I was twelve when I found my grandmother’s body, at the height of summer, when by six in the morning it was already too hot to sleep. By seven I was on my way over, no reason to linger at home, where our rattling air conditioning was little use. Grandma’s house was older and had no air conditioning at all, but somehow it stayed cooler. Also she was old and needed someone to check in on her, keep her company, and I liked her. No one else did.
This was the twentieth century. Grandma was born near the end of the nineteenth, her house built sometime before that. It was tall and pointy, the idea being you could put your servants down in the basement and yourself high above them. (No servants actually ever lived in that house, but people who hoped for servants did.) The exterior cladding held up remarkably well, not having been repaired or cleaned in decades. The tiny lawn was mowed because I mowed it, and the few zombie plants dragging up from garden beds and window boxes were not yellower or angrier than any others nearby. The house stood feet away from the Main Street sidewalk, and if you strolled by and didn’t pause too long or look too close you might think it was a good house, and had solid people living inside.
She had been dead for hours before I found her. I went into the house and thought she must be doing something in the kitchen, banging cabinets, or maybe the little dog was barking, or she was fighting worse than normal with her sister Regina. My senses were confused. The house was, in fact, silent, but I imagined noise because the smell was so loud. Loud, thick enough to feel, and where once there had been a doorway, between the foyer and the living room, there seemed to be a wall of urine and sweat.
I pushed through. She sat in her wingback chair, head tilted to the left, eyes wide, blood crusted around her nostrils. I didn’t scream. I didn’t go to her. I didn’t, for a moment, even get upset, because the dog was there and not upset. He curled on the rug by the cold fireplace. I was afraid, for a second, that he was dead too, but his ribs moved up and down. Up and down.
I went to the kitchen and put kibble in his bowl. I went out to the street and stopped the first person I saw.
~
My grandma was not immediately distinguishable from other grandmas in town. Old and ugly, wrinkled-paper skin on a shrinking frame, gums peeled back from yellow teeth. She still drove her Oldsmobile to Kmart and to church, and she walked across parking lots with impressive and sometimes frightening speed. She counted ten pennies into the collection plate every Sunday. She sometimes drew crumpled dollars out of a velvet drawstring bag to pay for cigarettes and dog food, though never had quite enough and always ended up counting pennies for that too. She blamed cashiers for prices and called their haircuts trashy and their brains demented. Even alive, she always smelled slightly of pee.
In town, she became interesting only because she died, and she didn’t stay interesting for long.
“She’s a bitch,” my dad said, when I was ten, when Grandma still had two years, and the dog’s eyes were clear. He’d gone over to shovel snow off her sidewalk and come back with jaw clenched and face red, peeling off layers and saying bitch bitch bitch, walking between me and The Beverly Hillbillies but apparently taking several minutes to notice I was there. “Don’t ever say that word,” he said to me at last, and Mom from the kitchen called, “I wish you wouldn’t say it either.”
“I have to say it,” he answered. “I have to.”
Dad had four siblings. They all hated their mother and her house, which had never been theirs. She spent their whole childhood threatening to send them to an orphanage, then told them actually they couldn’t even go there because all the orphanages belonged to the church, and they’d been excommunicated for being lousy and rotten. Most winter mornings she went out the back door declaring they would never see her again. She was going to walk through the woods until she was too cold and tired to walk anymore, and then she would lie down in the snow and peacefully die, and that would be better than another day alive with such horrible kids.
Dad was not the oldest, but he was the first to escape. When he was nine, he wrote a story about a dancing bear, and at the kitchen table with a cigarette in one hand and the story in the other Grandma said, “How could you even begin to think this makes sense?”
And how do I know that? Did he ever trust me enough to tell me, and can I swear before God that it happened? No. But I spent enough years around my father to know what would gut him.
Anyway, he decided then that he would never count on, never ask her for anything, and at sixteen he moved north, got a room in somebody’s attic and a job at a lakeside resort, in summer holding out both hands to help rich ladies from their power boats to the docks, in winter insulating pipes and selling bait to ice fishers. He was happy. For almost five years, he was happy and he was free, and he probably should have just gone on not knowing that his brothers had fled to the army and his sisters to marriage, that his mom was alone until her own sister moved in and made things even worse. He shouldn’t have felt even a sliver of pity about his aunt’s cancer, or their subsistence on cigarettes and coffee and Kraft singles, or how nothing made them even a little bit happy except for their stupid and poorly constructed dogs.
