My grandmother's hands, ten big knuckles with twisted skin, reach over to her coke, no ice. Every Saturday during this rust hot New Mexico summer we have been going out to lunch. She picks me up in her uncomfortably clean maroon car and drives uncomfortably slow, her big iridescent white curls brushing the roof and her big, 1980's eyeglasses reflecting all the unforgiving sun through the windshield. I always pretend to gush with enthusiasm about her choice of restaurants; when you are that old, I figure, you deserve to think, even falsely, that the decisions you labor over are important ones. She has only a white Scotty dog--with brown drooly fur around its mouth and a horrible name: Duffy--and a brown and beige condominium and a Bible study group to think about. And Oprah. And me, of course, she has me. She has been spending our monthly lunch dates as of late recording her history. It is as if she has chosen me, her oldest granddaughter, to record her eulogy.
"Isabella, you know I was just like you, a country girl going to a big city school." At this she laughs a bit, the wrinkles of her white skin folding in on each other like wax paper. "Yes, I went to school in Philadelphia and even though Grampy wanted to kill me when I told him I was going, he did buy me the trunk. You always carried a trunk."
"How did you apply to school then?" I couldn't imagine my grandmother huddled over some old typewriter in Carney, Nebraska pecking out her social security number over and over.
"Well, I just went to the library, looked up schools for teachers in Philadelphia and wrote them a letter. I was always the smart one. Joan, you know, she was the pretty one."
My grandmother is obsessive about absolutes. Everyone always fits in a category. You are either smart or pretty, the naughty child--that's my mother--or the quiet, faithful type--that's my uncle. Her grandchildren, too, are set up in neat and clean categories. My youngest cousin Amanda's mammoth brown eyes and sleek legs automatically place her in the beautiful-and-to-be-watched-over category. My grandmother mentions at least once every time I go on these lunches with her how surprisingly lucky it is that Amanda has a good head on her shoulders. "That girl, she could really be seen for a fool if she's not careful." She never talks about me being foolishly gorgeous. I wonder if that means I made the smart-and-not-pretty cut off. I guess I could also be in her honored sensible-and-not-pretty cut off, which was actually quite preferable. Sensibility was at the top of my grandmother's virtues. She thought smart people were inherently a bit big-headed. Sense, not smarts, was the kind of thing that pushed you to going out to lunch with your grandmother once a week. Sense and duty, those were the two solid gold lettered words, capitalized and underlined, that my grandmother's God would be checking off at the pearly gates. I think, so far, that I could squeak through.
"Are you still spending time with that fella?"
This is how she likes to ask me about my black boyfriend without really asking me about my black boyfriend. He's from Brooklyn. She has heard of it. He has grown impartial to his uncombed afro--says it isn't because he is trying to make a statement but because he just has no money. I think he likes to feel bohemian; he is even learning to play the acoustic guitar. It would have been so much easier for her if he cut his hair like Michael Jordan. Then she could place him in the black-young-man-with-a-promising-athletic-career category.
When he came to visit we all went to this horrible theme restaurant off the highway--Fargo's made all its workers were itchy old-fashioned outfits that squeezed their neck fat at the collar and required that they nightly change the pose of the two yellowing mannequins that sat in their own booth in the front of the restaurant, supposedly eating their own fake pizza and loving it perpetually for the last fifteen years. Over our own grease saturated pizza my grandmother managed to bring up Rocky Mountain oysters. "Do you know what they are?" She said it as if it was the most natural question in the world for a seventy year old woman with a wrinkled up face and a bubble gum pink sweat suit on to be asking a twenty year old kid from Brooklyn who thought I was joking when I told him that I rode in carpools when I was little. "Yeah I think I've heard of them," he said quietly. "Yeah, he's heard of them grandma," I said loudly, pushing my words across the table as if they were bricks, something heavy and final.
"I also took flying lessons once. You probably think it was only my brother who knew how to fly a plane, but after Jack learned, I learned too." She carefully wrapped up one side of her small pastrami sandwich with mustard spilling out the sides. The woman can make four meals out of one potato.
