A WOMAN telephoned our house for my grandmother about six months after she abandoned my grandfather at the Sir Walter Hotel. She took the receiver, listened a few minutes, and then said to the person on the other end, “I imagined you would be dead.” She listened a little more and asked, “Did he purge?”
The woman was an old family acquaintance my grandmother had not seen or heard from in years, and was calling to tell her that my grandfather had passed away at her home earlier that day. My grandmother motioned for a pen and paper to be brought to her, and she wrote down the funeral arrangements, such as they were. When she was off the phone, she turned to my mother and said, “Your father died. We need to go to Pasquotank County tomorrow.” She gave no indication of wanting to talk about it further, and went to the stove to make tea.
My mother’s eyes filled quickly, and she dabbed them dry with a dish towel. She said to her mother, “I heard you ask if he purged. Did he?”
My grandmother stopped midway to the sink with the teakettle and looked out the window, out toward the spot where we had seen him standing, and sighed and said, “Yes, he did.”
The fact that he had foamed at the mouth immediately upon dying indicated that he had had a great backjam of wishes and desires and truths that were never spoken. His love for his wife and child and his remorse over having left them were expressed, at the end, in spite of himself. Out bubbled all the words he had swallowed while he was alive. My grandmother put aside everything she knew about the automatic reactions of bodies in order to hear a dead man say that he was sorry.
I said, “Suppose he hadn’t purged?”
My mother spoke for the two of them. “We would’ve sold him to the medical school in Chapel Hill and let them do as they pleased with him.”
The next day the three of us went to Pasquotank County. He was laid out at the home of the friend who had called. Besides the woman, who was wearing a thin dress without a much-needed brassiere, the only person there was my grandfather’s uncle. He was the oldest person I had ever seen. He had lived on the Pasquotank next to my grandparents. My mother acted genuinely happy to see him, but my grandmother ignored him.
When my mother asked her why she couldn’t say just a couple of words to Uncle Otha, she was told, “He does not exist.”
My mother asked, “Still?”
My grandmother said, “Yes. I have not forgotten, and never will.”
Later in the day, I asked my mother about this and was told that the man had once stolen five dollars from my grandmother and then lied about it. “If he had only stolen from her,” she said, “she’d at least act like he was in the room.”
I mentioned how very old he looked. My mother told me he was probably well over a hundred, and although he was repugnant to her mother, she held fond childhood memories of him. She and I were sitting on the back steps of the old woman’s house, sneaking a cigarette together. She said, “He was at Shiloh and loved to tell about it, although the people he told couldn’t bear it because it broke their hearts in a million places. But I thrived on hearing about it, so he talked to me continuously. Listen to this. He took a bullet in the head, and the doctors in the field got it out, cleaned the wound, and then took a silver dollar and mashed it into this thin sliver and put it in the place in his head. Isn’t that wonderful?”
She had always been drawn to horror tales, ghost stories, and real-life accounts of the weird and unusual. Her curious nature and her mother’s profession made this more or less unavoidable. She was going through a phase of addiction to magazines like True Crime and Weird Tales and Startling Adventures, and right before this trip she had come into my room, awakened me, and read aloud a story about Bonnie and Clyde and how they were blown all apart, their limbs and things then preserved and later basted together in some slaphappy fashion. Curiosity-seekers apparently lined up to see all this, and one man who was interviewed said he would’ve readily paid money for the privilege, as would have my mother. She asked me as she did with regard to Uncle Otha’s head, “Isn’t that wonderful?” I said it was not. I said it was gruesome, and I thanked her in advance for my nightmares. She argued that it was an example of the marvelous extremes present in human nature, and thus began an argument that made me too tired to sleep. That is why I let the silver dollar in the man’s head pass as wonderful. I never possessed her stamina for debate.
When we went back inside we saw that four pallbearers and a preacher had arrived, ready to do their business. They all expected to be paid for their services, and my grandmother was expected to pay them. She said she had no intention of doing this, and so she asked my mother to ask Otha if he had any money with him.
My mother said, “Why don’t you ask him yourself?”
My grandmother said, “In my eyes, he does not exist.”
I asked my mother how much money she had, and she asked me the same. Between us we had sixty cents.
My mother looked at the old family friend in her too thin dress and red lipstick, and said, “What about you?”
