“Grandma, imagine the snow.” She is fanning herself with an important issue of Time or Meusweek that my grandfather insisted she save. John F. Kennedy is on the cover. His eyes seem to roll into his head and back out again as she waves him in the air. Her thumb rests on the base of his skull.
“Grandma, the snow is so high we can barely stand in it.” I take her hand and we tumble down the hill for what seems forever. My brother Fletcher glides by. His feet are like the red runners on sleds. Snow in slow motion falls on our shoulders. Snow settles on our knees. I can see my grandmother’s breath. Our hair goes white, silver white, our faces so bright. Grandma, come back. She disappears in white. Something cracks like ice. Snow piles in my throat. We fall to the ground. We sink in the snow. We move our arms and legs and make angels like the old days. Fletcher flaps wildly. I prefer a slower, more graceful technique. Our arms make the wings, our legs make the dress. And there’s mother, too, from out of nowhere, right next to us now. It’s snowing so hard that our angels seem to fill up even as we stand, turning to look at them. Mother shivers in the cold. The snow has soaked through her coat. “Oh! You make the best angel of all, Mom,” Fletcher sighs, looking at hers, which the snow does not seem to cover over. And he, too, begins to shake. The hills swerve into us.
“Such utter nonsense.” My grandmother’s voice chills the air. “Where do you get such ideas?” But she doesn’t wait for an answer. She’s blaming my mother, I know. My mother disappears for weeks and weeks. My mother hears voices in the trees.
“That is no way to live, Vanessa.”
My grandmother wished that I might take some sort of control over my life, that I not float along recklessly until death, but that I consciously choose a life and then live it. I know if she had lived to see me choose an enormous gray city to live in she would have helped me as much as she could have. First we would have memorized the thin pages of the encyclopedia under New York, learned its population and the shape of the city. She would have shown me where each borough was. We would have learned the grid system of the streets — east from west, downtown from up. She would have mastered the subway system, known that the E train crosses to Queens and the RR goes west. We would have written to the mayor and the chamber of commerce. We would have knocked on the walls to test their thickness and checked the positions of the windows and the ways of escape. We would have inspected the size of the closets, the condition of the appliances, learned something about the neighbors and the superintendent. We would have known the rights of tenants. We would have studied the lease until our heads hurt. She would have made sure that I made the most intelligent, the best choice. “Zabar’s,” she would have printed across a postcard or “King Tut” in a red pen. “Flower show at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, May fifth.”
Then, after I was settled, she would have found me the right job. It would have been in an office with a big view somewhere on the twenty-ninth floor of a building downtown in a large firm, taking up four floors with its hundreds and hundreds of offices, its dull carpets, and Xerox machines glowing in every corner. She would have seated me next to some computer, so cold, so terrible to the touch that my arm would jerk back into my body for protection. She would have wanted me among businessmen, among stockbrokers, in halls of finance, among corporate lawyers and their secretaries and cigarettes and air-conditioning, earning an honest living, saving my money, enduring this life, even though it is the only one I have.
The locusts grow louder and louder. It means more hot weather.
That is not living at all, Grandma.
We get the white cups down from the top shelf, fold the red cloth napkins. I place the fork on the left, the knife and spoon on the right. I take the pitcher from the refrigerator. My grandmother pinches some mint from the plant on the windowsill and puts it in the tea. It floats on the top. Because of the heat we wait to put out the butter, and we put the tea back in the refrigerator. We sit at the table and wait for the chicken to finish cooking. Her hands rest in her lap. They do not fly unexpectedly like frightened birds when the light in the room changes or a small breeze blows from the back of the house. My own hands are cold, even in this weather. “It’s my circulatory system,” I tell her. She smiles. I’m smart for my age. The sunlight pours in the kitchen window, making us think that it is earlier than it really is. Tomorrow I’ll be back on the train to Connecticut.
“How pretty you are,” she says sweetly. My grandmother looks so nice sitting there. I wish I could be more like her. She wipes her brow and leaves me seated alone. When she opens the oven, the heat is unbearable. The chicken is done. It falls apart on our forks. She stares at me from across the large pine table, which used to be an appropriate place to eat when the whole family was together.
What’s wrong? I wonder. She stares at me through the pitcher of iced tea. Do I eat too fast? Is my hair not neat enough? She keeps looking at me. Grandma, don’t, I say under my breath. She looks at me as if with enough concentration she could pass her brain into mine. “Grandma, don’t.”
She asks that I cut myself out from her, like a cookie from dough, like a dress from cloth, and that I be grown up about it and sensible and that I go quietly. She offers her hands in the well-lit kitchen, and to anyone it would look like a small gesture of love, a Mother’s Day card, a painting by Cassatt, a simple movement that any grandmother might make toward her grandchild. She offers her hands like two white loaves — something good, something nourishing, necessary to accept. She offers her hands in the well-lit kitchen among the thick white cups, the fruit balanced safely on the wallpaper.
“Be mine,” she whispers. “Be mine.”
But she’s underestimated me.
“Don’t leave me. Don’t. Don’t go,” she says quietly over and over in a voice so casual, so offhand that you might think the weather is the subject. And when we look to the sky the low clouds have begun to form, the storm not as far off as I once thought, already gathering force.
“They came in wagons — hundreds of them. They covered the land like terrible shadows. Many were sick. There were graves all along the way — white people’s graves everywhere. They brought their darkness. They made us sick with their diseases. They infected us with their lies, with the way they lived. They wanted to tear apart the graves of Indians for minerals, for gold. They would pull apart their own parents. There is nothing they would not do.
“The sun seemed to be going out. They came, hundreds of them, in covered wagons. They dug under the face of my father. They made my mother’s body sore. They think they can own the land. There is nothing they would not do. You cannot trade the lives of people for handfuls of gold. They came in wagons. They came to claim the land.
“But how dare they dig under my father’s skin for gold? How dare they cut my mother’s hair?”
Mary, I love your apple face — round and broad, smooth and shining on this late-fall afternoon. I can’t stay long — this old car is not mine and I’ve got to get it back to the college by dark.
“Ah, yes, the college,” she nods, trying to see it in her mind.
“This will be the last picking,” she tells me, bending and stretching — reaching, reaching. I follow her, cherishing the movements our bodies make in their last harvest dance. We hear apples like heartbeats, falling from all parts of the orchard, the only sound. “They are picking themselves,” her husband Donald laughs.
“The last time for the year,” she repeats. Donald has agreed, it is time to move inside. Let the remaining fruit go untouched. Let the children come and take it for nothing. The earth gives of itself freely; it asks nothing in return. It is time to collect the wood and enter the small house, fragrant with apples at the foot of the orchard. It is time for the final weatherproofing.