"That's amazing," I told her genuinely. "I really want to learn to fly a plane someday. It must have been so frightening." I wonder if I have reminded myself enough lately that learning to fly was one of my things to do before I die. I find that I forget them as if they were the butter on my mental grocery list. These things are important.
"Oh no, I wasn't scared at all. I've never been afraid of that kind of thing. In fact, when your grandfather went to war, I immediately put my name down for the WAC. He came back, of course, and the war ended before I was asked to do anything, but..."
"What is that, the WAC?"
"The Women's Army Corp was a way for women to help the effort. You didn't actually fight of course, no combat. No, you did other things, things that made the soldiers feel supported. You don't understand...in those days being American really meant something. Being part of the war effort was something you just did. No questions asked."
When Isabella was 17 years old she found an old Christmas card I had written, buried between a stack of old appointment books--fading red leather with gold flaking off numbers on the covers--and a dusty, bent-cornered Earth, Wind and Fire record in the attic. Back in eighties I had still been tortured by the annual guilt of my mother's mimeographed Christmas letter wrath. "You know," she would always work into a conversation right around December 1st, "there are so many people who would really love to hear how the children are doing. They are only young once." I always ended up writing some miserably inauthentic piece of holiday crap, making 100 copies, and sending out 20 to her friends. The rest sat in the attic for eternity, stagnant and embarrassing.
Isabella, full of rage and certainly unaware of the painful memories I associate with cold nights of staring at the green glowing computer screen and trying to come up with something witty to say, stormed down our one hundred year old stairs--leaving a creaking groan in her wake--and found me in the kitchen.
"What is this?" She questioned me with a righteous indignation fit for a television preacher, not a seventeen-year-old girl in baggy jeans and a baby T.
"What do you mean what is that? I mean, what is that?"
"Maybe this will remind you," she unfolded the paper, gray and pathetic after so many years of purposelessness--memorabilia is by definition lifeless--and began reading. "'At the age of twelve Isabella is turning out to be extravagant about social justice. She has treated the Gulf War as if it were cause for her to drop all routine and become an anti-war activist. Michael and I can't help but be amused and proud of our little protester, rallying support in the milk line of the cafeteria. She even made a T-shirt with puffy paints and glitter that reads, 'Violence is not the answer.' Her passion is endearing and reminds me of my own fresh days of political activism and naïve passion. I believed so much that my own personal grief could be channeled into broader change.'" Closing it with a definitive little smack, "Ring any bells?"
I did, in fact, remember exactly when I had written the letter because as soon as it reached Aunt Joan I got a very terse, frigidly cold call from my mother. She wondered why, of course, I had to re-hash the past, especially she wondered: "Why would you ever bring up such a painful thing to Aunt Joan and the others? You know they loved your brother very much." Yes, they loved him very much. I stopped writing Christmas letters and she stopped asking about them.
"Well, I guess. I mean I faintly remember writing that. You know I grew out of that sixties slave mentality to the annual Christmas card years ago. I only did it because my mother always frowned at me if I didn't and I hadn't figured out yet that her frown was not the axis which the world tilted on." Right after I said this, I regretted it. Isabella is consistently smitten with her grandmother. She thinks that there is something so noble and dignified about my mother's Nebraskan farm girl act. I decided long ago to let her make her own decisions about character. God knows my mom is a much better grandmother than she ever was a mother; she lets Isabella have a space to move around that I would have died for as a young child. When I'm not trying to smooth out the edges in my own relationship with my mother--which is just about all the time--I am actually quite shocked at the relative fluidity of theirs. There is something so embracing in the way they look at one another.
Isabella yanked me out of my sidebar with the fierceness of her vocabulary, "I can not believe that you would write something so demeaning about me."
Jesus. "Isabella, you have to understand the context in which that letter was written. For those of us who lived through Vietnam, the Gulf War seemed like the failed pilot of a new sitcom for CBS. I mean the Vietnam War was very real for me. Real, I suppose, in a way I just don't think you have the historical context to understand." She was going to hate that.
