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By Ann Graham Price
timbrel, March-April 2006
Although it’s been years since I’ve seen my favorite photograph of Gladys, taken around 1917, I remember it vividly. By the time I knew her, she was Grandma: dignified, elegant, warm. Yet now when I think of her, I see the young woman the camera saw that day, lithe and graceful, skirts spread out on some long-forgotten lawn, eyes gazing dreamily at something that lay beyond the frame.
Her eyes were always like that, they tell me—always searching for things outside the frame that defined her life. Our eyes were alike, hers and mine, although by the time I became aware we had this in common, her silence had long been deepened by the years.
And my silence, too, was beginning.
“Why are we here?” she would ask as a little girl as she helped hang the wet clothes on the clothesline.
“Oh, Gladys,” they would snap in exasperation. “Why do you need to know such things? Stop asking so many questions.”
In silence she buried herself beneath her hourglass waistline, her spotless house, that famous meatloaf. Her children grew up asking no questions. Her hair turned white and flaxen and beautiful. All was well.
Arthritis crippled her lovely hands, and she held in them her youngest grandchild—a girl with eyes like her own: dark, inquisitive, searching.
She taught me about soft, pretty things: my mother’s antique bisque dolls; the lavender sachet she would dab on my wrists—but not too much. “Too much and you aren’t a lady,” she said.
She talked of her years in the Philippines teaching women to cross-stitch. More soft arts.
It’s not that I questioned the value of those things. But I ached to see beyond all that, into the silence that kept the generations from really knowing one another. There always seemed to be something more to know that never got said. It lay just outside every family photograph, immediately behind every gesture, at the edge of every conversation.
Who were we? Why did we try to hide so much from ourselves?
Relatives who were with her during her final years tell me she awoke suddenly from a deep sleep one afternoon, quaking in alarm, and could not be reassured.
“Where is Ann?” she asked in terror.
“She is at home, where she should be,” they answered, observing among themselves how she always fussed over trivial details.
“Where is Ann?” she said again, her alarm increasing.
“She is at home, with her parents,” they sighed, and their exchanged glances said it all: There she goes again with her crazy fixations.
But I was not at home with anyone—not then, and not for a very long time afterward. At the precise moment my grandmother awoke with a start, I stood hundreds of miles away at the bottom of a hill that went up and up forever, choking with fear, while the boy from school with shiny black hair came closer and ever closer behind me.
I was 13 the day I discovered there was no safety in knowing which fork to use or in being able to outspell the school superintendent. There was no proper attire to cover this kind of nakedness, no polite excuse to take off the chill. There was only this boy with his relentless pursuit that had gone on for weeks, and my terror.
“Boys will be boys,” they had said at school when I asked for help.
“If you really wanted him to stop, he would,” they had said at home when I pleaded for help.
And there at the bottom of that hill, with no way out, no way to escape, terror turned to rage, rage to despair, which in turn, having nothing else to turn into, turned inward.
Thus was the silence of the generations made complete.
The following summer we took our annual trek to visit the grandparents. I sulked wordlessly in an armchair, enduring the disapproving glances and clucking tongues from my relatives. I knew without having to be told they all preferred me sullen and mute rather than truthful. I had grown adept at hearing unspoken messages. The one for me that summer came through loud and clear: Don’t let your grandmother see what a disgrace you’ve become. It would kill her.
It was the last time I saw her alive.
Many years later I stood like stone at her grave, remembering the face I had once loved so well, unable to feel anything at all. Years, distance and
old wounds stood between us, impenetrable as granite.
I had come to hold her partly responsible for the lie I could no longer believe: of fine old music boxes and dainty lace fans, of white-gloved hands folded neatly in one’s lap, and Beethoven sonatas. As if she conspired to create those things to hide an ugliness she knew lay underneath.
Half a lifetime has now passed since those painful years. I never quite learned to be silent. I found my way into a group of other women who had experienced similar violations. In that setting, I finally was able to speak and to find healing.
I see now how difficult it must have been for my grandmother to speak when no one seemed willing to listen. I suspect she would not have rejected me if she’d known the truth. |