“I wasn’t,” Uncle Rick says with a smile. “But let’s have a nice visit.”
Aunt Madeline glares at Mom, and Mom puts on her innocent “don’t look at me, it’s you” face.
“Well, what’s your career, Madeline?” Mom pokes.
Aunt Madeline, a child prodigy, is quick to lament she would have been a great concert pianist if her career hadn’t been interrupted by the birth of her daughters.
As soon as Aunt Madeline leaves the table, Mom whispers to me, “God, Madeline makes me so mad sometimes. She’s still ganging up on me. It’s just like when we were kids, when she would tickle me until I peed my pants. It was torture.”
After dinner, I volunteer to do the dishes, as is expected of me as a good guest. Aunt Madeline is pleasantly surprised, but I am the one in for a shock, when she shows me her dishwasher.
“You just have to rinse the excess food in the sink, then put them in this rack,” she explains, demonstrating for me. “It will wash the dishes.”
I don’t really believe it. Washing dishes has composed a large part of my life from the time I was three years old. It would take a group of eight kids at least an hour to clean up after every meal. Aunt Madeline has a family of four; we had at least fifty people to clean up after at the Family Homes. Why didn’t we have one of these?
I marvel at the wealth on display in my aunt’s home, not realizing this is a normal middle-class household in America. While Erin and Erika are similar in age to Nina and Jondy, their lives are worlds apart. Each girl has her own room. Erin even has her own TV, and she is only five! There are toys everywhere.
“What a terrible influence for a little kid to have her own TV,” I comment to my mother.
“Yes. No wonder she’s so difficult, always screaming and throwing tantrums.”
“They’re like the spoiled System kids Grandpa warned us about in the Letters,” I reply, with superiority to match my mother’s. I show the expected disdain for their worldliness and lack of discipline and maturity. Of course kids who grow up in the Family with a Godly education and discipline are better behaved.
Deep down, though, I desperately want what my cousins have: New clothes, piles of toys, books, and movies that they can watch whenever they want. Cookies and ice cream every day. But even I can see that they are not happier for it; the opposite, it seems.
After a month or so in Atlanta, Mom is excited to start our road trip across America. She wants to feel free and in control of her life again and loves our new, heavily used eighteen-foot camper, with its 1960s orange curtains and doo-doo-brown upholstery. I think it’s ugly and tacky and tell her so.
But I’m also amazed. “I didn’t know you could drive! How come you never drove in Macau?”
“Oh, well, we had your dad to drive, and I didn’t want to drive in a foreign country . . .” She trails off, as if just hearing how lame that sounds. Something is off, but I can’t think what.
Our first stop is Indiana to see Grandad Gene.
I have met my maternal grandfather only a couple of times, when he visited us in Macau. He was warmly welcomed but, as a Systemite, kept separate from the reality of our lives. A tourist visit and a few dinners could not bridge twelve years of absence. To me, he is a friendly stranger.
Mom likes to tell the story of how I shocked Grandad when he came to visit us in Macau when I was three years old. I was sitting on the floor at his feet playing with LEGOs he’d brought me as a present. Grandad watched as I lined up the LEGO family. “Here is the daddy and the mommy and the other mommy,” I explained, setting each small figure on the coffee table in front of him. Grandad’s bushy eyebrows shot up, and he harumphed. He knew about Mom’s arrangement, but he said nothing, preferring to avoid the topic.
From the few times my mother spoke of him, I could tell she loved her father. But before this trip to America, it was almost as if my maternal grandparents didn’t exist. Now, they were becoming real people.
Grandad is like a storybook gentleman, tall, handsome, and clean-shaven with a smooth, oval-shaped face and white hair. He’s well-spoken and elegant, and even though he’s seventy, he has the energy and looks of a man twenty years younger. I pick up a heavy iron anchor from a shelf as he tells me about catching satellite space capsules with it before they got lost in the Pacific Ocean. He’d swing the anchor on a rope out the back of his B-52 bomber and snag the parachute as the capsule fell from space. A framed newspaper article describing this amazing feat hangs on the wall. I love his mischievous smile and sense of humor, which flashes out from under the pretend gruffness.
Barbara, his third wife, is like no lady I’ve ever met, with her short, brassy styled hair and fashionable clothes. A “classy, sassy, redhead broad” is how Grandad lovingly describes her. She welcomes us with warm hugs and makes sure we are situated with towels and blankets, even toys for Jondy and Nina in the basement left over from her now-grown kids.
This is Barbara’s house that she bought, and she rules the roost, as Grandad says with a pretend annoyance that barely covers his “cat in the cream” contentedness. He knows he is a very lucky man to have snagged a woman like Barbara after two failed marriages. He met her on a plane and knew right away he wasn’t going to let this smart redhead escape. Like a true fighter pilot, he locked on determinedly until he’d convinced her to go out with him.
Life with Grandad and Barbara is a revelation. Their lovely, modest Americana-style home has a lightness to it that comes from Barbara’s spirit. It is filled with an abundance of riches: stacks of board games in the den; shelves of leather-bound, gold-embossed books; three TVs; a pantry full of snacks. Mom and my siblings sleep in the basement bedroom off the TV den, and I’m put in a bedroom at the top of the house that belongs to Barbara’s youngest daughter. She is away at college, so I have the whole loft to myself. It’s scary to sleep alone for the first time, yet the privacy is wonderous.
Barbara bakes pies and makes dinner when she gets home from the school where she works as a third-grade teacher. On the weekends, Grandad makes us his famous blueberry pancakes with real maple syrup. Every night before bed, Grandad and Barbara religiously watch the evening news, followed by Jeopardy! And Wheel of Fortune. I sit snuggled on the couch in the living room against my grandad’s side.
Mom says to me one day, “You don’t know how much it means to see Grandad cuddle you and be affectionate. I was always Daddy’s little girl. He’d laugh and sing and make up silly songs for me. Seeing you together reminds me of my childhood.” It’s nice to see Grandad and Mom getting reacquainted; she was a teenager the last time they spent much time together.