My grandmother would not allow her daughters to wade into the ocean past their knees.
My mother would not allow her daughters to take a photo perched atop a fence overlooking a valley below, for fear that they might fall.
My great-great grandmother grew up during the Great Depression. Her mother died while she was young. She raised several siblings. She grew into a strong, steady woman, a rock for her family.
Her daughter, my grandmother, lost her father when she was two. And so my great-great grandmother did it all alone all over again. She already knew she could.
My grandmother married an army boy, met him just before he pushed off, and he promised to return. He wrote her love letters while he was abroad. When he came back they married at the justice of the peace in San Francisco. She wore a blue angora sweater and matching pencil skirt, which I still have somewhere.
When they married and had three girls, my grandmother went to work as a telephone operator and my great-great grandmother raised a third generation of children.
My grandmother was overwhelmed by her offspring, the noise and the chaos. She escaped to her job as a telephone operator where things were orderly and predictable.
I think my grandmother had the fear of lack and loss in her cells, going back maybe generations. Unlike her mother, she had a choice to run away or to stand her ground. She chose to run.
My grandfather was an alcoholic turned white-knuckle Mormon. Like many men of his generation, there was no other place for his emotions to go, no other outlet for self-loathing than either inebriation or religion.
Before drink got the best of him, he opted for the latter. I respect him for that.
My grandfather did unspecified things for the army that had to do with computers and mechanics. He took a job working on an island when my mother was two and she thought he was never coming back.
The elder daughters didn’t like him. From the stories, it seems that he was either brooding or yelling. He wasn’t an easy man to get along with. My mother was his pet; she says she understood him. Maybe he couldn’t stand having a third daughter who despised him.
He was a man of informal learning, a voracious reader with a particular penchant for geology. He towed his protesting teenage daughters around the deserts of California in a Winnebago with no air conditioning in pursuit of his passion. One day, their dog escaped from the camper in Death Valley and never came back.
I don’t know much about my grandmother, except that she was my grandfather’s shadow. She was from Alabama and it showed in her speech and her politics. She was afraid of her husband and lived under his reign. Maybe that’s why his daughters hated him.
They ran a little photography shop together, another of my grandfather’s hobbies. My sister and I would run through the aisles and find trinkets to beg grandma for. She always said yes.
They had a fat little dog named Bump who stank. He came to the shop with them every day.
My father was a real estate agent who worked long hours. I remember always wishing he was home so we could play. I remember announcing to everyone that one day I would marry him, and they all laughed.
During the times when the real estate market dipped, my mother would pick up a job, usually at a bank. Otherwise, she was home with us.
If we got sick during these times, we’d have to stay home from school at grandma’s shop. I would lie on a cot in the back and languish with boredom, passing the time eating Campbell’s chicken soup and covering pages and pages of blank printer paper with drawings.
When my mother wasn’t home, I never tried to get out of school unless I really had to.
What I know of my grandmother and great-grandmother is food. Granny was a tremendous chef, according to everyone’s account, as I never knew her. On Christmas morning, we still have biscuits and gravy and grits with our meal, like Southern women. No one bothers cooking anymore, though, and most of it comes from packages.
My mother used to make Granny’s famous potato soup for us. She didn’t know the actual recipe, so she used a powder instead.
She and her sisters grew up right when the idea of convenience was taking the place of heritage. Their time is a sterile one, right between when hardship made you into a human being and ease came along to supposedly allow you to be one.
People had forgotten what to do with all that space. My mother’s generation remembered the trauma of lack with all the time in the world to baste in it.
When I was young, family gatherings were vibrant and lively and homes were full. I felt that I was a part of something real, like a broad net stretched out over several households, something that would always catch me.
My sister and I were the youngest of our generation, and people drifted after that. Marriages ended and feelings soured. Our family gatherings shrank exponentially.
Both of my aunts eventually returned to their mother’s house. Once my grandfather’s heart finally killed him after several years of trying, it was just the women.
Every time we’d visit, there they were in the living room watching violent crime reenactments on TV. They wanted to see something outside of themselves that matched how they felt on the inside, I think. They wanted to see something to validate their fear.
We always talked very little. Their house felt stifling, like resentment and bitterness made up the air.
When my son was born, they all came to visit. We went out to a meal and they sat, watching. I imagined they had forgotten how to do anything but spectate. They could watch our young lives unfold and take a third-hand pleasure in it, but living was something they couldn’t do themselves.
My grandmother decided to die once my grandfather passed. He had provided her with direction and purpose for so long that she didn’t know anything else but to be his shadow.
It was strange to watch her slowly and voluntarily die over so many years. She disappeared a little more each day, doing less and less every year. Eventually she melded with her environment entirely and ceased to exist.
Funnily, at the very end, she became more spirited than I’d ever known her to be. It was as though being close to death for so many years had allowed her to finally live.
My mother doesn’t see how she is like her mother. She doesn’t see how the trauma of poverty lives in her cells, or how she succumbs to inertia with every heavy, dissatisfied sigh. She doesn’t see how her unhappiness is an incantation, a prayer for relief from life.
She and her sisters grew up in the space of newfound convenience. They had no labor to distract them from their loss, their aloneness, from the immanent presence of death. In this way, convenience is a cruelty. There is no moving on when you have nothing to move for.
So they marinated in their injuries, their shortcomings, their anxieties. The animals in them content, their higher appetites choked by rancor.
They are like the widows of India who are cast out and forgotten, except they have done this to themselves. They are widowed to purpose.
I wonder how many silent households exist this way, how many quiet neighborhoods are pregnant with anguish that had nowhere to go. I can understand how people can hope for disaster, something to pierce the oppressive silence. To make them feel alive.
They grew up in that fresh era of ease. It still gave them loss but no hardship to match it. They had no reason to lift themselves and keep going, no mouths to feed, no one to live for but themselves.
In this way, they had infinite space for their pain to fester, and yet not any space at all to feel.
