My grandmother has something lodged inside her, a tumor in her intestines that tests and charts and wires tell us is cancerous. Doctors with protective masks will have to operate on her, slice her open and gingerly remove the knotted mass. Radiation that at rates just slightly higher would mutate her will attempt to chase the disease from her frail body. She is almost 80.
My grandmother is Catholic in the way that people who make fun of religion disdain. She went to secretarial school and calls pants “slacks.” She married my grandfather when she was very young, and even though he died of a heart attack almost 25 years ago, she has never taken off her wedding band. Once, when she was suffering from seizures that meant we spent Easter in the hospital waiting room, the doctors had to remove the ring to run tests. The skin beneath was pale and papery, a permanent, luminous band around her finger. The first thing she did when the tests were over was put it right back on.
My grandmother does not like cursing or sex; whenever I have a new boyfriend she says things like, “Be careful” in a very strict tone of voice. She once threatened to call the cops on me when I was 15 and we got into a screaming fight about whether or not God existed. We haven’t talked about religion since. She is pointed and judgmental for someone who gives such warm hugs. “Why do you wear your hair like that?” she asks, “Why is your shirt so wrinkled?” I’ve learned by now that she just can’t help herself. She still calls Asian people “oriental” and even though a computer could greatly improve her quality of life, she has absolutely no interest in learning how to use one. She is a curmudgeon, but a soft one, with a perfectly-groomed coif.
The one theme that unified me and my cousins was that of subtly torturing her. When our whole family got together for her 70th birthday, we videotaped my younger cousin Matt hiding M&Ms in her hair while she napped. She has lived on her own for 20 years but feigns helplessness when my dad is around. Suddenly, she has forgotten how to change a light bulb and the trash bins are too heavy to lug to the curb. She is extraterrestrial, of another world, a world where women’s skirts hit just below the knee and men drink brandy with lunch. When she came to visit us in Allentown, I used to wait excitedly by the front door. Our cat hated her dog, but she kept bringing him, and he kept peeing on all of our rugs.
My grandmother is sweet in a way that women born in the 1930s are: superficially, for proprietary purposes. When my parents got divorced she was enormously supportive, despite her religious beliefs. I think this was probably just because she never liked my mother very much. We have almost nothing in common, even our mutual femaleness is rendered a wall to scale by generational differences. I see endless opportunities and she sees endless opportunities to mess up. I think, in her mind, I am constantly doing that: with my mini skirts and my gay male roommates, birth control pills and adroit Blackberry fingers.
When I call her, which is about once every six weeks or so, we talk about her sorority or how there was a sale at the grocery store or about my dad’s new job. I don’t tell her about my life, about the disappointing dates and difficulties of being a freshly graduated young person or how hard it is to move to a new city alone. I do not talk to her about literature or music or anything that’s important to me, really, because I’m not quite sure what she would say. A positive response might be an uninterested, “That’s nice;” more likely is a polite retort cloaked in a harsh judgment: “That sounds great but you really should be careful about those sort of things.” Once I moved to New York, I grew out of being sullen and hiding everything from my parents; for self-preservation purposes, I never grew out of that phase with her.
My grandmother has lived alone for so long that it makes me ache to think about. Since the 1980s she has gone to bed alone, and made no effort to rectify this part of her life. She is still in love with my grandfather, an Irish Catholic pipe-smoking high school principal who died before I was born. She still has old neighbors put flowers on his grave in Pennsylvania, even though she moved to New Jersey a few years ago. I wonder often if the health problems she’s faced–seizures, ovarian cancer, strokes–were subconscious efforts made by a Catholic person who doesn’t believe in suicide to leave this earth and join her husband. Perhaps in dreams she willed on sickness, the loneliness finally breaking in her. It’s a romantic thought, but one that from her would elicit robust disdain.
My grandmother has a tumor the size of an acorn caught in the gash of her insides. Last night I said in a dark, dark bar: “I think that everything happens for a reason,” and the man I was with scoffed, flicked his eyes upward and replied, “The universe has no plans for us.” I felt like crying, then, or using my elbow to sweep all of the drinks off of the table. I agree with him intellectually, but really I don’t care about facts in light of emotion, would prefer to ascribe meaning to events than admit that bad things happen just because. People who go to church every Sunday grow malignant tumors and babies die suddenly in their cribs, with no warning at all. My grandmother and I hurt each other often, without even trying. After all these years, we still don’t know how not to.
We cannot really know if the Universe has plans for us. Like so many things, the truth perhaps matters less than the choices we make.
I loved this post! I laughed out loud at the M&M’s part. Grammie….