Warning: long post ahead

Home Away

And then I realized she was the house, the house in the ‘Ford, along the banks of the Rock River. She was the reason I remembered it.

Every month or so, I drove down to Mankato from St. Paul to visit Grandma at the Hillcrest Health Center. One summer I got to spend the weekend there, leaving the kids with my husband. She had wanted a chicken sandwich from Burger King in time for the nursing home’s lunch hour. I was late and on my way got a ticket for going fifty in a thirty-mile-per-hour zone. I tried to explain to the policewoman that I was rushing because I didn’t want my grandma to be stuck again with a dried-beef sandwich and broth soup with the rest of the residents.

When I walked into the solarium I saw my Grandma and said, “I brought you a $75 sandwich, Grandma. I got a ticket racing to get it for you in time.”

She said, “Well, it’s about time . . . I’m starved! I was sure you were coming so I didn’t take any lunch. But when it got past one, I thought you had forgotten.”

“I wouldn’t forget, Grandma. I’d never forget you,” I said.

I tried to see her as much as I could since she’d been transferred to the home. Three years is such a long time to spend in one room. One that wasn’t even hers alone; she’d had roommates off and on. Some just didn’t like her and asked to be moved. Others had died. My grandma died there, too; she was only in her early seventies.

I always thought she looked just like Barbara Stanwyck. Especially the way she turned in one ankle when she posed in front of the camera. When she was in her twenties, she posed like that in front of Tibbie’s, the famous restaurant she and my Papa owned in Indianford, Wisconsin. Papa was in the war back then and I thought she looked as good, even better, than all those posters of Betty Grable. When she mailed that picture over to Papa in Germany, he had his own pin-up for his tent. She kept that pose throughout her life, and in pictures Papa sent me he would write things like, “Pretty sharp-looking babe, eh?”

In the nursing home, she still had a little wave to her hair and we all tried to keep her nails manicured. Mom bought her velvet green pantsuits and matching big slippers that she could wear comfortably in her wheelchair. She liked to have a smoke in the solarium, even though by the end she never really smoked a whole one. I didn’t like sitting out there because everyone smoked and it was one big foggy cave, but the TV was usually on and it was easy to make the residents smile.

In 1991, the year the Twins won the World Series, about twenty minutes before game time the residents would start shuffling their wheelchairs into the solarium, their feet pulling their chairs with baby taps, tap-tapping their way in single file from all directions, like Boeings coming in patterns to land at the airport. They’d gently shuffle themselves into the big room, like they were all being pulled by some magnetic force, some life force they couldn’t resist. Grandma would snuff out her cigarette then and say, “Oh, I can’t stand the Twins. Let’s go back to my room.” She didn’t like to shuffle her own wheelchair. She liked to be pushed and loved to watch all the residents comment on her chauffeuring visitor: “Oh Marj, I see your granddaughter came down.” Or, “Is that good-looking man your son-in-law?”

I was an Air Force kid. I moved often and my family was an island among strangers, those strangers swapped with another circle of strangers every eighteen months or so. But I grew up loving my extended family dearly, hanging by the phone when my mother cackled with her two sisters, reading my Papa’s long letters quickly the minute they came in the mail, then rereading them over and over until I had all his stories in my mind. My Papa, my mother’s father, was the master storyteller of the family. Blonde, Irish, funny, sentimental, sociable. My mother inherited that gift, not just from her father, but from all the people in the village where she grew up. She tells stories of sitting up at the bar stool after the restaurant had closed, when everyone sat around talking and counting their tips. She tells stories of boating out on the Rock River with her dad. She tells stories of growing up in the house along that river. And in all these stories, her mother played big—bigger than life sometimes. I never knew where we would live from year to year, but I knew I could always count on hearing about Grandma, and it was like that was my home.

My first memory of visiting Grandma in that riverfront house was when my Dad was in Vietnam. My brother, Mom, and I had taken the train up from Kansas City to spend a few weeks with all the family. Mom and I slept up in the second-floor bedroom, the one she and her sisters had slept in all those years growing up. It had a shed dormer and lots of angles and windows and overlooked the back lawn. The bats would come in through the attic on summer nights like that one and I woke up in the middle of the night with my mom yelling and swinging pillows in the air. She told me to get under the bed, that a whole load of bats had gotten into the room. My papa had heard all the noise and came up and, by then, my mom was throwing the pillows at the bats. And then Grandma came out to the bottom of the stairs. My brother woke up, too. I saw from under the bed that Grandma was buck naked. I mean buck naked. She had about a 40D bust and a slim waist even after the kids, and when my brother raced out to the hall to see if maybe the war had slipped over to Wisconsin from Saigon because we were all spooked during that time when Dad was away and because the racket had gotten so loud, all he could do was go ghostly white and look straight at my Grandma’s big breasts and say in one of those loud and raspy whispers, “Grandma. GRANDMA.”

