No outsiders were allowed to enter the home where I lived with my mother and my brother. The place wasn’t in good enough shape for guests, according to my mother, and we had to get it fixed up before anyone could come over. But for that we needed money, which meant that it was in the future. Also people sought information to use against us, and we couldn’t take any chances. “Trust me,” she said. And I did.
My brother and I were instructed not to make eye contact with others, not to attract attention, and never to speak to a neighbor or go inside anyone else’s house for any reason, even if it was an emergency. My mother’s strict policies held within them an inherent contradiction: in trying so hard to be invisible, we became a very strange family, and therefore conspicuous. But all this hiding (we had to duck down in the car when we were “being followed”) was so much a part of my childhood that I did not question it. I followed my mother’s rules as I followed the hours of the day.
One dark December afternoon when I had just turned thirteen, I came home from school and stopped short in the doorway to the kitchen. An unfamiliar old woman was ensconced at the end of our kitchen table. Draped in a faded, floral-print housedress, she was perched on the kitchen chair where my brother usually sat, her body sloped to one side. Leaning against the wall behind her, like something from a giant toy kit, was a life-size peach-colored plastic leg. At the top of the thigh were grommets and straps. I couldn’t imagine its purpose. The leg looked like a circus prop or torture device from another time period. I hung back in the shadow of the foyer, but it was too late—I’d been seen.
“Ah, there you are!” The woman’s voice was creaky, and she had a thick Midwestern accent. She motioned with fierce friendliness for me to come toward her. She did not stand. When had anyone been in our house besides us? I remained in the doorway, arms crossed, trying to figure out if I should run. Then I saw my mother, strangely home from work in the middle of the afternoon, unpacking groceries at the counter.
“Come, come now, kiss-kiss,” the woman commanded, continuing to motion to me with her thick, crooked fingers. “My Heather-kin!”
I approached the kitchen table slowly, dreading the kiss.
“Patty,” the woman said to my mother as I dragged my sneakered feet across the floor, “she looks like a Sellers!”
Now I smiled. I hated how I looked: too tall, too thin, arms far too long, chest way too flat, with a massive mane of too-thick brown hair that puffed from my head. My mother did not allow me to apply makeup, wear deodorant, or shave my legs. I was furry, gawky, grotesque. But I was happy to hear I looked like my father and not my sad, vanquished mother.
Just then my brother, two years younger, entered brusquely and sat down at the far end of the table. Taking advantage of the diversion, I slid away from the old woman’s reaching hands and took my place across from him.
The woman pulled on his arm, saying, “So handsome, you, and still such a stinker.” He asked my mother what was going on. Grim-faced, my mother shook her head and continued to put groceries away. I resented the tone of my brother’s voice, as though he were in charge. Also it was rude of him, I thought, not to greet the woman. So I said hello.
Before I could ask who she was and how she had gotten past my mother and into our house, she said, “I’m your Greenie!” She sounded so insistent that I drew back. Could this woman really be my grandmother? “Look at you two!” The woman’s eyes were blue gems, glittering and giddy. With one hand she grabbed my brother’s arm, and with the other she clutched my wrist, pulling us both to her across the table. Her grip pinched the skin of my wrist, and she did not let go.
“Patty, they are beautiful! My lieblings,” she said, the pinch increasing in intensity. “Sie sind wunderschön.”
When I drew my arm back, the skin was white where her fingers had been. I was put off by her oldness, her smell—urine and menthol—and the weird plastic leg. What was it for? At the same time, I was fascinated by the German words. It felt like stepping into a new country. A part of me wanted to send my arm back to her.
She leaned low over the table and asked conspiratorially, did we like to play canasta? Backgammon? Poker? Did we like to play for . . . money?
My brother said he only played for money.
I kicked him under the table because he was lying, and bragging, but also because wasn’t it wondrous? Let us three stick together, my kick said. This magical-seeming creature with the mop of hair, the black wire springing out of a ragged mole on her chin, the housedress buttoned unevenly and loose at her collarbone—well, I sensed she might have the power to rescue me from my mother, perhaps rescue us all from our lonely, isolated lives in that dark, musty house in Orlando, Florida.
“Mom, please,” my mother said from the kitchen. “Don’t get them started.”
Oh, do get us started.
