Wedding Invitations

    If I close my eyes, I can still hear the scratching of my grandmother’s pen. I used to lay on the floor, sprawled out on the antique carpet, the rough wool fibers making my stomach itch where my shirt pulled up and exposed it, my sock feet in the air, waving back and forth gaily like a pirate’s flag. She used thick, heavy duty paper that she bought from a local artist, paper the likes of which I had never seen. Grainy and rough to the touch, flecks of old paper inside the new one. The remnants of a stranger's memories becoming part of the paper that would hold my memories. It wasn’t smooth like the paper I used at school, carefully practicing my alphabet on the methodically laid out sections, tracing the line in the middle of my A’s across the dashes. I dreamed that one day I could form letters the way my grandmother did, as if the pen was just part of my finger, caressing the page with a grace that surely must give the words more power than they would have otherwise. I would write, heavy handed with my crayons, pushing down until the tips of my Crayola markers became smudgy and ugly, trying my best to sound out the words for things around me. Rug. Table. Coffee pot. My mother used to get frustrated with me, sighing and throwing her hands up at the sheets of paper littered all over the floor; the ink that I got on our sofa, the pencil shavings sprinkled across our dining room like confetti. She would sit down with me, grasp my tiny fist in her much larger, much more graceful hand, help me form words, giving up before too long and sighing, taking the markers and putting them on a shelf too high for me, giving me something else to do with my hands instead, like snapping the ends off of the green beans. She said it was good to channel my energy into something useful. 

My grandmother never got impatient with me. Every piece of paper that I brought her she would hold up in front of the window or a lamp, push her glasses as high as they could go on her nose, and inspect each line as if it were sky writing on the clearest day.  She would nod and murmur to herself, very good, even when I had written twelve times that Jack had gone up the hill. She didn’t let me touch her box until I was much older, and she never let me touch it without her being nearby. I never got the sense that she didn’t trust me, more that this was the most important thing to her, and she didn’t want to leave them unattended. The pens were like little soldiers, lined up in her big wood box, on the shelf beside the fireplace that was never lit inside her big study. My father grumbled, saying that it was a shame that such a beautiful and masucline room was wasted on books and pens and things, but my grandmother ignored him in a way that only she could, a way of ignoring that didn’t hurt any feelings, just made it clear that there was no room for nonsense. No room for nonsense is what she always told me and my mother when we came to visit and my mother had yet another sad tale to tell about my father, about his angry outbursts and his coming home late and the airplane bottles of liquor hidden in the bathroom cabinet. My grandmother would tsk tsk and put a kettle of water on the stove, and once my mother was fortified with the fancy leaves that my grandmother kept lined up on her shelf on perfect order, she would steel herself up, straighten her back, grab her purse, and head out the front door, intent on giving my father a piece of her mind. I would get to stay with my grandmother then, and she would give me my own tiny cup of tea, put a raspberry shortbread cookie on her rose-painted china, shushing me and winking her left eye as she did. I would never tell, and even if I wanted to, my mother had more important things on her mind. 

Then she would take me up to her office, and I would beg her to show me her box, just one more time, only a few moments before bed. She never told me no, I don’t think she had the heart to. She would shake her head as if there was a chance of refusal, and then pull over the old wicker chair that I felt sure she kept just for me, and I would climb up as she used the tiny key from her desk drawer to open up the top of the box. It was thick, creaky wood, with little metal pulls on each of the drawers, and I would reach out and touch them as she pulled them out. And the array of pens inside, I felt surely that this was the most exciting thing at her house. A row of pens with the handles turning into feathers on their way up, the individual strands of each feather fluffed out and immaculately groomed, in all of the colors of the rainbow, and even one colored like a peacock. There were rows of featherless ones too, some carved out of wood, slender and wavy, and some thick and glass, heavy to the touch, but sparkly when the light hit them. A few of them opened into multiple pieces, and I watched her screw and unscrew them, wiping them down. These ones, I was allowed to hold. Careful, she said, tapping the pointy end with her finger. It never bled, but the way she jerked her finger back each time was enough of a warning for me. Then the rows of pens that were inkless. My grandmother’s favorites. She said the pointy things on the ends were called nibs, and showed me another small box inside the big box, filled with so many different kinds of them. I looked down at the pen in my marker stained hands and wondered what she could possibly do with so many. 

