Mammy

It wasn't the wine, but we were all sitting around in the room being more than a little nostalgic. It wasn't the wine, because nobody was drinking any, nor had anybody been served wine. It wasn't the tea, either, because none of us was a great fan of teas, especially that night. To be honest, we probably were just drinking in the evening air and allowing it to do its work. If you've never tasted nght breezes, they are to die for.

“I remember my grandmother,” one of our small group said, looking at two of us, then lowering his gaze, looking out from beneath his oak-colored hair. “I know it’s not supposed to be like that, but she was my best friend.” 

My friend - because he was a friend, as were all the members of the group, in one way or another - then went on to reminisce. We could see there was such a longing look in his eyes as he gave copious examples of his Grandmother Elvira. She had such an old-fashioned name, but we looked beyond that, navigating the growing shadows, to find his words. Elvira certainly did seem to those of us listening to have been a gentle, caring person, the perfect grandparent. At least our friend thought so. To prove it, he went on for another twenty minutes, providing us with more than enough details to convince us.

Elvira apparently had started something, because we were by now convinced of the need to address the topic from our own points of view. Who doesn't have something to say on the topic of our parants' parents?

“I remember my grandmother, too,” another person said then. This was my friend from Yarmouth. She had lived quite different circumstances, some of them very surprising. We didn't know all the details, but we knew she had lived in more than one house and more than one state. We wondered how she felt about that, since it meant she hadn't really had the opportunity to know the woman. That didn't mean she didn't have fond memories of the woman, and we listened as she recounted several. It doesn't always require a lot of time spent together for the thoughts to run deep.

There is a lot of centering when we reflect on our grandparents. They tell us more about ourselves than we sometimes want to know. 

"I don’t remember mine very well," said a couple people in the room, which by now had been eclipsed by the complete disappearance of the sun and the total reign of the crescent moon. New moon, old people, stranded memories with no place to sail, I thought, but didn't know why. I also didn't know why, or perhaps didn't even realize, that I myself had started to drift and was not concerned. There were more stories to listen to, heads nodding gently, and thoughts like islands had begun to appear on the horizon, my horizon anyway.

There is a lot of empty space around grandparents, believe it or not. That's because they tend to have lived a lot of years before we are born, and often we don't give them a chance to fill in the empty spaces, all those years that feel like centuries to little children.

"I remember my grandmother," I heard myself saying, despite having hoped I would not. Say anything, that is. My reason was a good one: I didn't feel like groping through the lightless murk to find her. My murkiness, not my friends'. However, it was too late; once the members of the group had spoken up on the topic, they had to offer something to document their memories. I was expected to do the same. I chose one of my grandmothers from the three I knew about. One I had never met, so I figured what I knew about her didn't really count as remembering. It was all hearsay, learned from my mother, not from my father, whose mother she had been. 

Now that I think about it, my mother was the only one who ever mentioned her, and my father's mother had technically been her mother-in-law, although she had long ago abandoned my father and hadn't seen him since he was a tiny child. He never spoke of her. I understand now why he didn't, couldn't. He was silent about a lot of things.

I began to explain the grandmother I had known, who was my mother's mother and lived with us. (I never knew where else she had lived and never asked when she had left my grandfather. I would have left him, too. Most of the time he wasn't very nice.) Oddly enough, I no longer recall if I said everything aloud or if it's all just in my head. I'll tell you what I think I said, however.

Just know that the best thing about my grandmother was her name, first and last. Her exact name was a mystery and I wished it hadn't been, because it was a lovely name.

She read to me. This is the first thing I always tell people, because it's what I know happened. It might or might not be my memory, but it happened and it's a nice thing to know. The only problem is that she read to me because she wasn't able to keep me still otherwise, lively little child that I was. She read so much she got bored with the stories. I didn't. I was busy imprinting them in my mind's eye.

That was likely the most valuable thing my grandmother ever gave me.

She noticed my disability and might have thought I was being obstinate or lazy. I don't recall her ever liking people very much, except for her daughter (my mother). She never talked about her husband (my grandfather), but was polite when they saw each other at holiday gatherings, because they did see each other and were, in fact, still married. Good Protestants didn't believe in divource, although they practiced it.

She coughed all the time. A bottle of codeine syrup was always nearby, although it didn't seem to help a lot. Her lungs were bad, and she bequeathed those to my mother, which I didn't like at all. I was told she coughed so hard that she coughed all the oxygen out of her head. That seemed scary to me, so every time I coughed, I tried to stop right away. I didn't want to walk around with an airless brain.

She once cried out Kill that bird! when her dear Petey sang. Poor Petey, he lived his whole life in a little cage. We had a cat, too, but I don't recall its name. It knocked the cage over once by leaping from a chair a few feet away. Petey survived, dear little blue fellow, and he didn't deserve to have somebody want to kill him. He had learned to talk, too, and had three or four phrases people could coax him to say. My grandmother was angry at him. Maybe he sang a wrong note or was the wrong color. When he died, we got a new parakeet, who was bright green and we named him Kelly. That happened much later, though.

She laid on her side in bed a lot of the time and that's how I could tell was no wider than a Bible when you looked at her sideways. This was after she'd spent so many hours reading to me. Funny, though, how I thought about no longer having to rest my head on that bony body of hers. If I had been any heavier, I might have snapped brittle thighs or a stone-like shoulder. You didn't hug my grandmother, that I had always known. First, because she didn't like hugs, and second, because things inside her were so brittle they might splinter.

