2003, Racine, Wisconsin

By Allison Hantschel

You rode a purple tricycle, brightshinypurple, around and around on the basement’s cement floor, ducking your head so you wouldn’t hit it on the laundry chute. There were rusty old roller skates you strapped to your sandals, the leather so old and stiff it cut your fingers. There were Band-Aids in the medicine cabinet for that, and lawn darts to throw, and a softball tee you dragged up into the daylight and hit from, for hours, and he chased the balls and never complained. Old and mostly deaf, knees aching, hands destroyed from factory work, he chased the balls and brought them back, because you laughed when he did it.

She made the best chocolate chip cookies, and when you were 8 that was so important, the jar with the top that screwed off, and the cookies inside, and you could have as many as you wanted.

Two recliners in the living room and after dinner, he dried the dishes she washed, they sat in those recliners and you sat beside hers on the carpet which was brown-red and then gray, pretending to do your homework but really watching as he answered every question on Wheel of Fortune right but scoffed when you told him he should be on the game show, he’d make a million dollars.

There was a butter dish in the kitchen cupboard full of quarters and she told you to take some and run over to the dime store, buy some bubble gum and a glitter pen, it’s just a quarter, it doesn’t matter. Every Wednesday night you slammed open and shut the gate and walked up the back, flung your backpack down on the lawn, joined her on the patio swing and chattered, for a solid hour, about your day.

He loved her so desperately, terribly, you could see it in their wedding photo, his wide, gap-toothed grin, wearing her like an Olympic medal, his rumpled too-big suit beside her perfect satin dress. You had the same one made for your own wedding, admiring her straight back, her determined eyes. He dated two of her sisters but settled on the older one, who’d studied nursing by herself in Chicago, who left home at 19 and came back having stepped over drunks in the gutter and treated children burned in fires. He settled on the one with the eyes that saw to the end of her life and though she was four years older he married her, and told you once, on their anniversary, “Only one man had a better wife than me: Saint Joseph.”

And she was happy to see you, no matter what you did wrong that day, what you’d failed at, she was happy. All you had to do was walk in the door and you’d be the best person she could think of. She loved you like that. He said your name, drew it out so that its three syllables lasted a full minute, and because he said so little, that said everything.

Every Wednesday until you moved away, from before you could remember until the day you packed a duffel bag and left for college, 17 and a half years of Wednesdays where you didn’t have to prove anything, say anything right. You walked through that door, flopped down on the carpet, complained when dinner was meatballs and boiled potatoes, he kissed your forehead and tickled you, she cut your hair and was the only person you trusted to touch it.

It was what you did on Wednesday and when things were very hard, when there was yelling at home, when you couldn’t do anything right, you went over to the house and you were perfect for them. Nothing could hurt you there, he’d protect you, she’d comfort you, give you that smile that split her stern face and lifted you up out of your shoes, it made you that happy, you felt that loved.

Five houses down from a church, on the east side of the block round the corner from the bakery and the Italian restaurant and the dime store. A brown-sided bungalow with two dormers in front where each Christmas he hung baby dolls against tin foil wings, Joy to the World written above them. The Lord is Come. Joy, joy to the world, and the warm Christmas mornings you walked over, presents piled in paper bags.

You’d go upstairs, up the curving staircase past the window that let into a crawl space where your baby things were stored, and into the bedroom your mother and aunt had shared long ago. It was yellow, with desks beneath dormers and a door that led to the attic space.

Her wedding dress hung from the ceiling in a plastic sleeve, ghost of a love story, with your mother’s many bridesmaids’ dresses you loved to play in hanging behind it, 1970s green chiffon and bright blue velvet. Tins she used for Christmas cookies, ice skates, old watercolor paint sets and board games you see now at antique markets and think of buying. Spider webs. You hated spiders. She’d catch them and throw them outside. You wanted them squished.

You played with her old jewelry boxes; on the bookshelves there was a book from the 1950s about beauty that said tall girls should stand up straight because slouching was useless and only made them look slovenly. You always stood up straight after that. People ask if you’re a dancer and you think, something to thank her for that neither of us even noticed she was doing, putting that book where you, awkward teenager, would find it.

When you visited him in the hospital, the last day he was really coherent, he looked at you before you left and pulled you close by the bed. “You were a good granddaughter,” he said forcefully, looking into your eyes, passing final judgment. “We had fun.”

The times you kept him up too late, wouldn’t listen to him when he tried to help you with your math homework, bugged him until he bought you candy or whatever else you wanted — God you were a lousy kid — but after all that, it was the fun he remembered, and let you remember, too, gave you, at the last, a picture of yourself and him that you could live with. When he died you wished someone would talk about the tricycle at the funeral, but of course no one did.

They were like this to you, you weren’t even their favorite grandchild, no, that was your older cousin, but they lavished this on you, the hands holding yours in the 4th grade when the boys teased you, the look on his face when you came up the aisle at your wedding dressed in her dress, the way he danced — old, knees rotten, self-conscious — with you because, as always, you asked for more than he could give.

She listened on the phone as you cried about moving away from your new home and all your friends, because she’d done that, she knew how hard it was. You told her to teach you to make her pie crust, she protested that she was too old and shaky to do it now, but she wouldn’t let you even scoop the flour, she had to do it, or else she’d be deficient in her lessons, if she didn’t show you how to do it right, which meant doing it herself.

Her new apartment is better for her, a new place with new friends and she won’t worry about taking care of the rose garden that you picked flowers from and put them in your tangled, frizzy hair. She won’t worry about the vegetable garden, lying fallow now, where she yelled at the rabbits eating the beans, devised elaborate chicken wire constructions to keep them out, and grew rhubarb. She won’t worry about falling, and her children, your mother, won’t worry about her.

You haven’t run to her house for safety in a long, long time. You’ve never lived anywhere longer than two years and often bemoan the fact that you have too many belongings to just pick up and go, too much permanence. You’ve got little use for the town where you grew up, and even less use for selfish nostalgia. What her house was has nothing to do with its walls and everything to do with those inside them, everything to do with being loved unreservedly, uncritically, totally, as only grandchildren can ever be loved and that love will be there in her voice on the phone, wherever she’s calling from, and when even that is gone it will, somehow, you have to believe it will be there still.

There’s something, though, in the fact that you put your mittens on those radiators, and the snow melted off them, so when you were ready to go outside again and whine until they helped you build a snowman, your mittens were already warm.

Allison Hantschel is a political writer living in Chicago. She is the editor of the anthology, “Special Plans: The Blogs on Douglas Feith and the Faulty Intelligence that Led to War.”

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 | Email This Post

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