At Agnes’s house there is a picture of a tree which is not a picture but which is more a raised surface, a topography of a tree, made with quilled paper leaves, tightly coiled and glued to the wooden surface, in yellow and orange and gold, and there is a thick, knotted trunk in brown and gray quilled swirls, interlocking, and the tree stretches its limbs out toward a series of clouds, and in the clouds are various names, and so the tree of her family is recorded in a kind of white calligraphy in the margins of the frame. She is, she tells me, a daughter of the revolution.
I would like to draw such a tree for myself, but we do not know all the clouds to fill in. Honey, no one knows much about your dad’s people, she says. Agnes remembers a few things about my mom-mom and her husband, and that is about it. She knows nothing about any other of the people we come from. They are all dead or gone.
Agnes has many children and grandchildren. The youngest grandchildren are my brother’s age, and they are also responsible for lots of sack-tossing of me over the years. I like them because they are fancier than us. Their father works for an oil company and they have a nicer home and nicer things, and the girl looks more properly like a girl from TV and the boy looks like a boy who will go to college, and later does.
They ask after my brother. I have no information. Everyone in Agnes’s family calls my brother by his first name and his middle name, which I know he hates because his middle name is my dad’s first name. It is also part of my own name. There are a few too many namesakes.
While I stay with Agnes, everyone comes to see me on the weekends and keep me company. Or perhaps they come to protect her from my famous tantrums. I am mostly tantrum-free with Agnes, but that is in part due to the shaming on the part of her older grandkids. They shame me, and then are very nice! Shame then niceness! Sometimes they boil me an egg and remove the yolk, which I do not like, though I like the rubbery white. This is an act of shortchanging my tantrum by just doing the thing that I want while shaming me for wanting something difficult! I learn this important lesson that getting something you want is never free of shame!
Sometimes, these grandchildren color a picture with me, but they like me not to press so hard on the crayons. Why do you make it so dark? It looks better when you color it in lightly. I like it dark, I think it looks better when the thick layer of wax on the page makes the colors shine. They are dark and darkly lined, and therefore each part is distinct. I like this better, even though it is messy and sometimes tears the paper. What do I care?
Sometimes, they put my hair in hot rollers, which almost any child in the world would mind, but I do not, because I am already seeking a kind of more contemporary beauty in the form of little matching shorty outfits and jelly sandals and long loose waves of elegant hair. Farewell to homemade rompers!