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I have only two photographs of my maternal grandmother, one black-and-white, taken shortly before
my second birthday, the other taken four or five years later, in color. When the black-and-white
picture was taken, she and I were sitting on the beach at Hannaford Cove. It was the end of summer,
and I wore overalls and a hooded sweatshirt. The hood had fallen back as I faced the camera, holding
up a small plastic pail. My smile was joyful; the pail must have held something beautiful:
periwinkle shells, or bits of sea glass, perhaps a few smooth stones or a crab claw. My grandmother
was turned away from me, facing the sea, most of her face hidden by the hat which protected her skin
from the sun.
In the album with these pictures is tucked a typed list of instructions, dated August 25, 1957,
for taking care of Kathleen, me, while my mother was recuperating from the birth of my brother.
The list is thorough, as I would expect from my mother, even when she was in her twenties. In fact,
the list is thorough enough to seem naive and innocent: Kathleen's bedtime, waking time, potty time,
play time, her favorite toys, foods, and games. My mother even included a key to my speech, in case
my grandmother wanted to talk to me, or should I say, in case I tried to talk to her.
Mushmo=milk, cracker=Zwieback, celery=grapes. The list is neat and logical, with the exception of
an admonition typed off-center at the bottom of the page: ENJOY HER!
The color picture was posed, taken at the end of one of my grandparents' yearly visits.
Wearing their tweed traveling suits, they were sitting on a slip covered couch, flanking my brother
and me. My brother and I had what my mother called "the cutes." His tongue was flopped out of his
mouth, and I had turned my lips inside out. Because I had recently lost some baby teeth, my mouth
looked all gums, red and inflamed. Whenever I come across this picture, when it slips out of the
album as I pack up my things for another move, I look for the indulgent smile playing at the corner
of my grandmother's lips. It is seldom there.
* * *
My grandmother's cancer has recurred. The phone call to my mother is short, matter-of-fact.
When the phone rings, I know who is on the other end by the change in my mother's voice--not in
tone but in pitch. The change reminds me of a guitar string being slowly tightened to bring the
instrument into tune. The cancer is inoperable.
* * *
When I was little, my grandparents would arrive for a visit in a large, neat station wagon,
its back seat folded down and covered, mysteriously, with a tarpaulin. In my family, a child
would not ask the obvious rude question: Grandmummy, why is everything in your car covered with
a tarpaulin? However, although I couldn't ask, I knew there was a logical reason for the tarpaulin.
I also knew there was an equally logical reason I shouldn't know what it was.
According to my brother, the reason for the tarpaulin is this: As he helped our grandfather load
the car at the end of a visit, our grandfather exclaimed, "Now I need you to help me spread the
tarpaulin. We wouldn't want to look like gypsies going down the road!"
Although my brother told the story to amuse me, I know that my grandfather was serious, no matter
what his tone of voice. I know further that the tarpaulin was my grandmother's idea. I know she
believed that if their suitcases and jars of crab apple jelly and boxes of hand-me-downs with Lord &
Taylor labels were not covered by that tarp, the cars passing them on the turnpike would see, not a
station wagon carrying a gray-haired couple back to their quiet home in Lexington, Massachusetts, but
a gypsy wagon, painted bright red or yellow, decorated with bells and painted flowers, blackened
cooking pots clashing, the tail of a dirty quilt hanging out the back. A wagon filled with gypsies.
Unwashed, loud, inquisitive gypsies.
* * *
Each time another phone call comes, from my grandfather now, my mother says, "Yes. Yes, I see.
Thank you, good-bye," the "Thank you, good-bye" so rushed as to be one word. For a moment, her
hand, bony, big-knuckled, stays on the receiver. When she notices me watching her, she takes her
hand from the receiver and gives me the latest report, matter-of-factly, as we are both adults now.
I usually say something inane: I'm sorry, or, That's too bad. Sometimes, to show my concern for
my mother, I ask for more information: Does Granddad have far to travel to the hospice?
Does Grandmother feel better now that they've stopped the chemo? She answers all my questions
clearly, thoroughly, and then I leave the room. I cannot ask her, How are you preparing yourself?
