If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir (13 page)

I found these stories mesmerizing, even while I recognized the essential misconceptions that made them possible. They were fascinating because they revealed a softer side to my grandmother, a glimpse of the woman beneath the facade of doctor’s wife, church choir soprano, and country club denizen. As I got older, I learned to distinguish the many layers of Cynthia—many personalities even—each with its own voice and posture and set of values. But they took years to learn, years in which Cynthia shed her family and friends like dead skin, a gradual sloughing of excess souls, until it became just her and me on the telephone, a young woman she exalted and lavished with money and attention, a relationship as fantastic as any fable and just as dangerous.
I am your fairy godmother
, she often sang out in the middle of conversation, her voice a mercurial liquid silver.

Now that Cynthia is dead, Lucienne is above my desk. I talk to her. She is my confidant, my silent partner, an empty vessel into which I pour my stories. She does not breathe a word. She is sexless, heartless; her skin is bleached. She is a doll that I
can arrange at whim, as I once was, ragged and mean. I wish I could dig my knuckles into her spine and pull those tender shoulders back against my chest.

Hold your shoulders back, child. You have such lousy posture
.

My Lucienne is smart but ineffectual and greedy in the hungry way of the young. I send her abroad and buy her pretty dresses and expensive scarves. I pay her way to Italy, England, Scotland, and Ireland. She studies art, history, and the literature of decadence: Oscar Wilde and Vernon Lee and Robert Browning. She is my world, my pigeon,
my little pet
. Perhaps she is half
-Jewish
, my Lucienne, my beautiful belle. She is not to tell and not to use
those
words, her mother’s words—
oy
and
kepala
and
kvetch
—they only make her sound dumb. Even now, I must help her tidy her sloppy sexuality, her stringy clothing, her countless mispronunciations. A silly girl who needs fixing.

My mother was fourteen when Cynthia swept her into the fold. The four Nelson boys each drove expensive but practical cars. They snuck out at night, drank themselves sick, and in the morning came down to breakfast donning neckties. They attended (and were summarily expelled from) various boarding schools in New England. When Cynthia came upon a glass bong in the basement one day, she mistook it for a vase and filled it with fresh water and a handful of white lilies from the garden.

There were prime ribs for supper and fences to keep the deer from dining on prize-winning rhododendrons. A gardener named José and a beautiful Jamaican housekeeper named Icy. A grand piano. Cynthia was learning the violin. My grandfather,
Harry, nipped at bottles of gin squirreled away in the cushions of his easy chair and tugged on a pipe, bergamot-laced smoke tumbling over the fat drowsing cat they called Floosy.

It was an intoxicating narrative, you understand. My mother’s father sold upholstery; her mother, real estate. They did not vacation in Bermuda, but down the Jersey Shore. Year after year after year. And when Cynthia stole my mother’s favorite synthetic-blend sweater and sliced it to pieces with her sewing shears, they all had a good laugh. There would be better sweaters soon. Countless cashmere sweaters and matching pearls.

But enough. I am twelve and I want news of my father. I rarely see him anymore and so she tells me this story.

It was 1958 and Jon was still churning inside her belly while the blows of Chicago’s most violent snowstorm were still at bay. She did not yet realize all the damage it would do, that she would be right there, in the eye of the storm. She was a new wife and living in Philadelphia with my grandfather Harry, who attended medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. She did not love this man, not really, but had married him to please her mother—a stony woman who’d been drawn to the scent of old money wafting from the Nelson family home, from gleaming mahogany chests and the warm flanks of the thoroughbred horses as they stood stomping and snuffing inside the stables. The cinnamon smell of the maid’s slick, black, and shining skin. A doctor’s wife, her mother had cried out after receiving news of the engagement. Her heart was an empty bank vault, Cynthia tells me, and I believe her, believe most anything she tells me for a very long time.

Jon craved red meat and so she ate it, rare at first, thick steaks singed and peppered black on the surface, wet and crimson inside. It would not do; it was raw flesh he demanded—needed, she supposed—some prenatal nutrient gone missing from the modern diet, and so she pried apart small strips of the uncooked steaks and sucked them down greedily, stealthily, until Harry caught her one day and snapped, “Cynthia!” She’d felt ashamed and stupid and didn’t eat much of anything after that.

