Among the village businesses are the houses of my grandparents’ friends: Altha and Ernie, Violet and Clyde, Emily and Larry, Velma and Grover. From where I sit with my grandparents on the screened porch of their sprawling cape, we can see them all—the houses and the people, sitting on their porches, too, and waving.
My grandparents and my father and
his brothers lived in that house forty years. It is a cape like any
other cape, but over the years they have polished it until it is the house that catches your eye when you look around the circle. It has wide lawns and
spherical bushes. It has a gazebo when most people have never heard of
such a thing. It has a small, almost formal garden only three or four
feet from the paved road, and passing by, you can smell my grandmother’s pink
roses, climbing over a trellis you can almost touch as you drive past.
Down the middle of the garden is a mounded, grassy path bordered with irises,
helianthus, and rows of pansies in the shade along the pine trees toward the
back. Along the low, rock wall on one side of the garden are mounds of
bleeding hearts.
I never live in this house, but
some secret part of me grows up here—the part that never goes to school, never
reads or writes anything. It is the part that knows without knowing and
cares little why. My grandparents keep me there overnight sometimes for a
visit, sometimes for a day or several days, and when I visit—it is always a
visit, never a stay—I am their girl. I go to Velma’s with my
grandmother, and while they chat, I trace designs with my fingers in the
thin, greasy film on the oilcloth on Velma’s kitchen table. I study
Velma’s wallpaper, and I eat Velma’s cookies, which smell musty the way
Velma’s kitchen smells, the way Velma smells.
Sometimes
I go with my grandmother to church, where, at least as it seems to me, there is a never-ending rummage sale. Everyone brings hand-me-downs, misfits,
and extras to the basement, where the stuff is laid out on long
cafeteria-tables for inspection. I find real treasures: a sparkly pin, an old
pocketbook, a deck or two of sticky cards. It doesn’t matter that most of
it is useless.
I go with my grandmother to
Moulton’s Store, where she buys me a cup of ice cream, half vanilla and half
chocolate, to eat with a little wooden paddle. Sometimes she buys
potato chips, and we take them to her house, where she lets me make
sandwiches—potato-chip sandwiches, on white bread with butter, with Orange
Crush to drink.
We make the sandwiches with the
bread she bakes in her pantry. Because I am too short to reach the
counter, she pulls out a bottom drawer, and I stand on that. I wear one
of her aprons, which reaches to my shoes. She uses milk and water, sugar
and flour, shortening, salt, and cake yeast. She mixes the dough until it is just the right consistency—not too dry, not too sticky. Then we squeeze
it with our hands until it is soft and pliable, a white pillow of dough
my grandmother picks up by its edges, gently flapping me in the face as a
finale. It is warm and impressionable and dusty with flour. It
smells like something growing in the dark.
We put the dough in a bowl and
cover it with a damp cloth to keep it moist. When it is buxom and
ripe, we poke it down and flatten all its bubbles. Then we shape it
into mounds and gently lay it to rise like little hills in long, rectangular
pans. After it is baked, we drop it out of the pans, cut off the heel
of one steaming loaf, and sprinkle it with cinnamon sugar to eat, no matter
what time of day it is.
My grandmother teaches me exactly
when I am teachable, but in a few years I grow taller, and I see the
limitations of her knowledge. I go away to school. I get a
job. I move away for good. When I visit her house on and off
during the next decade, I see little things fall into disrepair—the gardens aren’t weeded, the lawn is shaggy. My grandmother has stopped baking.
She doesn’t button her dress all the way down.
Then I learn the house has been
sold, its contents divided among family members, and my grandparents placed in
a supervised home. Shortly thereafter my grandfather dies in the hallway
outside their room of pneumonia after a flu epidemic. My grandmother
stays alone in that room for days after he dies, then, according to her
supervisors, tries flirting for a few weeks with the widowers in the home.
Then she becomes more forgetful, then ill. When I hear she has been
failing to recognize her own children, I visit her. All by
herself she lies in a metal hospital bed in a room that smells like urine and
antiseptic and the insides of vacuum-cleaner bags. She knows me
immediately, and she says she knows why I have come.
She tells me the thing I need is
in the back of the pantry closet in her house. I should go there as soon
as my visit is over and get it. She tells me exactly what shelf it is on
and where it is on that shelf, though she never tells me exactly what it is I
need or how I will recognize it. I humor her, however, and assure
her I will use it well. Then I thank her distantly, politely.
“We all come to this, you know,” she
says.
I can’t stand it. I hug
her quickly and leave.
After going to bed early one night a
couple of weeks later, I float, half-dreaming on the edge of sleep, and I
find myself at my grandparents’ house again. Everything is as it has
been—the trellis, the roses, the lawn. My grandmother meets me at the back
door in her bare feet and leads me by the hand all through the house, coming
finally back to the kitchen, to the pantry. Bread is rising up out of pans
on the counter, and I can smell the yeast. Then I stand in the doorway
while she takes her apron off, puts it in the closet, and walks away, still
barefoot, across the lawn and into the woods. Silently she leaves me there,
and I began to weep. Then I am awake, and I really am weeping. I
dismiss it as moodiness and fall asleep.
When I awake the next morning to the
ringing of the telephone, I know why it is ringing. Before they tell me,
I know the time she has died.
Her funeral takes place in the
village church. Most of her friends have already died, and the ones who are there quiver and wheeze like threadbare bagpipes. I feel
ridiculous and out of place, and I don’t really care for the casket, though it is nice enough, I suppose. It is smooth and softly curved on top—almost
feminine. I keep wondering whether she is wearing shoes. I wonder
whether her dress is buttoned all the way down. I wonder whether her
head is on a pillow. When they carry it somewhat clumsily (my
grandmother was a buxom woman) out of the church, I wonder what is going to
happen to it, though I know perfectly well.
They load it into a hearse and
drive it through the village, past Velma’s, past my grandmother’s house that is now owned by somebody else, past her garden next to the road. They
keep going down the road, toward the village cemetery beyond the woods, only a
half-mile from her house. They head straight for the hole they have dug her,
next to my grandfather, right across from Grover and Velma.
Most of the older people have paid
their respects at the church, and only the family stands by as the casket is
rolled out of the hearse, lowered pneumatically into the cement vault in the
hole, and covered with a cement cover. A few words are
spoken. Some dirt is sprinkled on top of the vault. The family
leaves. On some pretense I dillydally, watching two men, who had been
lurking at the edges of the scene, fill the hole. They use regular,
long-handled shovels to move raw dirt from the pile, which has been covered
with a tarp during the burial. They drop it rhythmically into the
hole. It takes about ten minutes to fill the hole. They tamp it
down, then shovel more on top to make a rounded, rectangular hill where the
hole has been. One of them crushes a cigarette and tosses it into the
bushes outside the cemetery wall. She wouldn’t have liked that, I
think.
It is
time for me, too, to leave, so I walk to my car and start the motor.
In my rear-view mirror I see the fresh mound of dirt in the plot next to my
grandfather’s, which is already covered with bristly grass. Hers isn’t
an uncomfortable-looking mound, I think, but I hope the grass will cover it
soon.
And sure enough, the next spring her
mound is warm and green and covered with tiny wild violets. But it is
taking a long time to settle.