Even if she has the answer for me, I won't ask.
My brother calls from Burlington. He talks first to our parents and then, longer, to me.
We talk mostly about his job, his kids, concerts he and his wife have attended, because he knows
that is what I want to hear. I tell him that my life is routine. I suppose he is thinking, Living
with your parents, that is to be expected; your life will be healthy, chaste, and routine. He is
too polite to say it out loud. After a brief pause, he asks, "Have you seen her?" and when I don't
respond, he says her name, or what we call her now: Grandmother Moore. We had stopped calling her
Grandmummy by the time we were out of elementary school.
"No," I say. "I haven't. I know I should."
* * *
The summer I was twelve, I tried to find out what my grandmother was really like, who she was inside.
I had never thought about it before that, because she had always been the same to me: gray-haired, with
the rounded figure of an old person, but the erect posture of someone who knows what other people think
of her. Her skin, although I had never touched it, looked as though age had softened, rather than
wrinkled or lined it. The sound of her voice was distinctive, like the click of a fork against china.
That summer, we were visiting my grandparents at their summer house in Cape Elizabeth, as we did every
summer. One day, as my mother and I were leaving the house for a walk on the beach, my grandmother stopped
us. She told us, both of us, that her figure had changed. Her bust line--she gestured--had dropped, two
inches, more? Her body was changing. Her clothes didn't fit right any more. My mother murmured
something vague, Oh yes, I see, and we walked down to the beach.
The tide was going out, and we walked along the wet sand picking up pieces of sea glass. My mother
dropped each piece into her cupped hand. When she couldn't hold any more, she opened her hand and
let the pieces of glass cascade into my bucket. I watched to see if she would hold back some of the
pieces for herself, slip a blue or a lavender or a perfect white into the pocket of her shorts, but
she didn't. "When I was a child," she said, "I used to read books about the sea." This time, when
she opened her hand over my bucket, she let the glass slide through her spread fingers. "Your
grandparents didn't buy the cottage until the year you were born."
"Did you like the ocean?" I said. "Did you want to live there?"
She straightened up, easing her back. "In a house like that," she said, pointing to the Conner Club,
a huge dormered house that set on the bluff overlooking Hannaford Cove. "I imagined myself going out
each day to my private beach and collecting these big glass balls fishermen used to keep their
nets from sinking to the bottom. Floaters, they're called. The glass they're made of is beautiful--dark, with little bubbles suspended in it. The floaters were just going to come bouncing in on the
waves, and every day I'd go out and pick them up and put them in my house. Everywhere, on tables,
shelves, bookcases, on the floor, and when I ran out of room in the house, I'd put them on the porch.
I'd never get tired of looking at them!"
She was smiling, and suddenly, for a few brief moments, until she told me I was getting sunburned,
my mother became real to me, a skinny girl in baggy shorts holding in both arms dripping balls of
colored glass. As we walked back to the house, I wondered if my grandmother would also become that
real to me if she could prove to me, as my mother just had, that she had once been a child.
When we got to the house, I stayed in the front room on the studio couch, waiting for the right moment.
My grandmother sat in her rocking chair at the other end of the room. I watched as she knit for a while,
then read out of a thin paperback book, then wrote letters. After she'd sealed the envelopes, she got
up and left the house, walking quickly across the prickly grass to the mailbox. She set the letters
inside and raised the flag. Then she turned and walked across the narrow dirt road to an expanse of
wild flowers that bordered the beach. She came back into the house with a handful of Queen Anne's
lace and set the flowers on her worktable.
As she spread a newspaper open on the table, I blurted, "What was your childhood like?" She looked
surprised and left the room without saying anything. When she came back, with a cut glass vase, she
said, "It was different from yours."
She began trimming the flowers. Each end fell to the newspaper with a soft patting sound.
I waited for her to give me the answer I wanted. "I lived on a farm," she said.
"What was it like?"
