by Danzy Senna
I reached the back of the house, where a vast picture window looked onto the garden. Inside, the dining room was dark—no dinner party on the schedule for tonight. I pressed my face to the glass, which fogged up with my breath, and could make out the large silver teapot on the mantel. It had fascinated me as a child, the way I could see myself so clearly in it, only distorted, my head large and my body shrunken in its curved reflective surface. A few windows over from me, a light bounced out onto the bushes, and muffled music played from within. I sidled along the wall like a cat burglar. Inside those windows, I saw the television flickering and heard the familiar music of “Masterpiece Theatre.” On the couch before the television, my grandmother sat, slack-jawed, sleeping in the glow of the room. She looked older and seemed to have grown smaller. I had remembered her as tall, towering, angular. Now she looked like the silver teapot in the next room, her head tilted back and her mouth open like a spout. Her hand rested on Delilah, her cat, who stared at me from her lap. The cat’s eyes were gleaming yellow, reflecting the light from the television, and I was glad that she didn’t know how to bark. The dog, Gory, had been old the last I’d seen him. I wondered if he’d died.
I knew I had to enter now, though I was terrified. I thought my mother would kill me if she could see me here. This was somewhere she had sworn we would never return to. I walked back, sweating with fever and fear, to the front of the house, the proper entrance. I rang the bell and waited for Edna to answer.
Instead, a new maid, a plump Irish woman, came to the door in a sweater that had crumbs littering its front. She smelled strongly of peanut butter and seemed to have a hard time talking through the food in her mouth. Her lips smacked as she said, “Yes, what can I do for you?”
She eyed me with a slight suspicion, I thought, as if she were trying to make out where she had seen me before.
“I’m here to see Penelope Lodge. She’s expecting me,” I told the woman.
She frowned, seeming anxious to get back to her snack. “Well, come in. You’ll catch your death out there. Come in, dear.”
There was something maternal in her saying this, and I smiled, trying to stop my teeth from chattering. She wiped her hands on her housedress and said in her lilting accent, “They say it’s supposed to snow tonight. Thank God, you know. Snow brings the temperature up. Now, let me get Penny. She’s probably fallen asleep by now. Who should I say is here?”
I hesitated. “Tell her it’s her granddaughter.”
The woman seemed to turn a little pale and looked at me with newfound interest. Finally she stuttered, “Oh, yes. I think I’ve heard of you. Hold on, please.”
She shuffled off toward the living room, where I had seen my grandmother sleeping. I looked around. Nothing, indeed, had changed. There was still a clutter of ancestors lining the wall under the staircase. Cotton Mather’s face peered out from a print—the same one that once had hung in our house, over our television, the one my father had said made Mather look like an octoroon dandy. The print had been framed properly, and the rips and stains that had marred it in our chaotic household seemed to have been mended. My grandmother must have taken all of our things after we evacuated.
There were no family photos in the hallway. The Lodge family considered it vulgar to have their family photographs exposed to the public, and liked to keep them hidden somewhere secret. They had been kept in the study just off the hall, the study that once had been my grandfather’s. I stepped over to the study door and pushed it gently. It gave. I switched on the light. Books covered the walls, and there was a small manual typewriter on the table. Beside it sat a picture in a wood frame of Randall, older now, sitting in an Adirondack chair on a lawn, gazing off beyond the camera as if he is thinking of something important. Beside that, a picture of my mother, age fifteen or so, looking haunted, staring gloomily over a coffee mug. Through a trick of the camera she appears thinner than she really was at the time, not like herself—more like an approximation of what my grandmother might have wanted her to look like. She looked more like the woman my mother was now, only younger. On the bookshelf behind the desk I noticed a picture of Cole and me. Randall had taken it one gloomy afternoon when it had poured and we all were trapped inside to stare at one another. In the picture we look like gypsy children: Cole’s hair is covered by a bandanna because it had gotten nappy in the rain and my mother hadn’t been able to do anything with it. She is only about nine in the photo, but her eyes are like an adult’s, cynical, unyielding. I am a child beside her, grinning, rambunctious, my overgrown bangs hiding my eyes. I am holding her hand tight.
