Grandmothers

My great-grandmother’s house was yellow, like a canary. One story and made of stone, with a carport out front used not for cars but for a rusting white glider. There were crate myrtles in the yard that my great-grandmother, Mary, tended to as if the blooms were wounded animals, and a rotted wood fence that encased the backyard from the thick woods on the other side.

Stone Mountain, Ga. always felt like a different world. The drive out seemed to stretch on and on. I was just beginning to develop an acute disdain for driving that would become harsh and tactile as I grew up, so every drive felt too long. But I remember with distinct clarity the dread that dropped into the base of my stomach whenever my grandmother came into town and the plans for a trek out to the canary house began.

I don’t remember much of Mary, who she was and how she acted; only small things remain that mean nothing out of context but are what I base my perception of her off of. Mary had Troll dolls, old things from a by-gone era. They belonged to her daughter, to my grandmother, until they were forgotten in a box in an attic to be found again and placed, proudly, on the television stand in the living room of the canary house. There was a small seating area, a round table with metal and leather chairs situated under a light from the 1960s. Mary’s house stayed, as the decades passed, in the 60s. Not growing, not shifting, but remaining. I don’t know what color the walls were, but in my memories, they are yellow. Everything is yellow. I remember the yellow sunlight coming in through the kitchen windows and bathing the room in butter and honey. The air was always warm in the house; not stuffy or heated, but an agreeable 73 degree Fahrenheit. Most of my time was spent snooping through albums and bins, looking for clues and relics of my grandmother’s childhood, because I always found her history alluring. Clues to my dead, not-often-talked-about, great-uncle I heard snippets about; hushed tones from the next room over when the adults thought my siblings and I were minding our own business or scribbling in the lines of Disney coloring books.

Mary moved to Hartwell, Ga., where my grandparents lived in a house on the lake, when she was 90. My grandfather is a fisherman, first and foremost. The lake was always calling to him, a siren beckoning him nearer, nearer. When Mary moved to the lake, the canary house sat vacant until it was repainted, sold and re-inhabited by a young family.

She lived in the lake house for five, maybe six years. In those years, I saw her form wither. I began to see her arch forward, her back becoming curved and crooked. Her skin, once bright and warm, turned to wax paper. Translucent like reptilian skin; her veins thick and purple. Mary’s hair was white, like the crate myrtles, so thin and sparse she had to combed the long pieces up and over and around in order the cover the places where the hair had fallen out. My grandfather bought a luxe, red leather recliner that he positioned parallel to my grandmother’s linen armchair. The red recliner was taken over by Mary and, due to her groaning spine, the back cushion developed a depression from her relentless sitting. She had a sore on the bridge of her nose that never healed. I don’t know where it came from, what caused it. In the canary house, there was no sore. Now, I can’t remember her without it. It was a cycle: raw and bleeding, scabbed and brown, her gnarled fingers pick, pick, picking.

Mary’s mind mirrored her body. It weakened, developed holes and blank spaces that remained empty no matter the efforts put in by her children, her grandchildren, doctors and at-home nurses to dredge up the lost artifacts. Where there used to be memory, recollection or recognition was now a pair of glassy eyes staring ahead, lacking a focal point. She spoke very little, and always had a cup of oatmeal in the morning with tea and my grandmother was forced to keep Little Debbie’s Oatmeal Cream Pies on hand. Mary was a figure in the background of all memories I have of Lake Hartwell. Never there, in frame, but somewhere off camera staring at a wall with blank eyes.

Mid-summer. I woke at 5:22 a.m. to a quiet house. When you get far enough away from big cities, the world lacks ambient noise. The background sounds that pollute our ears are gone and we’re left to hear what is right beside us. At my grandparents’ house, my brother, sister and myself slept on paper-thin mattresses on the floor of my grandparent’s room. My mattress was right next to the double-doors that lead out into a hallway, with the garage door at the end. There was something moving outside the door, sounds that echoed through the big house without interruption. I eased open one of the doors and looked through with one eye. There were four men dressed in grey, barely visible in the light coming through the open garage door. They were carrying something, a big dark shape made of thick plastic.  

The three of us were corralled in my grandparent’s bedroom, by my uncle, until 10 a.m. that morning. I was a kid, but the energy in the house felt off and I knew something wasn’t right. Time spent at my grandparents means constant family, constant time together from sun-up to sun-down. My siblings and I had been up for four hours and had only seen our uncle.

Mom came in later and told us that Mary passed away the night before. I kept seeing the men in grey suits, faces shadowed by small-brimmed hats and moving past the sliver of sight I had between bedroom doors. The thick black plastic was a body bag on a gurney. That day was spent with my grandmother in Mary’s room with a tissue to her eyes and nose, picking through things and putting them back in their place. The rest of us—excluding my mother who stayed back in the living room in case my grandmother needed her—spent the day on the water. On boats and docks and tubes and water skis. Sending up a flurry of bubbles from our noses rippling up to the surface of the lake as we sank deep and down to the bottom of the lake. I imagined that, in her last moments, Granny Mary’s mind and memories came back with acute clarity. Wrapped in a green towel in the sun, it made things seem all right. The holes that once sat empty filled again and she passed away with memories of crate myrtles and trolls dolls and the groan of a white metal glider.  