He shouldn’t have, but he did. He moved home to help out. He met my sweet mom from her big and joyous family. I was born, and then there could never again be a lake in autumn at ten at night, each ripple reflecting stars and all the boats still.
~
Grandma had softened a little by the time I arrived, and in the chair where she would later die she posed smiling for pictures with me in her lap. For birthdays, she gave me new pennies, one for each of my years, Scotch taped to strips of cardboard. More than once, she came to Mom and Dad’s, loaded me in a stroller and rolled me around the block of newly built, nearly identical ranch houses. When I got old enough to make my own way to Main Street, she always had M&Ms in a plastic bowl on her kitchen counter and let me eat as many as I wanted. From their grandmas, my friends only ever got Werther’s.
She hated everyone, but she liked and maybe even loved me, and I don’t know why. Because I was both hers and not. Because her heart was twisted, and she knew it would wound Dad further to see her giving me the care she’d withheld from him. Because she was old and lonely and tired. Because I was cute and wispy and blond.
I loved her back, and I learned to walk across her hardwood floor. I built kingdoms for my toys on the stairwells, and I felt God in sunbeams and dancing dust. She told me stories as if I was old enough to understand them, and while she was alive I was happy.
~
On the sidewalk, my mother held my hand. A crowd had gathered. People knew there had been two gross old sisters in that house, and it was the other one who was supposed to die. Regina was a decade older, and more than a decade earlier, doctors had told her she had a year to live if she was lucky. Regina was even more cruel than Grandma and gave me no special treatment, and Mom told me to try my very best to be a good Christian, to meet the cruelty with kindness. To remember that sometimes people are mean because they are in pain.
Mom said Regina was mean because of the cancer, even though, as I knew from Dad and Grandma, she’d been mean long before.
Where was she? people murmured. Where was the older one, the sick one? They whispered to each other, wondering and many already deciding that she had killed Grandma and run off. Rat poison, strangulation, a knife in the back. Whispers traveled up and down Main Street, all the way out to the leafy subdivisions and even the trailer homes parked by blacktop roads. Enough people came that children started pulling red wagons and selling ice water for a nickel. Traffic slowed around the coroner’s van.
My teacher from last year, the bartender from down the street, the three lay deacons who sweated through their matching long-sleeved shirts and watched me but did not speak—I thought I knew everyone in town, but a stranger held Grandma’s dog. She had kind eyes and was fat and wore a sundress, blue with white dots. The dog slept in her arms.
Dad had gone inside and come out again, mouth set in a hard line and eyes seeing through all of us gathered there. No comfort for me, no asking if I needed it. No fear that I might be broken, that her death might have cracked me just as her life had cracked him. He didn’t know me. I had never happened.
Mom stepped toward him, reached for him, and he walked right past her. What I saw, some trick of my eyes and the heat and the light, was that he walked through her, as if she were made of air. He continued up the street and vanished in the haze.
~
There must have been a funeral, and either the church was nearly empty because Grandma was terrible, or it was full out the back because of her weird death. There must have been a Christian burial, but I don’t remember that. Which is to say: the memories I have cannot be real. I remember white sky and orange leaves tumbling to the road, still unpaved, between the cemetery and the church. I remember chapped lips and sniffles as Dad threw the first dirt onto the casket of the mother he hated, but I know that when Grandma was buried it was summer still.
She died of an aortic aneurysm. The coroner’s report would have exonerated Regina, if anyone still remembered, but it seemed no one did. Dad looked for her, called the police department and the hospital, even spent one weekend searching the woods with three other local men. Then he stopped. The bartenders, the three lay deacons, all the teachers and doctors that I passed in town stopped looking at me with questions in their eyes. Everyone was on to other things.
~
I continued my morning walks to Grandma’s house, and Mom came with me like a weird shadow. She told me to pick three things, and only three, to keep. We were cleaning, getting the house ready to sell. We were packing boxes carefully and not wasting an inch of space.
Anna Leonard came by most days. Some mornings she was there before us, making tea on Grandma’s stove. Anna Leonard was the stranger in the sundress, the one who kept Grandma’s dog and walked him up Main Street every Saturday, laughing and hugging and drawing everyone she met into long conversations. She knew every affair; every woman who claimed to love a dear friend’s hat even though, in fact, she hated it, every miserable man who dragged his family to church but did not himself believe.