A shriek came from the next room. Then the sound of a cat howling as it came bounding out from the living room and across the hall in a dart of gray fur. My grandmother’s voice: “Good God, Doris! Don’t joke with me!”
Footsteps. I quickly returned to the hall, closing the study door behind me and bracing myself.
She had a look of fear and hope on her face when she came around the corner. She paused there, her lips parting, then closing. “Birdie?”
I nodded. She was still tall, still imposing, even in her eighties. Her hair was frost white, no more streaks of black, and her face seemed slightly sunken. But awake, she was remarkably herself—still gaunt and well-dressed, in a pair of gray cashmere slacks and a dark red cardigan, her hair pulled into a chignon. She was still vain at her age. She had a walking stick at her side, but didn’t seem to need it now. She simply stared at me for a few moments, showing no emotion—her mouth set into a thin straight line.
Finally she said, “Well, goodness. You look awful—like Anne Frank. Come, sit with me in the other room. Doris, make me a drink. And something hot for the child.”
I nodded and followed her into the living room, relieved now to be under a roof and out of the cold. She settled in her television chair, and I sat primly at the edge of the couch. She stared at me for a few more minutes, while I rubbed my hands together and tried not to meet her eyes. She had always acted stone cold toward her own family, flowering only in the company of near-strangers.
We were quiet while Doris brought my grandmother a glass of sherry with ice, and me a cup of lemon tea that I gulped too quickly, scalding my tongue.
When Doris was gone, my grandmother said, “Close the door.”
I obeyed, and when I sat down, she spoke, looking dramatically out the window onto her own ghostly reflection. “So, go on. Tell me, please. I’ve been waiting for this. Now, go ahead. Where is that horrid daughter of mine?”
I hadn’t prepared a speech. “She’s safe and sound and she’s got someone taking care of her. She’s okay.”
She sipped her sherry and fixed her eyes on me. “Where is she. Not how is she.”
I looked down at my fingers. She was making me small again, turning me into the little girl I had been, who cowered before her as a child. I said in a small voice, “That’s a secret.”
My grandmother laughed harshly. “I have the right to know where my daughter is. If I’ve earned anything, it’s that right. Now, speak it!”
I shook my head and remained quiet.
She was silent for a few moments, stunned, I think, by my audacity. Then she tried a new tactic: “You poor, poor child. We don’t choose our parents. It’s all terrible fate. I should have taken you away from her a long time ago. But she wouldn’t have let me, you know. Sandy had a will of steel.”
She had always said things like this to me, making me feel as if there were something pitiful about my existence. As a child, those words had made me feel ashamed. Now they made me angry.
“I’m just fine, Grandma. Really. Trust me. My mom’s fine. I’m fine.”
She shook her head, her eyes moistening as she said those words that were so familiar to me, words that had sent my mother into conniptions of rage when I was a child.
“It was doomed from the start. Tragedy in the making. Your mother should have stuck to her world.”
I dropped my teacup and watched the dark liquid flow
over the wood and into the cracks. She watched it too, as if it proved her theory right.
I remembered something my father once had told Cole when she complained about how my grandmother treated her. He had rubbed her little curly head and said, “Baby, don’t pay that old lady any mind. She’ll be gone soon. She’s a dying breed. You’re the future.”
I snapped at my grandmother, and my words flowed with some rage I had been unaware of until now: “Oh, please. I’m not in the mood for this Victorian crap. You and all your ancestors are the tragedies. Not me. You walk around pretending to be so liberal and civilized in this big old house, but you’re just as bad as the rest of them. This whole world—it’s based on lies. No wonder my mother left. I mean, it stinks.”
