My grandparents knew scant little about one another when they married, but over time they learned to love their differences. He liked a cold beer; she preferred Manhattans. He spoke only when he had something to say; she spoke in monologues. But they fit, mainly because she liked to lead and he, averse to confrontation, willingly followed. He had no interest in power, prestige or money, and handed his income to Granny so she could figure out the bills and the taxes. They parted every morning for their separate worlds—hers in the classroom, his in the Big Sur wilderness—and then came together every night at the dinner table where he ate in silence as she lectured on a never-ending list of topics. Grandpa admired her mind, although he also had an Olympian appetite and could fill his plate four times in one sitting. This made him an excellent listener.
It didn’t take long for Matthew and me to adjust to the rhythms of our grandparents’ schedules. Granny preferred her afternoon cocktail lying down. After a full day of teaching grammar and arithmetic to a roomful of trying fifth-graders, her first order of business was to mix a Manhattan and recline on the orange shag rug in the living room, her head propped on a pillow and a newspaper spread before her. By now she had taught me how to make her drink, and I liked the daily ritual of it almost as much as she did. I poured brown bourbon into a tall blue plastic tumbler until it was two fingers high, splashed in some sweet vermouth from the green glass bottle and added two ice cubes and a neon red maraschino cherry. I swirled it around with a dinner spoon and brought it to her.
“Grazie,” she said, reaching up from the floor.
With a loud licking of her fingers, she flipped the pages of the free Carmel Pinecone that she’d picked up at Jim’s Market and told anyone within earshot what she thought about local politics.
“Goddammit all to hell, I can’t believe they want to put streetlights in the village! Excuse my French.”
Her outbursts were not invitations to respond. She kept her head down and continued her conversation of one.
“What do we need lights for? We don’t even have any sidewalks. Damn Monterey County supervisors!” she said, taking another gulp from her tumbler. Outsider politicians were always trying to modernize unincorporated Carmel Valley Village and ruin the reason people moved out to the country in the first place, she said.
I kept listening as I climbed into Grandpa’s recliner and wiggled the handle on the side, trying to get the chair to go flat. I believed Granny was exceptionally smart, and knew things that regular people didn’t. My opinion came from two sources: Granny herself, who had told me several times that her 140 score on an IQ test proved she was a genius; and secondly that she could predict the weather. I didn’t know that forecasts were printed in the newspaper, so when I’d ask her what the weather was going to be like and she’d foresee sun or rain or frost, I thought she had some direct line to the universe.
She dropped phrases in Latin and Italian every once in a while, which sounded cosmopolitan to me. As the cocktail hours piled up, I was slowly starting to adopt her worldview, dividing people into those who were wrong and those who were right. I didn’t know what a Democrat or a Republican was, but I had heard the words so often that I knew we were on the Democrat team. Granny’s world was black and white, and therefore easy to follow. She was right, and anyone who disagreed was dim-witted and therefore deserved our pity.
“It’s tedious being smart,” she’d sigh, swirling the ice in her drink. “Waiting for everyone else to catch up to you. One day you’ll know what I’m talking about.”
Granny was now reading about the gasoline shortage and flipping the pages with more force. I went to the kitchen and helped myself to one of her cocktail cherries, and then slipped away to Mom’s bedroom. The door, as usual, was shut, and there was no sound from inside. Mom had been in bed so long that she was becoming shimmery around the edges like a memory. I felt my mother more than I saw her, when she curled her body around me at night.
“Mom?”
I tapped lightly on the bedroom door. Nothing. I knocked a little harder. Her voice sounded like it came from under the covers, thick and muffled.
“Go away.”
Her words pinched, and I winced reflexively. Mom still liked me; I knew that. I reminded myself that she just wasn’t herself right now. Granny rounded the corner and spotted me lingering where I wasn’t supposed to be. “Come with me,” she said, placing a hand in the small of my back and guiding me to the kitchen. She lifted a wicker basket of wet clothes off the counter, and I followed her outdoors to hang the laundry. She dropped the basket on the ground with a thump under the wire clothesline that Grandpa had strung up between two T’s made out of plumbing pipes.
“Hand me the clothes,” she ordered. “I can’t bend down on account of my bad back.”
I passed her one of Grandpa’s white cotton undershirts, encrusted with drips of plumber’s putty and worn so thin I could see through the fabric. She snapped it into the wind once, then pinned it with clothespins. Then she reached toward me for the next item. I pulled out her floor-length quilted nightgown, the one covered in pink roses.
She cleared her throat.
“You know your mother is going to need everybody’s help to get better,” she said, contemplating the clothing in her hands. I knew what was coming. I was in trouble for knocking on the bedroom door again.
“I just needed Morris.”
Granny paused and faced me.
“Aren’t you getting a little old for a teddy bear?”
Her words were so horrible that I momentarily forgot what I was doing and dropped my favorite green-checkered dress on the ground. I couldn’t sleep without Morris tucked in my arms. He was my only possession, the only thing left from Before.
“Dad gave him to me!”
Granny bent down to pick up my dress, and she grunted like it really hurt. It looked like she was stuck, but she put her hand to her back and rose slowly, puffing out her cheeks with the effort. She shook the dirt off my dress and continued pinning.
“That’s another thing,” she said. “I don’t want you and Matthew mentioning your father around her. It only upsets her.”
Dad was the only thing I wanted to talk about, but his name had not come up once since we landed in California. Everyone acted as if Dad didn’t exist, and I was beginning to wonder if Matthew even remembered him. He had even started to refer to Grandpa as Daddy. Each time, Grandpa gently reminded him that he was a grandpa, not a daddy. It was like our life in Rhode Island was a movie, and the movie had ended, and that was that. Over and forgotten. If everyone pretends your dad doesn’t exist, does he?
Granny was staring at me, waiting for me to agree to never say Dad’s name. It was pointless to argue, because I would be taking Dad’s side against hers and that would have repercussions I could only shudder to imagine. It’s true I wanted Mom to get better. I didn’t want to keep thinking of her as a sick person, someone with a weak heart and faraway eyes. I wanted her to braid my hair again, read Winnie-the-Pooh to me, take me with her to the grocery store. If that meant having silent conversations about Dad in my head, then that’s what I would do. But before I submitted to Granny’s ultimatum, I had to ask a question.
“When’s he coming?”
Granny reached into her shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She shook one out, lit it and relaxed her shoulders with the first exhale. She stared at the honey bus as if searching it for my answer.
“Your father is not a very good man,” she said, keeping the back of her head to me. Then she indicated to me to hand her the next thing in the basket. Conversation over.
I put my tongue between my teeth to keep from calling Granny a liar. How dare she pick sides, as if she could just snip Dad out of my life with a swipe of her scissors? I