Tell Your Story Fall 2022 Writing Contest — Finalist
Grand Rapids
It was a three-hour drive from our house to theirs. A trip my dad would navigate without the use of written directions in a feat my young mind thought incredible. How could he possibly remember where to turn left? How to know what was right?
Mom would sit in the passenger seat, tense and silent. After she stopped making the trips with us my sister sat up front in her stead, with an inherited tension that increased year by year until it grew to fill the hole our mom had left behind.
In the basement of Grandpa and Grandma’s house: a ping-pong table; a shuffleboard court painted across the cement floor; a horseshoe hanging over the stairwell; a musty workroom with a drain in the floor; a kaleidoscope of butterflies in my stomach.
It was a big house. With sunrooms and brickwork. A front door with a shiny gold slot for mail. A stuffed pheasant that stood in a glass box in the hallway, perched in front of a peeling backdrop of hunters in a field, terribly out of place in his afterlife.
In Grandpa’s office the walls were lined with religious texts and filing cabinets. On his desk a small wooden dish held a large, yellowed toenail. A relic from his farming past, removed from his body decades ago by the hoof of an unruly horse. A repulsive totem to what? To loss? Pain? Nothing?
A white tablecloth covered the dining room table on holidays, a ring of ice shaped by a Jell-O mold slowly melting in a bowl of punch on top of the washing machine. No matter how hard I tried, I always seemed to stain the tablecloth. Red drops on white linen.
We sang hymns and carols in a circle in the living room, Dad providing piano accompaniment. Lyrics to songs we all knew by heart printed on a stack of colored sheets we passed around. I moved my lips, a mumble of jingling bells, snowmen and someone else’s memories of Bethlehem.
At times, the silence, the order, the focused attention of the opening of gifts gave me terrible anxiety. I would feign a stomachache and head upstairs to lie face-down on the bed in a room carpeted in bright stripes of colored shag, waiting for the festivities to end.
When they were still together, my parents left my sister and me with our grandparents for a night. Bathed by Grandma and tucked into bed, we sat awake, deliriously drowsy, watching the tiny figures in Grandma’s curiosity cabinet come to life. Porcelain Siamese cats twisting in the moonlight.
Grandpa made his money in real estate, helping struggling families to find homes in low income areas. Ethical a landlord as he may have been, that money — their money — was my inheritance. The small paychecks of those families formed the large checks I received each Christmas.
Every Sunday, Grandpa preached at the church he owned next door. A relic of a more flourishing time, when the congregation was more than just seven devoted locals who seemed duty-bound to humor the vacant proceedings, quietly watching him preach amidst hundreds of empty pews.
I rode the electric chairlift slowly up and down the steep staircase in his church. Later, when his body followed his mind in failing him, I rode the new chairlift up and down the carpeted staircase in his house. Eventually Grandma and her new hip rode the lift as well.
Grandma was in fact my step-grandmother. I wasn’t aware of this until I was older. She was always just Grandma to me. My dad’s mother died when I was a baby. Twenty-five seconds of silent 8mm footage. Kind eyes looking at the lump of me in her arms. Christmas tree twinkling beside us.
In winter, the rooms of their house were heated by radiators. Metal monstrosities that lurked along the walls. I remember a time my dad stubbed his toe on one, cursing, seething, radiating anger at everything in the room. A kind and lovely man rendered impotent with rage.
I once turned at the top of the stairs. Grandpa stood naked in the bathroom at the far end of the hall, his back to me. Saggy skin and sloped shoulders. Hands hanging at his sides, reaching almost as low as his knees. He looked out the window, a strange shadow before bright afternoon light.
Whispers of Grandpa’s dark side. Family secrets. Hushed explanations as to why women didn’t want to be alone in his company. Buried truths from the past digging through dirt, fighting for oxygen. Locked in a closet and refusing to come out.
Am I speaking ill of the dead? Laying bare a man who isn’t here to defend himself, or even to admit his guilt? And what of me? What was my responsibility as his grandson? Silence, I supposed. I never said a word, and I cashed every Christmas check.
Grandpa’s road to the end was paved with clichés. Calcifying resistance to growing truths. A car that “came out of nowhere” and was T-boned by his pickup truck. Urinating in garbage cans, lost in his own home at night. The inevitable dying of the light. And, yes, the rage.
Dad cursed Grandpa on the drive to the nursing home, frustrated with his own father’s unwillingness to be put away. Grandpa tried to escape, from the car and the room he was later put in. Fire extinguisher taken to his window. They kicked him out. A liability. A danger.
He did not last long in the hospital. He’d lost his will to live but his grip was strong when he held my hand on his deathbed, even though he was otherwise too weak to open his eyes. He’d always turned a handshake into a minor battle. And he’d always won.
I didn’t speak at his funeral, and afterwards I never saw Grandma again. Not that I can remember anyway. That feels like a mistake. We exchanged a few letters in the decade between his death and hers. Pictures. Sometimes, from certain angles, I can see my grandpa’s face in mine.
Alone in his empty church, I once ran my hand through a rack of dangling choir robes, shaking loose a cloud of dust and buried ghosts. Some invisible shadow of the past. My head swam and I leaned a hand on the wall to keep from stumbling, unsure what I’d just set free.
