I found it when I was cleaning out my grandmother’s cedar chest, a small lock of hair, one curl, tucked into the pages of John’s first epistle. I’d been looking for a bundle of old newspapers that my grandmother wanted me to see, but once I discovered the hair, I forgot about the papers. I knew whose hair this was. I recognized the yellow, almost golden color, my grandmother had once described. It was Cecily’s hair. Cecily, whose name had long ago been erased from the family tree.
The cedar chest stood in what was once my grandparents’ bedroom. For most of my life, they had lived on the lower level of my parents’ house, in three adjoining rooms. I used to sit on their shag carpet floor and watch television or hold my grandmother’s hand and talk, each of us sunk into their old striped couch, shoulders touching. I thought I’d seen everything they owned in the long years of growing up. I thought, during the days we packed Grandma and Grandpa for the nursing home, I’d seen everything in the cedar chest.
I put the lid of the cedar chest down. A thin layer of dust lined the top, like the new, thin layer of silence that had filled the house since Grandma and Grandpa had left; like the old layer of silence, long undisturbed, that I had just discovered.
Cecily. Spitfire. Flame. Turner. “She turned,” Grandma had said once, “like milk.”
Grandma was waiting for me in the nursing home lobby. She sat on the blue flowered couch, feet crossed at her ankles, hands folded. She stared at the floor, and she didn’t move unless she saw a blur of feet pass by, then she squinted at the passing shape. Her hair, newly permed and carefully arranged, covered her growing bald spot. She looked thin, and the wheelchair placed strategically within reach was a sure sign that she was feeling weak today, unable to use her walker. Yet when she took my hand, her grip was strong.
“Did you find them?” she asked. There was a story behind the newspapers that she wanted to tell me so that I could include it in the family history we were compiling.
“No, but I found something else I want to talk about.”
I pulled a plastic baggy from my purse and laid it gently in Grandma’s hands. Grandma pressed the plastic flat to see, then pulled the hair out and ran it between her fingers.
“I was surprised to find this,” I said.
Grandma squinted at the hair, bent over it.
“I’d like to write about her,” I said.
“No, not her.”
“But she’s-”
“She’s nothing,” Grandma said. She closed her hand around the curl of hair, tugged at her wheelchair with the other. “Cecily is not family.”
I avoided her gaze. In the lobby, the other scattered stuffed chairs were empty. Grandma swatted at my hand.
“Push me to the window,” she said. “I’ll watch you leave.”
Surprised, I took her by the arm, lowered her gently into the wheelchair. Grandma still had Cecily’s hair, and I worried about what she would do with it, maybe flush it, but I didn’t have the courage to ask. I pushed her to the window.
“I love you,” I said, uncertain what my sudden dismissal might mean.
She tilted her head up to look at me and smiled. “Leave Cecily out,” she said.
I gave her a kiss on the cheek and said nothing. I waited for the doors to open, marched out into the frigid air. It was late January, cold enough in Minnesota that I should have hurried to my car. Instead, I turned and looked back at her. She was holding that curl of hair up to the light.
Cecily Manning Morris Huffner Bowes. The fifth of nine children, squashed between Jocelyn and Edward, both of whom died of diphtheria. Born in 1909, died in 1953. Left no will.
“That,” my grandmother once said, “is a crock. She left plenty of will behind, just not the kind they were looking for.”
Grandma talked about Cecily on rare occasions, on days when I traipsed home from school in thick snow, and dark came early, and we sat at the kitchen table reviewing the day. Maybe after a glass of wine, when Grandpa started telling stories, and Grandma would insist he had them wrong, and the stories got lost temporarily in the debate. Sometimes then, amidst the chaos, Cecily came through in a line.
I knew that Cecily had sinned, but I didn’t know what could drive her apart from the family, make her what she had become, a whisper, a sideways glance, an interrupted line, never recovered. Didn’t she deserve a sentence or two in the family history? Everyone got at least a line. Each lady also got a square.
In my parents’ basement, packed carefully into cardboard boxes with the baby clothes my mother hopes to pass on, is the women’s patchwork quilt. Each generation adds a row, or at least a square. My grandmother’s square is now pale yellow. It’s plain save for the careful red stitching that makes her name. Catherine Andersen.