“That was my first mistake,” she says.

She gestures me close and helps me into my newly hemmed pants. She does not hug me or pinch my
tuchus
like Helen, but she pats my head and blinks, her eyes giant blue marbles like Louise’s, my favorite doll’s. Louise has three yarns of yellow hair that I twirl around my tongue until they yield like chewing gum. In this way I fall asleep most every night. Cynthia gave me Louise when I was just a baby and she will periodically confiscate her and give her a good scrubbing. Cynthia’s hair is soft as rabbit fur and she lets me fluff it sometimes when she is using her baby girl voice, which she uses now, and there is much blinking and mewing and oh, she loves me so.

“I flew to Illinois. I was eight months pregnant. Daddy was away on a business trip and had begged me to come home and look after Mother while he was gone. I agreed, out of boredom, I suppose, and devotion to Daddy. It was a Saturday when I arrived,” she says. “I know it was a Saturday because the milk was out, in the bottles, you know?”

But of course I don’t know, being twelve and morose and narrow-sighted.

“When Mother answered the door she just stared at me. She was wearing this white silk robe I couldn’t recall. She must have thought me fat, fat, fat. And I was. ‘Well, come in child,’ she said. ‘You’re letting all the good air out.’ Can you imagine, Jessie? Oh, it was an ugly house! Cheap, cheap!”

She lifts her arms in front of her and lets her wrists dangle as she flutters her fingers about. It is a silent request for me to hold her hands, which I grant her eagerly, because physical affection from Cynthia is rare—or at least it is never enough for me, so accustomed to the hugging and kissing and cuddling from my mother’s side of the family.

I WILL RECALL
this conversation years later, as an adult, when I arrive at her deathbed and startle her out of a morphine coma.

“Gramma, it’s me, Jessie!” I cry out. “I’m here.”

I won’t mean to cry, but the suddenness of her condition will undo knots and scrape the sky out.

An email from Harry’s third wife on another Saturday morning:

“We have sad news. Grandma/Cynthia is in critical condition after having been diagnosed last Wednesday with pancreatic cancer and metastases to her liver. She is not responding but is getting excellent care at the nursing wing at Foulkeways where she has been living.”

Beyond the inappropriateness of an email in such a situation, it is the duplicitous mention of her, “Grandma/Cynthia,” that will dissolve any last notions that this is a family. When
I finally get to her from Connecticut, two hours later, she is already beyond language, and there is only this final expression of her.

“It’s me, Gramma. Jessie. Can you open your eyes?”

When she does, I will see that I’ve scared her terribly, suddenly wrested her from whatever hollow of peace the drugs had carved out, her blue eyes shot through with electric yellow, the liver quickly expiring (weary, punched out), and her arms will lift and her fingers will flutter and her expression will send screws tumbling to the floor—an image that will beat itself out inside me for weeks and months and maybe forever—her mouth contorted in the most awful grimace of hopelessness and anger and utter disappointment. Even though I am assured by the nurses that this has nothing to do with consciousness, with agency, with message, but only with the helpless contractions of a body shutting down, I cannot help but feel that I have let her down, again and now eternally, and I will never know why. More than likely, this is the ego at work, a terrible self-importance compelling me to believe her ultimate act of will would be for me, albeit one of scorn, and that she would use any last shreds of selfhood in order to get this message across. But because I can’t know, because she did not phone me the week before, when she first learned of her terminal diagnosis, nor in the days that followed, I cannot help but wonder and despair at the thought of her loneliness, her fear, and what may have kept her from reaching out to me then, as she did with most any other grievance. Was it merely to protect me? Or was it because she had decided that her final days would
be her own, away from the tears and terror of people who had already mourned so many, and so loudly? Certainly, a little quiet might be in order. I ought to honor her bravery—that she would climb so quietly into her deathbed and politely offer up her arm for the morphine drip that, she must have known, would take away her volition for good. While I had often felt that she was living her life through me, offering up the pleasures of travel and education, she had never suggested that I had any right to her death, too. I had assumed that this singular love meant that she would want me near her in those closing days, the only person she seemed to trust, and that she would have some last wisdom to impart, some direction to offer to a life in which she had seemed so vested, and yet so quickly abandoned. In turn, I thought I could offer all of me, just this once, which is what she had always wanted after all.

