mama not to worry about me, baby,” Lavinia said. “And never you mind about it either.”
“Okay, Nana. I’ll tell her…but it won’t do any good. You know how she is.” Dylan shrugged his shoulders.
Lavinia did know. She thought often about Amy Lynn’s tendency to worry, and she tried to analyze its source. It had to go as far back as when Amy Lynn lost her real daddy, Lavinia’s son. That’s when Lavinia and Edgar had gone from being her grandparents to being her parents. Amy Lynn was only three, but losing her twenty-two-year-old-father had left a mark. It stamped her with a seal of insecurity she still bore thirty-three years later.
Lavinia thought more about her precious Samuel—how up until the accident he was so determined to take care of Amy Lynn, even working two jobs while taking classes at the community college. Lavinia and Edgar could have paid for everything Amy Lynn needed, and much of what she wanted, but Samuel was hard-headed and hard-working, just like his daddy. He had insisted she was his responsibility.
Lavinia shook off the memory of her handsome, gone-too-soon son and put the car in park. She held Dylan’s hand to cross the busy parking lot. She’d been careless enough already with the fib she told Amy Lynn.
“I don’t think this summer’s ever gonna let go!” Lavinia said. The knowledge that a North Carolina summer could last until Thanksgiving wouldn’t stop her from complaining. “Middle of October and still pushing eighty.” Pushing eighty. Just like me.
Cool air welcomed them as they entered the glass double doors of the office building, and Lavinia let out a sigh of relief. Dylan led the way toward his dentist. As they passed a large, gilded-framed mirror in the hallway, Lavinia stopped briefly to inspect the humidity’s effect on her foundation. She raised her glasses and patted at the perspiration that had accumulated beneath them with the tip of her pointer finger, then took a moment to fluff her short, wavy hair. The hair was housecat gray with champagne undertones and just the slightest hint of lavender; and she liked it the same way she liked her Ray Stevens music—with some volume. Sufficiently fluffed, she adjusted the pearls so that the clasp was perfectly centered at the back of her neck.
Lavinia gave herself a satisfied wink. For a woman of seventy-nine and three quarters, she looked pretty good. She dared to think, attractive. Not in an unnatural way, like some of the artificially plumped up, pulled back, and sucked in women at Cypress Shores whose decades-old midlife crises procedures were pushing their expiration dates. Lavinia looked every day her age, but she wouldn’t have it any other way.
Inside the office, Lavinia and Dylan checked in at the desk. The fifty-something receptionist peeked out from a sliding, frosted glass partition. She confirmed Dylan’s information in the computer and slid the partition shut quickly, dispensing with the formality of pretending she liked her job.
Before they could sit, a pretty, young hygienist came out smiling and called, “Dylan Davenport.”
Dylan gave Lavinia a mischievous playboy wink. “Nana, you can stay here. I think I’m fine to go by myself.”
She smiled and rolled her eyes then held her hand near her face and gave a wiggly-fingered wave goodbye. “I know, I know. You’re practically grown.”
Lavinia hoisted her bag into her lap and dug out the smartphone. She passed the first few minutes of the wait by playing her word game—a favorite pastime. When the phone sounded a loud, triumphant chime for a high-scoring word, everyone in the crowded waiting room looked at her, sending her long fingers fumbling to find the silent switch.
After Lavinia beat her opponent—whom she’d learned weeks ago through chatting was a Swedish shoe salesman named Wilmer—she sent him a message congratulating him on a good game then put the phone back into her bag. From the table beside her, she picked up an issue of Southern Living with Reese Witherspoon on the cover then put it back when she recognized Reese’s pretty blue dress. She’d already read that one.
A Bible underneath the stack of magazines caught her eye. It was a lighter shade of blue than Reese’s dress, and for lack of anything interesting to read, Lavinia picked it up. She ran her fingers across the Gideon’s International symbol on the cover—a double-handled pitcher with a flame coming from the top. When she opened the book, its thin pages picked sides, some falling to the left and some to the right, so that she found herself in the book of Proverbs and immediately drawn to a single verse.
A merry heart does good, like medicine,
But a broken spirit dries the bones. .
She read it again, then again, unable to move on. Hunched over and squinting at the small print, she rubbed the translucent paper between pointer finger and thumb. Lavinia gave a half-hearted look upward. “I’m trying,” she said under her breath. “I’m trying.”
She set the Bible on top of the magazines, took the phone back out of her bag, and started a new game with Wilmer. Her first word happened to be floss, though she hated to use two s’s right off the bat instead of saving them for an easy plural.
When Dylan came back with a shinier smile, he was still googly-eyed from his time with the hygienist. He talked a mile a minute about how nice she was and that she smelled so good, like bubblegum. Lavinia told lover boy that it was only the flavored mouthwash he smelled.
Dylan finally dropped the subject when they got to the car, but only because Nana jumped into the driver seat and distracted him by slipping a whoopie cushion under his bottom just before he sat down. The crude noise rang through the car, evoking a hardy laugh, as body noises always did, and he forgot all about Haley the Hygienist.
“I can’t believe you got me again, Nana!” He held his stomach and doubled over.
Lavinia threw her head back and laughed with him. Laughter—the kind that tightened stomach muscles until they ached and left the lungs momentarily devoid of air—was a treasure. Each episode, each exuberant fit of hilarity, pushed the needle of her vitality meter forward. It was a moment of triumph, as audible joy prevailed over the temptation to cry or complain over any number of situations about which one could be unhappy.
“Hey, Nana, guess what.” Dylan recovered from his laughter.
“What, baby?”
“I’ve got a special word for your jokes, you know.”
“Oh, yeah? What is it?”
“I call them shenanigans. Get it? She-nana-gans? ‘Cause you’re my nana, and you play pranks on people!”
“Well, aren’t you clever?” Lavinia said proudly. She turned to him as she cranked the car. “Anybody who knows big words like that must be grown up enough to ride in the front seat.”

