grandparents, where I felt safe, where the air seemed lighter, clearer. Where people spoke to each other in seemingly harmless and transparent ways. And left my father to his solitary life.
My grandmother made the connection for me more than once—how I’d come to her after my mother’s death in just the way she might have gone to her grandmother after her mother’s death. Now wasn’t that a strange coincidence? Two young girls, motherless like that at nearly the same age? She said then, and she wrote to me later, that she thought some of the pleasure she took in having me there, aside from her love for me, aside from the connection it made with her own sad daughter, was that she felt almost as though she were able at last to offer comfort and help to the girl, and then young woman, she’d been herself when the parallel events happened to her. “Who knows how things might have turned out for me if I’d done what you did—if I’d gone out to my GrammyParsons with Ada and Fred after Mother died. Of course, Grammy died together with Grandfather just a few years later in the influenza epidemic. Fit as a fiddle one morning and gone the next. And all that lovingkindness gone along with them. So you just can’t know, can you?”
She wrote this to me in my first year of college in California, where I’d gone to get away from my history and the confusing bonds of attachment and guilt and need I felt—for her and my grandfather, for my father, even for my mother. And standing there in my dorm room, hungrily reading the letter, I felt again the yearning for her, for them, that I never outgrew.
I remembered a moment from the spring of that first year I’d lived with them, four or five months after my mother died. I was lying on my bed in the attic, watching a sudden storm come up. The sky blackened, the birds stilled, the trees heaved and shuddered, showing the silvery undersides of their leaves. A wooden chair came skidding drunkenly across the yard, stopped, then hurried on. Suddenly my grandparents appeared in the yard below me, foreshortened and legless from my vantage—I could hear their voices before I saw them, and my grandmother’s laugh. They began to take the wildly flapping laundry off the line: the towels, the white sheets. They worked together quickly, with practiced skill, both holding a sheet, folding it, walking toward each other, away, then in again: the big white belling cloth first halved, then quartered and calmer, now disappearing to a compact bundle between them. They finished—they moved offstage—just before the sky ripped open with lightning and thunder nearly simultaneously, and the pelting of the fat drops began to accumulate to a dull roar on the roof above me.
But I had seen it—their quick mirroring dance, the arms lifting at the same time as they approached each other, lowering as they stepped back, the magic of the wild white cloth growing smaller and smaller between them on the dark grass—and what it looked like to me from my lonely perch above them was the purest form of love.
Four
G eorgia’s old grandmother had been right: the children grew up fast after their mother’s death—Georgia faster than either of the others. It wasn’t that her burden increased. Actually, she was freer now than she had been, so much of her time had been taken up in the care of her mother during the week. And she felt it, it was a relief not to be waked in the night by her mother’s groans or wild wails, or by the bell that signaled she needed help.
But she also felt lost and alone. Because however odd Fanny had been when well, however ill she grew, however much maturity she needed from Georgia; still, she was Georgia’s mother, and her existence, on whatever terms, meant that Georgia was still a child. And Fanny had struggled, within the demands of her illness, to remind Georgia of that, to try to continue to be maternal—and perhaps because of that was actually more maternal as she was dying
My grandmother made the connection for me more than once—how I’d come to her after my mother’s death in just the way she might have gone to her grandmother after her mother’s death. Now wasn’t that a strange coincidence? Two young girls, motherless like that at nearly the same age? She said then, and she wrote to me later, that she thought some of the pleasure she took in having me there, aside from her love for me, aside from the connection it made with her own sad daughter, was that she felt almost as though she were able at last to offer comfort and help to the girl, and then young woman, she’d been herself when the parallel events happened to her. “Who knows how things might have turned out for me if I’d done what you did—if I’d gone out to my GrammyParsons with Ada and Fred after Mother died. Of course, Grammy died together with Grandfather just a few years later in the influenza epidemic. Fit as a fiddle one morning and gone the next. And all that lovingkindness gone along with them. So you just can’t know, can you?”
She wrote this to me in my first year of college in California, where I’d gone to get away from my history and the confusing bonds of attachment and guilt and need I felt—for her and my grandfather, for my father, even for my mother. And standing there in my dorm room, hungrily reading the letter, I felt again the yearning for her, for them, that I never outgrew.
I remembered a moment from the spring of that first year I’d lived with them, four or five months after my mother died. I was lying on my bed in the attic, watching a sudden storm come up. The sky blackened, the birds stilled, the trees heaved and shuddered, showing the silvery undersides of their leaves. A wooden chair came skidding drunkenly across the yard, stopped, then hurried on. Suddenly my grandparents appeared in the yard below me, foreshortened and legless from my vantage—I could hear their voices before I saw them, and my grandmother’s laugh. They began to take the wildly flapping laundry off the line: the towels, the white sheets. They worked together quickly, with practiced skill, both holding a sheet, folding it, walking toward each other, away, then in again: the big white belling cloth first halved, then quartered and calmer, now disappearing to a compact bundle between them. They finished—they moved offstage—just before the sky ripped open with lightning and thunder nearly simultaneously, and the pelting of the fat drops began to accumulate to a dull roar on the roof above me.
But I had seen it—their quick mirroring dance, the arms lifting at the same time as they approached each other, lowering as they stepped back, the magic of the wild white cloth growing smaller and smaller between them on the dark grass—and what it looked like to me from my lonely perch above them was the purest form of love.
Four
G eorgia’s old grandmother had been right: the children grew up fast after their mother’s death—Georgia faster than either of the others. It wasn’t that her burden increased. Actually, she was freer now than she had been, so much of her time had been taken up in the care of her mother during the week. And she felt it, it was a relief not to be waked in the night by her mother’s groans or wild wails, or by the bell that signaled she needed help.
But she also felt lost and alone. Because however odd Fanny had been when well, however ill she grew, however much maturity she needed from Georgia; still, she was Georgia’s mother, and her existence, on whatever terms, meant that Georgia was still a child. And Fanny had struggled, within the demands of her illness, to remind Georgia of that, to try to continue to be maternal—and perhaps because of that was actually more maternal as she was dying
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