The plainness of her square is striking in a patchwork quilt of names and symbols, favorite colors and long quotes. Whitman. Roosevelt. The Bible. Her name is all she needed to record. I was here, it seems to say, once a long time ago, and I was called Catherine.
I am Sarah, and I will not sew my name for years. I won’t sew my name until I know who I am, can script with such confidence the identity I struggle to define, until I know, as easily, and with such simplicity, the way to be remembered.
Cecily knew. In the second to last row of the quilt is her square, all her names in succession, each one stitched in a different color.
How she had added hers, I’ll never know. By the time she had accumulated all those names, she was already persona non grata. But if anyone could get something done, it had to be Cecily.
Cecily, I was told, flipped her long, gold hair once too often. Cecily liked to watch football games with Grandpa, smoking cigarettes one after the other. She went through men just as fast, Grandma said. Cecily used to waltz into Grandma’s house, swinging that hair, swinging those slim little hips. She had all the curves in all the right places and liked to show them off, to twist around on the sidewalk to see who might be watching her, to sashay into one of Grandpa’s card games or football parties and take a seat.
After all the buildup, I’d expected more. A bank robber, a witch. But what I got was a sassy woman who had had no luck in love. Nothing about Cecily seemed shocking. After all, I lived with my boyfriend, Al. I didn’t think she should have been run out of the family will, erased from the family tree. I thought she deserved a round of applause for persistence. And though I wasn’t supposed to, I surreptitiously began to write Cecily into the family stories, giving her entire sections all her own because no one, it seemed, would share a story with her.
At first, writing the family stories was a blessing. Writing them down gave me a break from the endless, seemingly hopeless, task of e-mailing resumes and calling contacts. Hello, I’m Sarah MacMillan, and I recently left Pillsbury. Chose to leave Pillsbury. Told my boss he was irresponsible and stormed out the door of Pillsbury. Punched the doughboy and ran. Hello, I’m Sarah MacMillan, and my savings are almost gone. The family stories became a lifeline, something else for me to think about, something more for Grandma than routine.
I’d looked for work the first week of January, but in the second, I pushed away my draft resumes and picked up a pen. The words came easily, like water, and I turned the page. I wrote one morning, then the next, and my job search slipped quietly into its own dark grave. I didn’t ask myself why I was writing, or for whom, or for how long. I simply let the pages fill. I ate Cap’n Crunch. I paced the house with my cat, Alber, in step, and together we etched the family history into something tangible. We wrote it down, each step a story, each story a life.
Grandma spent hours with my first stories. She settled in the lobby by the largest window she could find. She held each page in one hand, out to the light like a gift, and slowly passed her heavy magnifying glass over each word. Grandma asked for larger type, and I returned with the font so large that I felt like I’d written things on a billboard. For days, Grandma read as if possessed. The speed with which she read, for a woman who is legally blind, should have warned me. It didn’t.
“The Cartwright women did not have big fannies,” Grandma said, after finishing the first stories.
As a descendant of the Cartwrights herself, I thought this was going to be hard to contest.
“We have round fannies,” she said. “Not big. Round.”
This was her single comment.
Every story had five versions. She wanted hers.
After Grandma’s reaction to my first stories, I drove out to see Mom. January was slipping past, February loomed, and Grandma wanted more stories. I only had part of Cecily’s. I needed advice.
Cecily wasn’t easy to write about. The pictures of her that remained were few, black and white, and hard to see. Beautiful wavy hair, long. She was almost always smiling, almost always smoking. Her handwriting, in the few letters Grandma had saved, was thin, tight and scrunched. “Dear Cath,” her early letters began. And then a later one, written from St. Louis late in 1948, which began, “Catherine.” Other than the quilt, the curl, and the photos, that was all of Cecily that remained.
Mom met me at the door in jeans and a maroon sweater, long hair pulled back in a braid, her gray streak twisting down her back. At the old yellow kitchen table, bare in spots where the paint had chipped, my mother finished the sentences Grandma used to break off.
When Mom was little, Cecily had swept through the door one night like she belonged, grabbed a bottle of beer from the refrigerator, and walked into the living room. Mom had followed her, lingering in the door, waiting for her hello. Cecily said nothing to Mom or Grandma, but she said a hello to each of the men in turn. Hello, Sammy. Joe. Ed. Then she took her seat at the card table, on Grandpa’s lap.
