I was wrong. I should have stayed away. She had a right to her privacy, and selfishly, I took it from her when she needed it most.
After her funeral, a woman named Gerry will introduce herself as Cynthia’s driver.
“What a relief it must have been for her,” she will say to me. “Why, just last week she told me how she was never loved.”
I tried to love her, had wished to love her, at least. I wanted to explain how draining she could be, how she called obsessively, how she pretended we hadn’t spoken for months when we’d been on the phone for hours only the day before. That the conversation was always the same. (“No, I haven’t spoken to Grandpa. No, I can’t be a tenured professor right now.”) I’ll want to defend myself from charges no one is making but me—that my grandmother frustrated me, that I often avoided her calls or made excuses to get off the phone, that I still let her pay my exorbitant rent while I was in graduate school and accepted the trips she funded. That I sometimes let her put down my mother and brother because I was afraid she would stop paying my rent if I argued. That I believe this makes me a bad person and so I try to avoid thinking about it.
“Will you remember me?” she had often asked in the months before her death, before I had any clue that it was so imminent. “Will you write about me?” She had been planning her death all along, and I just didn’t see it.
After she dies, I take a budding Christmas cactus from her room and place it on my windowsill where, every day, it strains to drink up the few hours of winter sun. And every morning for weeks I will find another pink bud abandoned on the Formica, like the pretty heads of decapitated queens, snapped off for want of light.
“We mostly spoke about bridge club,” she tells me as I hop around in my new pants, “my mother’s weekly rendezvous with her lady friends. They were to arrive the next morning for a game.”
Cynthia had dinner with her mother: great gobs of mashed potatoes and wet fish in melted butter.
“I remember her drinking a martini and thinking how it must sting to lick booze over her cracked lips. Sip, lick, sip, lick. Like so. But that’s the sort of woman she was, you see; she’d get some satisfaction out of that, I suppose. Oh, but Jessie, it was a great big howling monster of a storm. Woooo, woooo,” she said, imitating the wind.
After dinner, Cynthia had sat in a chair with a blanket over her ankles.
“How is that doctor of yours?” her mother had called out from the kitchen.
I imagine my great-grandmother’s fingers tense around a silver shaker. I use some vague version of Maggie Smith from A Room With a View, since I’ve never actually seen a photo of my great-grandmother. I give her blue eyes like Cynthia’s and dark upswept hair. I hear the spoon clanking in the sink and then a long silence.
I lick grape juice over my lips and feel a burn, a satisfaction, and then a familiar shame.
“Harry is fine, of course,” Cynthia had replied.
“Though I was really picturing him gone, run off, dead,” she confides to me now. She giggles and I giggle back. She likes me best when we are in cahoots.
She had watched the snowdrifts in the light of streetlamps, tossed skyward like the risen dead. My father, unborn and belly warm, pedaled softly against her ribs. The grandfather clock chimed the hours and she fell asleep, a newspaper over her stomach like a paper tent.
She woke to the smack of ice and sleet against the side of the house. She tried to turn on a lamp but the power had gone out.
“I thought I heard snoring but no, Mother was not asleep at all. I heard this gurgling or weeping. I couldn’t quite make it out.”
Cynthia hoisted herself up and went looking for a flashlight, finding one tucked away beneath a cabinet full of porcelain figurines, each a gift from Cynthia’s paternal grandmother. “Another woman of taste, my mother always said.” She fingered a glittering young peasant boy, a brown pail tucked beneath his shoulder. His blue eyes were delicately painted to look as if he were peering to the right. As her mother sobbed or gurgled or whatever it was that Cynthia suspected she may have been doing, Cynthia slipped him into her pocket before padding down the hallway, lightly pushing on her mother’s bedroom door. She was not in bed. She heard her soft whimpering, a heaving sound, and then silence. Tiptoeing toward the window, my grandmother shone her flashlight over her mother’s frail body, twisted on the floor and caught between the bed and the wall, her nightgown soaked with vomit. She was very drunk.
“I said, ‘Get up! Get up!’ but her eyes were rolled back into her head and I thought her dead. It was a great relief, Jessie, you must understand. She was very evil.” She draws out the word “evil” like a cartoon character. “She was not like you at all, dear. You are good! My pet, my little pigeon!”
My great-grandmother had whimpered again and flailed, wrenching forward, another stream of vomit pouring onto her lap. Grasping her beneath the armpits, Cynthia pulled her up and rolled her onto the bed.
“Looking at her lying there, crooked and pale, I was so afraid. Not for her, or for myself, but for your daddy, inside me, oblivious. I sometimes think he felt my fear, that this doomed him somehow. Still, I feel very ashamed.”