I have a picture of myself during that time. I’m in a white cotton nightgown with lace eyelet trim, floor length, and I’m sitting on the window bench in Grandma’s dining room. She loved Lucy Ball and on one show Lucy and Ricky bought a country house and Lucy had filled it, room to room, with early American furniture. So Grandma did the same thing. It looked great in her country house. Finally. She had worked so hard trying to decorate that house. Once she bought a modern sectional couch with a matching upholstered ottoman, all sixties modern and boxy. But that didn’t satisfy her. Then she hired a man from the village to come in to hang plaid wallpaper in the kitchen. She wanted the ceiling to be plaid—and all the insets in the wood cabinets to be plaid, too. When the job was about over the handyman she had hired was at the tavern talking to my papa, who was bartending that night. The man said, “Floyd, I like you, and I like your bar, and I even like your wife. But never, never, will I do another job for that broad again. Never.” She had hounded him with every move, him trying to match all those plaids, and all the walls and cabinets weren’t square, and she bent over him hounding the whole time.

It was about a year later from that visit that my Grandma knew she had to save Papa. Papa had started drinking heavily when he got back from the war, forever haunted by all he had seen. He had survived the Battle of the Bulge, but it never left him. Once someone came into the tavern and Papa had his back turned to the door and the customer, who thought he was being funny, made a big gunshot noise with an air rifle. Pop-pop. Papa hit the floor, flinging the towel and bar glass that were in his hands. When he realized it was just the guy joking, he jumped over the bar and threw the guy out for good, telling him he was a son-of-a-bitch for doing that to him.

His nerves got the best of him and he couldn’t sit still long enough even to go to a movie. His three girls had grown up and moved away and he just drank himself sick. Grandma came home to him one night and told him she had sold the house to a young couple, sold their shares in the restaurant, and had bought a Winnebago in Janesville. They were going out to California, to Los Angeles, near where one of my aunts had settled. My grandma was mad as hell and she was just pitching everything she could fit into that Winnebago: photographs and lamps and clothes. My papa called my mom in Kansas City and told her what was happening. “What am I going to do?” he said. My mom said, “Well, you better go with her, Papa. What other choice do you have?”

I have another picture of Grandma, this time she’s fifty-three and standing outside the Pacoima V.A. Hospital in Los Angeles. Mom tells me that this was the happiest she had ever seen Grandma. She had become a nurse’s assistant and worked first at the V.A. and then the city hospital. She loved taking care of the elderly men and helping to deliver babies. She bought her own Volkswagen and on her days off she sipped coffee on her new side porch with the bougainvillea growing up the trellises. Papa, healthier now, writes on the back of this picture: “They all like to have her shave them the men that is so they can lean their heads back.”

Back at the nursing home, I asked Grandma so many questions. What about the time my mom took the fishing boat out and the motor died and when they jumped out to pull it back up the river they came upon the dead body in the currents? Or how about the time all the river rats came up to the garage and when Papa went out to dig his garden, he dug up their nests and they started attacking him? Did he really burn down that garage? I would wish we could sit down in her old kitchen and she could tell me all about those days. She used to say, “Well, let’s just have a cigarette,” even if you were under age. And then she would go on. It was like coming home. Like being gone in a strange new world all the time, where everything is so unfamiliar that it seems either too sharp or just a soft blur, and then coming through that front porch with the swing attached to the ceiling and then through the front door to the big picture windows, and feeling so much relief. Everything was here, the river rushing past that sagging porch out back, the hens and chickens spilling over the side rocks, their thick shoots and runners sending out more shoots and offsets, all tender and connected by the mother leek. The one that started it all.

And even though we weren’t in her old kitchen, it felt good just the same to talk with her. She told me how she knows it was hard for me to move so much. But she was able to pick up and move back then and she said she knew just what she wanted to take with her. When I asked her what she missed most about the old days, she said, “I’ll tell you what I don’t miss. I don’t miss the gruel. I had that goddamn gruel every day of my life growing up. Couldn’t stand the stuff.” I laughed right out loud because I had expected her to be sentimental.

On another visit, we were sitting out in the solarium again, and I asked her too many questions. I remember feeling she would be gone soon. I remember I felt like I was already detaching from her and my questions sounded too much like a reporter’s. Like I was hearing all this stuff new for the first time and I was trying to get the story, but not getting it right. It was tedious to her, I’m sure. She leaned on her hand, her elbow up on the arm of her wheelchair. She was looking out the window and her body was very still. I asked, “What do you miss most right now? What could you have if you could have anything in the world?” I thought maybe she’d be funny again like last time and say chocolate cake or strong coffee or a decent actress to watch in the movies, these new ones couldn’t act their way out of grade school. The bones of her hands against her cheek were so fine, but strong and long, too, and her wrist was exposed where the velvet sleeve had slipped down to her elbow. I wanted to reach out and touch her. But she looked right over at me without any hesitation and said, “Papa. I miss Papa.”

Later, after the funeral, my husband and I drove over to Indianford and by the old house near the river. I told him about the fried chicken at Tibbie’s and how vacationers from Chicago would line up outside the door on a Saturday night. I told him about how my mom would pick strawberries lying on her stomach in the back of the pickup truck, her stained fingers reaching out carefully to the bushes while the truck moved slowly along the rows. I told him about how old Minnie used to sell us worms and rent us poles and a boat when my brother and I came to visit, her dock so torn and weathered you had to watch where you walked. He said, “I bet you wish you grew up here sometimes, don’t you?” I said I did in a way. He asked, “What do you miss most about the place?” “Grandma,” I said. “Grandma.”