It’s a safe bet that the statute of limitations for elder abuse has lapsed, so I’ll recount the revenge my mother and I exacted on my very spoiled and stupid grandmother.

All of her life, granny thought of old age as a time to live the Life of Riley: undeserved respect, servants trained to jump at her every scream, etc etc. In reality, she was nowhere near wealthy enough for that. She thought of me as a low-IQ chore-doing machine, one she could order around like she was a drill sergeant.

So when she fell, broke her hip, had it replaced, and refused to rehabilitate, my mother and I became the servants from hell. My mother tried to help Granny, and she’d sass my mother. She swore up and down to my mother that I entered her bedroom one November night, wearing nothing but my drawers, and that I crawled up the wall and onto the ceiling, like an insect. Once, she also swore there was a small dog, wrapped like a mummy in newspaper, lying in her bed next to her.

Well, one day I accidentally discovered the element of punishment. Granny used to talk in her sleep, and on this particular day when I was walking through the hall by her room, I heard her say “oh Richard (her younger brother who’d been dead for 8 years at the time), please don’t throw that dead rat on me—I’ll absolutely die.”

I told my mother about this and went out to buy a stuffed toy rat from a pet store, arranging that when the next time Granny sassed my mother, I’d threaten to drop the “dead rat” on Granny’s bib area. My mother was totally on board with this. Sure enough, Granny sassed back at my mother for trying to clean her, so I introduced Pip (the fake rat) to her by dangling him over Granny’s face by his tail, and threatened her by saying “you better behave, or I’ll drop a dead rat on you!” This I did because she started to sass me too. Granny had grown cross-eyed and couldn’t tell the rat was fake.

Man oh man, you should’ve heard that old witch scream. She even hollered for the next door neighbor to come over and save her from us, but he didn’t hear us, didn’t care, and was passed out drunk anyways. Granny finally agreed to behave if we took the rat away, and she actually did behave for about three minutes. My mother thought it was pretty damn funny.

But the stuffed rat incident had taken some of the bitchiness out of her, and Granny finally died a couple of years later. My mother and I said the reason why Granny lasted as long as she did was because Heaven didn’t want her and Hell was afraid she’d take over.

Incidentally, she looked like the love child of the Quaker Oats guy and a gorilla.

B.I.H. Granny 1923–2007