IN MY LAST YEARS AS A HIGH-SCHOOL STUDENT, I more or less lived with my Grandmother.
My father became a ghost, after the divorce. He wandered halls now haunted by missing picture frames and a distinct lack of decor. His humour deflated and his writing dried up. His speech, once filled with puns and non sequiturs that spilled into amusing stories, now tapered off into oblivion before his sentences could conclude, as if his thoughts weren’t worth the effort of voicing.
My mother, though, seemed better. I saw her less often, but when I did, she was smiling. She also seemed to have a better relationship with my Grandmother, her ex-mother-in-law, after the divorce. She made special visits, and always brought food—store-bought Danish sugar cookies in a tin, homemade minestrone, melting ice creams from the shop thirty minutes away. My mother and my Grandmother would sit side-by-side at the kitchen table, their heads tilted in amicable conversation, cookies forgotten on a plate between them.
I skulked into my Grandmother’s house, threw my duffel bags full of CDs and clothes onto the bed that I had long before come to think of as my own. I smuggled posters into her home adorned with pentagrams and men in black eyeliner and slathered them atop her inoffensive wallpaper. My Grandmother never commented on the posters, but with every return visit her walls were once again tastefully stripped clean. I took this intrusion as a challenge, amping up their obscenities every time my father ditched me there.
I didn’t leave my room when my mother arrived. I watched her silver Chrysler roll up from the window, and saw her emerge in pinstripe suits and pleated skirts. New job, probably. Not that I cared.
After each of my mother’s visits, I would slink from my bedroom, and walk to the front door. I was unconscious of the act until my Grandmother smacked my wrist with a spoon.
“Bloody waste,” she snapped. “And I won’t abide it. You, whipped dog, staring at the door handle, tail between your legs, whimpering. Oh, don’t you snarl.”
I folded my lips over my teeth and backed towards my bedroom, but she shook her head, angrier than I’d ever seen. She wielded her wooden spoon like a fencing épée and advanced.
“Get outside, catch some butterflies, pick a berry, or help me mow the lawn, I don’t want your shit any more than his and you have even less reason, she’s coming to see you, you know.”
My Grandmother snarled in run-on sentences, something I’d never seen before. I shrank under her tidal wave of words. Enough sank in for me to feel some shame.
“Come on,” she said, grabbing a fistful of my black T-shirt. “We’re building a damn birdhouse.”
And we spent a strangely relaxing evening, doing just that.
When my mother next came to visit, I sat at the table with her and my Grandmother. She probably asked all the questions parents are supposed to ask, but I don’t remember. I just remember her smiling at me.
My Grandmother gave her a tour of the birdhouse we’d built together (which no birds had moved into), of the lawn that I’d mown (made more enjoyable by a riding lawn mower), and of my sorry attempts at a tree fort (a wooden pallet, roped to a tree branch). My mother marveled at each as if I’d single-handedly constructed the Taj Mahal.
At the last stop on our tour, my Grandmother threw her withered hands in the air, an act of mock incredulity, and said, “Oh cut the shit, Cynthy. It’s not very good, Christ. A piece of wood in a tree.” Then she stumped back into the house, leaving the two of us alone.
My mother didn’t look at me. She looked up. And without a word, she kicked off her high heels and left them abandoned in the grass as she began to climb. I followed, slowly, mutely.
The world around was painted yellow and gold, constructed of paper and wood. Fat leaves drifted down to the already crunchy forest floor. And we sat atop my stupid tree fort pallet, me in a black hoody, my mother in business dress.
I held my mother’s hand as we walked back to the house—something I hadn’t done since I was a child. My Grandmother sat outside of the front door, asleep on her rocking chair, her distillery bubbling away beside her. On the porch table sat three cold mugs of herbal tea and a plate of my mother’s store-bought cookies.