Grandpa tried to laugh her off. The other men laughed, too, and Mom laughed. Grandma didn’t. She marched into the living room with a bowl of peanuts and set the bowl down hard. Cecily stayed right where she was, sipping her beer, laughing. Grandma offered Cecily a chair, and Cecily said no thanks, she didn’t need one. Grandpa tried to shoo her off. There was a silence then. One of the other men coughed; another lit a cigarette, and Mom remembered that cigarette, the way the tip glowed when the man sucked in, the way the air seemed to fill, suddenly, with the smell. Then Grandpa pushed so hard, Mom said, that Cecily fell.
Twice more Cecily tried to settle where she should not have settled, at least twice more that Mom knew. The last time, Mom woke to Grandma yelling. She walked into the kitchen. Grandma had Cecily by the hair, and Grandpa was trying to pull them apart. Grandma wouldn’t let go.
“Did they have an affair?” I asked.
“He was so handsome,” Mom said. “He really was. You’ve seen the pictures. He had that confidence that comes with good looks. He walked tall. He laughed easily. To Cecily, I think, he was the one. But he wouldn’t have acted on it. She embarrassed him. I think he was truly ashamed of her.”
“Was Cecily crazy?”
“Maybe. What sane person does that?”
“Were there other letters, after 1948?”
Mom nodded. “She wrote for the rest of her life, but Grandma threw the letters out.”
“Why not tell me all this?”
My mother smiled. “Really? You know your grandmother. She asked me not to, and it seemed okay to me, not to carry that particular ghost through the generations.”
There are turning points, turns of fortune, turns like Cecily’s, when the heart withers and the spirit sours. Suddenly my vision of the family changed. We were not as strong or as solid as I’d thought. We were not a fortress. We never had been. We’d only ever been human, individuals whose foibles were magnified by size.
“Then why does she have a square in the quilt?” I asked.
“Think about the difference between a quilt and a history,” my mother said as I left. “The quilt makes it look like Cecily married all those men.”
I timed my next visit to the nursing home carefully, spotted Grandma in her current events lecture, and sneaked down the hall to Grandpa. He was sitting in bed, gray hair combed away from his forehead, Twins cap on. He was contemplating a chess board.
“What is that?” he asked, pointing at the black king. His hand shook. His finger, knotted with arthritis, curled like a talon.
“It’s the king,” I yelled.
“Oh,” Grandpa said, not hearing.
I lifted the piece, put it into his palm, and rolled it around. “King,” I said again, this time into his ear.
“I’m losing against myself.” He said, then he laughed. “King,” he said and nodded.
“I want to talk to you,” I said, and Grandpa, magically, turned his head toward me. “About Cecily.”
He set the king down. “Move it someplace good for me. Don’t tell me where.”
“Cecily,” I said again, placing the king in a free square, having no idea what the rules of chess allowed.
Grandpa sniffed. He was still looking at his chess board. He squinted, looking for the king. “Can’t do that,” he said, pointing to it.
I sighed, handed back the piece. Not even he would talk about her.
“She rooted for the Packers,” Grandpa said, “just to be contrary.” He held his elbow to steady his arm and plopped the king down on an appropriate square. The board shook. “She was a party girl. You know the type.” Grandpa scrunched up his nose. “Nobody likes a girl like that. Why do you want to know about her?”
“Nobody liked her,” I said, trying to keep my words at a minimum. The fewer my words, the better chance he had of hearing me.
“Nobody liked her,” he agreed. “Except your grandmother.” He laughed. “They were always close, those two. She’d never tell you that, but it was true. Grandma defended Cecily, but the rest of the family. Well.” Grandpa laughed. “Your grandmother never forgave Cecily.”
“Never forgave her for what?”
“Sarah,” he said, “she was a hussy.” He sounded sad, as though he wished Cecily hadn’t been.
“Did you like her?” I asked.
Grandpa didn’t respond. He leaned back and rubbed his eyes. “When I play with your Al, he beats me every damn time,” he said. “ ‘Course he can see. Makes a difference.”
“Did you like Cecily, Grandpa?” I asked, tapping his arm, making him look at me.
Grandpa stared at me blankly. He knew, must have known, what I was asking. “She was a hard girl to like,” he said.
Grandpa readjusted his hat, and I brushed an imaginary hair off his shoulder, just to touch him.
