Irene had been sitting with her Granny Watanabe for nearly two hours. Belladonna had promised she’d be fine and it wasn’t as if she hadn’t wanted to leave.
She had looked cheerful when she had walked out the great cheery wood door, with a smile on her pastel face and a short red dress on her willowy body.
But Irene was growing weary listening to Granny Watanabe’s stories of the good ol' days and was looking for any reason to leave.
“When I was about your age, after my chichi died in the bombing of Tokyo, my mama was depressed and let me do whatever I wanted. But you never catch me roaming around the city like a whore in the Red Light District. I’d be in my room knitting dresses for my shimai like any woman should be doing instead of going to work and nagging about independence and equality,” she droned with her wrinkled face fastened into a grimace, her old fingers tightening into two gray fists.
“But things have changed. This generation takes their independence for granted, from the way they dress to the way they talk to their elders. The way women abuses their bodies just make me want to haku…I mean puke."
Irene looked through her heavy eyelashes with a slight smirk on her full lips as she whispered, “So my baggy jeans and turtle necks don’t make me look like a whore? I think I’ll have to buy myself some ankle length dresses to ‘abuse my body.’”
The young girl wondered if Gran would be angry if she just left and went to her room. She wanted to talk to Haylie, the only thing close to a friend she had, even though the girl spoke badly of her in public as if it was no big deal. She still was nice to her and came over whenever she was sad.
Granny Watanabe smiled, her hoarse voice grumbling in the short monotone that was hers, “Sometimes I wish you were my daughter. Your mother never looked me in the eye without rolling her own…and behind my back she would pull tricks to make me look like a buffoon in front of her father.”
She looked down at the portrait of her step-daughter, Diana and her husband, Dan. “He was the love of my life. I just fell in love a little too late.”
“It couldn’t have been that bad. Mom and you get along well now and granddad stayed with you until the very end,” Irene retorted while she nervously glanced at her bitten down fingernails. She hadn’t had a sip of alcohol since Monday and Friday towered over her with sweat dripping down it’s redden face.
She wondered if she called Haylie right now, could she be over here by one with beers and gin.
“You are too naive, Irene. You think you know what surrounds you, but in reality you don’t even know what looms a block away,” Granny Watanabe spoke sharply as she stood up gawkily, her flat nose wrinkled up in a foul way. “But as my father used to say, 'Ignorance can be your best friend, Hina; you just have to know how to treat it correctly.'”
Irene watched as her grandmother sulked toward her bedroom, her scrawny bones pounding onto the floor in a rhythmic way.
“What does that mean, Gran? I don't understand what you're trying to tell me,” Irene said, “How am I naive?”
Seconds past like hours as her grandmother stared blankly ahead with a small smirk on her chapped lips. When she finally snapped out of it, Granny Watanabe looked over her shoulder with a wide grin on her leather-like skin, murmuring her response so softly that Irene only grew more confused.
“What?” Irene exclaimed.
The stringy-haired woman wasn’t in the mood for explanations. She sighed heavily and glanced at her granddaughter with a sympathetic look in her deep-set eyes. “It'll make sense in no time, my innocent mago.”
