Family, As Far as I Can Tell

I am five years old and I am in the hallway leading to my Grandmother’s bedroom. We only visit on rare occasions, so I need to collect as much intel as I can. There are painted clay masks mounted to the walls. There is a lot of art, in fact, none of which has been reproduced for sale at Ocean State Job Lot. Rather, it is singular. Moody. Sensual, even. I did not have these words at age five, but I did have my curiosity.

I entered her bedroom quietly; I was careful not to touch a thing. My eyes, on the other hand, rapidly scanned and penetrated every detail. I was looking for clues to help me understand. She was a mysterious woman. Sparse with her smiles. Elegant and earthy all at once. I think she was what my dance teacher would have called, in his swingy Caribbean accent, “a tall glass of water.” My Grandfather would more readily describe her as “a woman who never learned how to love herself.” His words made me uneasy. How could I avoid the same fate?

As far as I could tell, my Grandmother and I shared emotional states. Everyone seemed to chastise her for hers. Everyone seemed to chastise me for mine. The black sheep of my family line are all women, and I am in their ranks. Now and then I get twitchy and nervous that my deviation will lead to my ending up an unhappy woman. For what could be worse? My Grandmother was no Catholic, as far as I could tell. She was devout in her own way, though. She was devoted to art, and to being different. She was a woman who lived alone.

I wish I had more than scraps of my Grandmother, brief and stolen records of the rough linens in her bedroom. The smell of old incense that hung in her house. The intricately cut wooden statues of women holding bowls on their heads that sat atop her dark, lacquered bookshelves. I had wanted to go inside each and every cabinet, turn over every object of hers in my hands. My Grandmother was a rogue. She was disliked by the family in what seemed to me a distant and vague sort of way, though I did hear the occasional story (which I would meticulously canvas for further intel). I have come to chalk up her controversial nature, in part, to her searching tendencies. How she prioritized herself. This habit drew her outside the largely uncontested bounds of what-women-are-supposed-to-do. I cannot speak to the fruits of her searching, though I know others in the family have opinions about what she missed while she was busy with her pursuits.

To me, who she was remains an alluring mystery. A subject worth studying. Who was this woman, really? Did she never love herself, as my Grandpa would say, or was this his convenient alibi for… ? My questions were numbered and persistent as a child. There were few openings available to ask them. So I wondered about her from afar, in the recesses of my mind and in my own bedroom. A place I was able to bring my own form of aloneness to even at a young age, even while sharing a home with five others.

The very thought of Grandmother cracked my worldview, which early on had encoded that a productive and valuable life for me in my particular body would be if I was to marry an Irish Catholic man, preferably someone who had served in the military, and to have kids. My Grandmother did that, of course. She wasn’t very happy about it, though, as far as I could tell. So she went on to live many other lives. I listened in whenever I heard word of where those lives had taken her.

In my early twenties we developed a pen pal relationship. Among the many details I discreetly collected about “Grandmother A” (that’s how she always signed her letters) were her departures in style compared to my other Grandma. My other Grandma wore lavender LL Bean sweaters with little flowerbeds stitched onto the front, a starchy white turtleneck poking out from underneath. My other Grandma sent me brief, nondescript letters in cursive writing, crafted to perfection during her early Catholic school days. Her cards had cartoon animals on the front and were purchased at the local Big Y grocery store. Grandmother A’s cards were thick, textured cardstock — were those seeds embedded in the paper? — with an abstract, original drawing on the front done in charcoal pencil. Grandma wrote messages like, “Congratulations on graduating! We love you!” Grandmother A wrote messages like, “Well, Rachel. You have done it. You have a lot of life ahead, and I am sure much of it will be beautiful. Much of it will be hard, too. Of this I am also sure.” Other Grandma had short, white-blond curly hair which she had permed every two weeks. Grandmother A had long hair, silver threads floating amid her fading locks, once a match to my own copper hair but now more of a quiet brown. Other Grandma made me spaghettios served with soft bread and margarine whenever I slept over. I cannot remember Grandmother A ever serving me a meal, but from what I know of her it would have been wild rice served over a bed of arugula, dressed in a homemade tahini sauce whipped with spices purchased at the local health food store. She was decidedly not maternal, at least not according to my early definition of the word. She did not seem to know what to do with children. She was a woman I was interested in knowing.

After the divorce, the first place my Grandmother moved was into this big old house in Harwich, Massachusetts. She filled it with art, including her own paintings. How I cherished those rare visits. She had this larger than life backyard that led to a river with a dock. Along the way, there was a garden nestled against the left boundary of the yard. When I close my eyes I can feel my tiny fingers bravely touching the backs of the fat bumblebees that worked there. I can feel the stiff crabgrass under my bare feet, warm from the sun. I can feel myself silently working to piece together my options as a young woman in our family system, attuned and on edge.

Upon arrival, our dog Bailey would leap out of the car and take off across that great sweeping backyard. She loved to wade straight across the river toward the other side. She would remain there, wandering through the tall, dry grasses for long stretches of the visit. We could see her from Grandmother’s dock sitting down and resting, all alone on that unkempt isle. Mom would eventually say, “she’s scared, she can’t make it back on her own,” and then tell my father to go get her. So my Dad would be the one to swim over and rescue. He acted begrudgingly but I also sensed a pride in his doing this. A sense of love for this poor mutt who he loved so tenderly, never fully admitting his affection, always crossing the solitary waters to bring our curious pet back to her original shore.