If I asked her, she would laugh, pull out old books that she kept at the ready, point at all of the letters, the words, the drawings. Even when I couldn’t read them, she would tell me that every word belied a choice, a choice of what the right nib was, what the right ink was. She said every choice we make is more permanent than we can even realize, because as soon as the thought has formed in our heads, it is changing things. She would show me the third drawer then, full of tiny jars of ink with exotic labels or labels with the edges yellowing and curved. She showed me her favorite one, nearly empty now, the label unreadable, that she had gotten while traveling abroad long before even my mother was a thought. She would dip one single pen in, draw a line down my coloring page for the night, write my name in her elegant script at the top. What I wouldn’t do to have just one of those pages now, one of the pages that was so effortless, took so few seconds, so little wherewithal to write. 

By the end of her life, when I went to see her feeble in her clinical bed with it’s newfangled buttons and levers, she couldn’t form the words. At first, with her hand, and later, with her mouth. She had a button to call the nurse, and eventually that was her only communication, and some days she couldn’t manage that. I brought her in her paper until I couldn’t handle it anymore, watching her stroke the metal handles and the fraying pages, look over at me and for a moment I swore she knew what I was thinking, thought she could channel her thoughts through her fingers and down to the inkwell and the page, like she had done so effortlessly so many times. People used to ask her to write things out for them, and she did it, sometimes, helping people write out their birth announcements, even allowing a tech savvy youngster duplicate her words over and over on graduation announcements for people who couldn’t possibly understand the intricacies of the words that they skimmed over so briefly before setting it on a shelf to never be seen again. My favorite things were her grocery lists, words such as ‘eggs’ and ‘mozzarella cheese’, written in a script that felt too fancy to grace the doorstep of a Kroger. She signed her name on every Christmas card by hand though, and even if I hadn’t seen her do it, I knew that she picked every pen and every ink for each card thoughtfully, for each person. 

When I graduated college and got a job at a company that makes cards, I was ecstatic. I was never naive enough to think that I would hand write every card, but I had such excitement thinking that maybe I could make things beautiful as my grandmother did, that I could, with one decision, send a piece of beauty out in the world that would not be forgotten, just as she said. Years of getting my degree, memorizing buzzwords, taking notes in different colored sharpies that got messier and messier the longer the semester went, I started to lose that passion. Instead of the sporadic several day long trips I used to spend with my grandmother when I was a child, I started visiting every few weekends. I hid my notebooks from her, ashamed of my penmanship when she had devoted so much time to making me a gifted writer like herself, and I devoted my minutes spent handwriting things to make them as precise and beautiful as I could, to make her proud. When I started working and instead of making beautiful memories I was learning to work an espresso machine and fix a fax machine, I didn’t tell her that. I would regale her with stories of the meetings we held, the cards we designed. Her mind was starting to go by then, so sometimes the stories would be repeats, switching an Ann to a Sophie and a St. Patricks Day to a Bat Mitzvah. When I met my fiance at my job, on my way to a meeting where I would not be heard, I was so excited to bring him home to my grandmother. He was clean and well-groomed and wore suits even when it wasn’t a special occasion, and he had a dog and a cute little suburban house, and he wanted me. I told him in the car on the way to pretend that I was more important than I was, that I got to design all types of beautiful cards. He didn’t know why I felt this need to misrepresent myself to the most important person in my life, but he went along with it, holding my hand while I told her about all of the cards that I got to write, my beautiful pen (a gift from her) flowing freely as I shaped the words that she too might receive for a holiday. 

When she died, she left me her key. My mother was confused as to what a key that small could even possibly open, but she was only confused because she hadn’t listened, hadn’t absorbed all of the moments that my grandmother could have shown her. I opened the box for the first time, safe in my living room at the house that me and my fiance shared, and I sobbed. I felt wrong, touching these pens, her prized possessions, when I couldn’t even be honest with her about what I did for a living. The next day I quit my job, unable to continue the facade, took a pay cut, and found somewhere that would allow me to honor her memory with words on a page. It confused everyone but me, but each time I looked at the box, ran a hand down the pens, I felt closer to her, and I felt more like me. One year after her death, I sat at the table alone, with her favorite pen in my hand, knowing that there was not a thing in this world I wouldn’t give up to have her here with me inscribing my wedding invitations.