Family stories
There are so many of them, and they're not all nice. When my brother was collecting stories from some of the old people who are no longer with us, my grandmother's sister Mary warned him: "Sometimes people don't want you to know their stories. Sometimes things are better not talked about."
This picture is of Gramma and John, as we used to call them -- my father's parents. Look at that picture; look hard.
Look at the details. Her rolled stockings and high-heeled shoes. His cigarette and picnic basket and lunch bucket. (And why a picnic basket and a lunch bucket?) Her short skirt. Don't you wish you knew the story behind this picture? Are they coming or going? Where? How did they spend their time? What did they want out of life? Did they get it?
I remember John as a silver-haired man who wore a fedora with a small red feather. He had false teeth that he could push out of his mouth with his tongue, scaring us. He was deaf, or pretended to be; it was a convenient way of staying out of trouble.
And I remember Gramma as someone who wore pointy cat-eyed glasses and who loved to go out to Vegas and gamble. She wore navy blue doubleknit polyester suits and had a wide ass; she had that crimped gray hair that all old ladies had back in the 1970s, and she was as mean as a snake.
She had grandchildren who were her favorites: John Patrick and David. She grandchildren she didn't like: Paul, and me. She used to refer to me as Little Miss Perfect. This was not a compliment.
Gramma and John used to drive from Missouri to Duluth every September in their red Chevy with the fins. Sometimes they'd drive out to California first and pick up John's older sister, Barbara, and then drive her lilac-colored Cadillac all the way to Minnesota. John loved driving that Cadillac. When we tooled through Chester Bowl looking at the autumn leaves, I used to sit in the back seat and press the button on the power windows and watch them go up and down and up and down. When we went up the North Shore, I would often get car sick. John hated to pull over for any reason--he would never stop to let any of us use the bathroom--and I remember being dizzy and queasy and crying, and I remember John gripping the steering wheel tightly, driving on and pretending to be deaf, and I remember Barbara laughing and saying, "She won't be the first person to throw up in this car."
I remember one evening of one visit, back when I was six or seven years old. Gramma and my mother were making dinner. I wanted to help but there was nothing for me to do, so as a way to feel a part of things I got down a box of graham crackers and started breaking them into a bowl.
I stood at the old roll-away dishwasher next to Gramma, using the top as counter space; she was chopping tomatoes for a salad and I was standing across from her, breaking up the crackers. It was warm and collegial in the kitchen, just us three women being efficient and preparing food.
When dinner time came, Gramma and my mother rushed back and forth from the kitchen to the dining room, bearing steaming bowls of mashed potato and platters of fried chicken--with Gramma and John visiting, we were 14 at the dinner table--and suddenly someone whisked away my plate and, in its place, set down a bowl.
It was full of broken graham crackers. I looked up, and Gramma looked down at me. She said, "You can't have any dinner until you eat all these crackers. You cannot let food go to waste." And then she smiled.
My memories of her are complicated. It's easy to get angry, 45 years later, to feel sorry for the little thing that was the six-year-old me.
And then I look at this photo, those flat breasts, that short skirt, those rolled stockings, and I think, she had a whole life that had nothing to do with us. She wasn't just Gramma. She was Bernice Monahan. She was a woman with a heart and desires and successes and failures, dashed hopes and dreams and sorrows and--who knows--great joy, as well. And in truth, I know almost nothing about them, almost nothing about her. And I wonder: Who was she?