I was breathing hard and put my face in my hands. My head was throbbing, something banging around inside it, and I was shaking and sweating. But I felt better once the words were out of me. The words were aimed at my grandmother, but also at my mother, Jim, Mona, and the whole state of New Hampshire. They were the truest words I had spoken in a long time, and having said them I felt a little lighter.
I had meant every word of it. My grandmother had always loved me more than my sister. Or maybe it wasn’t me she loved, but rather my face, my skin, my hair, and my bones, because they resembled her own. It wasn’t a pure love, if such a thing existed. It was clear in her face every time she looked at us, every time she had reached out to stroke my hair. She believed that the face was a mirror of the soul. She believed, deep down, that the race my face reflected made me superior. Such a simple, comforting myth to live by. My father had explained that to Cole and me one morning while we wandered through the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum. “Once they let go of that idea of their own innate superiority—and don’t let them pretend they don’t, deep down, believe in it—once they let go of that, it all begins to crumble. Things start to fall apart.”
I heard my grandmother say after a moment, in a softer voice: “You’re sick. I should have seen it. You’re sick.”
She was right. I was sick. But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want any more of her pity. It made me nauseous.
I peeked at her through the bars of my fingers. She looked genuinely concerned. Her stern expression had faltered a bit, and her chin quivered slightly. “I didn’t want it to turn out this way. She was so difficult. But I love your mother. I always loved her the best. She was always the smarter of the two. She was always the clever one. Randall was the great beauty, but never as intelligent as she was. She saw things no one else saw. And she was the only one to give me grandchildren. Randall might as well be a bugger.”
I laughed abruptly, despite myself, at her description of him. A small smile crossed her lips. “It was too easy for Randall. I think that’s a curse, really. To be given too much without even asking. Without having to work for it. It made him useless, weak. But Sandy, she cared about something.” She leaned forward toward me, and I saw that her hands were shaking. “Where is she, Birdie? Where is she?”
I looked down at the cat, who was licking up the spilled tea. “I can’t tell you where she is, Grandma. She’s in trouble. You know that.”
I said it but wasn’t sure anymore if it was true. Dot had said one thing, Ronnie had said another.
My grandmother was trembling now, and I moved along the couch toward her, putting out my hand to her. She was old and she was scared and she had lost her child.
She took my hand and began to cry, quietly, seeming angry with herself for this cracking, but crying nonetheless. She stroked my hand, and the skin over her bones felt loose and soft. “Oh, God. I hope she’s okay.” After a moment she said through delicate sniffles, “Your sister. Do you know where your sister is?”
She had always referred to Cole as “your sister” and my father as “your father,” as if she couldn’t bear to say their names, couldn’t bear to admit their relation to her. I restrained from comment this time, however, and said, “I’m not sure, but I think I might know where they are. That’s why I’m here. You’ve got to help me. I’ve got an address where I think they live. My father and my sister. It’s in Oakland, California, and I need money to get to them. I haven’t seen them since we left. Could you help me get to them?”
She wiped away the wet streaks that lined her powdery face. She was back to herself, glacial, hardened. “No, no, no. Don’t be silly. I wouldn’t let you go there alone. That’s not how to do it, Birdie. You’ll live here, with me. I’m going to send you to Beaver Country Day School. Give you a proper education, if it’s not too late. And then, when the time is right, you can write to them—a letter. It’s far more sensible.”
I sunk back into the couch, feeling deflated, trapped.
She yelled, “Doris!”
After a few minutes, Doris came in from somewhere, carrying a book, bifocals hanging from her neck. “What is it, Penny? For the love of Peter. I’m trying to get some rest.”
My grandmother barked back, “Get a bed made up for Birdie. She’s staying here. She’s going to live with us.”
Doris frowned, then gave me a questioning look. I shrugged. My flu had made me sleepy. I knew I should call Dot, tell her where I was, but all I could think about was my grandmother’s guest room—the Irish linen sheets and goose-down duvet. A real bed in a real house, with my own bar of apricot soap from Crabtree and Evelyn.