She said, “I’m broke. He ate up every penny I had.”
My grandmother pointed first to the coffin and then to the woman and said, “You know, if a woman’s husband comes to your house to pleasure himself and then dies, I’d think you could at least split the cost of the arrangements with his widow.”
The old woman pled poverty again, and my grandmother said, “That’s okay. Give me that clock on the mantel, and I’ll give these fellows fifty cents each and the preacher a dollar.” The clock was taken from the mantel and handed to my grandmother in the calm manner of all rituals. She carried it as we walked the short way to the cemetery. I still can see her walking along the narrow path through the meadow, holding time against her breast like a baby.
My mother asked her what she planned to do with herself now that she was officially a widow. She had asked the question in a lighthearted, teasing manner, but my grandmother didn’t respond in the same spirit.
She said, “What makes you think I’d want a man now? I’d take a poison pill before I’d take a man.” Then she told my mother it was rude and maybe even bad luck to talk nonsense on the way to a grave.
My grandfather wasn’t so much buried as he was put in the ground. After the preacher finished his dollar prayer, he tried to console my grandmother, who told him, “I don’t want to hear it.” The three of us started back across the meadow without saying much of a good-bye to anyone, except that my mother hugged Otha, who told her he expected to be dead before the end of the year.
He was, too. We heard through another phone call from the same old woman. My grandmother said to her again, “I imagined you would be dead.” Then she listened a moment and said, “No, I don’t care to come see him buried. You know he did not exist for me. How many does this make now?” She listened again and said, “You may not think it’s your fault, but you get a man in there with a bad heart and do all these things to him, and there he goes. You’ve been doing this for fifty years, you’d think you’d find one with a dime to leave you. You’re stupider than I thought you were.” She hung up the phone, looked at me, and said, “I’d rather you wash chamber pots the rest of your life than conduct business on your back.”
On the way home from Pasquotank County that afternoon, we passed the path that led through the woods to the home of Maveen’s sister. We turned around and drove down the path, talking all the way of how good it would be to see her. We had not hired a replacement. We had tried, but my grandmother turned candidates away midway through the interviews. When one after another of them was out the door, she would say, “I found her lacking.” After she did this five or six times, my mother gave up and announced that we would cook and clean for ourselves. The three of us cooked and ate like bachelors, and the only real challenge with our laundry was soaking blood out of garments.
Maveen’s sister let us in. She didn’t greet us as much as grab and pull us through the long hall, saying, “I should’ve sent for you. I should’ve.” When she opened the door to Maveen’s tiny room, we saw the reason she was so alarmed. The room reeked of vomit. Maveen was asleep on her side, facing us, her mouth white-rimmed with bicarbonate. She looked to weigh sixty pounds. She had been a large, strong woman, raw-boned. My mother asked what was wrong with her, and her sister said, “She screamed for two weeks and then slacked off, and now something’s in her eating all her food, at least what doesn’t come back up. Whatever it is won’t let her have enough to eat. They say it’s tapeworm indigestion.”
My grandmother asked, “Who is they?”
Maveen’s sister said, “Mr. Roosevelt’s crowd.” By this, she meant one of the public health clinics that had been established in county seats.
My grandmother went over, leaned down, and gently ran her hands over Maveen’s stomach, palpating her as best she could through three layers of calico. Then she laid a hand on her forehead, frowning all the while, and when she stood up she said she would be back the next morning. She told Maveen’s sister to stop giving her bicarbonate or solid food and to strip her down and rub her with alcohol every three hours. My grandmother left quickly, my mother and I following at a trot. If we had not been able to keep pace with her, I believe, we would’ve been left. My grandmother was thoroughly preoccupied. As soon as the car doors shut, she told us that Maveen had cancer and would be dead in six weeks. She would starve to death.
We asked my grandmother what she intended to do. She told us she was going to ask the real doctor, the one whose career she had spared, to admit Maveen to the hospital, where she could be more comfortable. When we got back home, my grandmother went right in and called him at his house. She answered his questions calmly at first: “She’s seventy. She’s lost probably a hundred pounds. Distended abdomen. Temperature of a hundred and three or thereabout. No, no sign of pain now, but I’m sure there’s intestinal paralysis. I’m worried about rupture. She’s got to be hospitalized right now.” When she disagreed with his response, she tried not to shout. She spoke in a high, thin voice. “I don’t believe it! It would take nothing for you to do this. You’d better watch out! Soon I might not be the only one around here practicing without a license.”
