I climbed into my car and drove a couple of hours south to see my father’s mother for a conversation that had to happen in person. My grandmother Rose stood in her black slacks and silk blouse, her old lady flats, her short gray hair, her compact five feet no inches, at the head of the tarmac path that led to the front door of her retirement village condo. It could have been 1978, this scene was so familiar.
“You’re delicious,” she said, and squeezed my cheeks like I was tiny. Except now there was no one behind me waiting to be squeezed and made to squirm. I was here alone, heavy with my task.
I followed her into the air-conditioning and sat on the couch in her icy-white living room. The coffee table was made of glass. There were glass sculptures backlit on bookshelves. There was a glass door to a patio I’d never stepped on. When I was little, I’d wander from here into the bathroom to pee, linger there and lift every cloisonné clamshell lid in search of treasure. Pause at the bookcases in the back hallway and check for her footsteps before crouching down on my knees to read the names of the authors of the books on the bottom shelf. Josh said they were Dad’s, and I worried that if I didn’t memorize them on these visits, Dad really would disappear. Cheryl Nash. Barney Parrish. Walter Bond. I didn’t know then that Dad’s most prolific pseudonym was missing from his mother’s shelves, I didn’t know then that my father wrote more than these titles to pay the mortgage.
I’d sneak further back into her bedroom to scare myself at her shrine. Giant portraits of my grandfather and my dad hanging on the wall by her bed. Grandpa’s hair was gray but his skin was smooth, and there was his nose like a mountainside on his face. I’d peer in as close as I could get to see if I could spot the scar—Mom said he’d tried to cut it off with scissors when he was little. Cecil died a year after his son, died of esophageal cancer a year after his son hanged himself. Died of esophageal cancer after not smoking a day in his life.
Dad’s portrait was different. It was taken outside in the snow, and his puffy seventies jacket and transition lenses and slight smile ached because I knew them so well. This picture was meant to appear on the back flap of a book he never published. Even as a kid I knew where Mom kept the negatives. I used to search them for clues. In high school I got one printed, kept it hidden between books in my bedroom. He’s sitting on the top of a picnic table in a yard I don’t recognize, he’s smiling like there’s something funny. How can Rose bear to have these portraits hanging on the wall, looking at her all night long? Doesn’t she want to forget?
“Where shall we eat?” Rose said to me when I sat on her couch. It was a trick question, because there was only one place she thought good enough.
“That place you like,” I said. “But before we go, there’s something I need to tell you.” My hands shook and my face was too hot. I was ready for the slap this time. She took her round pink plastic glasses off her face and looked at me steadily. “Ngoni and I are getting married.”
There was a pause before the tears. I sat with my hands in my lap, tea cold on the table, and felt myself get distant from that place, from her pain. I almost wanted to laugh. If this was going to make her sad, I decided in that moment, I was sad for her. But I was not sad. This is a ridiculous thing to cry over, I wanted to scream. I’ve found my person after all my life not having my person! If this makes you cry, I wanted to tell her, then cry. But I will sit here next to you and smile. I saw her then as if she were very far, and I didn’t come back to meet her.
After a while she got up and walked to the kitchen, so I got up too, and found her standing at the counter with something large and glass in her hands. A vase or a bowl. It looked heavy.
“Where will the children be?” she shouted as I walked in. “That is what I want to know!”
She slumped into a chair at the table, her back hunched and heaving, and I didn’t know where to put my body, where to put my eyes. So I focused on the large glass bowl in her lap. She was curled around it like a baby. It was clear and the glass looked very thick. I’d never seen anything like it, but it reminded me of the thick glass countertops in the bank my mother used when I was little. As she filled out small rectangular strips of paper with a pen attached to a chain, I stood with my eyes just exactly at the counter level, staring into the thick green glass edge. I’d then pile onto tippy-toes to see that from the top all was clear. Back and forth, thick green glass edge, all clear on top. A magic trick, an illusion. I repeated it again and again, rolling up and down on my toes. The bowl in my grandmother’s lap held this same illusion—purple edging curled into handles like a basket, clear from another angle. I focused on the edges, the thick purple edges I couldn’t see through. They were the color my skin turned with a bad bruise.
“Where will the children be?” she said again.
I sighed.
“That’s what I asked your father,” she said quietly.
“That’s what I asked your father!” she shouted.
“But Grandma,” I said, thankful now for a script. Thankful for her reference to what she considered the other mixed marriage in her life—my parents’. “Look at me! I’m fine. I’m happy and I live in a world that doesn’t wonder what I am. By the time we have children, their world won’t be as divided as yours has always been.” How naïve to think this, but how could I have known?
She wouldn’t look at me. She just shook her head. Continued to cry. Was it an hour before she spoke? A day?
“There’s nothing I can do to convince you?” she asked finally, and I watched her free hand fold and refold a cloth napkin on the table. I looked at her clear nail polish, her papery white skin. Wondered if the bowl would tumble out of her lap onto the floor and smash to bits. Wondered who would clean it up.
“Convince me?” I asked.
“Because if you marry him,” she said and looked at me, her round eyes narrowed to slits, “don’t ever come to me. Don’t ever come to me again.”
I knew then that I never had to eat soggy chicken parmesan at a crappy Italian restaurant again in my life. I saw the exit map and I wanted to follow it. I could get out of this condo, forever. I pushed my chair back and stood up. Walked to the door.
“Julia,” she said behind me.
I turned and saw her there, small and sour. Did I want her to take it back? Did I want her to come through herself and back to me? Did I turn because she was my grandmother, because she was my father’s mother, because once when I was small we stood together at his grave and cried? She could have made it right with a word.
But instead she shoved the glass bowl into my hands. I grabbed onto it because I didn’t want it to smash my toes. I grabbed onto it because I didn’t want it to smash her toes. I grabbed onto it because she shoved it into my hands and I couldn’t do any other thing.
We looked at each other for a moment, but there were no more words. So I turned and walked out the door with my gift. But once out onto route 84, I pulled into a rest stop, opened the driver’s-side door, and placed the glass bowl on the black pavement. Looked at it in the rearview mirror as I drove away, an illusion of light in the afternoon sun.
BY THE TIME I joined the Taconic Parkway an hour later, almost safely returned to my apartment in the woods, singing along with Joni Mitchell with the sun shining and my eyes alert for deer in the median, I felt a familiar tap on my shoulder.
“It’s just a muscle spasm,” I said aloud, though I’d never before pretended to believe the tap on my shoulder was anything but what I knew it was. My dad, reminding me he’s here.
I steadied my hands on the wheel and pulled myself up a little so I could see the backseat rather than the road behind me. I startled hard and swerved into the other lane, looked back to the road to right the car. Took a deep breath.
“No one was there, Jules.” I said this out loud, too. But I saw him there in black lines and fuzzy shapes and tan cloth-covered car seats. Was he in the car with me, or hovering just outside?
I pulled into a rest stop that invites tourists to park and gaze at