My great-grandmother’s house was white, like salt. One story and made of wood, with a front door overgrown by rose bushes and alligators sunbathing by the pond ten feet from her sunporch. It was always sticky at Anne’s house. Saint Augustine, Fla. was a gaping mouth ready to swallow whatever wayward traveler dared pass by the teeth. She lived in a gated community with more golf carts than cars and retirees who milled about the sidewalks or in the clubhouse until six p.m. and the community turned into a ghost town.

Saint Augustine wasn’t sleepy. It’s the oldest, continuously-operated city in the United States. But the energy Anne’s house lacked age and time, standing still by the pond eternally. It felt still, an endless summer day spent on the sun porch rolling from the white-wicker sofa onto the floor, and back again. Making beaded bracelets and coloring in the pages of coloring books I left behind last summer, the summer before. I slept on a mattress in the living room or—when the nights were cool enough—on the sun porch so I could listen to the night settling around me.

Anne had fake teeth and glasses that took up half of her face. She had short, perpetually curled hair and always wore a short-sleeved button down with khaki pants. I remember swimming in the clubhouse pool with her. It was indoor, not too big but large enough that I could swim laps. We waded to the deep end, my sister and myself, leaving Anne at the opposite end. She wore a blue, abstract one-piece bathing suit and a white swimming cap. The knowledge that my great-grandmother did not know how to swim reached my ears one way or another on one of the trips to Fla. And though she never left the three-feet end of the pool, she struggled as if she were swimming through glue, or in the hands of a hurricane. With certainty, I knew she was drowning. I’d watch her, distracted from the game of tag or Marco Polo my siblings were trying to play, waiting to spring into action and drag her 80-year-old body to the side of the pool.

She did not drown, though. Simply the beginning phases of my anxiety, I guess. Anne moved to Hartwell, Ga., into two guest bedrooms, located on the main floor of the house. A door was put up, closing off Anne’s hallway from the living room, creating a suite for her to live in. The origin of Anne’s move to Lake Hartwell wasn’t explained and I was too young to ask, or to care.

One month before things turned, Anne and I sat at Red Lobster for my grandmother’s birthday. She loves the endless shrimp promotion, so we make a point to go every year to celebrate, even now. Anne drank a blue margarita from a bowl and talked, with clarity, about her life. She made jokes. She got my name right and asked how school was going, if I’d had any writing published. She seemed bright, in her head, present. That’s the last time I saw her.

The reason for her trek from Saint Augustine to Lake Hartwell became clear. She lived for a few months without incident. She was the same Anne I’d known my whole life and spent a lot of time tuning her hearing-aids and watching her “shows” on one of two televisions in her suite.

Her stint at the lake became fraught with tension and fights between my grandparents and Gran. Three a.m. phones calls from Gran to my great-aunt and –uncles—Gran either believed that she had been abandoned by my grandparents, that they were holding her hostage or she didn’t know where she was or how she got there. The stories slowly trickled in, unwillingly, from Mom and our trips to Hartwell became less frequent, less time on the water. Due, partly, to our schedules becoming full and partly because my grandparents and Mom didn’t want my siblings or myself to see Anne deteriorating.

To satiate the phone calls and paranoia, and save my grandparents from the pain they incurred at the hands of the unknowing Anne, she was moved to Rock Hill, Sc. with a great-aunt; then to Savannah, Ga. with a great-aunt and a great-step-aunt. Then to a “memory care” facility in Savannah where she moved around on her bottom, scooting along like a baby, after losing the ability to walk, drink water, speak and getting punched in the abdomen by a caretaker.

I did not see men dressed in grey carrying Anne out of the lake house on a gurney. I was not quarantined in my grandparent’s bedroom for hours, left guessing. I received an unceremonious knock on my bedroom door on a Wednesday morning before school in November, 2017. It was Mom telling me she’d passed away.

Memory is an elusive thing to me. It’s a slow thing, something that gnaws and tears and pulls away at the things that make us who we are. Without memory, we’re vessels. Mary and Anne both became apparitions of the women I knew, bodies left empty or drowned by those around them trying, with might and fervor, to force them into remembrance, before the disease set in fully. These women, who didn’t meet, who lived separate lives, shared more than a family tree. I never thought about the two of them at the same time or in the same train of thought. I intended to write about Anne, because I was older when she died so memories are clearer and, admittedly, I was much closer to her than Mary. As I wrote, I began interlacing details of Mary in Anne’s story, without realizing the mistake. Once I did notice, I needed to tell both stories.

I find myself trying, desperately, to hold onto things. I have drawers at my house filled with things from childhood: cards from my grandmother, a bag of rubber bands, a deck of playing cards with Elvis Presley’s face emblazoned on the back. Try to hold onto quiet conversations, words spilling from blue-stained teeth; the smell of crate myrtles or scratchy-fuzzy pink troll hair when the adults weren’t looking. I have clothes from middle school I keep hung in my closet; shoes that don’t fit anymore take up space under my bed. My grandmother is the same. On the back porch of her lake house sits the white-whicker side tables, part of a matching set, from Anne’s sun porch which flank a white glider. I sit on the white glider on the porch and listen to it groan.