She slammed the phone down, plopped down at the kitchen table, and mimicked him. “The only thing that goes wrong below an old colored woman’s waist is fibroids. That, and too much grease. Let’s keep on with the bicarbonate.”
We went back to Maveen’s house the next morning. I remember packing a snack of graham crackers and apple butter and putting a copy of The Mill on the Floss in the bag to read if I had any spare time. As it turned out, I had no time to read, and afterward I associated the book so much with Maveen that I could never bear to finish it. When I walked into her room with my grandmother I was startled to see her completely naked body. She lay curled like a baby with her arms up over her head, a bad-luck sleeping position that means a person is calling trouble. In spite of the breeze from the fan, she looked buttered, glistening with sweat. My grandmother checked for dehydration, which was present, and then slipped a thermometer underneath Maveen’s arm, and when she read it, she whispered, “Why she’s not dead is a mystery.” Then she told us we were all going to stay there as long as it took. I asked her how long she thought that might be. She unclipped the railroad watch from her bosom and said, “It’s ten o’clock now. Mercy will take her by suppertime.” My mother led Maveen’s sister, dazed and staggering, from the room.
Maveen held on until nine o’clock that evening. My mother kept her sister in the yard most of the time. I could see them through the bedroom window. My mother had pulled two metal chairs close together, and though I couldn’t hear anything, I could see that the sister held a Bible in her lap. Her head was nodding in rhythm to the verses. Under different circumstances my mother would’ve nitpicked discrepancies and rolled her eyes over the miracles, but on this afternoon she nodded along with Maveen’s sister. I stayed inside with my grandmother in the dying light of that old woman’s dying day. My grandmother held one of Maveen’s hands, and I held the other. She slipped away from us in a manner that I almost want to call graceful, and she purged, not much but some. I put my head on the foot of the bed and cried until the lingering odor of vomit in the sheets made it impossible for me to breathe.
I felt my grandmother’s hand on my back. I asked her, “What do you think she meant to say? What do you think were her secret wishes and desires?”
As she covered the body and reached over to stop the clock on the nightstand, and moved about the room, hanging towels on mirrors and glasses, making all her death rounds, she said, “I’m not sure, but it could’ve been something having to do with a certain useless doctor. I’m thoroughly disgusted. He’s blinded one and helped starve another, and that’s just the two I know about.”
When we left that evening, my grandmother directed my mother to drive to Anderson Heights, a neighborhood of grand houses and fine lawns. In these homes lived Raleigh’s chief doctors and lawyers and a dying breed of Southerner, white people who seemed to earn a living automatically. She gave me a street address, and she would not listen to my mother’s protests that she couldn’t go to anybody’s house this late in the evening. My mother asked into the rearview mirror, “What do you want me to do?” She said, “Keep driving. The hour does not faze me.” We drove through what felt like a true maze of affluence before we found the right house. My mother and I sat in the car and listened to the radio while my grandmother went up to the house. A butler let her in. I remember my mother’s saying, “Remarkable. Truly remarkable. People are hungry three miles from here. A butler. Remarkable.” My grandmother stayed in the house about fifteen minutes, and when she returned, all she said was, “I took care of the situation for certain this time.”
The next week my mother brought a newspaper article to my attention. She pointed to a picture of a fine-looking gentleman and said, “Isn’t that him?”
I said it was. It was the real doctor, and the world, I’m sure, was shocked to learn of his early retirement. My grandmother came in the kitchen and looked over my shoulder at the article.
“What do you think about this?” I asked.
She said, “I think I should have taken him off the streets a long time ago.” Then she took down her mortar and pestle, mashed two cloves of garlic, spread the paste on toast, and ate it without blinking.
One morning my mother asked why I wasn’t dressed for school. I reminded her that it was the end of a grading period, and students with high averages were allowed to skip the reading day before examinations. She suggested that we go to the movies. She wanted to see Gone WiththeWind. Because of the movie’s grand popularity, the theater stayed so packed in the evenings and on the weekends that a weekday afternoon was the only time she believed we could find three seats together. My grandmother went even though she had disliked the novel and thought the movie could only be worse. My mother and I didn’t really care, as we would watch anything all the way through and see it again if it stayed in town long enough. My grandmother would not. If she didn’t like a picture, she would get up and leave without a word, and if she had suffered through no more than thirty minutes of the movie she would request, and receive, a refund. She’d sit in the lobby and read until we came out, and if we asked her why she had left, she’d say, “It was stupid” or “I didn’t believe any of it.”
