Nanaville

by Anna Quindlen

  Lessons learned:

  “No” does not mean “I don’t love you.” It just means no.

  Manners can be taught early.

  Hang back. I cannot repeat this one often enough. Hang back.

  THIS IS WHAT THE FUTURE LOOKS LIKE

  After Arthur was born, the pediatrician flipped him onto his stomach so his parents could consider his buttocks. Spreading across them was an irregular area almost as big as my hand, which was the color of a lowering sky before a storm. It was something called a Mongolian blue spot, a congenital birthmark almost universal in Asian babies. One reincarnation story has it that some souls were unwilling to be reborn and that they had to be forced from the womb, leaving what looks like an enormous bruise on the back end. I’d never heard of a Mongolian blue spot, and neither have many other people, which is why the doctor was explaining it to Arthur’s parents, because in communities unfamiliar with Asian babies it is sometimes mistaken for a sign of abuse.

  This is what our country looks like now. This is what the world looks like. The child who has one parent who is black and another who is white. The child who has one parent who is Latino and another who is Swedish and who ricochets among languages, sometimes mixing them up in a single sentence. The year our first grandchild was born, one in seven new babies in America was multiracial or multiethnic, almost triple the number in the year my eldest child, his father, was born. And this in a country that when I was young banned interracial marriage in many states.

  The arc of progress bends toward grandchildren that are like us and yet not. When I was a child the lines between countries and cultures were wider, barely semipermeable. I knew one Asian girl, who had been adopted from Korea when she was a baby; there always hung about her some persistent sense of do-gooding on the part of her parents, as well as an aura of difference so glaring that it was incandescent. The number of times neighborhood kids thought it was hilarious to pull their eyes tight at the corners to mock her was infinite. Where I grew up, a mixed marriage was between a Catholic and a Lutheran who had, naturally, converted.

  And then there was my family. All my father’s brothers had married within the Irish clan: Reilly, Kelly, the kind of women who knew how to serve corned beef and cabbage and wore a lot of navy blue. My father married a woman whose surname was Pantano, who could bang out a pizza rustica without thinking twice and looked slamming in a red dress. It sounds so silly to say it now, when my parents’ union would be so unremarkable, but it was a bit of a deal, like the Sharks (Puerto Rican) and the Jets (Anglo) of West Side Story. Which is, of course, based on Romeo and Juliet, and the Montagues and Capulets. Everything changes and nothing changes. My sister reports that the high school students she teaches still exist in silos: the Latino students beef with the Samoans; the black students bully the Chinese, who are seen as having some special status. The capacity of human beings to create an exclusionary society knows no bounds, even when those bounds are stretched or seem to be broken. Until the moment when you are handed a baby, who breaches them entirely.

  The world has changed since my grandparents presided over a welter of purely white grandchildren. As I grew to adulthood there was more travel, more intermingling of ethnicity and race. More people went to college, where they often met people who were substantially different than they were in some essential way. I have two daughters-in-law. One is biracial. One is Chinese. Well, kind of. When people ask Lynn Feng where she is from, she likes to mess with them a little bit and say, “Lawrence, Kansas.” Which is actually where she spent her formative years.

  She’s gotten a lot of this, and I’ve appreciated it more since Arthur was born. Twice it happened when I had him in the baby sling, both times when I was standing in line, once for produce, once for a snowsuit. The first time it was a woman: “Where did you get him?” she asked, and I was speechless. The second time, I’m not sure why, my inner smart-ass came out to play. “Where did you get him?” said the man in Baby Gap. “Whole Foods,” I replied, inexplicably.

  This is obviously because my grandson is Chinese and I am not. But he is also Irish, Italian, Slovenian—maybe some German or Austrian, but Pop is less sure of his bloodlines than I am, and his may be more polyglot than my own or than he knows. I come from Irish who married other Irish for many generations and Italians who did the same, until one from each side of the street became a crack jitterbugger and met, danced, dated, fell in love, married, and had me. Some of those involved were not pleased. My father lived with his in-laws for the first year of my life, and he learned to recognize an Italian sentence that, translated, means, “He eats like a bird.”

  But our eldest grandson’s maternal side is pure and unadulterated Chinese. I find this all miraculous, and strange, and I warrant his maternal grandparents do, too. Shengli Feng and Yaping Yu went from Beijing, where they were born, to the countryside, where they were sent for something termed “reeducation,” and then to the United States, where they did graduate work and became professors and raised their daughter in a university town. Across the world, Gerry Krovatin and Anna Quindlen grew up as Catholic children steeped in the need for missionaries to convert the so-called Red Chinese, realized in college that this was errant nonsense, learned to use chopsticks at Chinese restaurants in places that served the kind of food Americans think of as Chinese and Chinese people think of as nothing they’ve ever eaten at home.

  In the best sense their children expanded their existence, and their minds. They introduced them to plays they would not have seen had their children not been acting in them. They made them watch movies they might have skipped, read books they could have passed over. When their eldest child went to live in Beijing after college, they toured the Forbidden City, hiked the Great Wall, ate in restaurants where their son ordered and the waitress clapped her hands and said, delighted, “He speaks Chinese!” Thank God he does, because his in-laws certainly do, and always have.

