Grandmother
The beginning of a good story has to resonate with the ending. That's what I always say. Her stories had that quality partly because she poured them into me. I have kept them alive and rewritten them many times in the depths of my heart. She never knew that all those tales she told were conveyances transporting us both into the future. That was because she tended to live in the past, where everything had already happened.
"It was winter and real cold. He was sickly, kinda blue-like. He lived a couple of days, but he didn’t make it. There must’ve been something wrong with him. Anyway, it don’t matter now. It wasn’t meant to be. He wasn’t meant to live."
She tells it with such conviction that I almost believe in her detachment; then she continues.
"Later your ma was born good. But we never had another boy. Max wanted a boy, but you can’t tell what you’re going to get. It’s that way with babies, and it’s that way in life. You got to take what comes to you.”
I'm seventeen and I don’t know what to say. I’ve heard the story before about the baby who died, along with all the other incidents that were legended in my mind by her talk—like the one about how her brother Walter had a huge boil on his head. She had to take him to the doctor and listen to Walter scream while it got lanced, and the pus ran out. Walter is dead. I never even knew him.
She scrutinizes my body, her face puckered with worry.
“You’re too thin,” she tells me.
Because I am not wearing a bra at the moment, I'm aware of my breasts underneath my gray T-shirt. I know from looking in the mirror that they are shaped like small pears, not heavy enough to swing or form cleavage, but protruding from my chest and definitely marking me as a woman above the dense mass of my light brown pubic hair. Exasperated, I swivel my hips in tight jeans. After months of dieting, I’ve finally reached my goal of losing twenty pounds.
“Grandma, I just took off all that extra weight,” I counter defensively, knowing all along that there's no defense against her criticism. Feeling light and flexible, I reach down in front of me and put my palms flat on the floor with my knees still straight.
“Ach,” she says, “would that I could do such things. But you’re too thin. You haven’t got any meat on you at all. I guess they like 'em like that these days though. Such nonsense. We wasn’t always dieting back then. We was glad to have something to eat.” She slumps in her chair, pulling absently at her stockings that are losing their elastic. Cupping her hand, she smoothes her hair as if to prove to me that she was once young, too.
Wryly, I raise my eyes and look into hers. It doesn’t do any good to argue with her about either the past or the present.
“I’m going steady,” I point out, displaying for her my boyfriend’s class ring with mohair wrapped around it to make it stay on my finger. “That means we only go out with each other and not with anyone else. See, I got his letter jacket too.”
“Don’t he ever need his own coat?” she asks me, squinting and shoving up her glasses as I let the jacket hang heavy on my shoulders.
“He gives it to me so that I can always be thinking about him when I’m wearing it.”
“It don’t fit. It’s too big for you.”
“Grandma, it’s the thing. See, guys who are going steady with girls let them wear their jackets.”
“I suppose,” she says doubtfully, “but I think they should be wearing their own jackets. How many jackets does he have?”
“He’s got others. He’s got lots. See it smells like his aftershave.”
“Such stuff!” She waves her hand as if to dismiss me and everything else she doesn’t understand.
The point is, I can still see her making that gesture as clearly as if it were yesterday. Closing in on the musty smell of her body, I enter into the reality of her sheer and implacable will to survive her physical infirmity, poverty, and the lack of love in her life. I can still see her digging rutabagas in her back garden, stomping her sauerkraut, and doing things the way she always did them, which was the right way.
Of course, she had Max , her husband of fifty-five years. After he retired, Max puttered around outside for most of the day, chewing tobacco and avoiding her. They had a barn on their property, but Max was never a farmer. He worked in a factory that fashioned fiberglass animals for carnival rides. In his barn, he kept rejects from the plant, carousel horses with flaws and circus elephants with red saddles. Early on, he picked up extra money by mounting these on rockers and offering them for sale at the local flea market. Later, he retained examples of each and sat out there among the relics of his working days, regarding them as familiar, dusty old friends. Outside, the ground was stained brown with spit from his chaws. Sometimes gobs of phlegm perched in the grass made me retch when she sent me out to call him for dinner.