The only time she ever implored us to leave a movie with her was that afternoon. She leaned forward in the darkness and whispered, “Come on. I’m not going to let you watch this.” I mouthed, “Why?” She said, “It’s hideous. You’ll walk out retarded. Come on.”
My mother wouldn’t budge. I got up because I didn’t like the thought of my grandmother alone in the lobby for two and a half hours. She had forgotten to pack a book in her satchel, so we walked down to the bookseller’s and bought The Yearling at the clerk’s urging. We walked around a bit and then went back to the theater lobby and read it together. I remember her asking me, “Do you think this is maudlin?” I told her I did not. She considered my opinion a moment, grunted, and started back on the page. After a few minutes, she handed the book to me and said, “You take it. I can’t stand it. Not enough happens.” She got up and said she was going next door to the drugstore to buy a newspaper, and while she was gone I wondered at all her complexities and inconsistencies, how she could walk out on a movie in which everything in the world occurs, and then dismiss a novel on the grounds that not enough happens.
When my mother emerged squinting from the theater, she was not alone. She had a man with her. He was of ordinary height and weight, but unlike the other men in town, who hadn’t been able to buy a new stitch of clothing since 1928, he was dressed in sharply pleated gabardine pants, a tweed jacket, a stylish tie, and excellent cordovan loafers. He walked right up to us with my mother and put out his hand as she introduced him. “This is Mr. Richard Baines,” she said. “We met during intermission. Where were you two?”
Shaking this man’s hand, I told my mother we had been down to the bookseller’s and must have missed her then. He shook my grandmother’s hand. She looked at him hard enough for him to understand that a quick explanation was in order. He told us that he was new in town, and that after a nice chat with my mother during intermission she was gracious enough to consent to sit with him for the remainder of the picture. He looked and sounded as if he already adored my mother, right down to the ground. My grandmother glared at her, and had she reached over and twisted her earlobe my mother could not have felt any more chastised. I stood there and made small talk with him and my mother for a moment, and then suddenly my grandmother blurted, “Well, Mr. Baines, it was nice to have met you.” We were out of the theater in no time.
All the way to the car and all the way home, my grandmother and mother fought as I had never seen them fight before. They fixed their theme early and stuck to it: There is a man lurking. What are we going to do about it? My grandmother said mainly that my mother didn’t need a man, that she had been happier without one and would remain happy that way. My mother responded with variations of, “What makes you so sure? Haven’t you been looking at me close enough to tell I’m actually lonely?”
She was showing signs of loneliness. She had recently begun the process of resigning herself to the slide from beautiful lady to handsome older woman, adjusting her lipstick color from fire-engine red to brick, exchanging bright beads for pearls and stylish platform soles for pumps. And by “process,” I mean just that; she had not fully committed her body to middle age yet. There were still her stockings with the perfect seams that she knew exactly how to reach down and adjust in a restaurant, making all the men’s heads swivel in such a way that their wives must have said to themselves, “She’s not sixteen anymore. How does she do that?” There were her cheekbones, high as they could be without disappearing into her eyes. The shadowy hollow of her cheeks gave her a slightly hungry look, and of all the things she gave me, even the bright beads that I would exchange for her pearls in the coming of my own middle age, I was always most grateful for the cheekbones. There were other signs, seen not so much in her appearance as in her behavior. She hid herself in her room and read romantic stories too much, listened to the radio too much, busied herself with volunteer work too much, blowing arguments with co-workers out of proportion so she would have something to fix her mind on for a day or two. And when I changed her sheets each Monday morning I saw the indisputable evidence of her rising loneliness. She had started going to bed with her makeup on, and then smearing the pillowcase with mascara cried off during the night. Although I had always believed my grandmother to possess the ability to see into, beyond, and through the human heart, she had not seen my mother’s loneliness emerging. Even as quietly and slightly as it came, I thought she would have seen it.
My grandmother shouted, “You could’ve had Charles Nutter when he was offered to you. Now look! You’re thirty-five years old. Haven’t you learned anything?”