She had tanks of oxygen after the final transition to her bed. There were daily shots in her withered behind, administered by my mother. I thought her body was leather, although it would be difficult for leather to be so fragile. I also wondered if the hypodermic needle ever would go deep enough in that shallow body to splinter a bone in her hip. 

I wondered if all old people ended up in bed, getting shots all the time and pushing their silence out into the world. It wasn't something I could ask my mother, who was too busy tring to keep her alive and that was her focus. 

She often stared at a photo on the inside wall of her bedroom. It was hand-colored, quite old. I thought of the woman as the Lady in Blue, although her rounded forehead gave her the look of a young girl. She looked old because her hair seemed to be gray, although later I found out it wasn't. 

The Lady in Blue was probably the reason my grandmother didn't like the world very much. She was actually a girl. She would always be a girl, due to the accident.

My grandmother's hair was still nearly all dark brown at 65. She thought it was sinful to let one's hair go gray, but she also thought it was sinful to dye it. In fact, she probably thought most of the world was sinful. After all, she was a Protestant and a believer. Oh, the tales one could tell about that world...

She was 65 when she died, but since she was an invalid long before that, I never knew how she walked, if she used a cane, if she got carsick. She was never far from my mother, her daughter and first-born. My father might not have been jealous, but I admit to feeling left out of things at times, competing as I did for Mom's attention. (Not for her affection, which I knew she felt for me. But my mother never seemed happy.)

Her lungs, they said. That was the cause of everything. The coughing, the not eating, the scarce movement around the house. They did not say smoking was the cause, although they could have. Women smoked back then, certainly, and they smoke non-filtered brands since filtered cigarettes might not have been invented yet. Funny, but I recall seeing an empty, semi-crumpled pack of Camels on a shelf in her room. Her room was off the living room, so the double doors could be open and she could be part of the family gatherings. 

She didn't care about that and focused on the window to the driveway next door or on the Lady in Blue. She had obviously forgotten about me, her avid listener when she read.

She was cadaverous. That should have been obvious after the part about the shots in the wilted behind. However, that adjective is important. If I looked at her closely, she did look like a corpse or a mummy. In fact, she was much skinnier, so that her parchment skin stretched over every joint, but especially over the bones in her skull. Very dark hair, capping a head tightly, leaving the head no room to breathe. At the same time, her dark hairm like the night that has overtaken the room where we're all sitting, framed sharp cheekbones. Ugly cheekbones, exactly like those of a skull. The ones I see now in my bathroom mirror. They make me shudder, they aren't mine. It's like looking into her dark sockets and wishing I looked like somebody else. If I mistakenly apply a facial mask on my dry skin, the horror is real.

The clothing she wore just hung on her bones. She only wore navy blue, black, or taupe. It may have been the perpetual mourning or her desire to ward off any efforts to engage her in conversation. Rimless glasses? A lot of people wore them, and they were the old-fashioned style. She was old-fashioned, plus she was straight-laced, conservative, set in her ways, and out of touch with her pet bird. I bet the ugly polka-dot dress is packed away somewhere in the basement.

She was religious, as has already been made clear. That did not prevent her from being as racist as the day is long. She disliked all religions except her own, because hers was the right one. Of course a lot of people feel that way about their religions, but it's that rigid thinking that gets people into trouble all the time. Respect other people? Only if they're like you. Tolerate them? Why? God-fearing Protestants are always right.

I called her Mammy because I couldn’t say Grandma. It killed her to hear me say it, and I hope it's clear why so I don't need to explain. My mother was even embarrassed, but nobody would tell me what was wrong with that name. 

Mammy never smiled, as has also been mentioned, or if she did I couldn’t tell because she looked like that grinning skull and I couldn't translate her expression any other way but with fear.

She was cold and heavy in the coffin, all 80 pounds of her, in our house. By the time that happened, she might have weighed the same as her age: 65. What did I know?

She read next to nothing but the Bible and The Galveston Horror. That was a book about a devastating hurricane, I think it was. I discovered the book behind a glass-covered door, but was told I couldn’t read it. (Yet I’d go on to read all of Edgar Allan Poe later. Maybe Galveston was the reason.) The book was probably the one written around 1900 by John Coulter. Maybe it was a first edition. It was only about five feet away from my grandmother, who still talked out it. The horror, oh the horror. A Texas she'd never visited. Her thing was the suffering in death, perhaps.

That book has disappeared, like so many other things from that house.

My grandmother must have had a macabre sense of humor, so she didn't feel the need to smile and so I remember her as the most serious person in the world, except for her estranged husband, my grandfather. (Married life must have been hell for them.) Now I understand it was because she never stopped mourning the dead people in her life, and she believed in ouija boards and séances that never worked, never brought them back to life and never provided the line of communication she so longed for. 

For a woman who didn’t get out much, she seemed to know a lot and was right every time. That Methodist upbringing, for sure. I certainly never tried to cross her. Pure stone.

She crocheted, but knitting was a sin. It was obvious that crocheting was superior and she was excellent at it. Or if not superior, crocheting was simply something passed down in the family and so had become ‘the right way’ to keep hands from becoming idle.

When not crocheting the tiniest stitches in the world, mostly with ecru thread and a tiny metal hook, she would occasionally sing a hymn. She recalled one that had been her daughter's favorite. (Not my mother's; the other daughter's.)

Quite a legacy. That's not the half of it.

I was six when she died. 

Probably by then she only weighed sixty pounds.

Unfortunately, I never got to ask her why she thought the KKK was a good thing. I know she had her contacts, because I have proof. 

I am saving that for the future.