by Sue Miller
It seemed to me that there was a sense in which I had least to lose by asking my grandfather. He had the money, and he liked to loan and give it to his children and grandchildren because that tightened his grip on them. I had already heard his judgment on the way I was conducting my life. There would be no surprises. He might be hostile when I asked, openly contemptuous, but all that would be clear, clean. Beyond that, I think I may even have imagined taking a kind of perverse pleasure in the idea of involving him in a situation which he’d find distasteful.
I hadn’t called ahead of time. I knew that I’d find them at home. It was summer, after all.
It had been a hazy day in Boston. An inversion made the air feel thick. It stung at the eyes and tasted metallic. But on the highway coming north the sun had shimmered lighter and lighter behind the white haze, until the blue seemed all at once to burn through around it. The shadows on the ground suddenly sharpened and I felt a responsive sense of hope lighten my heart.
There was a big green metal wheelbarrow set by the turnaround to carry luggage or groceries in, just as there had been when we parked on the other side of the lake and rowed over. I ignored it and followed the cleared path into the woods. Rusty pine needles lay across the earth, and raised roots striped the path. The sun flickered through the high cover here and there, and the smell of the lake and pine tar drew me forward.
Before I really saw them, the buildings were around me, partially hidden by the trees. For a moment I couldn’t make sense of them because I wasn’t sure at what angle this path cut into camp. But then, suddenly, they took position in my head. At a distance down to the right was my grandparents’ cabin, barely visible, except in front where the trees had been cleared to give a view of the lake. In front of me were the two guest cabins. The path led uphill and slightly left, to the icehouse, since early in my youth empty of ice, full of bunk beds where the boy cousins slept. I could only dimly remember the ice itself, cut from the lake in winter, gray and solid with glacial mystery all summer long under its bed of sawdust. When you leaned your head into the dark room, your breath whited, the cold pinched your nostrils. Even after the ice was gone and the bunks hung by chains from the walls, the sawdust persisted, pushing up again and again from between the cracks in the floorboards. The boys were required to sweep it out before breakfast each day.
As I came round the corner of the icehouse, the big house loomed into view. In spite of myself, I felt the sense of safety and peace that the camp had meant for me as a child. The place was utterly still except for the call of birds and the distant mosquito whine of motorboats. But I judged it to be sometime in the early afternoon—I’d left right after breakfast, I’d been waking with the first gray light these days—and I remembered that everyone lay down, by an unspoken dictum, for more than an hour after lunch. I crossed the packed dirt of the dooryard, thinking I’d sit on the screened porch until my grandfather got up.
I gently opened the screen door to the kitchen and passed forward through the house. The ticking clock over the mantel in the main room seemed to pulse with my heart; and everything was as familiar as the detail of a recurrent dream. I stepped onto the porch, and looked out over the lake. The sun danced white on it out in the center, but its deep green was revealed in the shadows of the trees lying across our inlet. I looked around the porch. The same pale green tables ringed with odd chairs, the overflow from the sisters’ city houses; the trunks holding bedding, children’s games, lining the porch’s inner walls; the striped curtains strung across the winged sides of the porch to separate those sleeping areas from the public area in front. And then I saw my grandmother.
She lay arranged and frozen on a daybed at one end of the porch. Her hands were folded across her midriff; her skirt was neatly pulled down to cover her knees. Her eyes were shut, her jaw slack. Her glasses sat on the little white table next to the bed. For a moment I was frightened; I had the fleeting notion that she was dead. But as I crossed the porch to look more closely at her, she stirred slightly, her lips shut once or twice with a light smacking sound.
There was a wicker chair near the foot of the daybed. I put my purse down on the floor and sat in it and looked at her. I sat there for what seemed like a long time, perhaps a half hour or more. I listened intently to the noises around me. I could hear just the lap of water, the distant boats buzzing, the birds, the trees softly groaning in the sibilant wind, my grandmother’s breathing, and once or twice, the mutter of her flesh as she passed wind. It seemed that no one else was here except my grandmother and me. I decided that my grandfather and whatever cousins were staying must be in the cabins. And there probably were very few cousins anyway. In recent years, I knew from my mother, most of them tended to vacation in other, more comfortable and interesting places—places where they could play tennis and golf, go to the theater. Even she and her sisters now made only token visits—a weekend, five days. There were elaborate arrangements for the younger, still poor cousins to babysit the grandparents; but the sisters didn’t go and stay anymore, as they had when their children were young. My grandmother stirred, shifted slightly to the side. Her pale, white-lashed eyes opened, looked blankly at me.
“Who’s that?” she said harshly, reaching for her glasses.
“It’s Anna,” I said. I got up.
She hooked her glasses over her ears and swung her legs off the bed. Still looking confused, disoriented, she allowed me to kiss her cheek.
I went back to the chair and let her look at me. After a moment, she said, “I was napping.”
“I know,” I said. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”
She thought for a moment, then raised her wrist close to her glasses and tilted her head up to see through the lower lens of her bifocals. “No, it’s time,” she said. She reached around her waist and patted her blouse into her skirt. Then she looked at me again, frowning.
