It always feels wrong—cruel even—to do anything overly athletic in front of an old person. Like you’re taunting them with your youth. The youth they lost long ago, and would perhaps kill to have again. Maybe even kill you, for daring to be so overt with your “athleticism.” A.k.a. being able to do something as “simple” as riding a bike. But after a certain age, nothing feels or is simple anymore. Or so Bebe had been told, often and early by her grandmother, Eleanor. Referred to with the diminutive nickname of Grandma El. She was Bebe’s maternal grandmother, and the only one of her grandparents that she ever got to meet/generally spend any time with. The other three died before Bebe was born, sometime in the early 1990s. Even though she never met them, Bebe still felt the occasional pang of sadness over the loss. Particularly when Grandma El was being cuntier than usual. Which was happening more and more frequently as she advanced toward her late eighties.

But even before then, Grandma El was filled with piss and vinegar (an expression that Bebe had only learned from her). Constantly complaining of aches and agonies that Bebe, she liked to remind, couldn’t possibly comprehend. Adding as a schadenfreude-laden warning, “But one day, before you know it, you will understand.” It never failed to make Bebe shudder, yet she didn’t bother trying to push back on what her grandmother was saying. She learned early on that the elderly got a large bulk of their thrills in life from “teasing” (a.k.a. lambasting) the young, so what was the point of trying to make them do otherwise? Being exposed to her grandmother’s rhetoric was one of the first instances of Bebe realizing that, in many ways, the elderly were to be pitied. Though, of course, the elderly would tell you it was patently the other way around. That “kids these days” didn’t even fuck anymore. Didn’t do drugs. Didn’t know how to live a little at all. The screens had stamped out all the chutzpah that previous generations had been naturally imbued with. This being another subject that Grandma El liked to go on and on about ad nauseam, in addition to her pain. Both physical and emotional. As for the latter kind, it was losing her husband, Randall, so many years ago that had become yet another source of bitterness for her. She would often repeat the highly unnecessary information, “We were still having sex when he died, you know. I was robbed of at least a few more years of dick all because that bastard couldn’t quit smoking and he had to go and have a heart attack on me.”

Bebe would nod along in silence as Grandma El said this, hoping to God that she would rightly take that silence to mean that Bebe was utterly repulsed by this “juicy detail.” But no, Grandma El never got the message. Seemed willfully oblivious to Bebe’s discomfort. In fact, the only discomfort she would or could ever acknowledge was her own. It would often get to the point where Bebe had to wonder why the hell she even bothered to keep up their visits once she got to a certain age. An age of greater sentience. The age when most grandchildren start to turn their back on their grandparents (save for Rory Gilmore): adolescence. But something kept her coming back to Grandma El, over and over again. Almost as if there was a masochistic element to it. Or was it that Bebe harbored an inherent sense of guilt, long indoctrinated within her by Grandma El, about being young? “Flaunting her youth” merely by existing, by being born in a certain year that presently made her young. And that, as such, going over to Grandma El’s was a form of penance for enjoying that ephemeral youth so much whenever she wasn’t there. And she was enjoying it a lot lately now that her tits had grown in.

As a result, it wasn’t long before she was spending most of her free time in the back seat of various boys’ cars. After all, if Grandma El had taught her anything, it was to enjoy it while she could. And the “it” she was enjoying was her body. The sense of pleasure it could get from friction with other bodies. Though Grandma El probably had no idea that those words of wisdom would be interpreted quite like this by Bebe. Oh well, Bebe inwardly shrugged as she pulled her skirt up in the latest guy’s car so that he could start to work some of his foreplay magic. Words of wisdom are what you make of it.

During this summer of Bebe’s sexual awakening, her visits to Grandma El’s steadily began to wane. And even when Grandma El called her out on it, Bebe could no longer be made to feel guilty. About anything, least of all the youth that Grandma El had chided her for possessing during these many years of spending time with her. Time that was, as she started to question, perhaps wasted on her grandmother, who never did anything for her except steadfastly chip away at her confidence. A confidence that was already low enough for any preteen or teen without an older, theoretically loving person in their lives making it even lower.

It was only later in life that Bebe understood why Grandma El had been so mean, so bitter. Because it was just as she said: it took getting to her age to fathom not just the pain, but the level of insecurity she must have felt. Not only when she was around Bebe, but any young person. For was it not the young that consistently mocked the old as well? It was hard to say which faction had started the war because it had been going on for so long. The only thing that seemed certain was the war was unlikely to thaw unless one of the sides was willing to admit to their senseless cruelty first. The youth argued it should be the elderly because they were supposed to be the “mature” ones, while the elderly argued that it should be the young because they ought to respect their elders.

Luckily for Bebe, her only daughter never had any children, which meant that 1) Bebe wouldn’t have to go by “Grandma Bee” and 2) she wouldn’t have to carry on the cycle of Grandma El’s meanness as she suspected she probably would have. Along with reciting her various ailments in conjunction with the signature Bette Davis quote about getting old not being for sissies. In the present climate, being young wasn’t for suck ilk either.