Max never had a lot to say, at least not to me. Of course, she never shut up. It was as if she sucked all the words out of his mouth, and there weren't any left for him. In addition to chewing, Max also smoked his hand-rolled cigarettes. Pinching the little cylinders with yellow-stained fingers, he would lick the white papers closed before lighting up. My grandfather had a ragged cough from all that smoking and chewing, but he never got sick that I can remember until the very end when the cancer got his liver. Sometimes, he went on a drinking binge when he wanted to show her what was what. Actions speak louder than words, I guess. They were a long way past touching and holding hands, but they must have had something in common one day. In the beginning that has to resonate with the end, maybe there was a time when they even believed in love.
For years, I thought she was going to die. Max passed away, but she hung on like a June bug clinging to a screen door. Summers came and she’d be out there again, picking bugs off her potato plants. She liked to squash them between her fingers and drop them into the green plastic bucket she carried slung over her arm. Slugs she drowned by putting out little dishes of beer at night so that they'd fall in and gorge themselves. Next day, as she walked through the garden, she'd dump the slop into the same bucket. Later she'd pour the whole mess on her garbage, where potato peels from last night's supper slathered over the remains of other rotten vegetable parts. I guess it was her compost pile, though she never called it that.
Even now, it seems she isn't gone. Maybe somewhere outside of time, she is still pressing on the meat with her finger, then lifting the lid on the potatoes.
“These chops are almost done,” she says. She pokes into a spud with the same old black fork she has used to test the potatoes for thirty or more years. With its tines of black iron coming out of a paint-flecked wooden handle, it’s a simple tool that fits her temperament perfectly.
“Go and tell Grandpa we’re ready to eat. I’ll get these dished up.”
She’s always glad to sit down, I know, because of the pain. Her varicose veins make her have to wear support stockings, and sometimes she has open sores that she medicates with an ointment made for cow's udders, claiming that it helps more than any salve she can get at the drugstore. At the table, to top off the meal of chops and boiled potatoes, she dips homemade bread into a bowl of melted pork fat from the pan. I try not to watch. Max doesn’t say anything, either while he eats or afterward. Breaking off part of a piece of bread, he begins dipping it into the pork fat too. She knows I won’t partake of this delicacy, so she doesn’t even suggest it. We've had that conversation before.
“When you go home,” she says, “take that new paring knife back to your ma. She bought if for me, but I still got mine. I got no use for a new one yet.”
“She got it because it looked like your old one was going to break.” I pick up her knife from the kitchen counter as evidence. Its black blade is almost worn through from whacking it against the crockery bowl she uses to sharpen it. It looks like the potato fork.
“That knife is still good,” she exclaims vehemently. “I don’t want nothin' like that new one.”
“Well, why don’t you just keep it in the drawer? Then if you need it, you’ll have it.”
“Nah,” she says, “your ma can use it.”
The new knife has a yellow plastic handle and a price tag that says forty- nine cents. It doesn't look like it could cut anything. Taking it from the counter, I slip it into the pocket of Kurt’s letter jacket, and forget it’s there. The next day, he shows it to me, holding it out like an offering.
“This must be yours,” he says.
“Not mine. My mom’s.” I don’t really want to get into the whole thing. He doesn’t talk, just tries to kiss me, but the knife is between us in my hand. It’s dark out, really dark in this place where he’s pulled the car over. He puts his hand inside my jacket, reaching up underneath my sweater, fingering to get inside my bra.
I flinch.
“God, that’s cold,” I practically scream.
But he doesn’t say anything. He’s feeling my breast. He’s tonguing the inside of my mouth. He’s telling me the direction we’re moving in.
I want to say no when he opens his fly.
The knife is lying on the seat next to me. I’ll have to remember to give it to my mother. I’ll leave it on the counter later. Kurt is using my hand to see him through. The darkness seems a giant maw. I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. I should probably be crying, but I’m not. I’m not doing anything, which is the whole point. You got to take what comes to you, I hear her saying, and suddenly, I need to get away.
“Kurt, I didn’t agree to this.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m walking home.”
