Angela Townsend

Kingdoms, I Agree to Give My Honest Opinion, and All the Clause

We had never been to Disney World, which was sufficient reason for the kidnapping. 

My uncle had been to Juilliard and Florence. He had come within arm’s length of joining Blood, Sweat, and Tears. But now the bass player was fifty-six, teaching surly children the comforts of choir. It was winter, and his sister the psychologist was snowshoeing through a divorce. She had saved teenagers from their savagery. She had made Christmas for a father who would not be merry. She had never made time for Orlando and its mice. 

It could be because she had an only child, a writer who loved authority figures more than cartoons. The daughter had long crinkle-fry curls and notebooks full of cursive novels. Childhood had been daffy with untrademarked fun, piano lessons, and Prufrock readings. We dutifully attended Disney movies and instantly forgot them. The psychologist sketched imaginary friends on muslin, sewing them into stuffed animals who would never have theme parks.

Uncle Jeffrey didn’t judge, but he did insist. The day after Christmas, the three of us would drive from New York to Florida. At fifty-one and twenty, his sister and niece would accomplish a pivotal American task. It had to be done.

We would depart from my grandfather’s condo, a canyon of grief where festivity fell to its death. “I will never enjoy another holiday,” my grandfather vowed after my grandmother’s death. Six years later, his promise was pristine.

“Was he in rare form?” Uncle Jeffrey was sympathetic the moment we fell into his Buick.

“Whatever you imagine, multiply it by ten,” my mother became a human sigh. “Jeff, there was a moment where I contemplated telling him to shove the entire Christmas tree up his ass.”

She had wanted to tell Grandpa to shove both the Christmas tree and an entire platter of meatballs up his ass. But my mother and uncle were laughing too hard for me to interject, and I had mixed feelings about the whole matter anyway. 

I had proclaimed my grandfather my best friend when I was three, and I kept promises as well as he did. He was angry now, reporting to the Psalms every night but keeping things businesslike with God. He did not want his kitchen to smell like Grandma’s meatballs. He preferred his bald head to remain cold if the alternative was a polyester Santa hat. 

I reminded him of Grandma, and I did not mind the cloud cover over his condo. He filled his freezer with my soy burgers, even though he didn’t understand them. He aligned Diet Dr. Peppers like lieutenants on the counter, and he was not offended if I hid in a sleeping bag with my headphones on all weekend. His bathroom smelled like Ivory soap and honesty. He thoroughly read my “character charts,” painstaking matrices of people I intended to write about, elaborated in four-color pen. He donated to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation to tamp down his anger over my diagnosis.

He had no interest in Orlando.

“Mom gave him the most beautiful Christmas anyone could hope for,” I reported accurately. 

“And he hated every minute of it,” Uncle Jeffrey understood accurately. 

But we were southbound now, thirteen hours from a Magic Kingdom. My Uncle Jeffrey, gifted with a gait and face that made him look like many men everywhere, exulted in being an utter original. My mother and I snickered that we saw “Uncle Jeffreys” everywhere – lookalikes in every race, of every age – but there were no other Uncle Jeffreys. He had bent like a craftsman over each detail of our odyssey, and this was showtime.

We would listen to George Carlin standup, filthy enough to forget Christmas. My mother wept with hilarity over a gag about what to do if you accidentally run over a pedestrian. “Leave the past behind!” became her rallying cry all weekend.

We had to pay homage to Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, honorary uncles to the marinara swirls in our double helix. No matter that Grandpa was German, or that honeyed English Breakfast dominated my veins from the other side. Today, we were made of Mediterranean.

An hour into the drive, “Santa Lucia” gave way to Uncle Jeffrey’s original performance of “Santa The Bathroom.” With no road stops in sight, the situation was dire. I had never seen my mother laugh to the point of tears so easily.

I had never seen my mother and my Uncle Jeffrey together outside of Thanksgiving, an annual choreographed cartoon. In childhood, this was my uncle’s only appearance. He was larger than life, a maestro making sure everyone was comfortable. We toasted “cent’anni!” but Uncle Jeffrey was more of a character than a other family member to me. I’d checked out of Thanksgiving at nine, the year that replaced pie with insulin. I became a vegetarian and glued myself to my grandmother’s sparkly brooches and my grandfather’s observations. 

But when Uncle Jeffrey’s wife died at fifty-one, and then Grandma died, and then my mother left my father, and then my father died, Uncle Jeffrey stepped off the screen. He and my mother talked into the night, laughing and crying and getting loud. The six years between them shrank from elephants to mice. 

I was grateful they had each other. I was about to become their responsible party.

The Maestro wrote our itinerary like Vivaldi wrote symphonies, precise and breathlessly agitato. We had one hour in the Magic Kingdom before I realized what I was in for. As we waited in line for Peter Pan’s Wild Ride, Uncle Jeffrey vanished. 

“Where is he going?”

My mother’s eyes were shining, but she laughed instead of answering. Jeffrey returned with what appeared to be two fifty-five-gallon drums of Slushee material.

“Mango margarita coolers,” he whispered.