My mother wouldn’t answer, even though she was probably about to explode with the reply that Charles Nutter hadn’t wanted a child bride. She knew my grandmother meant hadn’t she learned anything in regard to men and how they would, at best, take advantage of her or, at worst, leave her.
My grandmother said, “Well, if you won’t answer that, would you mind at least telling me what he does for a living?”
My mother said she didn’t know. He hadn’t mentioned it to her.
Under her breath, my grandmother said, “Must not be much.” She turned her body toward the window, letting us know the conversation was closed.
My grandmother believed our household was fine as it was. If there was heavy lifting to be done, the three of us did it together. If a picture needed hanging, we tapped the wall to listen for the stud and then drove the nail in with an admirable economy of hits. If anything mechanical broke, for instance the mantel clock from Pasquotank County, we took it apart on the kitchen table and spent the afternoon putting it back together. So my grandmother was of the opinion that not only would a man be a threat, he would be an intrusion, wholly unnecessary.
The fact that my mother was moving so steadily toward middle age meant that my grandmother would soon have a grand companion, one more like herself. If my grandmother could’ve populated the world, all the people would’ve been women, and they all would’ve been just like her. And if she had been able to attach a rope to my mother and pull her through time, she would’ve happily greeted her somewhere on the other side of fifty. My mother, she probably thought, would be adequate compensation for her lost sister. But instead my mother was eyeing another man, and that meant she would want to remain youthful. She would no doubt visit the Elizabeth Arden counter to learn how to accentuate those cheekbones. She would buy ultra violet lipstick, a new panty girdle, satin pumps, and an Omar Kiam cocktail dress. The problem, though, was that my mother resisted any sort of tugging. She had the will sufficient to go her own way, which is what she did. When we got home that evening, she went straight for the telephone, took it with her into the coat closet, and shut the door. My grandmother sat and stared at the closet door, frowning. After my mother came back out, my grandmother asked, “When’s he coming?”
My mother said, “Tomorrow night, if that’s okay with everybody. If not, I’m sorry.” Then she went to her room and left my grandmother and me alone in the living room. My grandmother jerked the radio on, turned the dial through every station, and jerked it off. Then she announced she was going to sleep, and suggested I do the same. I didn’t. I sat up into the wee hours of the morning and finished The Yearling. When I finally went to bed, I saw that her light was still on, so I pushed open the door and was almost knocked down by the odor of Vicks VapoRub, which she always put in a noisy hot-water vaporizer and smeared underneath her nostrils when she sensed that air wasn’t moving freely in and out of her system. She sat up in bed and asked me why I wasn’t asleep. I told her I had finished the novel, and I wanted to report that something did indeed happen in it.
Before I could say anything else, she interrupted me. “I know,” she said. “The deer dies.”
I asked how she knew. She said, “I could see it coming. The problem was that not enough happened while she was getting there. Go to bed.”
My mother woke up early and started organizing herself to get to town when the stores opened. She returned a few hours later with an astonishing Alice blue silk dress. We barely had dinner ready on time, unaccustomed as we were to preparing a full-course meal. My mother all but took over the kitchen, seeming with her new joy to be everywhere at once. My grandmother’s only comment was, “You need a traffic cop in here. If you were cooking blind you could not have made a bigger mess.” Her refusal to help didn’t surprise me, and when she was called late in the afternoon to deliver the sixth baby of a very obnoxious Christian Scientist lady who had yet to pay her for the first five, she didn’t grumble. She left quickly.
Mr. Baines arrived on time and with flowers and chocolate-covered cherries. If he had been any more charming, I doubt I would’ve trusted him. My job was to greet him and then entertain him in the living room, and then when he had had just enough time to wonder where in the world that handsome woman could be, my mother would enter. I chatted with Mr. Baines about my career plans, which I exaggerated so much that when I finished talking to him I was greatly enthused about all the opportunities in the field of medicine. He said a few things about his job, where he had gone to school, things like that. My mother must have been waiting to hear a lapse in our conversation. She walked into the room, and he stood to meet her. She held out a hand and said without speaking, “I’m what you have lived your whole life to get to. I’m why you were born. You are one lucky man.”