Anna Leonard had lived far out in the country and moved to town that summer. Or else she came from Milwaukee, or even Chicago, but had grown weary of the city. It depended on who you asked (and I never did ask her), but she had in any case fallen in love with our town. She joined and soon ran the county historical society. The day would come, and it wasn’t far off, when the county paid Dad for Grandma’s house. It was a good amount of money, enough to fund the kitchen remodel that Mom had been wanting and, later, four years of liberal arts for me. Anna Leonard lovingly preserved broadsides and curated displays of a plucky little town built on marshland and cleared forest, finding its footing in dairy farming, furniture making, pickle canning. They put a microfiche machine in Grandma’s bedroom, insulated the attic and installed humidity monitors, and moved the town’s archives out of the musty basement in City Hall.
Regina’s room was the historical society office, and for many years Anna Leonard sat at a roll-top desk and typed a newsletter, carried it to a shop half a mile down Main Street to be printed on pale blue paper in spring, yellow in summer, red with festive borders for Christmas. My parents got it in the mail, in exchange for Mom’s annual donation, which Anna Leonard charmed out of her even though they never attended the pie and ice cream socials, never went to meet Miss Dairyfest, never entered Grandma’s house at all after Mom and I finished cleaning. Whenever I was home, I took a newsletter or two from the magazine rack by the couch and brought them back to college. My friends and I sneered at NOTES FROM A LITTLE WHITE TOWN.
~
Regina always said she had cancer because Grandma’s house had poisoned her. The N-House, she called it. She said it stank of n—s. What are n—s, I asked Dad, and he told me it was a bad word that I should not say.
Grandma used another word that also started with n, a word that, in those years and according to my father, was all right to say, but even then it made me feel strange and nervous, and in my mind I marked it out of Grandma’s stories. And this is not to give myself any particular credit—only to suggest that guilty white liberals, like so many other sorts of people, can be formed early.
One day in the last winter of Grandma’s life, I walked over after school, in no great hurry, looking for fragile ice to crack under my boots and saying hi to the hardware store clerk, the bartenders, the auto mechanic. They could have stayed in their shops where it was warm, but they liked coming out on the sidewalk to smoke and watch shadows grow as the sun faded out behind Kmart. I sang church songs to myself and hooked my hand around lampposts and spun.
Dad had already been by Grandma’s, already lit the fire and gone. Regina stared into it and did not turn when I entered. “Little hussy’s here,” she called to Grandma.
From the kitchen, Grandma answered, “I can hear as good as you and you know it. Go to hell.”
“You go to hell.”
The dog shuffled to the foyer to wag his arthritic tail and lick the dirty slush that I’d tracked in. My mouth felt dry, and my stomach churned, never afraid that he would hurt me but perpetually afraid that I would hurt him. I was, in a way, more afraid of him than of Regina, who hid up in her room most of the time. She was dagger-thin and brutally ugly, long teeth, gnarled veins. She gave me a tickly, haunted house feeling, but she was no real threat to me.
I lit the stove and made Swiss Miss. I lit Grandma’s cigarette too, while I had the burner on, and carried it to her at the table. Her hair was stark white, but unlike Regina’s it had not fallen out in clumps, and she let it grow longer than most grandmas and wore it gathered in a bun at the base of her neck. She took slow, thoughtful drags.
The stairs cracked as Regina went up them, perhaps all the way up to haunt the attic, stare out the dormer window. “She thinks she’s still queen of all her fools,” Grandma mumbled.
Long before I was born, Regina had been beautiful. Blond curls, high cheekbones. When she narrowed her bright blue eyes and told you to go to hell you couldn’t quite tell if she was joking or not. Obviously, it was a joke, she would say, if you got upset and cried, and what was wrong with you, that you couldn’t take it.
Most people laughed uncomfortably when she joked about them, and laughed until they could not breathe when she joked about others.
At barn dances and socials, and in the street every Sunday after church, she held court. She joked about everyone, and they stayed and took it. Waiting for her best jokes, which were about Black people, about the people who were not and would not ever be there. Grandma, to fill out the story, repeated the jokes, and sometimes when I was nine, ten, eleven I accidentally laughed, then was quickly mortified. Not because of the racism, but because Grandma scowled and through clenched teeth snapped, “Stop it. Stop laughing. That was her joke, and she was never funny.”