She arranged the trimmed flowers in the vase, lifted the vase off the newspaper, and rolled the
clippings into a neat bundle that she dropped into the wastebasket next to her chair. "I have a doll,"
she said, walking past me to set the vase on a table in front of the window. "It's upstairs. I'll
get it for you." After a few minutes, she returned with the doll and placed it in my hands, a thin,
naked doll, light as balsa wood. "This is the doll I played with when I was a little girl," she said.
"It has a kidskin body. The arms and legs are porcelain. Dolls weren't made of plastic then."
I looked at the doll, at its shiny painted hair, its tiny brush stroke of a mouth, its painted black
eyes, and nodded, unable to think of another question to ask. She took the doll back and went upstairs,
moving quietly under the eaves, packing it away.
* * *
My mother packs a lunch for the six-hour drive to the hospice. Tuna sandwiches, fresh fruit, and iced
herb tea for us, milk, juice, and two jars of Gerber for the baby. My daughter Amy is ten months old,
and my grandmother has only seen her in pictures, a few snapshots and one studio portrait, taken almost
four months ago when she first sat up by herself. Amy is, I tell myself as I take her upstairs, a
forgivable mistake. I dress her in pink tights and a white dress with rows of pink smocking. She has
four teeth and smiles as joyfully for strangers as I once did for my little pail of sea treasure. She
looks so much like me, I can't help but wonder, as I strap her into her car seat, how much point there
is in taking her to the hospice today.
When we stop at a rest area for lunch, my mother says, "She doesn't look the same. Her hair has
fallen out. She won't look the same to you." The August sun is hot, and I take Amy's tights off.
The smell of disinfectant in the hospice is so strong, I touch a finger to the corner of my eye to stop
it from watering. The receptionist recognizes my mother, and we go directly to my grandmother's room.
My mother enters first, and I lag behind, in the doorway, with barefoot Amy straddling my hip.
My grandmother is lying in bed, watching us, and I can't read the expression on her face. She does not
look as bad as I expected. She looks thinner; the skin of her arms lying outside the covers is looser,
her hair whiter. She looks very tired.
My mother sits in the chair at the foot of the bed, places her purse on the floor, and folds her hands
into her lap. "I've brought Kathleen and Amy with me this time, Mother," she says.
My grandmother moves her head slightly as I enter the room and walk to stand with the baby next
to my mother's chair. She doesn't say anything, and I look into her thin, white hair. When I was
in high school, there was an old lady who lived near us who had that same kind of white hair you can
look into. When she would stop me by the park to talk, I could see bugs, gnats, caught in the white
filigree of her hair.
"Would you like to see the baby?" my mother is saying. She motions for me to walk around the bed.
As I stop and turn, Amy lunges forward, her head down and both arms out, thinking this new person
wants to take her. Horrified, I grab for her dress and pull her back up. An indulgent smile flickers
across my grandmother's lips and she speaks for the first time since we entered the room: "She's a
beautiful baby." I say, "Thank you," and walk back to my mother's chair and perch on the arm,
transferring Amy to my lap.
"Did you have a nice visit with Sean?" my mother says. "He told us he came to see you."
My mother asks another question about my brother's visit and then says, "We're going to eat supper
with Dad tonight, after he comes to visit you."
An odd expression crosses my grandmother's face suddenly, and I'm afraid she's going to vomit.
"Are you all right, Mother?" my mother says, getting out of her chair.
"I'll call the nurse," my mother says. She steps quickly into the hallway, and a nurse appears
immediately. "Mrs. Moore needs the bathroom," my mother tells her.
The nurse efficiently flips back the covers and helps my grandmother out of bed, supporting most of
her weight as she leads her across the small room. My grandmother says, "No, not like that," querulous,
but the nurse doesn't change her grip. When the bathroom door shuts behind them, I look at my mother's
hands lying big-knuckled and useless in her lap. After a few minutes, the bathroom door opens and the
nurse leads my grandmother back across the room and into bed.
My grandmother puts her head back and closes her eyes. Leaning over the bed, my mother says, "I'll be
back next week." We turn to go. I see my grandmother's hands resting on top of the covers,
open, receptive.
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