“Are you allowed—” I wasn’t allowed to finish my sentence. They tucked the tureens under their jackets and giggled like hoodlums. 

Between my diabetes and the galloping family “history with alcohol,” I had never had so much as a beer. I read and reread the story that drinking didn’t appeal to me. I was the example and the laureate, smitten with professors and pastors and people who proclaimed me precocious. I was the granddaughter of the NYPD captain who proclaimed me “Princess.”

I was here to keep my saintly mother and virtuoso uncle ambulatory and out of a police cruiser. I was horrified. 

The bad children snickered through the teacups and the Small World, kissing their chaperone on the top of my frizzy head. They crowned me with sparkly ears and asked me not to hear what I heard about Grandpa. They tossed their empty cups aside, proud as centurions, whispering to each other, “Leave the past behind!”

They were bonding, bronzing decades of being acquaintances, making up for lost time.

I was Alice in Wonderland, outside of time and unsure of my own size. I gnawed granola bars to keep my blood sugar up. I thought of Grandpa, who had announced that he would deep-fry himself in anxiety until we returned.

Everything was plastic, and every story belonged to someone else. My mother was talking about aunts and uncles I’d never met: Brooklyn stoops and First Holy Communions miles from my rural Protestant childhood. Princesses with burlesque eyeshadow and ducks with vulgar eyelashes hugged me without permission. I glimpsed human eyes inside a dog-man with body odor. I wondered if the scent of fried dough could be removed, or if I would just have to burn my clothes.

I tried to talk to my uncle, but he was in a different castle. When I told him I was about to declare for Anthropology, he made a joke about my grandfather’s middle initial standing for “Rigid” rather than “Richard,” and launched into his upcoming trip to Paris.

I had no idea Disney World was so sodden with alcohol. I talked them out of vodka. “There’s nowhere to hide it on Space Mountain. Besides, do you want to vomit?”

In Epcot’s “England,” my mother and uncle were giddy to find Stratford-on-Avon, commanding me to take their photo. They tittered about their love of the Bard and their pride in being educators. I was happy to see my mother proud. I wanted to tell them that I loved words, too. I wanted someone to take a picture of all three of us. I wanted to be delightful. I took the picture. 

I was tasked with our Epcot dinner reservations. “I hear France is the place to be,” the Maestro suggested.

I scheduled us for The Kingdom of “Morocco.” My mother was curious. “Why Morocco, sweetie?”

I could only shrug and adopt a dramatic accent from nowhere in particular. “The Kingdom…of Moroccooooo!"

We had to pass through “Norway” to get to the fertile crescent, and long-nosed trolls snuffled my name. I knew they were every bit as focus-group-tested as Goofy’s hat, but I felt at home in their scripted Scandinavia. Their blue eyes were wistful, even homesick, and their old-man eyebrows frizzed with true stories. I hugged a nose and felt it lean into my arms. If it was animatronic, I didn’t want to know.

“Mom!” My voice surprised me, young and urgent. “I want a picture with a troll.” She flew to my side, as she’d always done, and we embraced the enormous head together. Her laugh mingled with mine, and I caught the tail of our story. She held my hand as we walked to Morocco.

Mice gave way to belly dancers, and I grabbed a string of couscous pearls. Morocco pulled me out of the funnel cake. We laughed, all three of us, together, and nobody cried at all. 

We’d agreed that Grandpa would not appreciate rodent ears or other appendages. I found him a plush troll with blazing eyes, and I knew he would like anything from the princess’s hand.

My mother and uncle did not get in any sort of formal trouble, and the next day I recognized them both. We galloped through St. Augustine, taking blurry pictures of ourselves at the Society of Oddfellows and a statue of Ponce de Leon. I stumbled upon a Ukrainian Orthodox chapel and bought a triptych of the Holy Trinity.

“Jesus looks very serious,” my mother observed.

I studied his eyes, dark as figs. “He looks loving. And exhausted.”

My Uncle Jeffrey looked over my shoulder. “It’s hard to be one without the other.”

We made it back to New York. We ate the petit fours and drank the elixirs that restored us to our appropriate sizes. My grandfather cried when we returned safely.

He attempted to laugh at himself. “There are alligators down there.”

I nodded solemnly. “Even worse, there are grown men dressed as mice and dogs.”

My grandfather’s brown eyes nearly smiled. “I never understood the Disney fascination.”

“If you came with us, you’d understand it even less.”

“But did you have a good time, Princess?”

“I did.” I did. “And Mom and Uncle Jeff…”

“It’s good that they’ve gotten so close.” My grandfather plopped down beside the tabletop Christmas tree whose story could have intersected too closely with his own. “I’m just glad the holidays are almost over.”

“It’s a holiday whenever I’m with you.” The proximity of my grandfather made the truth fall out of my mouth.

“I love you, Princess.”

Angela Townsend is the Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, Paris Lit Up, The Penn Review, The Razor, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Terrain.org, and The Westchester Review, among others. She is a 2023 Best Spiritual Literature nominee. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 33 years, laughs with her poet mother every morning, and loves life affectionately.