“You know, they always show the weather in Chicago right before Philadelphia. So I always keep an eye on what it’s like out there.”
This is the fourth thing my grandmother says to me after we embrace, right after:
“Hi, sweet! How are you?”
“You look great, you really look wonderful.”
“How is Chicago?”
No matter how many times I return home from school for a holiday, no matter how many times I may see her during that holiday, this is how our conversations always start.
And I smile and nod and assure her that all is well and I am so thankful that she is looking out for me.
The sliding door to the back porch is open, a cool breeze coming into the living room through the screen. I can hear the chirrping of heat bugs in the dusk. Every now and then a car hums by. I know that the next time I sit in her living room, the door will be shut and the chair I sit in will have been moved to the spare bedroom. A fake Christmas tree proudly wearing the wooden ornaments once made by my grandfather in their garage will have taken its place. Maybe she will decide to put candles in the window this year.
“So, is the car all packed and ready to go?”
When she speaks in such a sweet voice, it is impossible to remind her that I am flying back to school. To remind her of these things she forgets, or to tell her that she has already asked this question, or has told this story, feels like smacking the nose of a dog when he’s had an accident on the kitchen floor because you weren’t home in time to let him out. To bring these things to light makes them no one’s fault but your own. And yet she blushes is internally furious with her mind.
So I just take a sip of water and nod to give her the consent she needs to hear.
On the coffee table in between us are loose photographs, black and white, delicate paper borders. She smiles back at me one hundred and forteen times.
“You know, at seminary, they used to serve us hot meals every night on white table clothes.”
I’ve lost count of how many times she has related this annectode, of how many times I have tried to tell her how different univeristy is today. There are no white table clothes, no servers, no single sex dorms (sometimes bathrooms), no curfews, no designated Saturday date nights. When I tell her these things, I don’t know what sort of image forms in her mind. Whatever it looks like, it slips from her memory like sand through fingertips.
That’s all I ever want - to feel sand run through my fingertips. To be standing on the Northern shore of an Eastern island and see nothing but ocean. For wind to whip my sunbleached sand speckled hair into tiny knots that will cause me to curse Aeolos when I try to comb them out. To feel the waves lap back and forth over my feet, shifting the sand in off beat rhythms underneath my toes.
When I am in Chicago, softly crying in the public bathroom of some univeristy building, questioning irrational graffiti that someone scratched into the paint with a pencil, that is where I try to drive my mind. An empty beach. Salty water. Salty air. No more salty eyes.
“Will you please hold Nana’s arm?”
One girl holds the frantic dog on his leash, another gets the surf board, another the brown bag filled with sandwhiches, another the cooler filled with Nantucket Nectors and candy bars and dog treats, another the bag of towells, another Nana’s arm.
While the others parade through the grass and down the dunes with a sense of urgency to get to the water, the last girl lets her grandmother set the pace. Linking arms, she listens as her grandmother reminsces of when she used to stay at her aunt’s house on the lake every summer. They would float in black inky inner tubes for hours and make up songs that they would later perform after dinner for the adult guests. Sometimes they would go fishing. Sometimes they would kiss boys on the dock after the sun went down.
By the time the two make it down to the beach, the rest of the party has already set up camp. The dog runs back and forth from the water to the girls, tail shaking uncontrollably. The towels laid out, the sandwhiches distributed. The empty chair is for the one who’s legs can only bend to greater angles.
Two empty chairs.
Summer night, just like this one of the last of the season. Window open, breeze through the screen, heatbugs in the darkness. She sits cross legged on her bed, alone. Everyone else in the house is asleep. To the voice of some acoustic surfer turned down low on her laptop speakers, she glues a magazine picture of two empty chairs into her notebook.
But they never sat on chairs. They always laid on their towels. He would only carry a towel, his book, and a shirt. He rarely even brought shoes. She would drive the jeep, with a foot of sand at the bottom and muted paint forever speckled with dry salt, into down. He would stand on the street corner and would around the front to jump into the passenger seat when she stopped.