“I’ll deal,” Greenie said. A deck of cards—greasy, with fraying edges, like her dress—appeared as suddenly as she had. She shuffled the deck, which made the most delicious sound. I felt myself wanting to cry. How had we lived without her?
“Please,” my mother said.
I wanted to tell her to stop washing every can and wiping down every box before placing it in the cupboard and join us. Greenie lifted the deck into the air and shuffled the cards in an arc between her clawlike hands.
“Can I try that?” my brother said.
“No way,” I said. “Me first.” I took the deck and immediately sprayed the cards across the table. The three of us laughed as my brother swept them up and reordered them. I couldn’t remember a time there had been laughter in that kitchen, which, with its bare light bulb, had always had the aura of an interrogation room.
The slapping of cards began in earnest, and my brother and I argued over each point, leaning over the table and shouting.
“Please,” my mother said at the sink, “can we keep it down?” She leaned against the counter as though something were physically pressing on her. She was often haunted by phantoms and voices we could not see or hear.
When my mother asked for help with dinner, I dragged myself away from the table. Behind the open fridge door I whispered, “What is she doing here?”
My mother motioned me into the dark dining room. “Oh, Heather,” she said, “this was not my idea, believe me. It’s a terrible time.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“This is not my doing. My sister put her on a plane with no notice, no warning. I am hanging on by a thread.” She put her palms to her face.
I wanted to hug her, but my mother grew angry when approached. I was already standing closer to her than usual. “Ma,” I said, “we’re going to have fun! I promise.” I clasped my hands together. My mother was visibly shaking, but I absolutely believed a fairy godmother had arrived. It felt like our house was waking up from a long slumber.
I knew only this: My mother didn’t speak to my grandmother or my aunt up in Wisconsin. (She didn’t like to talk on the phone. The lines were tapped, conversations recorded. One careless word, and we could lose everything.) I knew she sent these relatives Christmas presents, but she refused to talk about them. She told me she would explain when I was older. I am older, I kept reminding her.
In those days I did not speak at school, not even to answer a direct question from the teacher. I kept my eyes on the ground. I had started chewing notebook paper compulsively. I did not want to be the psycho, but I always had to have a strip of paper in my mouth. I swallowed the hard little balls. I was slipping away from myself.
Sometimes my mother left the house without explanation and didn’t come back for a day or two. Other times she could not leave her bedroom for days. She lay on top of the covers, hands folded across her chest, like a person made of wax. More than once I wished she were dead, so that my brother and I could live on our own. And I hated myself for this—wicked, evil daughter.
This was where Greenie had landed: a cold, dark house (my mother was reluctant to spend money on heat or electricity) where her haunted daughter was struggling to get to work every day and put meals on the table for her two traumatized kids, each imploding in a different way. My father had been gone for a couple of years by then. When I was born, he and my mother had been living in a little pink house west of Orlando, where Disney World is now. Both grandmothers had come to see me, the new baby. I’d seen photographic evidence of their visits: black-and-white snapshots hidden deep in a box in my mother’s closet. In one an old woman with a doily pinned atop her black hair, black cat-eye glasses, a print dress, and pointy pumps held me on her hip in the sun, both of us squinting. On the back, in my mother’s pretty cursive, it said, “Greenie w/ Heather, age one.” In another my paternal grandmother, dressed in a 1960s Easter suit, held my hand in front of that concrete-block house with its single-car carport, the sky above us so bright it looked electrified.
There were no photos of my brother and me with our mother.
That night, elated, I peeled potatoes, cut carrots into coins for salad, and returned quickly to the table, where Greenie and my brother were playing cards. My brother was leaning over, trying to see her hand. She slapped him on the arm and said, “Cut it out, fella.”
When Mother said we could not play cards while we ate, Greenie made a pouty face, like a child.
“You’re no fun!” I said to my mother. I certainly wouldn’t have said a thing like this to her if it weren’t for Greenie.
Startled, my mother said softly, “Eat without me, please, OK?” and left the room. I ran after her to apologize and begged her to come back.
“You are all better off without me,” she said.
I dragged myself back to the kitchen, bereft. My grandmother was here. We should have been rolling out the red carpet.
I don’t remember how the Matchbox-car game started, but I am certain it began after the table was cleared and the dishes were dried and put away, all by me. Maybe Greenie had asked to see my brother’s toys while I was cleaning up?