I was wrong. I should have stayed away. She had a right to her privacy, and selfishly, I took it from her when she needed it most.

After her funeral, a woman named Gerry will introduce herself as Cynthia’s driver.

“What a relief it must have been for her,” she will say to me. “Why, just last week she told me how she was never loved.”

I tried to love her, had wished to love her, at least. I wanted to explain how draining she could be, how she called obsessively, how she pretended we hadn’t spoken for months when we’d been on the phone for hours only the day before. That the conversation was always the same. (“No, I haven’t spoken to Grandpa. No, I can’t be a tenured professor right now.”)
I’ll want to defend myself from charges no one is making but me—that my grandmother frustrated me, that I often avoided her calls or made excuses to get off the phone, that I still let her pay my exorbitant rent while I was in graduate school and accepted the trips she funded. That I sometimes let her put down my mother and brother because I was afraid she would stop paying my rent if I argued. That I believe this makes me a bad person and so I try to avoid thinking about it.

“Will you remember me?” she had often asked in the months before her death, before I had any clue that it was so imminent. “Will you write about me?” She had been planning her death all along, and I just didn’t see it.

After she dies, I take a budding Christmas cactus from her room and place it on my windowsill where, every day, it strains to drink up the few hours of winter sun. And every morning for weeks I will find another pink bud abandoned on the Formica, like the pretty heads of decapitated queens, snapped off for want of light.

“We mostly spoke about bridge club,” she tells me as I hop around in my new pants, “my mother’s weekly rendezvous with her lady friends. They were to arrive the next morning for a game.”

Cynthia had dinner with her mother: great gobs of mashed potatoes and wet fish in melted butter.

“I remember her drinking a martini and thinking how it must sting to lick booze over her cracked lips. Sip, lick, sip, lick. Like so. But that’s the sort of woman she was, you see; she’d get some satisfaction out of that, I suppose. Oh, but
Jessie, it was a great big howling monster of a storm.
Woooo, woooo
,” she said, imitating the wind.

After dinner, Cynthia had sat in a chair with a blanket over her ankles.

“How is that doctor of yours?” her mother had called out from the kitchen.

I imagine my great-grandmother’s fingers tense around a silver shaker. I use some vague version of Maggie Smith from
A Room With a View
, since I’ve never actually seen a photo of my great-grandmother. I give her blue eyes like Cynthia’s and dark upswept hair. I hear the spoon clanking in the sink and then a long silence.

I lick grape juice over my lips and feel a burn, a satisfaction, and then a familiar shame.

“Harry is fine, of course,” Cynthia had replied.

“Though I was really picturing him gone, run off, dead,” she confides to me now. She giggles and I giggle back. She likes me best when we are in cahoots.

She had watched the snowdrifts in the light of streetlamps, tossed skyward like the risen dead. My father, unborn and belly warm, pedaled softly against her ribs. The grandfather clock chimed the hours and she fell asleep, a newspaper over her stomach like a paper tent.

She woke to the smack of ice and sleet against the side of the house. She tried to turn on a lamp but the power had gone out.

“I thought I heard snoring but no, Mother was not asleep at all. I heard this gurgling or weeping. I couldn’t quite make it out.”

Cynthia hoisted herself up and went looking for a flashlight, finding one tucked away beneath a cabinet full of porcelain figurines, each a gift from Cynthia’s paternal grandmother. “Another woman of taste, my mother always said.” She fingered a glittering young peasant boy, a brown pail tucked beneath his shoulder. His blue eyes were delicately painted to look as if he were peering to the right. As her mother sobbed or gurgled or whatever it was that Cynthia suspected she may have been doing, Cynthia slipped him into her pocket before padding down the hallway, lightly pushing on her mother’s bedroom door. She was not in bed. She heard her soft whimpering, a heaving sound, and then silence. Tiptoeing toward the window, my grandmother shone her flashlight over her mother’s frail body, twisted on the floor and caught between the bed and the wall, her nightgown soaked with vomit. She was very drunk.