Going Home

Four Generations of Beautiful Women

This past weekend I visited with Rennie, Erik and their 4 children. The older girls, Kelly and Rachael were home to help celebrate Austin's baptism into the LDS church. One of the must do's when children come home is to go through the albums and watch videos and relive what once was. I often wonder why we like to do that. Years ago I ran across a piece in the New York Times and it perfectly captured my feelings about " going home". It was a time when we weren't so transient and "home" was a definite destination. Nowadays, it is more about the people than the place. I take the liberty to share it with you now. Enjoy.

HERS
by Mary Cantwell
New York Times, April 3, 1980

“ All my babies were spring babies, “ I heard her saying as I stood outside the door. “ Esther in April, John and Margaret in May and Mary in June.” She is lying in a railed bed, looking like a small bird now, her nose beaked by age, her wispy hair tied back with a scrap of red yarn, telling stories to herself. There is no one else for her to tell her stories to. She is surrounded by the senile, some of whom shout, some of whom follow you and beg to be taken home, and by stroke victims, most of whom are silent.

The nursing home is very clean and cheerfully colored and there’s a piano in the lobby for sing-alongs and a color television set for following soap opera ( no one gets to stay up late to watch sitcoms), but none can sing and few can follow a plot, and threading through the scent of pureed food and talcum powder that palls the corridors is the faint, ineradicable sting of urine. But when I enter the room and my mother says “ Do you know who this is?” she answers briskly, “ Of course I do. It’s Mary Lee.”

* * *

It is harder for me to think of myself as an adult than it is to behave like one. The latter is simple: one watches children and does the opposite. A lot is lost, but civilization, or what passes for it, is gained. But a photograph on my desk - that of a 6-year-old with two bows in her hair and a 19th century gingham dress that slipping off her shoulders ( she is in a pageant, and this is a group shot) - effaces the woman the mirror reflects.

In fact, but for being able to see where the eyeliner is smudged or the lipstick is uneven, I can’t see her at all. I am partnered by that little girl; we are encased in a body that is a surprise to both of us, and when I die, it is her hand I will be holding And there’s a further complication to my growing up. Not only am I still somebody’s daughter. I am the grandchild of the woman in the bed as well.

My grandmother is 103. The local newspaper hailed her birthday with a photograph and an article. Some found the article charming. I found it patronizing. People tend to patronize the old anyway. And I sensed, besides. the old Yankee tendency ( the writer had three names, all of them surnames), to patronize the Irish. He called her “Maggie” for one, the first to have the gall to do so. My sister and I call her “Granny”, my mother calls her “Ma”, her husband called her “Mag” and her brothers-in-law called her Margaret. The friend of her old age was our next-door neighbor, Sadie Munro, whose skin was like wrinkled linen and whose eyes were violet and who called her Mrs. Lonergan. She called her Miss Munro. Together they sat in the bay window, Granny plump in her starched cotton, Sadie Munro skinny in hers, talking about- I don’t know, illnesses, I guess, and wills.

When my grandmother was 6 years old, her mother left her in charge of her younger sister for an hour or so. Her sister fell and broke her leg, and limped for the rest of her life. “I was too young,” my grandmother told me. “I couldn’t keep an eye on her. She moved too fast.” She was apologizing, but all concerned had been dead for generations; Guilty, she wanted absolution. I was handy,

She felt guilty, too, about the daughter who died at the age of 11 and the son who went wrong. “Go and talk to your grandmother,” my aunt said the day he died. “You can always make her laugh.” So I juggled my rubber balls and whirled my hoop for a woman who had just lost her only son. We wouldn’t let her mourn, we were afraid she’d drown.

When my grandfather died, she sat in her rocker receiving visitors, impassive, charming, courteous. She carried his clothes to the funeral parlor - underwear, shirt, tie, his best suit, socks but no shoes - and she went in by herself. The only time I ever saw her cry was when our dog, Judy, ate rat poison, and she pulled her apron to her face and sobbed the tears she couldn’t , so deep was the discipline, shed for people.

Remembering my grandmother, I place her in a chair near the window with a newspaper, which she is reading with a magnifying glass; in her lap As usual, her shoe is untied and, too plump to bend, she has just asked me to tie it for her. Then I sit in the chair opposite, and while the room grows dim ( “What are you two doing sitting in the dark?” someone will say eventually, pulling the chain on the Pairpoint lamp), we watch the passersby and she tells me stories; about them, about their families, about herself. Sometimes her stories are about the town; the ice-skating on Barnyard Lane, the skiff that used to take the Catholics across the bay to church, the rubber factory and its whistle, which, even in my childhood, split the day.

I am stuffed with my grandmother’s stories. I can hardly close the lid on me. When I am home, I walk streets that are thronged with people even when they’re empty.. I can see houses that were torn down before my birth. Our town is not only the place in which I used to live, but a book I am always reading, and which I have never been able to close.

* * *

“Doesn’t that smell remind you of home?” I ask a daughter as we walk toward the river. “Mother,” she says patiently, “this is my home.” I am amazed, not having realized that my children and I live in different places. They visit my home, they even think it is pretty, but they are there on vacation..

Often I am sorry that my home was chosen for me before I had a chance to find my own. The harbor and elms snared me; so did my grandmother’s tongue. Her stories are perilously close to being more real to me than the ones I’ve lived, and I’ve had to run very far to live those at all. Once in a while I dream that I am in my old bedroom, the one I shared with my sister, and that there is no college, no husband, no children, nothing has ever changed. I am mired. The dream is a nightmare, and I wake up relieved to see brick walls rather than red wallpaper, a quilt rather than a spread crocheted by my mother.

But there are other days when, tired, I run for that bedroom as quickly as I ever fled it, grateful that I’ve kept the lease and that it has not run out. They meet me at the railroad station, my mother, a beauty, vexed because my hair is in my face or my skirt seems too long; my aunt, another beauty, asking what I think of her new haircut; my dear uncle, 85, and reaching for the suitcase in my hand. Tonight I will sleep in what mother’s from time immemorial have called “your own little bed.” Tomorrow I will pull up a chair close to my grandmother’s bedrail and she will tell me a story. For 24 hours I will be, once again, the child of the house.