The game unfolded naturally, as the best games do: Greenie snagged one of the Matchbox cars and zipped it down the length of the table. Seated at the other end, in my mother’s chair, I caught the car before it fell off the edge and zinged it back to her. My brother, perched in between, tried to smack the racing car with the flat of his hand and stop it. That was the game. The rules created themselves: You had to stay behind your boundary line. The smacker could not lean out and hover in advance. Hands below the table! It was as though the game had always been there, and we’d always been together this way. When Greenie sent the car toward me, she was quick and strategic. My brother missed smacking it just often enough to keep us all on edge. Greenie faked him once, faked again, and then, as if by magic, she’d already sent the car my way. I didn’t let it drop. I felt athletic and savvy.
Then I was the smacker, and suddenly my too-long arms, which made me feel ugly and awkward, were fast and smart. I laughed so hard, I fell out of my chair and onto the terrazzo.
My mother appeared in the doorway and said it was a school night and way past our bedtime.
“One more round!” I shouted. “For the championship!”
“We’ve got to play one more, Ma,” my brother said. “That one didn’t count!” He and I were on the same side, and it seemed like we would never go back to being enemies. How could we?
My mother insisted the game stop immediately.
“Ach,” Greenie said, “I gotta go.”
What? Go where?
Greenie was trying to stand with some urgency, asking for her walker. My mother went to the foyer and tried to unfold it. Greenie said to hurry. She had to get on the pot.
My mother placed the walker in front of her, and my brother helped Greenie scoot the chair back and stand up—on her one leg. Why hadn’t I understood this before then? She didn’t have her other leg tucked up under her. She had one leg. I felt queasy. I couldn’t stop imagining what the stump looked like. Was it smooth skin, or tied off like the end of a sausage? I didn’t want to see. Ashamed, I looked away.
Greenie was hopping, my mother was trying to assist, my brother was explaining where the bathroom was, and I was standing there frozen between the table and the artificial leg propped against the wall.
“Oh, Patty!” Greenie said. “I’m afraid I might not make it!”
I have heard many times as an adult, when I tell someone about my childhood, You were so resilient. I was not resilient. I am not resilient. How did you survive? I despise this question too. It’s an awful kind of othering. These well-meaning words touch a fearsome, barely restrained rage inside me. I can feel the speaker’s pity, and their superiority. I can hear them thinking, Thank God that was not me. Most of all, I can feel their fear.
Sometimes I wonder if that moment when I came into the house after school, during a time when I was mostly friendless, dressed in matronly, dated clothes from the Cancer Society thrift shop, barred by my mother from concerts, movies, and parties, and I sat down at the table and was grabbed hard by my grandmother’s hand, which seemed to hold a charge of energy—sometimes I wonder if that moment, that physical connection, that pinch, was how I survived.
When things got even harder in the months and years to come, I always had that night with my grandmother at the kitchen table, when she looked at me and said, “It’s your turn, Beauty-girl.”
Beauty-girl.
I can still feel the strength of her hand on my wrist.
My mother and I sat at opposite ends of the living room sofa that night, facing each other. Greenie’s accident had been explosive, the smell unbearable. My mother had scrubbed the floor with bleach. I’d taken the towels to the washing machine in the garage.
Greenie was asleep in the bed I shared with my mother, who uncharacteristically had left a light on so my grandmother could find her way to the bathroom. (On her own? How?) My brother was in his room, door closed. The smell of bleach lingered in the air. But our house felt lived-in for once.
My mother had brought pillows, sheets, and a quilt for us. It was like we were in a sleeping car on a train. I watched my mother put curlers in her hair and snuggle under the covers. I tried to see how close I could get my legs to hers before she withdrew.
“She’s going to pump you children for information,” she said. “Promise me you won’t say anything. Not a word. Especially about your father.”
Even this late at night, my mother wore her uniform: oversize khaki pants and a stained khaki shirt. Her eyes were rimmed with dark rings.
I crossed my arms. “I am certainly not going to lie to my own grandmother,” I said righteously, in my Anne of Green Gables voice. “And Daddy’s going to want to see her. He loves her too!” I’d heard many times how, on the day he and my mother had gotten married, my father had disappeared, and my mother had found him and Greenie in the church basement, playing poker, drinking beer, and “carrying on.”
“I need your word,” my mother said.