“I must have forgotten you were coming,” she said.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t tell you. It’s a surprise.” I smiled. “And really I’m just here for the afternoon. A quick visit. I can’t stay.”
“Just visiting?” She gave the word two syllables. Her eyes were sharp on me through the watery distance of her glasses.
“Yes. And I need to talk to Grandfather about something.”
“Money?” she asked.
I nodded.
“That’s the way of it,” she said.
“I’m afraid so.”
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she said. “He’ll be back in a while. I sent them all off for a picnic. Thought I’d make pie for dessert tonight. They’re getting the berries.”
“Who’s here?” I asked.
“You know Celia?” she asked. “Weezie’s girl?”
I thought of Celia, disgusting in her plumpness to me and Babe. Babe had once said we weren’t going to be able to tell when Celia got real breasts, because she’d had little fat boobies since she was about two. That was our nickname for her after that. Fat boobies, F.B. for short. It covered her shape, and what we regarded as her colossal stupidity—though what we were really objecting to was that she, years younger even than I, followed us around, wanted to know what we were doing all the time. I nodded.
“She’s here. She’s pregnant, you know. Her husband’s coming too, but I can’t quite remember when. And Garrett’s up, just for the weekend, doing chores for your grandfather.”
“Not many people by the old standards,” I offered.
“No,” she said. “Though we see a lot of the younger grandchildren from time to time.” She looked at me. “Where’s your baby?” she said.
“Molly,” I said.
“Molly, yes,” she said irritably. “Now I knew that.”
“She’s visiting her father for the month,” I said.
“Oh!” she nodded her head, as if remembering suddenly all the circumstances of my life. “Well, that’s hard. You must miss her.”
“I do,” I said. “I can’t wait to see her again.”
After a few minutes my grandmother called from the kitchen and I went back to her. She was just going to get a few things going for supper, she said. They didn’t want her working in the kitchen alone anymore, but since I was here, she thought she’d take the opportunity. I could help, if I liked. They were going to have potato salad, and she showed me the bowl of boiled new potatoes in the refrigerator, the hardboiled eggs, the onions. She was going to start the pies. She had the apples for one of them.
We set to work in opposite corners of the primitive kitchen, working silently as we had years before when I, the oldest granddaughter, was expected to help, and to learn from helping about the responsibility of being wife, mother, of serving others. The silence between us then had always seemed complicated and rich to me, unlike the blankness of the silence I remembered from my visit to my other grandmother in Colorado.
This time it was full also, but now of Molly. Of Babe, too, and my recollections of what it had been like to be a girl here; but I came back to Molly again and again. Oddly, in this place where I’d never brought her, I missed her more keenly than I had at any moment since Brian’s call.
“That man,” my grandmother said, abruptly. I looked at her. She was bent over the oilcloth table. “Brian was his name?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“He’s in Washington?”
I said he was, and explained what he was doing there. I tried to keep my answers expansive, relaxed, but in between them, I realized, I was listening for the sound of the returning motor which would signal my grandfather’s arrival.
My grandmother was cutting fat into flour with two knives. They clicked sharply against the blue ceramic bowl. In spite of the slowness with which she got around, her arms and hands moved with efficient grace.
“Divorced,” she said out loud. I had the sense she didn’t realize she’d said it. Her upper body rocked quickly with each flick of the blades. Her face was intent on what she was doing.
I turned back to the potatoes. I began to peel another one, but after a moment I stopped. My grandmother had never said anything to me about my divorce, and I realized I had no idea what her attitude might be. Somehow now I wanted her to understand it. I spoke to her moving back.
“I know it may be hard for you to understand, Gram, but we simply didn’t—couldn’t—make each other happy.”
She turned around to look at me.
“What makes you say that?”
“What?”
Her body swung back to the table. “I understand,” she said. “That’s easy enough to understand. Happy!” She began the knives’ alternating motion again. After a minute she spoke. Her tone was slower, less sharp, but her arms kept that quick rhythm.
“There was a period of my life where I used to wake up each morning and wish I’d died. Just wished I’d passed away in the night. I never would have done anything, you know, but each day I’d open my eyes sorry that I had to.”
Clickety, clickety, clickety went the knives. My thumb pressed a sliver of purple skin against my knife and pulled it away from the white flesh of the potato. My grandmother had never said anything more intimate to me, and I didn’t know how to answer, or even whether I should. Finally I asked, “How long did you feel that way?”
After a moment she said, “Oh, perhaps ten or fifteen years, I suppose.”
I tried to look at her, but she wouldn’t interrupt her work for that. “I never knew that, Gram,” I said.
“Why should you? No one did.”
“What ended it?”
“When I had Edith. Your grandfather didn’t take too much of an interest. Hadn’t wanted her in the first place. He’d got his son by then, you know. She was mine, I felt. The only one that was.” Then more slowly: “The only one that was.” Again, I wasn’t sure she knew she was speaking aloud.