Bumpling over cobblestones, breezing down fresh pavement, blowing through clouds of sand - the windows were always down, the radio was always blasting. They would make it to the beach right before the tourists crowded the shore and you had to park a mile away before you even reached the water.
From the car, they would carefully slide down the red dirt dunes, taking baby steps. Turning left, they would walk away from the abandoned life guard stand. They would walk until there were no more people in sight. Laying down their towlels, they claimed that land there own.
He was reading The Sun Also Rises, and she remembers how her belly had cartwheels when he described the story to her. She thinks of how now she has been with dozens of boys at parties who have also described this story to her, how her stomach never flinched.
She was reading East of Eden for the second time. She told him how it was her second Bible, how he needed to read it before he left to go back to school. He smiled at her enthusiaism, told her that he would. Looking back, she doesn’t think that he did.
When her parents gave her a first edition of East of Eden for her graduation present, she burst into tears. All these years of “you don’t understand me,” “you don’t know who I really am” were suddenly nothing but self determenting lies she told herself to write terrible poetry in the margins of her biology notes. They knew she wouldn’t want diamonds or pearls, Tiffany silver or Michael Kors handbags. She cried becuase she didn’t think they even knew what her favorite book was, let alone that this copy would mean more than the world to her.
“Nana, do you remember when you gave me those books for my eigthteenth birthday?”
The tiny woman on the couch crosses her legs and leans back into the coushins.
“Now was that last year?”
“Mmmhmm.”
She shakes her head slowly, eyes concentrating on the ceiling.
“You gave me those books you read while at seminary.”
A Farewell to Arms, Edith Wharton, a book of sonnets. Each were a different combination of muted greens and blues and reads with gold script ingrained into the binding. The pages were yellow. They smelled like “Nana’s house.”’
Whenever she looked at these books on her desk, wedged between two book ends, she thought of her grandmother walking across a plot of grass holding the books under her arm. In her daydreams, she is always wearing a long skirt, heavy fabric the color of olives and wine. She is wearing a turtleneck and her hair is pulled back into a braid. She doesn’t know if this was even the style at the time, but this is how she imagines her grandmother. Her blue eyes are magnificent.
A boy greets her and her mouth slowly forms a toothless smile. They stand outside the threshold of a brick building. Ivy cascades down into the bushes. He is softly holding her hips and she is hugging her books to her chest. He turns his head and leans in something to whisper in her ear. She closes her eyes and laughs through perfect teeth.
“Did you read them?” Nana asks. She holds her claspes her hands on her lap, folding them around her middle. The lamp in the corner of the room shines directly on her face, highlighting wrinkles and sunspots on her cheeks. Her eyes have faded to gray, the color of fog against a morning sky. Her white hair is not her own.
“This is the last house she’ll ever own,” my mother told me as we were pulling out of the driveway. “She knows it.”
What goes through your mind when you know your time is getting short? That one day soon you will not wake up, leaving an empty niche in the world where you once breathed? To move to a nursing home would mean facing the fact that you will never live in a house for the rest of your time on this earth. You’ll never again have a home to yourself. You’ll never again have an attic filled with family artifacts. You’ll never open the front door that overlooks a quiet street and invite family in for a meal and conversation. You’ll never have a driveway. At least on this earth.
What goes through your mind when you slowly watch all of your neighboors die? When the couple from next door that used to come over for coffee oneday stops coming and you realize it is because she head a heart attack at the dinner table and he cannot bring himself to go outside. Shortly after, he dies too. The doctor says it was caused by overwelming grief.
A few days before our conversation in the living room, we went to view a private art collection in the city. She loved Renoir. As we strolled through the cooridors, arm in arm, she would comment on the children’s porcelain skin bleeding into the dreamy colors of French gardens. She did not understand VanGogh.
“Why are they so dark?”
“Why is their so much paint?”
“Why can you see their veins so clearly?”
These were the questions she asked everytime a certain portrait hit her the wrong way.
“I’m not sure,” was my consistent reply. “Let’s move on.”
