Wriye about a visit to your relative house
Answers
READERS WRITE
Visiting Relatives
BY OUR READERS
MY ITALIAN GRANDMOTHER cried easily and often: when she received news of a relative’s illness, when her oldest son walked in the door after a year’s absence, or even just when the Pope appeared on TV. Each time, her crying would go from a weepy trickle to a raging torrent in seconds. Her face, hair, and blouse would soon be wet with tears. Sometimes, during a lull, she would pull me to her, planting salty kisses all over my head and face, saying, “I love you; oh, I love you, belligramma,” her Italian pet name for all her American-born grandchildren. “Don’t be sad like me.”
For a few weeks each summer, I visited my grandmother’s farm in upstate New York. Once a week, we went into town to tend my grandfather’s grave. He’d died of complications from surgery several years earlier, and my grandmother was vigilant about keeping pots of geraniums blooming by his headstone from April to October. We had to fetch water from a distant spigot and haul it up a steep hill to wet the soil in the pots. After we had swept away the dead leaves and watered the plants, my grandmother would fall to her knees and sob inconsolably. Then I would receive her salty hugs and kisses.
Years later, I learned that my grandfather had been alcoholic, and abusive toward my grandmother; during one drunken confrontation in the barn, he’d threatened to kill her with a pitchfork and throw her body in the manure pile so it would never be found. It was tough to reconcile that story with my memory of the sobbing woman who made sure there were always flowers blooming at his grave.
Leslie LaChance
Knoxville, Tennessee
MY TWIN SISTER, T., had been missing for fourteen years when she was found rummaging in the trash for food on the opposite side of the country. Her apartment had nothing in it but a chair and a big plastic bag full of rubber bands. She had stopped picking up her Social Security checks, and the landlord was about to evict her. The authorities put her in the state hospital and contacted our parents.
When T. and I talked on the phone, the conversation revolved around food. “So, what do you think of food banks?” she said. I asked if she’d eaten yet that day, and she said, “Yeah, I have two meals — and you’re not getting mine!” She wanted to know how many doughnuts I had consumed this year, as if that were a sign of wealth.
Two months after she resurfaced, I went to visit T. at the state hospital. My sister sat squinting at the football game on a TV suspended from the ceiling. Every once in a while, she would glance at me out of the corner of her eye, and her lips would curl into a sly smile.
T. looked like herself, only older, and incredibly skinny. Her hair had grown long and was starting to gray. Her gums were bleeding. We didn’t know what to say to each other at first. “Stop smiling,” she said, and we both cracked up. “Could you take your earrings out?” she asked politely. “They are too small.”
We took a walk to the end of the hall. T. moved slowly and deliberately, like an elderly person. She rattled the door handle to the exit, but it was locked. She told me jokes that only she could understand. I knew they were jokes, though, because we both laughed at the punch lines.
When we went to T.’s room, I saw she had no clothes except the few items they had given her, among them a pink jumper six sizes too big. “I can’t figure out how to put it on,” she said. It was just as well; it would have looked ridiculous. “OK,” she said suddenly, “I’ll just change, and we’ll go out to dinner.” With that, she went into the bathroom and took a shower. When she came out, she left the water running.
“You have to turn the water off,” I told her.
“I’m trying something,” she said.
The shower basin was almost full when I turned the knob.
T. lay down on her bed and announced that she was tired. I covered her up and talked to her, telling her about my dogs and my recent trip to the beach. “I’m going to sleep now,” she said, and she shut her eyes tight and lay very still.
“Are you asleep?” I asked.
“Yes,” she answered.
Sarah W.
Watertown, New York