“Heck, Amy, it’s about two miles!”
“I don’t care.” I take off the class ring, flinging it at him, and slam the door
behind me. Then and there, my future opens up like a flower. The night sky is filled with stars and every one of them has a wish hanging on it. One of them must be mine. Cars pass me on the road, but I'm glad when no one offers me a ride.
At home, my mom sprawls on the couch that sags in the middle, while my father sits in the recliner with two empty beer bottles on the TV tray next to him. Engrossed in some western on television, they're both eating potato chips.
After setting the knife on the kitchen counter, I climb the stairs to my bedroom. Slipping into my white nightgown, I turn out the light, and pull the blankets up over me. In the ensuing darkness, I try to find my choices, and I hear her voice laying it all out for me.
"You just got to take what comes. We can't do nothin' about it. The baby died. He was kinda sickly like. Maybe it was for the best. He woulda probably been in the war. It was better to lose him that way than to lose him later. That one was a boy. We never had another boy. You got to take what comes. It wasn't meant to be."
But finally she did die. The truth is, she's been dead these twenty years, but she isn't gone. I know that because I can still hear her voice.
"We didn't have nothin'," she reiterates. "In the beginning, when we first started out, we didn't have nothin' at all. Max wanted to farm but we couldn't make it farming. There were days when the chickens didn't lay any eggs and we didn't eat. What can I say? It wasn't meant to be. You got to make do. Max didn't want to go to work at the plant but we had to do something. We had to make ends meet. In '59, we had the bathroom put in. That was a real comfort. Before that, we had to heat all the water on the stove. I'll tell you, when I turned on that faucet for the first time, I darn near cried."
Sometimes, as I sit in here looking out my kitchen window, a scene from thirty years ago silently meanders across the yard, and I remember. As I wander the particulars of my grandmother's long-ago wilderness, deep-shadowed places gleam with the dark, handspun riches of change. In my time on this earth, I have learned this much: time burns through everything, melts ice like fire, and makes the world flow while we sit down to dinner.
I am an artist. In my paintings, I sometimes portray my grandmother's life. Often, I show the old woman as I would have seen her from a distance. She’s in her garden, bent over as if to pull a carrot from the ground, or perhaps she’s poised to pluck a cabbage up into her arms. I capture her gesture as I remember it, but I always hide her face. Last year, I created a series of limited edition prints inspired by the watery, blue, embryonic form of the baby who died.
"It was a boy," she says to me, repeating herself. "He was kinda blue and sickly like. There must've been something wrong with him. We didn't know what it was. They didn't know nothin' about such stuff in them days."
When I hear these words, I wonder if he ever had a name. She never told me. I grieve for his lost life. I grieve now because perhaps she could not grieve back then.
That is my contribution to her never-ending story. I am not like her, but then, I live in a different world. Sometimes, as if she wishes to take away everything I have, she comes back to haunt me. Thickly, through sleep and dream, she reaches for me.
Grandmother, I call out. The apparition bends over me. Her dark form begins sucking energy through some channel that originates in my solar plexus.
It is frightening to see her again—an event of nightmare proportions. But I know her too well to be deceived. I've come to recognize these visits. She isn't alive. She's just here once again to scare the living daylights out of me. She considers it her duty to remind me that life can break you. I’m just lucky. That’s what she wants to say, but I already know this.
"Come here." I’m in charge now so I can issue commands.
"Give me a kiss." I try to put my lips over the dark hole of her mouth. This is a new story, one I’m telling to her. It’s a tale of happiness she will never believe. She jerks back.
"No, kiss me. I want to hold you in my arms."
Every time she appears, I threaten this kiss. It's the only way to get rid of her, affection being the one thing she could not bear.
But tomorrow, I’ll press the meat I’m cooking with my finger just as she did. And for old times sake, I’ll once again prick the potatoes with the black fork she finally left me when she died. After all, it's still good, isn't it? I know she'll be back, and maybe next time she will let me kiss her after all.
Everything is possible, I hear myself saying to her again and again. On the best days, she doesn't even argue.