"Real? Well last time I checked...well, you may not realize this Mom, but...I just think it is totally demeaning to belittle my feelings and my political passion." She was so smart. Sometimes at night I still looked in on her as if she were a baby. There was just something about her sleeping there, all legs and curls these days, face sometimes speckled with the redness of teenage years, always a gentle snore coming out of her barely there lips. She looked smart even when she slept. It made me so proud at one a.m. to think that she raised her hand at one p.m. in an English class I would never see and said brilliant things. It was poise. She had such a poise about her that I, insecure and fumbling, never would have had at that age.
"Honey you're right. It isn't nice, but I hope you realize that I never meant to demean you."
"Well you did."
"Isabella you are seventeen. I wrote that when you were twelve."
"It doesn't matter Mom. I want to be taken seriously now, I wanted to be taken seriously then."
"I guess I just don't know how to explain to you that it was not an intentional thing to make you feel made fun of. Okay, I'll just leave it at I'm sorry." I was sorry. But really. Really she needed to develop some sense of context. People died. Everything is time and place. People died, a lot of people died. Against my better judgment I added, "But please know that there is a whole context to that letter that is very relevant and one that you may never understand. War is real when it happens. War is an empty desk three rows over and up one that screams to you of a far removed violence, of a far removed loss of a pimply boy just starting college that used to crack blonde jokes and make your father jealous. War is the whole world changing in moments. And war for us, and this you really won't understand, was totally ephemeral and totally devastating. It's like knowing that next door there is a woman being beaten to death by a hulky son of a bitch, and when you go outside to scream for help, people are just walking around as if nothing is happening inside. You can hear the screams, but the rest of the world is blank faced and clutching their newspapers and cups of coffee."
At this she sat down and started crying, her thick eyebrows--still too new and inconspicuous to a young girl to be plucked--grew tired and slanted. "Mom it is not that I don't want to know war. I mean I don't, but I didn't mean to say that you hadn't experienced things far worse than anything I have experienced. I just felt hurt..." She trailed off. I had obviously said too much. The parmesan bread was burning in the oven. My shoulders were so tense I could feel them aching to be released. Her eyes were looking up at me like two reflective ponds. I looked angry.
"I'm not angry," I said, my voice softening into this mother tone I had suddenly developed when my breasts got swollen and my love of peanut butter and pickle sandwiches consumed me. Here she is, as tall I am and in love every other day, and I still have use of this maternal voice. I began to cry too, but not the kind of tears that feel satiating. The tears I cry, about things like this, are old and weathered. They never make me feel better. They are tears of an era that never got purged. Tears for a brother that I never got to touch again. Quiet and haunting tears.
"Honey, you know that I lost my brother in that war. Your Uncle Alan, my little brother, was a soldier and he never came home and that is just very hard for me to deal with. It was very hard for me to deal with then...that's partly why I became such an adamant activist. The physicality of marching, sitting-in, protesting, felt so good at a time when I felt so powerless. My hands were moving, my voice was growing hoarse and all used up. It felt so much better to be ragged from fighting, even if it was a philosophical fight, than to be sitting around. I guess in that letter I was just remembering how desperate everything was for me, and well, I am just so glad it didn't have to be so desperate for you."
"God mom, it sounds like the most unfair, horrible time in the world."
"Well, it was. There were just too many questions that went unanswered."
Elizabeth has always had to be too much. She eats too much. She gives too much. She even believes too much. As a teenager she always came to me and said things like, "Mom, I have this friend who is thinking about having sex with her boyfriend but she knows that is a really bad sin and that her parents would kill her. Is there a way she can do it without making God and her father mad?" I am surprised I never dropped dead. I did drink a lot of scotch on the rocks. And of course, I smoked cigarettes long before we knew that they were deadly.
It wasn't always like that. When she was a little girl I used to be the happiest woman in the world. That was when I only had her. I used to make matching dresses for her and I, spend hours stitching the sailor collars and the lace on perfect white socks. I even made this photo album once of our Christmas together. When I go over to her house now, all swollen with too many gifts (wouldn't you know) and slightly overcooked food on December 24th, she always has the album out on the kitchen table.
"Mom, did you see I put the old album out? Isabella loves to look through it. She can't believe that you made those dresses by hand. I guess I haven't exactly been Martha Stewart."