He was shaken to the point that when he stood to greet her he had to press the tips of his fingers on the arm of his chair for balance. My mother asked him if he was being looked after, and once he had swallowed the lump in his throat, he said that he was indeed. Then he sat down, or rather his knees unlocked and down he went. My mother displayed herself on the sofa across the room from him so he could get a glorious, full-length vision of her, and from the way he squeezed the arm of the chair, it seemed almost more than he could bear. I think that had he known she was reading To Have and Have Not at the time and considered it anything but scandalous, he would’ve been too amazed to speak. And furthermore, if he had seen her race into a stranger’s house, hike her dress up, and sit on a moaning husband’s chest to hold him still while my grandmother worked on what they called a butcher-knife accident, he would’ve considered my mother more than he could handle, and he would’ve run from our house. If he had seen her confronting my school librarian over the decision to pull Sinclair Lewis novels off the shelves, and winning, he would’ve wondered whether he was up to the challenge. As it was, he could barely deal with her outward appearance, shimmering as she was in her Alice blue silk.
She said, “Mr. Baines, I thought I heard you say you went to college in Atlanta.”
He cleared his throat and said, “Yes, I went to law school there, and then I lived there until a couple of years ago, when my wife and I divorced. I moved to Charlotte, then here.”
I looked at my mother. She took the part about law school in admirably. I watched the great dial in her head rotate, passing things she wanted to ask, such as how much money did he make, was there family money involved, did he defend poor colored people for free or had he grown out of that, all questions of this nature. Instead, she cocked her head and looked at him and said nothing. He stared back. I thought that after a minute or so of looking at each other, one of them would’ve grown embarrassed enough to stop, but they didn’t. I was the only one made uncomfortable by all this staring, so I got up and put dinner on the table. By the time they came to the dining room they had passed through the earliest, awkward stage of their love, and now they were asking questions of each other with the rapidity of a school spelling match. In a very short while they gathered all the basic information. By the time they sat down at the table, they seemed more than content, thrilled actually, to have discovered that they were just alike, and so they went back to gazing at each other. I considered saying I wasn’t hungry, excusing myself to my room, but I wanted to watch this. And hear it. I wanted to hear my mother laugh the way she was meant to, and I wanted to see her blush, as she did repeatedly. There had never been a meal like this at our table. My mother’s soul was fed as well as her body, and that sufficed to keep the two bound together, as they were supposed to be.
Mr. Baines stayed until nearly midnight, and had my grandmother been hiding in the bushes, waiting for his car to leave, she could not have timed her return any better. She came in as we were cleaning up the dishes. She was blood-spattered, and she was holding on to her right shoulder, which she tended to pull during forceps deliveries. Her left hip was also bothering her—another delivery injury she had received as a consequence of a woman’s suddenly drawing back her knees, catching my grandmother underneath her armpits, and driving her across the room, where she landed on a child’s wagon. My mother mixed a deep-heating compound and had my grandmother undress to her slip so she could massage it in. Nobody said anything about Mr. Baines. Instead, my grandmother filled that midnight hour with grousing about the self-righteous Christian Scientist husband who tripped and fell into the floor fan while his wife was in the final stage of labor. He refused my grandmother’s help, so she told him, “Okay, bleed to death. That’d be the true blasphemy.” After the baby was born, or rather, wrenched out of this woman, the husband consented to my grandmother’s suggestion that she apply the resin of Saint-John’s-wort to his cut. She told him the resin sprang from John the Baptist’s blood when he was beheaded, which, according to legend, it did. Then she tended to the baby, ignoring the fact that the mother was ignoring the fact that a great deal of money was owed for those first five.
My grandmother thanked my mother for soothing her shoulder, and got up to pour a brandy. She stood there, smelling highly of peppermint camphor, threw back her brandy, and then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, like a cowboy at the end of the bar. She put the glass in the sink and said, “I’m flabbergasted. Damn a Christian Scientist.” Then she headed off to bed. My mother couldn’t stand it any longer, so she called after her, “Mother! Aren’t you going to ask how dinner went?” Still walking down the hall, my grandmother shouted back, “No. I know how it went. When’s he coming again?” My mother yelled, “Saturday!” just as my grandmother shut her door and limped across the room to her vaporizer. She must have hoped that by plugging it in she could drown out Christian Scientists, the neighbor’s howling dogs, and Mr. Baines’s tumultuous wee-hour dreams of my mother.
