“You don’t love me at all,” my mother rages. “You don’t care how much I suffer. You don’t care if I live or die! None of you do! Neither do you, Vanessa. Don’t pretend you’re any different!” She is throwing things around the house, shoes from the window, books, jewelry. “You’ll be sorry,” she screams. “You’ll all be sorry someday. Especially you, Vanessa Turin. Go to hell,” she shrieks, exploding into a million pieces.
“No, Mother,” I say, standing up, sobbing now. “Who do you think you are? Come back here,” I demand, “right now. Do you think you can just disappear like that? Come back,” I yell. “Mother,” I shout into empty space. “Do you think you can explode into a million pieces and disappear?” I scream into the silence my voice makes, into the horrible void that is everywhere.
Anything would be easier than seeing her this way, I think. I turn away again in my hard bed and watch the mist as it moves in on the wings of morning like an angel, like a dove.
On the day of the Bicentennial, July 4, 1976, my grandmother got up unusually early, about 4:00 A.M., unable to sleep. The country would be celebrating its two-hundredth year this day in a grand way, and she had felt some of that excitement in the nursing home where preparations had been going on all week. Banners had been made. Songs had been practiced, the tenors and baritones and the multitude of sopranos getting together to rehearse their parts. Tiny flags had been purchased to decorate wheelchairs, and red, white, and blue crepe paper, to be threaded in the wheel’s spokes. The kitchen staff had made little strawberry shortcakes and had dyed the whipped cream blue. And my grandmother, the first one up, was making her own preparations, it would turn out — a different sort of independence.
In celebration, tall ships would be sailing down the Hudson later in the day. There would be elaborate fireworks displays in the evening. We asked Father if he would go to the festivities with us, and, liking water and ships of any kind, he agreed. “But we should go see your grandmother first,” he said with a certain resolve. He did not like to visit her alone. God doesn’t send us a cross heavier than we can bear, she had always said, but in the years since my grandfather’s death she had seemed to stoop further and further into the ground with the weight of it, growing more and more bitter and resentful of everyone but particularly of my father, who was not my grandfather and never would be.
“Sure,” we said, and so we went early that Fourth of July to visit Grandma, sometime near dawn.
I drove. I was just learning to drive. “Use the low beams in mist,” Fletcher said from the back seat. Though Fletcher was younger than I, it was clear that he had been driving for a long time. The early morning mist was thick and I followed his instructions. Slowly we plowed through the haze to Grandma.
I was doing welclass="underline" adjusting the lights, using the brakes and the blinkers, but nearing the nursing home I saw such a bizarre image, a picture of such eeriness in (he fog that I had to wipe my eyes to ensure I was awake, and, lifting my hands from the steering wheel, the car swerved. Fletcher leaned forward to help.
“Look,” I said, pointing. “Look.” Father stared straight ahead and said nothing. Fletcher looked up.
In front of us through the early morning mist we saw what seemed to be an old, old woman, or the ghost of a woman, dressed in a strange, elaborate costume and posed on the large front lawn of the nursing home.
“That’s Grandma,” I said.
“No,” they said, “it’s not.” They did not recognize her this way.
“Yes,” I whispered, “that’s Grandma.”
“How could it be?”
She was tiptoeing about the grass now, checking her stage, testing the light, bending and stretching in preparation. She waved to us and smiled. “My family,” she said. We stood at the edge oí the lawn and waved back — Father, too. “My family,” she smiled.
I looked closer, still not trusting my eyes. A red rosary hung around her neck. She wore a long skirt. Beads and other trinkets were sewn into it — beads from necklaces my grandfather had given her and she had never worn: crystal beads, beads of ruby-colored glass, mother of pearl. She wore a white peasant blouse, made hurriedly from a sheet, probably secretly. She had pulled the hair away from her face and made braids that she pinned up on top of her head. Attached to the braids were red and white streamers that flowed behind her when she moved. She looked like a little girl.
“Vanessa,” she said, and she made a full turn for me slowly so that I might not miss anything: the intricately sewn costume, the beautiful hairdo with streamers, the red rosary. I wiped my eyes again. She turned once more and what I saw this time was the girlishness in her motion, the joy, the thrill; yes, it was joy I saw in her turned ankle! She pranced to one corner of the lawn, picked something up, and brought it back with her. It made a lovely sound. It was a tambourine she had made from tin pie plates, yarn, and bells.
“How inventive you are, Grandma! We never knew!”
She was humming something softly to herself — a beautiful, melancholy melody. I trembled, freezing suddenly on this July morning. She hummed louder and then began to sing. Her feet seemed to lift off the ground completely as she began her lilting, graceful, lighter-than-air dance. She took three steps to the right, slowly raised the tambourine and tapped it lightly, then three steps to the left, then a twirl. Instead of her regular black tie shoes she wore ballet slippers. When I saw her tiny feet in those slippers, I felt like going up and hugging her, but I did not dare disturb the dance; I was afraid that she might turn back into the old Grandma if I moved even one muscle. I held my breath.
“I never dreamt it would all come back so easily,” she said, and there was a lightness in her voice, a giddiness we had never heard before.
She moved more quickly now, having been bitten, I imagined, by the tarantula of Italian folklore, the spider with a venom so potent that it had made her people crazy for centuries with the irresistible urge to dance.
“How graceful you are, Grandma!”
She smiled at us. “We used to make our own pasta,” she said sweetly in her new singing voice. A weight had lifted from her. “We used to make little tortellini, ravioli. We used to make our own wine and olive oil. There were mountains there.”
She was surrounded by home. It wrapped around her finally with large, comforting arms — not our home, bannered and lit with fireworks, but hers.
“Oh, Grandma,” we said, “why didn’t you ever make us those little tortellini? Or tell us about the mountains? Why did you keep it all from us?”
Strains of familiar songs could be heard coming from inside the nursing home—“I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “America the Beautiful.” There was much excitement inside. Some were dressing to leave for the day — off to backyard celebrations. Others were getting ready for the geriatric parade of wheelchairs and walkers. Sparklers had been promised.
Grandma stopped suddenly and looked directly at us. “Your grandfather never let me speak Italian in the house,” she said. “He never let me cook my own food. I missed that so much,” she said in the loneliest voice I had ever heard. “He never let me sing you to sleep with the sweet songs from Italy I loved so much.” My father put his face in his hands.
I thought of my grandfather as a young man in Italy straining toward some idea of America. I thought of him coming here, his dreams of being a real American — eating steaks and eggs, wearing good shoes, making a life — and then another idea, some time later, something quite different, though unmistakably American, too.