I always smile at her reassuringly, but don't say much about that. I knew she would never be the domestic type; she was always too busy arguing with people to enjoy the kinds of tasks that require patience and a careful hand. My arthritis stops me from doing all the baking I used to do...used to make four dozen Christmas cookies with the grandkids every December, but the frosting and all the little things just got to be too much. Plus they are older now, Scott is as tall and thin as his father once was, but not nearly as quiet, and Isabella is very smart. She plays sports and writes for the school newspaper. And Christopher, of course, is just your all-around American fella. His blonde hair and good looks get all the girls I suppose, but he is a smart young man. I trust in his sensibilities.
Elizabeth, on the other hand, was never to be completely trusted. I mean now, now that she has had children of her own and all that, she has developed a real surprising patience and a caring that I never would have expected. Sometimes she shocks me with her mind. I mean she always had that very empathetic bone in her body, but I never knew what to make of it...what she would make of it. She never understood anything about duty. Duty, that was a real four letter word to her.
"Mom are you joking? Please tell me you are joking."
I remember looking her dead in the eyes and clutching the end of my cigarette with authority. "No Elizabeth, I am not joking. I am urging your brother to enlist as soon as he graduates. He is strong, he is young, and frankly, he is directionless. The army could really show him a way to make use of his sensible nature."
"Yeah and he could die Mom. He could be taken from us forever. Did you ever think of that?"
"Elizabeth, must you always be so sensationalistic? He is simply going to boot camp. There is no real war on right now and, God willing, there won't be another for quite sometime. Johnson is really a wonderful president. He says he is going to bring peace."
"Oh please, you are so naïve Mom."
"Elizabeth I really won't take that from you. Joseph?"
He always looked up sheepishly when I tried to include him in these rows. He always had such a soft spot for her. I think it was something about their round bellied, excessive natures. If I sent him to the store for a jar of pickles, he would come back with a truck full of cucumbers and a business plan. They were both ambitious and ridiculous in the same way. In Joseph I found it somewhat endearing because, well really because he was a man. In men such errs of judgment seem somewhat quirky, but in women, well they are just inexcusable. Women must know duty. It is, in so many ways, our best virtue. We do what needs to be done when it needs doing. That is all.
When Joseph died, for the first time in my life, I didn't know what needed to be done or when it needed doing. His brain literally exploded, knocked against the inside of his skull, swelled up like a balloon too full of water on a hot July day that burst. What a hellish day. In a matter of 28 hours, my husband of 46 years was turned into a mound of flesh and bone. When he died I felt the duty fall right out of me. In the hospital room, white and blinding on a Sunday evening, I pulled my thighs off the sticky plastic of the chair, walked over to the badly-dusted window in the corner of the room and pulled the cord on the shades, watching them slip down and slice the light. Then I walked back over to my world, destroyed and heavy as never before on the bed, and wrapped my arms around my dead husband. His body was still warm and his shirt was pulling at the buttons. Buttons I had sewn on. That was duty. Buttons and darned socks and protecting the peace. We had places. They were destroyed with his death.
And then Elizabeth walked in. She was fatter than ever with the added weight of a baby girl, kicking fiercely inside her belly. I had so often wondered if the little girl would give her the same hell she had given me, wondered if it would have Joseph's thick eyebrows, Elizabeth's defiant disposition, my sense of patriotism, right and wrong. But at that moment, all I noticed was a slant of light cutting across her enormous belly.
Hospital light is so definitive. At one moment it makes the whole world seem like a factory of death. With the dusty blinds drawn you can actually smell the putrid odor of stale light, of people dying in dark rooms, of souls resting in shadows. And then someone draws the blinds and all the sudden light, too, accompanies disease and death. All the sudden, you see that the sun is really just a harbinger of the night and that people die at noon in hospital beds...and on fields of dirt and blood in countries you've never been...that duty is only something that you hold on to because you must hold on to something...America is really a piece of land...people have died for it...people die on it...your love is dead...your son is dead...the light is dying...and the only question left worth asking rests, swimming and cradled, in a belly you created...
But you can't live that way. People must go on. I sat up, straightened my blouse, and smiled, courageously, at my pregnant daughter.