This was the first and last time I ever heard Cynthia speak explicitly of guilt, of maternal guilt in particular, the very crux of her that becomes like a black cancer, small and hard and hidden beneath stoic resignation. Oh, these things happen, she will say when my father dies. This is just what happens. And then one day, when Eric was seventeen and I was nineteen, my mother finally called up the courage to confront Cynthia over the phone about her indifference toward Eric. During my next visit, a few days later, I found several photos of him as a child strewn about her dining room table, as if she had been trying desperately to dredge up some long-forgotten feeling for him. I suppose she didn’t find it, there in his gap-toothed smile, because she never brought it up.
Cynthia had loved her four sons. Her love, when she showed it, was full-press and unflinching. She found their teenage antics amusing and giggled conspiratorially when she learned that they had been leaping from the second-floor windows in the dead of night. She thought their gumption was hysterical, their very boy-ness a strange anthropological discovery. They would beat each other bloody on the lawn and Cynthia could only shriek and patter away. Eek! she would cry, covering her eyes.
When my mother first inquired about her seizure disorder, which was lifelong and controlled by medication, Cynthia explained that it was usually brought on by flashing lights, at which point my father began rapidly flicking the light switch.
“Aah! See? They want me dead!” she called out, laughing.
There was a playfulness to her relationships with her sons, a sense of humor that they could not share with Harry, the stoic patriarch. Once, they rented a house on Hilton Head Island that backed up to a public beach and had its own swimming pool. My father and Harry were off somewhere and so my mother, Eric, Cynthia, and I decided to make use of the pool. I remember my shock when Cynthia suddenly dropped her towel and dove into the water naked.
“Be free!” she had squealed, her white round breasts smacking the surface of the water like flapjacks.
It was this Cynthia I liked the best, the emboldened pixie, the overgrown child. My mother and brother also went naked and when it was my turn to ditch my swimming suit, I did so with great reticence and cried for hours after Eric tossed it far onto the beach, so that to retrieve it I had to run bare-assed over the hot sand. My mother and Cynthia found my modesty hilarious. After all, I was eight and flat-chested, a mere child, and therefore without possession of a Body with a capital B. What was there to be embarrassed about?
Like an older sister, my mother often exploited my insecurities for her own amusement. Later that same week, she suddenly pulled down my pants on a crowded dock and I froze, my underpants around my ankles, until she stopped laughing long enough to come help me pull them up again. I was so stunned I couldn’t move. My mother’s jokes were never meant to be cruel; she jus
t couldn’t understand how any child of hers could take herself so seriously.
“Get a grip!” she likes to say.
As I get older and my self-consciousness gets sanded down to a duller shade of red, I can appreciate her antics.
“Oh, you’re a little funny,” she will say occasionally, surprised at some joke I’ve pulled at my own expense. “I’d thought only Eric and I were funny.”
It is this part of their relationship that I can never fully enter. I am too square or too solemn or too judgmental. And it was this part of Cynthia’s relationship with her sons that Harry never understood. I cannot presume to know the exact nature of their undoing, but when Cynthia insisted my mother drive eight hours down to South Carolina to fetch her after suddenly leaving Harry after fifty-eight years of marriage—despite my mother’s own failing marriage, despite my father’s latest debilitating binge, no matter the two small children my mother had to care for (“You must get me now!” Cynthia had demanded. “Enough about you!”)—she came back with a fever hotter than hell and a new self-sufficiency that was cutting and cruel. Embracing her new independence seemed to demand total extrication from anyone who might need or give love. That part of her life was over, at least for a long time. She bought herself a townhouse and furnished it with opulent Oriental rugs and a grand piano. She had china shipped in from England and a hard, white, damask sofa. She made Eric and me a guest room on the third floor, though I think he was invited to stay only once. It was in that same guest room, six years later, where my father would spend his last weeks and where Cynthia would find him, one cool morning in April, crumpled, blue, and dead at the bottom of the stairs.
AFTER SHE’D FOUND her mother on the floor, Cynthia called the paramedics, but they were slow to arrive because of all the snow. Her mother toyed with them. They couldn’t take her away without her consent.
“Hello, boys,” she had whispered as they came in.
One man grabbed her wrist for a pulse. Another gathered the cord of an IV.
“You came to see something, eh, boys? Is that right?” she said slyly, parting her legs, her nightgown wide like an open mouth. “Listen, boys,” she said, “I’m not going anywhere, so you can take your hands off of me unless you’d like to do something useful with them.”
They let her go.
“Can you be a little tough, boys? Are you men or are you boys? What’s it going to be?”
From the other side of the room, Cynthia had to watch them gather their things and put their instruments away, mumbling softly as they walked toward the door.
My father was the second of Cynthia’s sons to die. David followed a few years later, swallowing a handful of Klonopin before walking into a hospital cafeteria, ordering a tuna fish sandwich, and collapsing dead on the floor. The first Eric, my brother’s namesake, died in a car accident when he was fifteen. He’d been driving around with some friends and drinking cans of Labatt Blue before visiting my father at the convenience store where he was working.
I imagine they bought cigarettes. I imagine they talked about the night ahead, about girls, perhaps, and an upcoming party.
