you see, i learned at a very early age that my grandmother had Money. when i misbehaved while visiting or did something embarrassing at church (like all kids do), my mom would sit me down and tell me how i needed to behave so we wouldn’t be Written out of the Will. whatever that meant. i remember being so proud to show my grandparents that i could do a somersault on my own in the midst of all the oohing and aaahing over the baby learning to crawl. i bumped into a statue that was situated at the top of the stairs and down it went, losing its head. we left at once under the cold stare of my grandmother and my mom cried the whole drive home. we didn’t see them again until christmas, even though we only lived a few miles apart.
i learned to bring a book, say my polite hellos, answer the standard questions about school and retreat quietly out of the way, preferably far from anything breakable, which was rather difficult to do in her home. most of the time i spent outside on the deck or smushed into a chair in the family room in the basement. in other words, as far out of sight as possible.
christmases were much different. one night a year i was allowed to be excited, allowed to be a kid and jump around, eating chocolates and banging away on the piano keys. that one night each year was like stepping into someone else’s grandmother’s house. i remember the christmases fondly, if only because they were what should have been normal, i suppose.
when my grandmother died, we had just moved cross country from texas to maryland for the first time. we stopped along the way to visit and took a four generations picture with my infant daughter. she spoke to me more in that visit than she had in the previous twenty years of my life. apparently now that i was not planning on knocking the statue down the stairs, i was good enough to talk to. or perhaps she knew it would be the last time i saw her alive. i had just begun a job and we had no money to fly back to the midwest for a funeral. i didn’t even cry when i heard the news. she had been sick and she didn’t die unexpectedly. i didn’t feel a deep void; if anything i felt relief that i could no longer screw up bad enough to get kicked out of the will.
at some point i must have redeemed myself over the statue incident because she did leave a few things to me. i have a pair each of plain gold, diamond, and pearl earring studs and enough plastic costume clip-on earrings to start my own store, along with a pretty black hills gold pin and matching necklace. i think of her when i see the jewelry in its place in the box and my mom asked me recently why i don’t wear them. i couldn’t give her an answer at the time, but now i think i know why.
those trinkets really mean nothing to me. a woman whose love for her own daughters was so cold that any perceived slight would leave them cast out of the family to fend for themselves was no real family to me. a mother who could not stomach more than a brusque peck on the cheek and would brush away even the slightest signs of affection with a look of disdain similar to that of watching a drowned rat drip on the carpeting never could hold onto the love of a child. i acknowledge my kinship, as she did to me. that’s all that should be expected. buying my undying affection with a few earrings after a lifetime of sour looks seems cheap and wrong. and it plain didn’t work.
i plan to have the pearl and diamond studs made into rings or necklaces, whichever the wearer prefers. my sons will get the diamonds to present to their wives-to-be. my daughters will get the pearls on the eves of their engagements, and i will turn the black hills gold pin into a second necklace so that each girl has a piece of that as well, leaving me with nothing but the plain gold studs. after all, that seems more fitting for the plain, stark, no nonsense relationship i shared with my foremother.
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