I should have known

I should have known better. I shouldn’t have felt so guilty about being unable to love her. Guilt is a wall to any effort to retrieve realities that might have mattered, but no longer do. I should have known. She lived with us from the time I was born until the end.

First I was a one year old sitting on her lap in her ugly armchair. Big ugly flowers, pink and green and gray. It was a very bony lap. All of her was bony. Years later, when I read Stephen King’s Bag of Bones, I thought of her. She read to me, a lot. It should have been a good thing, and probably helped me become the voracious reader that I am, but that came with a price. I liked the pictures in the books.

By the time I was two years old, I knew all the pictures by heart. I knew the stories as well, so when she tried to skip pages, maybe thinking I was too little or too stupid to notice, I let her know I was neither of those things. Later I wondered if I had figured out that she tried to cheat or my mother, laughing, told me. My mother thought I was smart. I didn’t like it that my grandmother had tried to fool me like that. She was bored, but so what? I was so happy with the stories. I still have some of them.

I ought to mention that my mother and grandmother were twenty years apart to the day. They passed me from lap to lap, because I wanted stories constantly. My mother never told me she tried to skip pages. They were very short books - how could I not notice?

My grandmother didn’t move around the house a lot. She sat in her ugly old chair and sometimes she let me sit on the floor at her feet with a few small toys. She started saying, “Open your fingers,” watching me. At some point she decided to tell my mother, who hadn’t noticed. It was my left hand she was referring to. I was about three years old, maybe less. Grabbing my little toys with my thumb and index finger, awkwardly. 

I couldn’t open my fingers. They were stuck in a claw like position, but you wouldn’t notice unless you were watching closely. At least my grandmother didn’t move that. Watched. Nobody ever solved the mystery of the claw that was my left hand, never bothered because it was invisible, no deformity. I only cried when after two years of piano lessons I had to give up. I never was able to play a song.

I was four or five years old in a photo I wasn’t supposed to be in and it’s a long story, but there were my grandmother, my mother, me in place of my much older sister who couldn’t make it for some reason, and her daughter (who was also my niece). Me, the stand-in. Four generations. Nice thought, but if my older sister had been available, I wouldn’t have been included. That, and my grandmother’s cadaverous face, cheeks and jaw showing every bone. Shoulders like plates of eyes. Sunken eyes. Yet there I am in the historical photo, still frightened by the face and shoulders but not the one sitting on the bony lap.

At some point I discovered a five year old pack of camels on a shelf behind some objects. I’d never seen her smoke; her lungs were a disaster. Probably the tobacco wasn’t the cause. Pneumonia and bronchitis or bronchiectisis were prevalent in those days. Lungs were a deficient organ in my family, it seemed. No, she no longer smoked when I knew her, but she might have hoped she would again. The pack was half full, but stale.

I know there was no more smoking because she spent her time in bed toward the end. Lying on her side with an oxygen tank they brought to the house every week. Getting shots in her raisin buttocks every day. My mother called the medication demerol, I think. I don’t know if it did any good, kept my grandmother alive. For what? So she could stare out the window at the neighbor’s house or at the wall across from it with the retouched photo of her dead-at-twelve daughter, a female in blue who looked like she was ninety years old? Haunted, both grandmother and me.

The stench of sulfur springs was a fitting end. The hospital that stunk of cures that never happened. The body in the living room, more intimate than a funeral parlor. Sleep a few feet away from the cadaver, trying to mourn sixty four years. Resentful of the order to touch the body even bonier than when I sat on it listen to books she didn’t want to read to me. Touching and never forgetting and hating that.

Still recalling her singing hymns in her chair (the one that was nobody else’s and anyway was very uncomfortable, as much a sack of white sticks as she was). Next to a small bookcase with three remembered books: the 1939 novel How Green Was My Valley, The Galveston Horror, the Book of Mormon. Later, the novel’s author would turn out to be questionably Welsh, but Wales wasn’t on maps I knew. The Galveston chronicle was a horrendous account of the 1900 hurricane and I was frightened by the name. Now I wonder who eventually stole the book from the glassed in case, but back then I wondered why a person who never read had that book and how she’d acquired it. The third book, I knew, had been acquired out of politeness and its purchase was a way to get the missionaries to leave because a good Methodist woman never trafficked with men who had many wives and children. Disgusting, I knew, yet there the book was, on a shelf waiting to continue not to be read.

Love letters. Those were a surprise. My grandmother, who was terribly racist and whom I called Mammy (which made her cringe; those of you familiar with terms associated with the dark race will understand thus), never seemed to hold any love inside her, except perhaps for her daughter, my mother. I found the letters in an old box and grinned at knowing there had been a secret lover, although a good Methodist woman would never engage in any shenanigans. She’d left her husband, in part due to a penchant for plate throwing, but I was never told who threw them (maybe both). No temptations were allowed because there had been no divorce. No more men in her life. Yet I found a lot of letters…

Speaking of those things, I eventually discovered a marriage certificate for my grandparents and the date was odd, leading me to wonder… my mother was born when? Less than seven months later? Oh, maybe Mom was born prematurely to a good Methodist couple. No mystery there.

Trumpets are something else I heard about, these being the type used in séances to summon the dead. Her dead, run-over-at-age-12 daughter. It didn’t seem the trumpets had worked, but neither did spiritualism run contrary to Methodism when grief was insurmountable. I inherited her grief, have lived it, and it isn’t fair. The girl was long gone when I was born, yet her dead casket face, her silky blond hair stored in a box with funeral flowers, the trumpets - I did not ask for this heavy inheritance.

Speaking of Christians, my grandmother ‘s mother was chased down the street by a drunken husband, maybe her third. A real scandal in a teetotaling family. I never was told about it and had to discover it in a digitized newspaper when looking up other genealogical information. I think my great grandmother lived with my grandmother and my mother for a bit. I don’t know if it overlapped with my coming into the world, but if it did… my poor father. He had the patience of Job, I heard. Surviving years of war can do that to you.

No alcohol. I just want to reiterate that. It was not allowed. Tobacco, both cigarettes and cigars, yes, but no alcohol and no references to sexuality in any form. Anything else was sinful.

No gray hair allowed. I thought getting it was also sinful. My grandmother’s hair was almost completely dark brown at the end. No sin on her.

My grandmother. From pretty to pretty cadaverous, the creation of a hard jaw over the years, but her hair remaining the same for four decades or maybe five. Tightly fixed to the skull with bobby pins and a fine hairnet. Curly. Sitting along the scalp, apologizing.

Sisters? Yes, my grandmother had several, but they sounded dead even when they weren’t because of their relationship. I knew three of them, heard of another, saw her letters from North Hollywood. Brothers? At least a couple. Thanks to my mother’s penchant for oral history, the letters I found from ‘Mel’ and ‘Than’ I immediately identified. They’d moved on, though, so their stories are unknown to me unless I scour the internet. Maybe I have scores of second, third, and fourth cousins other than the two I know about, one of whom hasn’t a clue who I am. I don’t even know if I care or should have asked about them. Greeting cards and letters: I have lots of those. Maybe a few years from now (I’m almost ninety) I’ll look at them. They’re waiting for me in the basement because I rescued them from my childhood home.

Some days the weight of the years is more than I can handle. I’m the last person who knows anything about any of this, who could piece the people together, lay the silken lock and crumbled flowers to rest with a story. The only one. But I also realize something:

I should have known better. I shouldn’t have felt so guilty about being unable to love her. Guilt is a wall to any effort to retrieve realities that might have mattered, but no longer do.