grandma dale

     When my dad told my grandma that I was a lesbian, she paused and then said she had always wondered about her Aunt Anna. I’ve only seen Aunt Anna in a small black and white photo, framed in a thick gold oval and resting on Grandma’s bookshelf. Her hair is short and gray and permed. She has a short string of pearls and pursed lips. She doesn’t have the soft roundness or smile to her face of an Aunt who comforts with candies and kindness; her cheekbones cut sharply, her stare is direct and firm. I think she was a schoolteacher, never married, a reader, she owned a canoe. When I picture Grandma as a girl trotting down the block to visit her Aunt Anna, she looks a lot like me running up the driveway or taking the shortcut (that was actually longer) through the woods, stretching my steps to take the stairs up her porch two at a time, knocking on the door and walking in before she had answered, kicking off my shoes, lifting the cookie jar lid more out of habit than hunger, plopping down in the easy chair and surveying the room: the full bookshelf (my books—a series of Raggedy Ann and Andy adventures and later the American Girl books—were on the bottom shelf), flowers freshly cut and centered on the table, empty vases along the top of her cabinet, birds outside her glass doors at the feeder and on the deck where seeds had spilled. We would sit and chat. I would tell her all the ways in which my brother’s had been mean to me, probably exaggerating to get more sympathy. As I sat in her lap and she read aloud, I would poke at the veins that protruded on the top of her hand, trace them and push them together under her skin. Her knuckles were thick with arthritis. She would pause in her reading to comment on how ugly they were, saying that’s what happens when you get old. I look down at my own hands now, squeeze tightly at my wrist until my veins fill and pop a little, imagine her loose pale skin over wiry veins and knotted joints. Those hands: bizarrely strong in the places they are flawed, like scars, thicker and tougher where there was once hardly any protection at all.

     When Grandma was a girl she wanted to be a schoolteacher like her Aunt Anna. It was the depression and her dad was drunk and then gone. It was her and her sister and her brother and her mom. She did what she needed to do to keep going, found refuge in the bookcases that walled her aunt’s cramped apartment, saved the money she made working at the local movie theatre and babysitting in a bank account that she had opened herself. She was going to be a schoolteacher like Anna. She would wall her apartment in books like Anna. She would get out, get away from her mom and sister that pretended as if things hadn’t changed, that bought new clothes and dainty shoes that were too small. She couldn’t leave them completely like her dad had. She was still subject to their pleas, they were still her family, but she knew she was better. She was like Anna. She finished high school and went to collect the money she had been saving, dreaming of college and escape; instead she found that the account was empty. That was when she learned how her mother and sister had been able to keep pretending. It was needed to get by, her mother responded nonchalantly when confronted. It was used for the family. How else could they do it with their father gone? What does she need school for anyway? A husband is what you need. And you won’t get a husband looking like that, that’s for sure. I’m just looking out for you. I am your mother remember.
     Grandma signed up for nursing school. It didn’t cost anything, as long as she committed to work. She didn’t particularly like taking care of people, but she was good at it, practiced at it, she’d done it most of her life, and it was the closest she could get to independence. She left home and lived in the dorms, practiced sticking needles in oranges, worked as an aid, changed sheets and bed pans, and handed out little paper cups of pills. Every morning she would get up early to swim. In the summer some of the other girls would come down with her to the river, they would all pile in a cab and split the fare. In the fall and spring the other girls complained the water was too cold, and Grandma would get up earlier and walk. In the winter she went to the Y. She liked swimming she told me. She laughed when she described her suit, one piece and rubber.
     She married too and raised four kids. My dad was the third. She kept nursing, picking up night shifts and putting away the money she earned. Checking it weekly to make sure it was still all there. She put all four of her kids through college, starting with Judy, the eldest and only girl, who became a schoolteacher. When dad was a kid they moved a lot. Grandpa would get a new job or lose the one he had and they would up and leave, always in the middle of the year and always to the protests of Grandma and the kids. After one particularly bad period when they moved four times in three years, Grandma finally said no, that he could leave but that they were not leaving with him.
     I never met my Grandpa Dale. He died of a heart attack, soon after my parents wedding. After the kids had grown and Grandpa had passed, my Grandma started traveling. She went to Europe and Australia. She gardened, she read, she owned a camper van. When my parents bought the farm and built their house, she had hers built just up the driveway, tucked away in the woods. She woke up early and did her stretching exercises, made coffee, and visited with my dad before he started his day working between the blueberry rows. Sometimes, I would wake up early and run up the driveway and join them. This is how I know her: in a house walled with books, alone but not lonely.
     It has been this way for as long as I can remember—a constant. The garden has fewer and fewer annuals each year, the cookie jar is more often filled with cookies bought at the store, conversation becomes more disjointed, but she is still always there in her house with her books and her vases and her birds and her strong knobby hands gripping her coffee cup. I pick a book up off of her coffee table and ask her how it is. She wrinkles her nose with slight disgust, oh that’s just something Judy sent me, it’s okay, and she goes on to tell me about how much she really likes reading biographies and how she read this great biography on Truman, and what a good president he was, what a good person really, down to earth and honest. We talk about this book every time I visit.
     This is the memory I keep anyway, because really I know that she has since had to move out of her house into assisted living and then into the nursing home. Her house is still there, just up the driveway from my parents, and the cookie jar, but they are empty now. In her room at the nursing home, the framed picture of Aunt Anna is propped on her dresser, next to a vase of fresh flowers. She is ready to die. She has been ready for awhile. She is content to live each day and go when she is supposed to. I am surprised, and not, with each day that she keeps on living. When I go to visit her and the confused look on her face doesn’t match the confident look I remember, I worry she’s not even really there anymore, that she doesn’t know who I am, or what’s going on at all, but then she squeezes my hand, those same firm fingers gripping my own, and she smiles. She asks me how I am. Her face is blank as I respond, telling her about Chicago and work and rugby. I know there is nowhere for her to store new information any more. It won’t be kept straight. She won’t remember. But then so clearly, so confidently she looks at me, and tells me I’ve done well, I’m doing well, I will do well. I don’t remember the exact tense and really it seems as if all three tenses were used and implied at once, that I’ve got it together, always have and always will, that she is confident in that, that I have that strength, that she continues to pass it on to me as she presses my palm in her own.