Because Regina hated Black people so much, Grandma kind of liked them, but that didn’t make her less racist. She was racist and mean and I loved her, and I’m trying to explain. To myself, I suppose. No one else is asking. No one was there, no one cares that I was a racist child in a racist town.
I blew onto my hot chocolate, and Grandma tapped ash into a pink plastic tray. “The n—s used to be out on the dairies,” she said. “You didn’t see them at any dances. But you knew they were just outside.”
I had never seen a Black person anywhere, ever in my life. I knew they existed, but they were not in my town or anywhere near. In school I learned that they were mostly in the South, where they had remained after President Lincoln set them free in the Civil War. They were simple people, the teachers explained, and they preferred what was familiar. The flat land and red earth reminded them of Africa. But also, and apparently for no particular reason, they liked living all crowded together in cities. You could find them in Milwaukee, for example, but Milwaukee felt as remote to me as the South, as outer space, even though you could drive there from my town in less than three hours.
In this town, Main Street was old houses and short brick commercial buildings. Grandma could remember—a lot of people, then, were still alive to remember—a time when you could have fired a cannon down Main Street and not hurt or offended anybody, because nobody was there. We had traffic lights, quite a few, by the time I was growing up, but even Dad could remember when the first ones appeared. We had Kmart, three elementary schools, a hospital, and a lot of churches, but it used to be just the one church. You’d walk there and arrive muddy more often than not. The church was not on Main Street, and only Main Street was paved.
The quiet. The cows. Months of bitter cold and drifted snow. As far as I understood, these were things that Black people did not like, and that was why we didn’t have any. To talk to teachers and priests and even most of the grandmas in town you would think we’d never had any, and of course no racism either, because there was no one to be racist about. But my grandma and her sister remembered.
“You go out on Highway V, there was nothing but the Amish and the n—s building the barns and chasing the cows and plowing the fields,” Grandma said. Her eyelids were low, and her lips lingered on her cigarette. Though she had not, in those days, been happy, her stories had a nostalgic glow, and listening to her loosened my grip on things, made me worry a little less. It seemed bad days, and even entire long and bitter lives, could in memory improve, and the memories were what lasted, so what did it matter really, in the end?
You might see them in town, too, Grandma said, buying corn for cows or nails for the barns or liquor for whoever they worked for. But they wouldn’t look at you. Even if, to offend your sister, you walked right up to a young man who’d just tied his horse to a hitching post and said hello (“Hello? Are you deaf? Are you dumb? Hello!”) they all kept their eyes on the ground.
In the day, you might see them, but out on the country roads leading into town from each cardinal direction there were signs.
WHITES ONLY AFTER DARK
And there were men who walked at night, watching. You didn’t know what would happen if a Black person broke the rules and lingered in town after sunset, because they never did. For years and years, they didn’t.
~
Grandma got married when she was seventeen, to the first man who asked her. Who was north of forty and had asked Regina years ago. Everybody asked Regina, starting when she was fourteen, but she always said no. She was too good for them all, until one day, out of nowhere it seemed, she wasn’t good enough and never would be again.
Grandma knew better. It didn’t make much difference, this offer or any other, and why risk it. Why hold out for someone richer or smarter or younger, when she could just marry this one and get away from home faster.
Home was a one-bedroom house on a dirt road with few neighbors but no farm, little property beyond the walls. At home, Regina spent her time smoking and ordering Grandma around. Sweep floors she’d already swept. Mend Regina’s dresses, scrape mud off Regina’s shoes. Stop looking so stupid. Their mother spent her time dying, and their father was already gone. The man Grandma married at least had a horse and a stinking coop of chickens. Servicing the man, at least, seemed to have some point. Something came of it. Not anything she wanted, but something.
A baby was born and then another. Regina stayed away, as Grandma had expected she would. Grandma had a husband and babies and Regina didn’t. Grandma could go into town and buy milk on credit. She could go to church and sit in the front row, and if her babies cried then after church the priest would only smile and call them healthy. People, all the men Regina hadn’t married and the women they’d married instead, loved Regina’s wrinkles and her flattening hair. They loved pretending to be nice to her, and knowing she knew they were only pretending.