***

Lavinia didn’t take Dylan straight home. Instead, they took a detour through downtown Southport, onto Bay Street, and stopped the car at Waterfront Park where she let him throw crushed up crackers out the window to watch seagulls swarm the car. His mother wouldn’t let him feed the birds from her car, due to the inherent risk of bird droppings on the hood.
No matter how many visitors were at the park doing the same thing, the birds always acted as if they hadn’t eaten in days and were willing to fight to the death over a tiny piece of ToastChee. He’d seen it a hundred times, but it never seemed to get old.
“Hey, look at that!” Dylan pointed to a bird on the hood of the Buick with orange cracker in his beak. “The little one got the biggest piece!”
Lavinia commented on the spunky gull then looked out over the rippling water. A few sailboats and two fishing boats dotted the wide expanse. A big barge appeared motionless, silhouetted against the horizon. The scene was like the painting that had hung in her master bathroom, in the house where Amy Lynn grew up—the picture she had studied every day while imagining what it would be like to live there. Gratitude swelled within Lavinia’s heart. She and Edgar did get to share their retirement dream, for at least a little while.
The Home of Salubrious Breezes lived up to its name. Lavinia was in the best health she’d been in for years, invigorated by the salt air and soothed by a peacefulness that seemed to hang over the city like a fluffy shade cloud. The two-hundred-twenty-five-year-old port town was alive with art and history and attractions, yet, as she saw it, maintained a downhome charm simply unmatched in all of Brunswick County. It had captured her heart before she knew it and become home in no time.
Part of what made Southport home was family. Amy Lynn had moved there years before her parents, when her new husband was offered a job with the police department. Lavinia and Edgar had planned to join them as soon as Edgar retired from his career as a bank executive in Wilson, two and a half hours away. But, as they told their daughter so often, things don’t always work out as planned. Edgar and Lavinia had just sold their house when the stroke happened; then Lavinia spent six months in rehab relearning how to be Lavinia while Edgar stayed in an apartment near the hospital.
Lavinia handed Dylan a second pack of crackers, not in any hurry to leave her favorite spot. While Dylan made the birds fatter, Lavinia spoke to Edgar in her mind.
That delay only made the dream more special, didn’t it, honey? After my recovery, it came true every day. For two years. And we spent hours on these wooden benches, content to do nothing but be together and watch the Cape Fear flow out to the Atlantic. Oh, and the picnics with the grandsons! And afternoons spent fishing on the pier. Those years were the best.
Too soon, the crackers ran out and the birds flew away, then Lavinia drove Dylan home to his quiet neighborhood of oak tree-lined streets near the school. She pulled into the short paved drive and rolled down the window, calling out to Lucas who stood at the door. She had texted him from the park to let him know she was on the way.
Dylan leaned over and kissed her on the cheek, making the corners of Lavinia’s mouth stretch outward. He sprang from the car as Lucas ran from the house, leaned his head in through the open window, and kissed her on the other cheek. Then Lucas turned back so fast she barely saw him.
“Bye, Nana!” they called in unison as they raced inside, no doubt to be the first to grab the remote.
“Bye, boys!” she said. “I love you!”
She let out a contented sigh and put the car in reverse. Before she backed into the street, Lavinia did a double take at her reflection in the rearview mirror. There was a faint black smudge on her left cheek.
“Lucas! That booger! He got me.”
She dug a linty tissue from her bag and touched it to her tongue, then rubbed at her cheek with it, still smiling.
Gotta be eyeshadow, she thought. Pretty clever. I never woulda thought of a black eyeshadow kiss. Not bad.
She hoped Lucas wouldn’t be in trouble for messing with his mama’s makeup. They didn’t both need to be on her bad side.
Lavinia backed out of the driveway, and at the stop sign, she looked in the mirror again. There were no cars behind her, so she fished the phone out of her bag and texted Lucas an emoji with a stuck-out tongue. Funny things, those little cartoon faces; there was one for almost any occasion. The phone dinged at her before she could put it down, and a purple, devil-horned emoji appeared on the screen. She smiled. Next it was her turn in the text message battle. Anything to make those boys happy.

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