Or they stood around in the parking lot for a while, smoking the cigarettes and nudging each other off the curb, spitting onto the pavement and watching their shoes, hands in pockets, their long hair tucked beneath wool caps. It was March, so there must have been gray clouds of breath rising into a black sky. They may have seen stars and a moon, or else there was a curtain of frozen air pulled tight like a shroud.
My father said goodbye to his brother and Eric nodded, tossed his cigarette, and climbed into the back seat of his friend’s car.
My father went inside, the bell ringing on the door, and the boys drove a mile down the street, lost control, and catapulted into a tree. The driver lived but the other three boys died instantly.
Was that it then? The loss that had broken my grandmother’s already fragile composure?
Had she settled into her life? Had she put away her fantasies and found some comfort in the routines of motherhood just before it all came undone? I’d always wanted to ask her, but never dared. She seldom spoke about Eric, by all accounts a handsome and funny boy whom his brothers, my father especially, admired and toddled after, basking in the glow of his charisma. But isn’t that always the case, after they’re gone?
“Do you know my brother Eric?” my father asked my mother soon after they met. “You’ll love him. All the girls do.”
I often wondered if he’d meant that as a boast or a word of caution. You may like me now, but not after you meet Eric. I found that story surprising because I’d always imagined my father as the most handsome and popular of boys. That was the story I’d been told. But later a different version surfaced and it made more sense. My father was a smart and quiet man who built model sailboats in the basement and constructed rudimentary computers from spare parts (from nothing more, it seemed to me, than fishing wire and an old icebox). He could make anything work, except of course, his own splintered psyche. So, it was this side of him I could imagine as the follower: the thoughtful boy drinking too much in the corner to cover up his shyness, daydreaming about sailboats and trout fishing, or camping alone high in the Tetons.
Half-baked business schemes were a necessity after children came along, not (as I’d once thought) the stuff of dreams. My father devised and demolished nearly a dozen businesses in half as many years before even that much effort became absurd. As kids, Eric and I would spend days on end in his office stuffing envelopes with flyers for Nelson Brothers’ Construction, or Nelson Computers, or Nelson Asbestos Removal, none of which lasted more than a few months. After he died, I often felt like my brother and I were just more unfinished business. When he failed, our father would retreat to the basement with a bottle of vodka and some hobby glue, tenderly affixing miniature sails to the mast of another doomed ship.
“I think now if only they had been an hour earlier, if only they had gotten to her before she woke up,” Cynthia said.
But what, I wondered, did she imagine would have been avoided?
She is a new character now. Not the little girl but the shrewd sophisticate, a role I always imagined Judi Dench might play in the movie of her life. She straightens and looks down at me, a raven preparing for flight. I am out of grapes and the fire has burned down to ash.
“When they left she hissed at me and called me a little bitch. My own mother said that to me.” Cynthia starts to rise.
She is grinding her teeth and stretching her neck, one eye moving about in its socket, roaming and reptilian. She opens her mouth as if to crow, as if to call out the day. I do not like this story anymore. I am scared and I listen for my mother’s car horn to rescue me, but it doesn’t come, not yet.
“I heard voices, Jessie. I heard voices and saw visions: my son screaming out and my father chuckling softly into his newspaper and Harry grunting and moaning. Oh, that moaning! I saw my mother as she was when I was a child, sweeping and dancing and drinking and clawing at the door when Daddy locked her up to dry her out.”
She is stamping her foot and the loose skin underneath her chin shivers like pond water and I picture my daddy as a little boy, waving goodbye as Harry drives her away to the psych ward where she spent eight months being put back together like a rickety doll come undone.
“Mothers are no good, Jessie. Mothers are no good.”
She is loudly alone. I see the cracks for the first time, and the tenuous threads of the hack jobs that keep us together. I feel for my own seams and wonder, dumbly, when they, too, will start to tear.
“When you’re ready to divorce ’em,” Cynthia confided to my mother one day, “you do it so fast it makes their head spin.”
In other words, get out before they have the chance to lawyer up. Always the more financially savvy of the two, Cynthia made out just fine after the divorce. While Harry had earned the money, Cynthia knew how to invest it. Newly single and financially independent, she decided she would go into voice acti
ng and hired a coach to help her develop a demo tape. She had her picture taken by a professional photographer and sent the photos along with the tapes. She never got a gig, but as a kid I marveled at this new tenacity, this belated drive to remake herself into something other than housewife and mother. If there she had failed, perhaps this is where she could flourish. And she was good, too. After she died, I found boxes of unsent demo tapes tucked into a closet in her apartment, detritus of the career that never was. I listened to the tapes obsessively on the flight back home to New York after her funeral, her voice swinging effortlessly from the smooth seduction of a yogurt aficionado into the brusque staccato of the drug rep hawking her wares. Here, all of her personalities were on display: the mischievous child, the no-bullshit intellectual, the doting mother, the flighty old bat hankering for a bowl of Breyers ice cream. She could be all of them at once and I was sorry she hadn’t been given a chance.
If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir Page 10