“Tell your Al to sneak in some scotch,” Grandpa said as I left. He patted me on the back, winked, gave me the OK sign with his fingers. “Maybe if he gets drunk, he’ll lose.”
I stopped to look at Grandma in current events. She was sitting in the front row, directly in front of the speaker.
“You do not abandon family,” Grandma had often said during my growing up years, “no matter what.”
But Cecily had abandoned family every time she appeared at a card game. Later she bought a one-way bus ticket to St. Louis. It wasn’t until I talked to Mom that I understood. All the names Cecily took were never hers, just the name of the man of the moment. She was all these and more.
“She was too free,” Grandma had said on one of those rare winter evenings, when she forgot she didn’t want to remember.
But that wasn’t true. Cecily wasn’t free. She had exacted a price. She nearly cost Grandpa a marriage, and she cost herself a family.
At the end of January, Kirsten, my grandparents’ day nurse, had taken to calling me with any problems, since I was the family member most easily reached.
“I’m busy looking for work,” I’d said the first day she’d called, the day I had gotten up at my normal time, dressed for success in my pajamas, and stayed in bed while Al trundled off to teach. Kirsten had ignored me, which was probably just as well.
Soon, though, she began to command me. I better do this, and I better do that.
“You better get over here,” she said after I had dropped off new stories for Grandma, including Cecily’s. “Your grandmother has a few words for you.”
“I can’t come over until later.”
Kirsten took a deep breath. She said, “I am not living with this all day.”
That cemented it.
“I’ll be there at eight,” I said. “p.m.”
Grandma was furious when I arrived. She sat on the blue couch in the lobby and watched who came, who went. She wore her best sweat suit, a teal blue. In her lap lay the family history, the pages neatly tied around the middle with rubber bands.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” she said the minute I swept through the door and she recognized my blur.
“I have not been avoiding you.”
“Yes, you have. Kirsten called you this morning. I know. I was sitting right there.” She punctuated her sentence with jabs in the air.
I sat down in an overstuffed chair opposite the couch. My grandmother squinted at me, and my heart beat faster.
“You wrote about Cecily.” She pulled out a sheaf of pages
and handed them to me.
“What are you doing?”
“Taking her back out.”
I saw the way this could go, the bitterness, the awful words that could fly between us and never be recovered. I had only described Cecily’s childhood, and then Manning; the absence of the marriage everyone expected, and the sudden, unexpected appearance of Morris. A ticket to St. Louis and then nothing. I had let Cecily whisk herself away.
I said, “What do you want to do, write her out after 1948?”
And that was where we left the entire family history, right where it was, in 1948, the year Cecily left as well, calling herself Cecily Morris.
“I don’t want you to change it when I’m gone,” Grandma said, voice trembling.
“I would never do that.”
“You said you would never write about Cecily either, but you did,” Grandma snapped.
“I won’t change the history,” I said.
“You think you know what it was like to have a sister like her back then?” Grandma pursed her lips. “Well, you don’t.”
“I have an idea. I talked to Grandpa. And Mom.”
Grandma stiffened. “That was my business to tell.”
“What does it matter?”
“It matters to me. I don’t want that known. Do you understand?”
“You, who said never to abandon family.”
Grandma stood up slowly, gripping her walker. She lifted her chin. She said, “I am the vine and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he trims clean so that it can be even more fruitful. John 15.”
I knew we had come to a new place, she and I. I had Cecily’s pages in my hand, and I grabbed my coat. I, too, stood. “Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in the darkness. John’s first epistle.”
“Get out.”
I blazed out the door.
“You cannot write what you want. It’s not just your story.” Her voice had a strength then that I had not heard for weeks, a power that made it rise and crack.
Who could lay claim to the past? That was what we were arguing about, who would control the way we were remembered. We had not thought of what we were doing. We had not practiced the kinds of verbal reconciliation that we’d need. That came later, slowly, like the snow that winter.
February rolled in with a storm. The snow came, and it hung in the air like a bad mood. Grandma and I settled into our fight, as stubborn as the cold, as unwilling to budge. Each day, Al carved a path from the back door to the sidewalk, and each day the snow covered it. Each day, I waited for Grandma to call, and she for me, and so we sat, miles apart, stories away, fuming over what was only ever ours to share. The snow trickled down, settling like dust.
