4.
I rummaged through the contents of a cylindrical trunk I had found in my grandmother’s cupboard.
Never seen this thing before, I thought.
It looked old, and beaten. Restful silence whispered around the bottom. Inside was a string of glass beads and yellowed lace. Three photographs – two of my grandmother as a young woman. Shiny shoulders and a straight, small nose. Beautiful. One of a boy I didn’t recognise. He had horn-rimmed glasses and lilac bellbottoms and a frozen smile full of teeth and happiness. He was riding a bicycle. I ran my fingers over them, removing a film of dusty time that had settled as the years set in.
Things that meant nothing now. She was dead. Tangible things were as useless as a piano to a physicist.
I looked up, into the mirror on her cupboard’s sliding door.
I look like her. Kind of. Nnnyes.
Green eyes and long, tangled hair. My grandmother’s straight, small nose. Fair skin and three too many teeth. For my unusually striking appearance, I had, strangely, very little presence.
Maybe because my mother’s absence seeped into my own eyes.
Maybe because normality lurked so close. In a stained coffee-cup. Or the reality in a dream.
I heard a breath at the door and whipped away the trunk. My mother appeared at the threshold looking ethereal and holding a stack of slack, wavy-paged books entitled with fancy Oxford-esque names.
‘All ready?’ she asked.
I stood and nodded. She smiled and drifted out of the room. I followed and left the trunk of little memories to coagulate into something distant and blurry. Nobody would remember it.
The doors closed with a solid THUNK. The car smelled of dog fur and acrid cleaning products.
‘So,’ my mother began, twisting the key in the ignition. The engine sputtered to life and coughed black, opaque smoke. ‘Have you written your speech?’
She manoeuvred out of the driveway and onto the road.
‘I think I’d rather not speak,’ I said. The car slowed a little.
‘You have to!’
We rolled to a stop in the centre of the bitumen.
I didn’t look at her.
She didn’t look at me.
With an exasperated sigh, she croaked out two thoughts I knew she had withheld for years.
‘No one in this goddamn family has the dignity to do anything.’
‘Why can’t you just act like a normal child and do what you’re told?’
As the word “normal” was uttered, Dysfunction slinked into the back seat and slammed the door.
Both Death and Dysfunction were present at my grandmother’s funeral. Death sat in the front row and whistled contentedly throughout the service.
Dysfunction cackled with Aunt Mary.
‘She’s lost her marbles, I swear to God,’ my mother grunted under her breath.
Aunt Mary took a swig from a flask that looked ominously similar to the freeze-liquid bottles often received with iceboxes and mentioned quite loudly how she always thought my grandmother would be the first to go.
My mother stood up.
‘What did you say?’ she gasped.
Aunt Mary ogled her through thick, plastic-framed spectacles. She opened her mouth and pushed her false-teeth around.
A small, thin-legged cousin giggled.
The priest, who had largely ignored the commotion, stopped halfway through Psalm 23 and placed his hands on either side of his stand. The organ droned to a halt.
‘What did you say?’ my mother repeated. She flared her nostrils and bent over two people sandwiched in the middle of the argument to look Aunt Mary in the eye. Her face scrunched in a gummy mixture of disbelief and anger.
Aunt Mary clicked her dentures into place and laughed.
A long, premeditated laugh. Something you could get arrested for. A laugh that suggested the sister knew more than the daughter.
A wave of murmurs undulated softly through the church. I imagined my grandmother with her hands clasped over her ears like a child not willing to acknowledge the world. The white and wooden coffin seemed to stir.
My mother grabbed my hand and ran. I watched her eyes return for the first time.
She cried.
Silently.
Her distance withdrew itself.
Realisation dawned.
For so long, she had denied anything that evoked an emotional response – my father, myself, her mother, herself. Everything that questioned her determination was either obliterated or neglected.
Only because she learned that love came with an unaffordable price. That to care for someone meant that she felt their feelings where hers were supposed to be.
She cried with her face pointed towards the sky and her mouth contorted into one word.
Why?
I touched her shoulder. She closed her eyes. Tears dribbled down her cheeks and spattered on her lurid pink houndstooth jacket.
A strange pang of affection smacked at my insides for the mild woman in front of me. She seemed juvenile – rocking herself with thirty years of misplaced sentiment.
‘Mum --,’
She cut me off with a whimper.
‘Go back inside.’
‘No. Let’s go home,’ I said.
‘What home? Where the hell can we go now?’ she sobbed. Her voice smudged as though she herself didn’t have quite a clear idea of what she was saying. ‘We can’t go back there. Not now.’ She doubled over and screamed.
Not a pained scream.
Just a broken one.
My mother didn’t cry because she loved my grandmother, but because she didn’t know how to cope without her abuse. Somehow, she managed to cry with the demand of a three year old and the long-forgotten melancholy of an elderly widow at the same time.
I said nothing. Sliding down the angry-coloured church bricks, I took her hand and re-drew the wrinkles on its palm.
Little rivulets that ran dry when her hand came to exist. Soft sand-dune ripples where her fingers met the rest of her body. Where the desert met the spidery sky.
It’s funny, I thought, how hands can tell as much about a person as their face.
My mother’s hands were slender. The translucent colour of peach-flesh. Delicate and whitish from essay-typing in a dark, snake-ridden carport. Long, oval fingernails. Perfect for scraping down a chalkboard. I shivered.
‘Sola.’
I dropped the hand I was examining and looked her in the face. Her cheeks had swollen with the effort of crying.
‘Mmm?’
‘Let’s go. We can get our things. Come on.’
She spoke with a voice slurred with saliva and tears. I helped her to her feet and she walked uncertainly to the car, her stare fixed on the grass and her hands chasing each other in circles.
‘What about the burial?’
‘No, no. Forget it. Let’s go.’
The car door opened with a click and closed with a different THUNK. An empty THUNK. The kind of THUNK you’d find in a dead bird’s bones. Hollow. Fragile.
Peculiarly intense.
She drove away from her mother’s white and wooden coffin.
Death waved us off complacently, as familiar as a well-read book.