In the afternoons, when my brother and I came home from school, Greenie was waiting at the kitchen table, Matchbox cars lined up in a phalanx, cards stacked neatly by their side. She piled butterscotch candies in the middle, and we played Crazy Eights to win them. When the candy was gone, we played the car game. We did this each day until shortly before my mother got home. Then my brother disappeared to do whatever he did, and I set the table and did whatever else I was supposed to do—my mother always left a list propped on the salt and pepper shakers.
Greenie would talk while I worked. She commented on how well I did each task. My brother, she said, was a sneak. She didn’t trust him. He’d taken quarters from her change purse. “I see everything,” Greenie said. “Ich sehe alles.”
I felt a pang of grief for my brother, but also the triumph of winning: I was the best child! I knew it!
Greenie was worried about my mother. She hadn’t known this was our situation. She was afraid of being a burden on my mother. I assured her she wasn’t a burden. She was the most wonderful thing in our lives.
Greenie and I made a plan: We would transform the Florida room into an apartment for her. It already had a sink and was plumbed for a toilet. My father could do the job in a weekend. Yes, she’d be sort of trapped out there by the steps up into the rest of the house, but maybe we could put in a ramp. When it warmed up, we’d plant a garden outside the kitchen windows. She wanted to teach me to sew and to dance and to speak German. Each afternoon she wrote a list of German words for me to memorize.
I worked on getting as much family history as possible out of her, while revealing as little as possible to please my mother. “Could we please start at the beginning again,” I would say to her, “when you were a little girl?”
A poor rural town in Wisconsin. Wooden sidewalks. Streets of ice and mud. Her parents spoke only German. Her father was a blacksmith. She had many brothers and two sisters. All but one were now dead. Some had died as children. She hadn’t gone to school at all.
When I asked for the unabridged story of my mother, Greenie’s face always fell. “She’s very private. I’ll be in for it.”
“But we aren’t scared of a little trouble,” I said. The new me was bold. “Please. I have to know. What was she like as a girl?”
“She was very serious.”
“But what was she like when she was my age? What did she do?”
“Oh, that was a hard year for her. That’s when her father died, you know. She was never the same after that. She buried part of herself in that grave.”
Greenie told me about getting a job in town after her husband died, going to work at the razor counter at the drugstore. She was locally famous for being able to repair any razor—any brand, any vintage. She wanted to travel, meet other razor-repair experts. Before that, in 1926, she’d been captain of the town’s women’s basketball team. She was an excellent swimmer and had beaten a rich boy in a race across a lake. She described her favorite dresses—open backs, polka dots, navy blue—and the shoes and bags and hats she’d worn. She talked about dancing and how she’d painted her living-room walls blue. I took it all in, wondering how my mother had turned out to be the exact opposite type of person, whereas I was a lot like Greenie: I’d often suggested we paint our kitchen yellow. I loved polka dots. I could swim faster than a boy—no doubt.
While I faced my school days with more ease because of the happiness waiting for me at home, my mother looked worse day by day. She grew so thin I could see her skull. When she came home from work now, she went straight to her sofa, complaining of a headache: “Eat without me, please.” So I made sandwiches for dinner. I cleaned up. It felt very grown-up, very Little House on the Prairie. My brother took out the trash instead of me, because Greenie insisted.
On the day school let out for the winter holiday, a Friday, I walked into the house and immediately noticed: The leg was gone. The suitcases, the walker, the foldable wheelchair. I ran through the rooms, frantic. Greenie’s medicine was missing from the bathroom countertop.
When my mother came in the door that night, I was curled in a ball, weeping. “What did you do? What did you do?” I choked.
“Oh, Heather,” my mother said, “I was worried you might be upset.” She moved past me with grocery bags.
“Upset?” I threw myself against the kitchen wall, wailing, “What did you do?”
“I can’t take this behavior!” My mother left the house then, fast. I heard her drive off in her truck.
Later my mother showed me the brown stains on the carpet, running in a dotted line from the bed to the bathroom. She explained how hard it was, always cleaning. The laundry. The smells. Treating the stump. Trying to keep up with my grandmother’s medications, the pharmacy, the expenses. Greenie refused to wear diapers. She was going to lose her other leg to diabetes too. It was just too much.
“Heather, please understand. I know you love her.”
But why hadn’t my mother told me she was thinking about sending Greenie back? Why hadn’t she asked me to help more? I would have done anything. Anything.