  But he and his brother have also introduced us to something else we hadn’t really experienced firsthand in a particular sort of way, and that’s stereotype and perhaps, as time goes by, the rawest sort of prejudice. A sophisticated acquaintance said to me of my first grandchild, “Well, at least you won’t have to worry about his math scores.” Now, there are surely worse things than being told that a kid is bound to be sitting in advanced calculus someday, and maybe this will turn out to be true. (His father certainly did, and he wasn’t Chinese!) But even so-called positive stereotypes are stereotypes; what’s called the Model Minority Myth has been dogging Asians for decades. As for my second son, whose future children will have three Caucasian grandparents and one who is a black woman from Belize, he’s already thinking about hard conversations he might have with his future sons about interactions with the police. His wife describes occasions on which passersby assumed that her mother was the nanny—of her own children. I imagine this to be a particular kind of humiliation that provokes a particular sort of anger, at the same time remembering that I have no real clue about the various injuries that come with being a person of color in a country that, at least for now, has white as its default setting. It’s not exactly the same, but perhaps because my mother was such a mild-mannered woman, I can recall vividly the times she talked about being insulted as an Italian girl. She spat the words: “Dago.” “Wop.” “Guinea.” She said them as though they were profanities.

  But because of my own background I also keep thinking about the positive attributes of swimming in various gene pools, and not simply the advantage identified by the genetic counselor Arthur’s parents saw when he was still in utero, who said, “There is no genetic overlap between the two of you.” Historians can attest to the downside of single-strand bloodlines; Queen Victoria married her grandchildren off selectively to keep the royal family tree pure and in the process created one in which hemophilia ran rampant.

  I felt a bit of whiplash involved in being Irish/Italian, a
n either/or, even in what today seems like a very minimal way. And I know some people insist that racial or ethnic intermingling has left them feeling as though they were moored nowhere, neither this nor that. But I feel as though it built in me a vague sense that I was an everything, that there was no template to which to hew, as there would have been had I been purely one or the other. I feel that all the time with Arthur. So much of it now focuses on his appearance. There’s a celebrity magazine trick that they do with computers that I think of when I look at him, where they take two photos and morph them into one face to show what the child of Pop Star and Franchise Actor might look like.

  “He looks so much like you!” someone will say to his (Caucasian) father. “He looks just like you!” someone else will say to his (Asian) mother. And at various times both of those things have been accurate, and then he turns aside, makes a face, and he is both, and neither. He is his own self.

  That’s one of the challenges for many parents, and the source of liberation for many grandparents. Having no expectations is extraordinarily difficult. I tried so hard not to make assumptions about our own children, assumptions about what they would do and be and think and want. And I made those assumptions all the time, unconsciously and reflexively, based not on their needs but on mine. I particularly did that with my eldest child, not only because I am an eldest child myself but because, let’s face it, he was the person I practiced on before I got the hang of motherhood. I was somewhat better with the other two, but I would probably give myself a B at best, and that’s grading on a curve, next to some parents I knew who never let their children, for example, consider any college but their own alma mater.

  But—and I may eat these words someday, I know—I feel as though I got a lot of that out of my system and that I really do look at Arthur and wonder what he will become, without spending much time wishing he would choose a given path. He isn’t a bit like his father when he was his age, and I don’t know precisely what his mother was like as a child, but I keep thinking that being a grandparent is the opportunity to put much of that aside and simply sit and wait and see. And the fact that he is made up of such disparate component parts helps make this possible. “He isn’t like anyone else in the family,” a woman said to me one day about her grandson, who can delve into the soul of the computer as though he were a cyber exorcist and who has tried but failed to explain to his granny, as he calls her, what exactly he is doing.

  Then she added, “Isn’t that wonderful?” And all I could do was nod enthusiastically. It surely is.

  SMALL MOMENTS

  The cupboard is full of teacups, the fine-skinned porcelain sort that, clinked together, make the high sound of a tiny bell. There are saucers, too, part of an ensemble that, when I was a kid, was trotted out for something called luncheon. For many years this was what you would ask for as a wedding gift, these sorts of dishes. But they got used seldom, and I asked instead for a stewpot and a food processor. These teacups, these saucers, are cherished because they once belonged to my mother, the woman who would be my children’s nana if she were still alive.

  They are always dusty. I never use them. I am a mug person. I love coffee, and I like a lot of it, and I don’t want to fool with refills. When I go to a coffee bar, it’s the biggest size I order, whatever they call it. It’s my one problem with Italy, even though I’m half Italian and think the sentence “How was your vacation in Italy?” is never anything but a rhetorical question. But still. Love your people, your food, your art, your leather goods, but those tiny espresso cups. Please.

  I’ve lived a life in mugs, one after another. There were handmade pottery mugs from craft fairs and big café au lait terrines from a French bistro selling off its stock. There was one that had the First Amendment on it—forgive me, I’m a recovering reporter—and another with the text of the Equal Rights Amendment, which was incredibly controversial because it said women should be treated like people.

