I was her favorite and she was my favorite. My grandmother married my grandfather when she was eighteen, and had her first child, my mother, at nineteen. My grandfather worked for the railroad and she could sew and together there was enough to keep them going. They had five children, the fourth of whom was a sleepwalker. Brian got out of bed one night when he was six, went down the hall and down the stairs and out the front door into the snowy night. Even asleep, he knew to close the door. When my grandmother went to get everyone up in the morning, Brian wasn’t in his bed. She looked all over the house and then went outside without her coat. She found him down at the end of the driveway by the mailbox, frozen to death. Her remaining four grew up fine. Over the years they brought fourteen grandchildren home from the hospital. Go look us up—-Kenison—-we’re everywhere. My parents met in high school and also married young, everybody married young back then. They had their two boys straightaway: Heath, who they called Hardy because he was, and Jake. That was the family. That was what they’d wanted. But when my mother was thirty--five I came along. Thirty--five sounds like nothing now, it sounds young, but being pregnant when she already had two big boys, one of them playing football on the varsity team, mortified her.
I would say nothing against my parents or my brothers. They were good to me, but there was from earliest memory an understanding that I would live mostly at my grandmother’s house six blocks away. My grandfather had died of emphysema and everyone said she needed company, insofar as a very small child can be company. I suppose I didn’t live completely with her but I was mostly with her, playing with fabric remnants and ribbon wound onto spools while she worked. The alterations shop had a small selection of needles and yarn because we didn’t have a knitting shop in town. When I got older, my mother would watch me knitting a sweater at the breakfast table and say she was sorry she hadn’t paid more attention to her own mother’s attempts to teach her things. I tried a hundred times to teach her myself but my mother was like a border collie. She couldn’t sit still for it.
My grandmother and I though, we were the absolute masters of stillness. She taught me to play honeymoon bridge, how to watch movies while silently keeping up with my stitch count. Those were the days before audiobooks, and she asked me to read to her while she sewed, following my progression from The Little House in the Big Woods all the way through Moby--Dick, which I never would have finished were it not for her insistent requests to hear another chapter. Every book I had to read for school, along with all the ones I read for pleasure, I read to her. This was probably the origin of my acting, as I can remember her telling me to be a little more interesting, and then later on to be a little less interesting. When I played my first Emily in high school, she helped me memorize my lines and I helped her make the costumes. We each had a copy of the play and we read it through breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
“She’s just like you,” my grandmother said. “The smartest girl in the class.”
My grandmother had been the smartest girl in her class as well, everyone said so, but there wasn’t much to do with that distinction once she’d married on the Saturday after graduation. Five children made for a full life, and then four children did the best they could to make life full. Her math was sharp, it had to be to make patterns and run a business. She kept the red leather--bound dictionary her husband had given to her on their first anniversary on the bedside table where another woman might have kept a Bible. She wanted me to go to college, and then she wanted me to go to California and be an actress. She wanted me to have everything I ever thought of wanting. “Look at her getting up on that stage like it was nothing,” she said to her friends. I went off to the University of New Hampshire, and after that I got on a plane to California and checked into a hotel room all by myself. I amazed her.
She never once made me feel bad about leaving. I don’t know that I would have gone if I’d thought she’d be lonely. But she was so cheerful about everything, so happy for me. She had plenty of family around her still, and she knew everyone in town, so off I went. I don’t regret that. She would never have wanted me hanging around for her sake. She meant for me to do something with my life, the kinds of things she hadn’t been able to do herself. But when I think about what those years away added up to, I would rather have spent them with her.