I lost all contact with Greenie after that. I wasn’t even allowed to talk to her on the phone. In the days she had lived with us, I’d thought we were tumbling into something pretty good. I’d thought the dark days were over for my mother, my brother, and me. Instead they got worse. It would take me decades to understand what was possible when it came to caring for children and creating a stable, happy home.
Somehow, after I escaped to college, I found Greenie’s address. When I wrote to her, she wrote me back—a miracle. She sent a list of German words for me to memorize and a dollar to buy a milkshake or something else fun: “Don’t tell your mother.”
She wrote me a few more times, always with the dollar bill and those words: Don’t tell your mother.
I learned of her death from a letter my mother sent me at college. Greenie had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage alone in her house in Wisconsin. This was mentioned at the end of the letter, not quite in passing, but close enough. I immediately called my mother, who answered the phone and, as she always did, breathlessly told me she would call me right back. I was to let the phone ring twice but not pick up until she called a second time; that was when I should answer.
“I’m not doing that!” I shouted. “How could you not tell me about Greenie?”
“I knew you’d be upset. I knew this was going to happen.”
“Mother!” I screamed.
When we connected later that week, I wasn’t much calmer. “I would have gone to the funeral with you,” I said. “I wanted to be there. How could you treat me like this?”
My mother said she hadn’t attended the funeral either. She told me at length about how busy she was, and how ashamed she’d felt, not going, but the cost of traveling to Wisconsin, and the time off work, the house, and the feeling her sister didn’t want her there . . . In the end she had decided it would be better if she stayed away. As she went on, I felt something inside me soften. I saw what someone outside of our family would have seen all along: that she and I were never going to have a close, loving relationship. We were never going to be normal.
“I’m sorry,” my mother said, sincerely. “I’m really, truly sorry, Heather. I knew you’d be upset about this. But we have to move on now, OK? Can you forgive me?”
No, I said.
Greenie grew up in a tiny town in the boondocks of northern Wisconsin and was in her early twenties when the Depression hit. But I liked to imagine my grandmother as a sophisticated urban flapper, dancing in those scandalously short knee-length slender dresses, long loops of pearls dangling. We were both tall and flat-chested, figures properly belonging to the style of the Jazz Age.
After she died, I frequented the vintage-clothing store near the university, sifting through the racks, coveting treasures I imagined were just like something my grandmother might have owned: a pricey silver comb and mirror; a black silk clutch with silver beading. I bought a worn, hem-torn black silk dress with fringe along the bottom, on sale for twenty dollars. I knew it was slightly ridiculous, but I wore this dress to class—with red high-top Converse. I felt Greenie in me. I felt her love, as I traipsed around campus with my new hairstyle, a Louise Brooks bob. I dressed this way not to attract men but to attract my grandmother.
In graduate school I bought a 1940s backless navy polka-dot dress at a garage sale. I had navy blue spectator pumps, just like ones Greenie had described, and I wore the dress and shoes to poetry readings at the Warehouse and to downtown bars and out to fields to listen to my favorite band, the Slut Boys. I put on thick red lipstick (my mother, who’d banned makeup, would have died) and pretended the outfit had been passed down to me from Greenie.
There’s a photo of me at a fellow graduate student’s wedding. The guys are in blazers and chinos; the women, pretty floral dresses. I’m wearing a slinky flapper dress, strands of fake pearls looped down to my waist, dark-red lipstick, and vintage black pumps. My bobbed hair is neatly curled under. I’m at the center of the photo, staring off into the distance, looking both very serious and very, very happy. There’s not one whiff of my mother, that tortured soul, about me. I am free.
I keep a framed photo of the Appleton women’s basketball team that Greenie was captain of. In it all the girls have bobbed hair, and no one is smiling. Greenie, the tallest, sits in the center, holding the ball, on which is written, 1926. Her shoelaces don’t match. In fact, they appear to be four or five pieces of shoelaces tied together to make them long enough. I hadn’t realized, when she’d told me about her life, how incredibly poor her family had been. None of the other girls in the photo have patched-together shoelaces. But in that photo, with a glimmer in her eye and a steady gaze into the camera, my grandmother looks like an aristocrat.
I will always remember her stories about how she lived her life, her yearning to have fun, no matter how bleak the situation—even with one leg, diabetes, and a heart condition.
I will always remember her tight grasp on my wrist. At the time, it hurt, and I pulled away. Now I know it saved my life.