  There was the one that said BECAUSE I’M THE MOM, THAT’S WHY. There was the one that said COOL MOM, which was kind of a lie and didn’t last long. If memory serves, and it so rarely does, there was a succession of Mom mugs.

  But the one to which I became most attached was one given to me by my son Christopher, who is also responsible for all my nun paraphernalia, including the giant rubber doll on one desk and the vintage nun doll in a removable habit on the other. (And, no, the removable habit has never been removed.) A gloss on the title of my novel published that year, that mug read RISE AND WHINE. Over time the yellow glaze chipped. A divot at one corner meant I had to be careful where I put my mouth. The handle broke off, which is why God invented Krazy Glue. (God invented coffee, too. Duh.)

  And then one day I was making a histrionic gesture with my arm, and I swept that mug off the table and onto the floor, where it broke into pieces so tiny that I was pulling them from my bare feet for days.

  “Chris, I know what you can get me for Christmas,” I said.

  Apparently he searched and searched for an identical mug, to no avail. The fashions in novelty coffee mugs morph over the years, along with mores and slang. There are now, for example, any number of mugs with the kind of profanity that would have made my grandmother’s luncheon crowd gasp as they held their porcelain. COOL MOM seems to have given way to EVERY GREAT MOM SAYS THE F-WORD.

  But luckily the timing was perfect for Chris to go in a different direction. And so on Christmas morning I unwrapped a new mug, big enough to hold a whole boatload of demitasse espresso. It’s brightly colored, with semi-psychedelic flowers, and it says, IT’S GRAND TO BE NANA. It’s pretty unbreakable, too, that hard-glazed pottery that is the antithesis of the elegant thin-skinned teacups for company. I feel as though the rest of my days will be like this, living amid things that can’t get broken, mangled, or dirtied up, so that the grandkids will have free rein in my house. After all, no décor, no matter how beautiful, is an adequate trade-off for playing fort under a quilt draped over a table on a rainy day.

  It’s grand to be Nana.

  I’ll drink to that.

  Lessons learned:

  One mug shatters and another one appears.

  There is never enough coffee.

  A lucky woman gets to trade her MOM mugs in for a NANA mug.

  THIS IS HOW IT BEGINS, AGAIN

  We searched for the signs. We tried to keep our counsel. Our daughter-in-law passed on wine with dinner. She didn’t have coffee in the morning. In the car to the country she turned, her father-in-law noted, undeniably green.

  “Lynn’s pregnant,” our son said on a video call with his sister, as his son sat in his high chair and everyone gathered around the table.

  Arthur looked terribly concerned as his aunt started to cry. “Gugu is happy, honey,” I said. “Really, she’s so happy.”

  “I’m really happy,” Maria sobbed.

  And so it begins again. Or maybe it began months ago, when they looked at one another and thought, it’s time, or even a year ago, when they watched their son try to climb the ladder to the slide and thought, it would be good for him to have a brother or sister to play with. Come to think of it, it probably began for our son many many years ago. His brother and his sister have been a pivotal part of his life forever; because he and his brother are so close in age, he has no memory of a time when he was the only child. His wife knows that. And despite a lifetime as an only child, her newly minted siblings are an important part of her life, as well.

  They will be different this time. They don’t know that yet, but I do. It turns out your heart is a balloon: it expands effortlessly. Your hands, not so much. It ought to be that two is one plus one, but two children is actually one plus one plus a hundred, or a thousand, or something, depending on the day. With the first one you nurse a baby, the silence deep and sweet, the smell of new hair and skin perfuming the air. With the second you nurse a baby while the elder chi
ld takes mustard from the fridge and paints the tile floor with it.

  That actually once happened. And our elder child was on the easy end of the toddler number line. Still. The first year after our second child arrived is a complete blur to me in many ways. I wanted to have a third child right away—what can I say, my hormones were raging—and my husband said evenly, “You’ve been in a bad mood for six months. Maybe we should wait a little while.” Which, while maddening—like I said, hormones—happened to be accurate. The space between the second and third was somewhat larger than the space between the first and second. “Three?” people said. Three. It was all pretty wild, going from a man-to-man to a zone defense.

  I wouldn’t change a thing. About any of it.

  I will be different this time, too. When I first tried my hand at stand-up paddleboarding, one of the women I was with pulled up next to me and began to fill me in on what I needed to change as I paddled, how my arms were at the wrong angle, how far I needed to push into the water, and precisely how to sweep back. I stared straight ahead and, without looking at her, I said between gritted teeth, “All I can do right now is try to stand up on this thing.”

  It’s such an apt metaphor for almost everything I’ve ever done in my life. I know how to use my paddle now, how to use it to move swiftly through the water, how to turn my board. But the beginning of everything is just trying to nail the most primitive part, to tame the lizard brain that says you can’t, don’t try, you’ll fall.

  In the beginning of my life in Nanaville, I was just trying to stay standing. I made up so much of the mothering thing as I went, and even more of the grandmothering thing. If it’s not clear enough here, mistakes were made. But they were made out of haste and ignorance, lack of thought but never lack of love.