When I look for that house in my mind, I have a blurry vision of my great-aunt Gladys standing in the dining room cutting flat rubber padding into tiny circles to paste onto her sore feet. Behind her I can see my grandmother sitting at the sewing machine by the big window, guiding a swatch of fabric under the foot, pumping the wide flat pedal back and forth. There’s a rocking chair beside the mesh-curtained fireplace where my seventy-six-year-old great-grandmother sits under a halo of white hair, her hands dancing around two thin knitting needles with a steady stream of twine-like yarn flowing from the paisley bag resting on the floor. I remember that chair, how it chirped like a cricket when my great-grandmother would rock me, quietly patting my back the whole time.
These are the women who raised my mother, whose influence had been ingrained in her. My grandmother and her sister Gladys, and their mother, Mimmie or Mama, as they called her. The two sisters lived in the house together since both of their husbands had passed away several years before, one right after the other. My great-grandmother didn’t have a permanent home of her own but moved around from daughter to daughter, sometimes making her way to South Carolina to visit Mae, the only one of her four daughters who’d stayed in the Deep South. The youngest sister, Perle, lived in nearby Glendale but was in and out of the house constantly. She was the only one whose husband was still alive, yet I don’t remember seeing Uncle Chet very often, and never for any other reason than to pop in and fix something. My mother’s brother would drop by, but I can’t remember him pausing to sit down, and even though my father must have entered the house at some point, I have no memory of it. It was a kind of no-man’s-land. A world filled with women who would straighten up if a man walked in, who would set aside the triviality of their own work and quickly move everything out of the way. But the men, whoever they were, never stayed long, and when the door slammed behind them, the house seemed to breathe a sigh of relief.
Gladys was the most imposing of the sisters and the only one who made me nervous. She’d sit at the end of the dining room table, always in the same chair, playing solitaire or one-handed canasta while she soaked her feet in a pan of hot water and Epsom salts after working all day at Bullock’s department store in Pasadena. I wanted her to like me the best, but no matter how hard I tried, Ricky was always Aunt Gladys’s favorite. Instead I had to content myself with being my grandmother’s favored child, and when I was little I always felt as though I’d been stuck with the shorter end of the stick. It has taken me a long time to see that it was my grandmother’s sturdy presence in my life—never full of tender touches or hugs and kisses, just a quiet, fierce devotion—that created a rock inside me, a safe spot I’ve always relied on but never knew I had. When I hear a house creaking under my feet, I’m instantly back there, in the safety of my grandmother’s world.
Her name was Joy and that’s what I called her. Never Grandma or Grammy or Newnee, just Joy. Which is ironic, actually, because I don’t think I ever saw an ounce of it in her. Well, maybe tiny glimpses of glee, never joy. Like years later, when we’d come to visit and she’d be waiting on the sofa, watching out the window. Then she’d quickly move to the backyard as our car came up the driveway, ready for us to scramble out. When I’d say a simple “Hi, Joy,” she’d fling her hand over her face as if to hide the smidgen of delight seeping out. The only reason I knew she was smiling was because her big puffy cheeks elevated her glasses, the cheeks that got handed down to me, along with a smaller version of her cow eyes with long lashes—spider-leg lashes, I called them.
Other than that, it was hard to read what was going on inside my grandmother. One time she caught Ricky and me playing in her “nasty, bug-infested” garage after she told us not to, and I don’t know if she was mad that we had disobeyed or scared that we’d get hurt, but for whatever reason, she chased us around the lemon tree with a switch, a switch she must have had waiting somewhere, ’cause there she was, instantly armed, red in the face and at a gallop. It was the only time in my life I saw tears rolling down my grandmother’s face, which was the most upsetting part of that whole event—those tears. Emotions, in general, were not encouraged, and if I got angry as a child, Joy would pucker her face and say, “Don’t be ugly.” So when she came at us in a blaze of fury and flowing tears, Ricky and I were totally befuddled, not knowing whether she was mad or sad, or what the hell was going on. Needless to say, we spent the rest of the day trying to make her laugh.
All of the women in Joy’s house, even Perle (whom I knew the least), were linked together like they were playing a lifelong game of “Red Rover,” except they never called anyone else to come over. They’d cluster in the backyard, just the sisters and their mama, sharing the task of turning the crank on the wooden ice-cream maker filled with cream and peaches from Joy’s tree, while we all waited for my mother to come home from her day at the studio. I would lie on the quilt one of them had spread out over the grass and dreamily listen to that bubbling chatter, punctuated by the occasional slam of the screen door as Joy moved in and out of the kitchen. Taking turns, one would talk and then another as they pleasantly gabbed on about what needed to be fixed, or what to cook for Thanksgiving, or whether the cream had set, but never about themselves, never about their past, or even their present. I never learned anything about them from eavesdropping or any other way, and for some reason I never asked. It seemed as if there was nothing I needed to know. And clearly my mother had never asked, because these women had been the backbone of her life, and yet she didn’t know any more about them than I did. And I knew nothing.
Many years later, long after Mimmie had passed away, just as all the sisters were heading toward the end of their lives, Joy slowly began to talk, revealing the memories that had been hidden for so long. It is Joy’s history, handed to her by Mimmie, her mother, but somehow a thread of that history got woven into my mother’s history and then into mine. I have always felt that, always thought that Joy’s story is somehow an important piece of this puzzle, the puzzle of me and my mother. Even though I’ve never really known why.
Born in Alabama in the late 1800s, Joy came from a long line of farming folk on both her mother’s and father’s sides. They were not the landowners, but worked on the land and were, for the most part, uneducated. When Joy’s father, Grover Bickley, suddenly died of malaria, her mother, Mimmie, was left penniless, with no means of support and four little girls to care for, my eight-year-old grandmother being the oldest. Immediately, Joy’s sisters Mae, age three, and Perle, not quite two, were sent to live in South Carolina on a farm with one of their father’s brothers, while Joy and five-year-old Gladys were sent to live nearby in the Epworth Children’s Home, where they stayed for almost ten years.
What shadowy information Joy gave us about the children’s home was all very Dickensian: It was cold, many little children died, the education was all hellfire and damnation, men are the devil and sex is evil. She told us about picking bugs—weevils, I presume, and God knows what else—out of the oatmeal, and that Gladys was sickly, refusing to eat. Joy had to force food into her. Maybe she dramatized some of the details but, bless her heart, she lived there for a good chunk of her childhood, years that no doubt shaped who she was. So if there was some creative accounting on her part, that’s fine with me.