So I followed Doris, who carried fresh towels and a washcloth, up to the guest room at the top of the stairs, thinking only as far as these bodily comforts.
THE WORLD OUTSIDE the window was as white as it had ever been. The clock over the desk said it was five-thirty. Doris had been right about the snow, and I opened the window beside the bed a crack, sticking my hand out into the fresh air, wiggling my fingers beyond the glass, where the snowflakes caught on them, then disappeared. The snow looked tinted with blue, the way totally white things sometimes do. It’s the same with things that are deeply black—an Asian girl’s hair, a drop of ink, a stallion’s coat. They turn blue. I pulled my hand back in and gathered the comforter around me, watching the clumsy flakes float past the window in slow motion. I had been dreaming of Alexis, of us playing honeymoon after a day of climbing trees behind Aurora. Me on top of her, rubbing against her until that sharpness turned to melting. But we were not little girls in the dream. We were our current ages, and in the dream she was sad, her hazel eyes moist with worry. She lay beside me when we were done playing, and stroked my hair, saying, “You’re right here, beside me, but I miss you.”
The guest room once had been my mother’s bedroom, when she was a high-school girl still obsessed with Camus. She had never chosen the pink-and-white decor that most girls her age had. Instead the room was a blend of melancholy colors—blues and grays and blacks.
I slipped out from under the covers and stood up, my feet bare against the cold wood floor. My head was still groggy, and I felt a little warm with fever. I went to the closet and opened the door. There were mostly men’s clothes in it—my grandfather’s suits that had been stored away since his death. But crushed behind those were skirts and dresses made for a sixteen-year-old fat girl named Sandy. I pulled out a checkered lime-green and white blouse and held it against my face. It smelled like stale clove smoke and mothballs. There were yellow sweat stains, like parchment, under the arms. I stepped inside the closet and pressed my face into my grandfather’s clothes. They smelled like cigar smoke. My grandfather and mother had been the two smokers in the family, and after dinner each night they had been confined to the den together, where they would smoke with their heads conspiratorially bent toward each other’s while they talked about the latest book they had read together—Sartre or Baldwin or Margaret Meade. It seemed somehow fitting that their clothes should be stored in this small space together. I wished I had known my grandfather. My mother said that if he had lived, things would have been different. I hadn’t known what she was referring to exactly, but understood that in some way he had kept her on track, had kept her pa
ssions focused. I pulled out his heavy cashmere coat. In the dark of the room, I couldn’t see if it was black or indigo, only that it was well-preserved, undamaged by moths. I draped it over the back of the desk chair and closed the closet door.
I dressed slowly, back into my blue jeans and thin sweater, as quietly as I could. I made the bed then with great care, redoing the hospital corners on the linen sheets and shaking out the gray duvet so it lay puffed like newly fallen snow. There was only the sound of the grandfather clock ticking downstairs, but otherwise everything was utterly silent, as if the snow muffled our snores. I put on my grandfather’s coat, over my clothes, and it draped heavily to my ankles. The sleeves covered my hands. I rolled them up, revealing a pale-blue satin lining, and reached in the pockets to find leather gloves, worn to the shape of someone else’s larger hands.
I went to my grandmother’s bedroom and knocked lightly. No answer. I pushed the door. Her face was sunken in, gaunt, so that she looked dead in the half light. She slept where she had always slept, in a big oak bed that had been passed down to her through the generations. My mother swore it was haunted; she had slept in it several times as a child and claimed that the bed had woken her up in the night, shaking, and she had turned over to find a chalk-white man beside her, grinning. Cole and I had been fascinated by the bed, conflicted between our fear of it and our thrill at the idea of sleeping in it, of maybe seeing a real live ghost. We never got the chance.
I whispered my grandmother’s name: “Penelope.”
She said something that sounded like an accusation. Dream talk. Her eyes stayed shut, but as I approached her, I could see the movement under the lids. I wondered what she was seeing.
I stood over her and spoke louder this time: “Grandma, wake up.”