And so she didn’t go to town. She didn’t go anywhere. Grandma almost never saw her and didn’t know or care how she was staying alive.
Dad was born in October, not long before the first snowfall of the year. It began in the day, gentle, fat flakes and white sky, and the older children, watching, were quiet. The man she had married was off somewhere. He sometimes disappeared for days on end, which suited her well enough.
A dusting fell on the road, and then within minutes the road was gone. Scrawny branches puffed up and filled out. The horse and the chickens were off behind the house. No hooves or claws, no poop disturbed the snow. The setting sun pointed orange fingers to snow on the distant church roof, snow on each fence post, snow already drifting at the far tree line.
The old horse needed his mash, but she didn’t bring it to him. She didn’t eat herself. She didn’t feed the children, and they didn’t complain. Only Dad ate, nuzzled at her breast, and then slept and sighed in her arms. The oldest child lit a single lamp. Night fell.
Someone pounded on her door. The children, little woodland creatures, perked up and turned their heads. She put Dad in his cradle, and he began to cry.
This was Grandma’s own house. The lock was good, and she didn’t have to open it for anybody, and yet she knew she would.
Regina, queen of demons, grinned and held a feed sack into the thin yellow light. Breath pluming from her nostrils could have been smoke. She had always been thin, but now she was gaunt, and Grandma felt a pang. She wanted to feed her. Comb out the tangles in her hair and tell her she needed rest and deep breaths. As if they were strangers, and Grandma had spent all her life taking in strays.
“Come with me!” Regina hissed, and her eyes bugged, and she hooked Grandma’s wrist with her free hand. “Come. We’ll leave it at the door. It will scare those n—s so bad they’ll wish they had never been born.”
The sack was discolored. Dark at the bottom, and whorls of stains spun up toward the sharp bones of Regina’s hand. A human head, was Grandma’s first thought, from the shape and apparent weight of it, but Regina would not have gone that far. Regina didn’t get her hands dirty. There was a time, of course, when she could have gone to any man in town and said: You. Find someone to kill, and bring me the head. But now there wasn’t anyone who would kill even a raccoon for her. She must have found it already dead, as she walked crazed at the edge of the woods after she heard the news.
A Black family had moved into town. No one knew exactly how it had happened, or who had ignored the sign in the woods and sold them the house on Main Street that I would later know as my grandmother’s. No one knew how many little ones there were, though people said there were enough to infest the whole town and more on the way. I didn’t know how many, but in stories I later told my college friends, on long nights of whiskey and big talk, I said two. They were old enough to love their new house and run through it in their stocking feet. For maybe one night they fell asleep safe and happy in a bedroom all their own. Just outside their window, branches cut cold wind, but they were entirely warm.
I said and still believe that the father was a doctor. High intelligence, steady nerves, and years of unflagging effort led him to a town with a growing population and an understaffed hospital. A persistent misplaced faith led him to believe in spite of everything that he would be all right, that skill would be recognized and rewarded, that people would be kind to you if you were kind to them.
The mother. Let’s say she was a doctor too. An extraordinary person who faced down impossible odds yet lived uncelebrated and died unremembered. She loved the house and even nearly loved the town. The afternoon she arrived, it was bitter cold and full of color, eggshell sky and yellow brick and overgrown grass. The next night, it became a winter palace, icicles glittering like diamonds from the eaves of the church, and a pure white road from her front door to the hospital.
She wanted it. It was hers as much as anybody’s, she had earned it more than most, and they could not scare her with dead animals at the door, shit painted across windows, or even armed men watching at dusk. But she had children. She had a husband, and every day she was afraid he wouldn’t make it home.
Within a week they were gone. The home stood empty for more than a year. No one wanted it. No one dared to want it. Everyone crossed Main Street to avoid it, as if it radiated poison. Everyone said it ought to be condemned, torn down. Everyone thanked and congratulated the men for isolating the problem early, and taking care of it before it spread.
~
Grandma was pregnant with her last baby when the man she’d married went to bed and never got up again. Suddenly the chickens, the horse, the house were hers to sell. They weren’t worth much, but the house where the Black family had lived was worth even less.