I recognized then, in the hushed world of the snowstorm, that I was writing my way to my square of the quilt, taking my slow place among the women I was only then learning to know. Even Grandma herself. I’d never realized before how entirely separate she was from me. I had only ever seen her as my grandmother, and yet when I thought of the quilt, I couldn’t imagine what quote she might have considered, what symbol. A flag? A garden hoe? The sea? I’d lived with her most of my life, but I could never have sewn her square if she had asked.
But she knew how to sew Cecily’s. With the quilt spread before me one afternoon, I noticed for the first time how similar the stitching was on Grandma’s square and on Cecily’s. The shape of the letter “A.” The signature curl to the C. Grandma knew the two names after Morris, knew the way Cecily wanted to be remembered, and only Grandma would have stitched them on, pulled the patchwork that was Cecily into place.
Grandma could have left her out entirely, but one day, she had taken the time to include her. An imperfect remembrance.
That was the easy part to write. The part that was both anger and forgiveness, love and hate.
In mid-February, the snow slowed, and then stopped, and I cleared through it, headlights on. At the nursing home, the nurses had pasted little red hearts on every door, even 129. I paused at the nurse’s station, staring at the string of hearts lining the hallway.
Kirsten put her hands on her hips. “What did you write this time?”
“Nothing incendiary,” I said.
Kirsten looked skeptical, but I knew what was in the envelope. The part about Grandma. I wrote her as I saw her, as a woman, not as a relation. I wrote about her as if I were reporting, and she stepped off the page for me, became something I had never even glimpsed before. Whole.
Kirsten took a deep breath. She said, “You need a job.”
“Will you tell her I’m here?” I wouldn’t go see Grandma until I had a sense of what my reception would be.
Kirsten checked her watch. “Let me give Mortimer his pill.”
I was sitting in the nursing home hallway when the light over 129 flickered, then again, on the board at the empty nurse’s station. I hurried down the hall. Grandma lay in bed, eyes closed. I touched her shoulder, and she didn’t open her eyes, she simply took my hand. That was all she wanted.
When she opened her eyes later, she stared at me for a while. But she held on.
“Who will apologize first?” I asked.
“How dare you quote the Bible to me.” She sat up slowly. “I raised you to have opinions,” she said, “but I did not raise you to disagree with me.”
I laughed.
“I am apologizing first,” she said.
My grandmother read her section while I was there. She tilted her lamp down over the pages, and when her eyes got tired, I read to her. We leaned into each other, shoulder to shoulder, out of habit. I described her first job at the five and dime; described how Cecily, whom she had so often defended, turned on her; described the salvaging of one lock of hair. I said that love had an amazing capacity to endure.
Grandma did not speak for a long time, and when she did, she said little, as though she had run out of words. She said, “You stuck to the facts.”
I nodded.
Grandma looked at me. She picked up my hand, uncannily like hers. “You give me more credit than I deserve.”
I remember a rush of feeling, that sudden relief and sadness, a sadness I had not expected and could not contain. I remember Grandpa, hand out, shaking, reaching for the pages. I remember Grandma opening her dresser drawer and pointing to the curl.
“Do you trust me to keep it?” she asked, and I nodded.
“I trust you, too,” Grandma said. She stared at the clock. “What time is it?” she asked.
“Six o’clock.”
“Time for current events,” she said. I handed her her walker.
“You better write Cecily yourself,” Grandma said. She spoke at the turn, when she would go right, to the rec room and the assembled rows of chairs, and I would go left, to the lobby, to the parking lot, and home.
“What?”
“I don’t want to write anymore.”
“I won’t write this myself.”
My grandmother rattled down the hall with her walker.
“Don’t ever turn your back on me,” I said. My voice carried, and Grandma turned back toward me, her face expressionless. Farther down the hall, I saw a nurse poke her head out of a bedroom, another take a tentative step our way, then pause.
My grandmother raised her hand, palm flat against the air as if she was pushing open a door. Then her hand twisted, moved in the air, like she was waving or tossing something off. The gesture was my benediction.
She said, “You tell them yourself. Tell them all. But do us justice, or I’ll haunt you.” Then she laughed. “I could do it, you know.”
As I watched her go, I nodded, having no doubt that she would haunt me all my life.