Fairy Tales
This morning I felt restless and impatient, wishing my appointment with Jennifer were at nine instead of three. If I weren’t so old I would’ve paced the room. I was even too restless to read, which is distressing, as without my mysteries what would I do with my time? The one I tried and failed to read today is from a series about a woman park ranger. She is resourceful, this woman, and unable to escape adventure, but I couldn’t concentrate on her and all the problems she knows she must solve. I gave up and called one of my grandnieces. The one I like. Her name is Lucy, after my sister, which I can’t hold against her. She has told me the name is making a comeback, like many other names from my childhood, though apparently not mine. But when they chose that for her, it seemed old-fashioned. She is an anomalous Lucy, misplaced in time. When she answered the phone I said, “Why don’t you pay more attention to me? I have all this money.”
She laughed. Not in a mocking way. In a surprised, amused way. A fond way. She always laughs at me, this Lucy. The original Lucy never understood my sense of humor. She never understood my anything.
“Are you offering to pay me for attention?” she asked.
“I’m thinking of changing my will in your favor,” I said. This was a lie. I already changed it, years ago, and most of what I have will go to her. Who else would it go to? There isn’t anybody else. I left a little something to her parents and her sister but I just don’t like those people.
“That’s nice,” she said. “But I’d rather have you around.”
“You don’t care if I’m around. You never come see me.”
“Margaret,” she said. “I have three kids and a full-time job and I live on the other side of the country. The last time we came to visit you couldn’t wait for us to leave.”
“I don’t know why you think that.”
“Because you told me! You said, ‘I like seeing you, but by the end I can’t wait for you to leave.’?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You did. You said if you were around my son any longer you were going to have to smack him upside the head.”
“I don’t know why you let him behave the way he does.”
She sighed. She said, “I don’t know either,” which is her way of saying she’s not going to discuss how she raises her children with me. Of course she’s under no requirement. I’m not her mother, not even her grandmother, and what do I know about disciplining a child? Besides that I remember being disciplined. After she brought it up, I did recall how irritating I found her children the last time they came, especially the little boy. She was patient with both of us, my good Lucy. I told the child to shut up in a restaurant, and she asked me politely not to use that phrase. She waited until the children weren’t around. I said her grandmother and I were raised to be seen and not heard, and she said, “That was eighty years ago,” and I was stunned into silence by the enormity of that number. The weight of it, the distance. There have been so many wars since I was a child.
I shut up, back then, and today. Or at least I changed the subject. “Do you still have that family photo wall?” I asked her.
“Of course,” she said. “My collection’s not quite complete, though. I’m still missing your grandmother.”
“I’ll send you some photos,” I said, though I have the feeling I’ve promised her this before and then failed to deliver. She is our family archivist, with a wall in her living room devoted to portraits in black and white. She is the one who might care about the old letters, the diaries, all my little treasures. She listens to my tales of family history with what I think is genuine interest. But still it’s not real for her; how can it be? How can she picture my early life in anything but black and white? There I am posed before a tank in shades of gray, when actually there was olive drab, there was blue sky and bursting green, there was bright red blood. And my hair was much darker than it looks in those pictures. There is no record of the exact shade of my hair. “You’re lucky,” I said to Lucy, “to have your memories preserved in color.”
“I love black and white,” she said. “Though maybe it makes things seem a little less real.”
This is why I like her: she understands what I mean. “They were real,” I said.
“I know,” she said.
“Any story I told you would just seem like a fairy tale.”