~
Three things to keep, Mom said, and only three. I said I wanted the house, the front yard, and the back yard. Mom froze with one hand in the kitchen cabinet, squares of newspaper on the counter, and a sectioned box for holding glassware beside her, as if Grandma’s cracked and mismatched cups were Waterford crystal. She turned to me at the table, blinked several times fast, blew a whisp of brown hair up from her eyes. She was, that summer, still in her thirties.
She forced half a smile. “Okay, don’t get smart. You know exactly what I mean.”
“Why don’t we just live here instead of our house?”
“We are not going to live here.”
Anna Leonard came in from the living room and got up on her toes, reached deep into the cabinet, and pulled out a pewter salt shaker shaped like the Statue of Liberty. As if Grandma had ever been to New York. As if she’d ever been anywhere but here.
“Why don’t you take this as one of your three, sweetheart? This is nice. You could use it for salt or it could be a toy, whatever you want.”
I did take it. I kept it and hated it for a long, long time.
~
I was out on my own, working a decent job and married to a decent man, living in a mid-size city in a house twice the size of Grandma’s, when I heard of Regina again. On December 23, 1993, my parents came to us for Christmas, as they did most years. My girls, already showing signs of loathing each other, were out front shrieking and hurling snowballs. Dad snored in the living room recliner, and Mom, who immediately on arrival had carefully unpacked everything and tucked suitcases deep in a closet, came downstairs in jeans and festive sweater and fuzzy slippers. She put several Anna Leonard newsletters on the kitchen island for me, saying, “I know you always liked these.”
Regina was right there on top, and she looked the same, more or less. She looked happy, so that was different, but she didn’t look a whole lot older or sicker. Somebody was taking care of her hair. Thin and pure white, but clean and teased up. There was a spark in her sunken eyes, sitting there in Grandma’s kitchen.
“WE DIDN’T HAVE MUCH BUT WE MADE OUR OWN FUN”
LOCAL PIONEER REFLECTS
“Mom. Mom. That’s Regina.”
I drank hot coffee too fast. My eyes jittered. Paragraph after paragraph of bullshit: Regina credited her long life to healthy eating and the grace of God. She told stories of barn dances and sing-alongs, of lifting skirts to hike through the mud to church. She said the Historical Society House used to be hers, and she spent many wonderful years there, but the years passed and the times changed and the memories faded, and the day came when she knew the house and its stories should belong to everyone.
So charmed was I, so fascinated by this living history, that I entirely lost track of time. We drank tea with water heated on the home’s authentic Vintage Monarch Electric Range, which readers may remember was acquired by a generous donation from the Mueller family. I’m afraid I let the tea grow cold, even forgot to put a light on as the sun sank low and sent orange streaks across the snow outside. I listened and listened, and I could have sworn I was right there with the family, gathered around the radio and taking in the events of the day.
There must have been some noise that brought me back to the present, where the kitchen was quite dark! I scrambled and laughed and apologized, but Miss Regina was not at all affronted and responded with her accustomed grace and good humor.
Dad yanked the crank on the side of the La-Z-Boy. “Regina ended up in the Purdy Home,” he said. “I guess she’s some kind of treasure there and all the nurses love her. I don’t know if her personality got rewired or if she’s just lying or what.”
But how, why, when, I sputtered, and all Mom offered was, “I guess she left town for a while, but she came back.”
I sat on the ottoman, and Dad turned on the TV.
“What about the cancer, though? How is she even still alive?”
“Oh, that one was always a lie,” he said. “It was just something for her to bitch about.”
“How come you never told me?”
“You were a kid. It didn’t matter to you.”
And who was he to say, I didn’t ask, what mattered to me and what didn’t? I retreated up. Carpeted stairs and garlanded banisters. House bigger than we needed. Each kid had her own bedroom, separated by a long hallway from her sister’s, and really no excuse for hate. Guest room empty and ready nearly all the time, and up another flight of stairs a bureau drawer held relics of the only person who had ever told me the truth. Pink ashtray, stupid salt shaker. Tiny hinged porcelain box painted with blue flowers. I had found it under a loose floorboard on my last afternoon in her house, when I went to hide under her bed. It looked very old and was full of teeth. My father’s baby teeth, I told myself, but the truth was they could have been anybody’s. I guarded them like a guilty secret, always glancing back, always almost glimpsing a rightful owner following close behind.