We worked for a few minutes quietly. My grandmother was pushing the fatted flour into a flour paste she’d mixed in another bowl, shoving her arm down into the blue dish with a twisting motion. Her lips were pursed with effort. I was sitting in the darkest corner of the room, by the soapstone sink with its arching cast-iron pump. There was a small screened window next to me, but pines hung over it, scratching gently against the screen, and shadowing the house.
My grandmother stood across the room in the light from the one full-sized window. With her white hair, her white blouse, she seemed nearly incandescent to me. I watched her. I thought again of the deep moat of silence around my Gray grandmother, and of how I’d always felt closer to Grandmother McCord, always found her silence restful, inviting, like the stillness in the middle of one of the small islands that sprinkled the lake—the noise of lapping water, boats all around, but the sense of secret peace really all you noticed. How wrong that had all been, apparently.
She set a breadboard on the oilcloth that covered the table, and reached into the flour firkin for a handful of the white powder. She sprinkled the board, and set the grayish ball of dough on it. From a hook on the wall, she lifted down the rolling pin. She floured it too and began to roll out the dough.
I’d finished peeling the potatoes. Now I crossed to the refrigerator and got out the hardboiled eggs. I took them to the sink, and one by one I rolled them against its stone surface, watching their perfect surfaces crackle into intricate patterns. I had started to peel them when I heard the boat, its noise separating out from the general distant buzz of boats further out on the lake, growing steadily in volume, then abruptly stopping as the engine was cut. Voices floated up, the oars splashed.
My grandmother looked at me a long moment, as if to assess my need for support. She paused, seemed nearly to shrug, then offered: “You wouldn’t have believed how handsome your grandfather was when we first met. I imagined I’d die if I didn’t get him. I just thought I’d die. I didn’t know anything about it.”
She turned and banged the pin down again on the ragged circle of dough. I wanted to touch her. I knew that she’d meant her statement as a kind of apology for how difficult it was going to be to borrow money from my grandfather. What she couldn’t have known was the kind of forgiveness it seemed to offer me for my blinding, disastrous passion for Leo.
Through the window behind my grandmother, I could see my cousins and grandfather plodding up the stairway cut with logs into the steep hillside above the lake. Celia’s voice floated high and gay, and it occurred to me again how much more relaxed the younger cousins were around my grandparents. It seemed that to them the sternness was just a part the grandparents played, something they could all joke about. The few years that separated me from them had altered completely the meaning of the long family history of forbidding expectation.
“Celia,” my grandmother said, watching her approach the window. “She’s a talker.” There was fondness in her tone.
And Celia was in midsentence when she yanked open the screen door and stepped into the shadowy kitchen. Tilted backwards, bow-legged from the downpulling weight of her pregnancy, she carried also a big wicker basket. “Yoicksl” she said, interrupting herself. “It’s Anna.”
She stepped up to me and bent forward over her own girth. Her belly brushed insensate against me. She leaned back away, the words tumbling from her mouth. How long would I stay, why was Gram working, she’d said she would do the pies this time, did I know her husband was coming day after tomorrow, and couldn’t she persuade me to call wherever it was in Boston I needed to get back to? No? Oh well, dinner anyway. She couldn’t imagine going up and back in one da
y. As she spoke she began to unpack the basket, throwing away the salty, crumpled wax paper, putting the sticky tin cups into the sink.
Pregnant, her face had puffed up, coarsened, and she looked suddenly like Aunt Weezie. Garrett came in, greeted me over Celia’s running stream; and then finally my grandfather arrived at the back door. He stood in the doorway for a minute, the outside light still falling on his white hair, his sturdy frame. “Ah, Anna,” he said. Then, knowing I would not, as the others did, just visit, he asked, “To what do we owe the pleasure?” and stepped forward towards me into the crowded room. I embraced him formally; then he went to kiss my grandmother, as he frequently did after even just a short absence. She didn’t turn fully towards him, but let him place his lips on her cheek. “Where’s my blueberries?” she said, as though they were a tribute he owed her; and Celia, gifted like Weezie with hearing through her own steady chatter, said she needed to wash and pick through them—Gram would have them in a minute.
I offered to do it. Celia was effusively grateful. She turned to Garrett, who was drinking milk from a carton in front of the opened refrigerator, and said, “Hear, male piggie? How come it’s always women who help?” He lowered the carton and snorted at her. Across the room, I heard my grandmother say to my grandfather, “Anna needs to borrow money.” He bent his head to her for a moment, then lifted it and looked across at me. Our eyes locked momentarily. Then I took the colander down from its hook on the wall and began to work the pump.
When Celia had finished unpacking the hamper and putting things away, she sighed dramatically. She was going to go out to her cabin to “rest a little minute,” she said.
“Yes, yes,” said Gram. “May as well go get it over with.”
“See you at dinner,” she said to me as she went out. I could see her crossing the needle carpeting of the yard. Then her screen door lightly tapped shut. Garrett had gone out before she did, and from somewhere down near my grandparents’ cabin I could hear him hammering rhythmically.