But as I’d grown older, in the year or so before we moved into her house, I’d begun to feel a little differently about Grammy. She was still nice to me, but I’d started to realize that she wasn’t always so nice to Mom. Grammy had never learned to drive, so we took her shopping almost every single Friday, picking her up and driving over the state line to the mall and the grocery store in New Hampshire, about thirty minutes away, to avoid paying sales tax. We often went over to Grammy’s house so Mom could check on various things, and we never missed a holiday, but still Grammy never seemed to thank Mom or do anything much for her in return. Instead she scrutinized her every decision, and constantly accused her of not doing enough to help. Her other nine children, with the exception of Gwen, visited much less often, but she didn’t seem to judge them for it.
When we moved into Grammy’s, her critical eye focused even more sharply on Mom. She always made sure her daughter knew what a favor she was doing her by taking her in. It was impossible to relax in her house, a tiny landscape of perfect order and personal rituals that we could neither anticipate nor master. Ray had died a few years before, and Grammy now had total control. Clean brown towels had to be tucked around the couch cushions to protect the upholstery that visitors never got to see or sit on directly. Washcloths had to be folded just so. Mom and I lived in a spare room with a twin bed that had a trundle bed underneath, and even though Grammy didn’t have any reason to enter the room during the day, the trundle bed had to be tucked away each morning, a tedious operation that made me feel like we were hiding all evidence of our stay.
We had to pay Grammy rent—although it was less than we would have paid for an apartment. We were allotted one tight corner of the basement for our belongings, and had to keep everything under a plastic tarp so the damp wouldn’t ruin our photo albums and clothes, or my toys. We had to leave a lot behind at Dale’s house, which left Mom, a twenty-eight-year-old woman with a ten-year-old daughter, without a couch or a bed or a dresser of her own. Gwen and Glenice had worked hard to talk Grammy into letting us stay so that I wouldn’t have to switch to a lesser school district. Grammy, Glenice says, didn’t like how it looked—that her daughter, an unmarried mother, had moved back home. She didn’t want her friends to know. Her friends never came to the house, but Grace wanted everything tidy and exactly the same as before, just in case.
Grammy’s unsolicited opinions about Mom were relentless. In the first couple of months, when we were moving back and forth between Dale’s house and hers, she wanted to know why Mom couldn’t fix their relationship. Without knowing any of the details, she assumed Mom was at fault, although when it suited her she criticized Dale, and Mom for choosing him in the first place. She always pointed out when she thought Mom’s clothes were too “flashy.” She asked her how much she spent on groceries and how often she was changing the oil in her car—even though she herself didn’t know anything about cars. Whenever Mom was in the house, Grammy constantly hounded her. “Crystal!” she’d yell. “Crystal! Why isn’t the water jug in the ’frigerator full?” “Crystal, who turned the heat up—what about the ’lectric bill?” “Crystal! What is that Dale doing now, anyway?”
When Grammy started to pick fights, Mom did her best to appease. I’d hear her mumble an explanation or response, see the tension in her shoulders when her mother sent her off on a chore the minute she got home from work. I got home about an hour before she did, and I remember my rushing excitement when Mom came through the door, but too often, Grammy ruined what should have been the best moment of the day. And soon I became a target, too. “My, Sarah sure is getting husky,” Grammy would remark loudly to my mother. I’d be sitting right there on the other side of the dining table, blushing with anger and thinking about how “husky” was the label for the fat boys’ section of the Sears catalog. Grace always knew just where to strike; I so desperately wanted to be thin and graceful, and I cursed Tom’s stouter genes for making it so I’d never be as lithe as Mom.
Grammy hated that I read constantly, that I mostly kept to myself; she wanted me to make more friends, be more popular, get out of her house. But as much as her comments hurt me, watching her bully Mom was worse. I couldn’t stand seeing my normally outspoken, witty mother bow to this woman, and I realized then that their relationship must have always been like this, that Glenice had been right when she’d once told me that my grandmother had been very different with her daughters than she had been with me.
* * *
One day during this time, Mom picked me up from school about an hour early—a big surprise, as it meant she had left work. I remember all the other kids staring at me as I collected my books and papers while the school secretary stood by the door, waiting. When I got into the car, I saw that Mom wore a thick patch over her right eye, fashioned from gauze and the familiar white tape that also bandaged her knuckles. Someone’s needle had broken in half as they pushed it into a shoe, and a jagged end had come flying across the aisle and hit her eye—a strangely common accident. Sitting there in the passenger seat of her little Tempo, I was very close to her. Her attitude was stormy, and the creepy lump of bandage seemed to stare at me far more intensely than the eye itself could have. She had already been to see a doctor at the hospital less than a mile from my school, so it made sense to pick me up a little early, but she wasn’t interested in talking. We barely spoke, her loudest expression her hands tensely gripping the steering wheel. I admit I gazed at her more openly knowing that she couldn’t look at me closely while driving. I felt like I was seeing something I shouldn’t, something that in that moment she didn’t have the energy to hide. I wondered what else there was to see.
* * *
Mom was working tirelessly to figure out how to get us out of Grammy’s and into our own place. She didn’t want to rent. She visited a realtor’s office again and again, trying to figure out what we could buy and how we could buy it. She was tired of shuffling around, of living in spaces owned by other people—a landlord would just be another man to whom she was beholden. She wanted a home of her own, of our own, a place where she and I could settle peacefully, breathe easily. Something simple and tidy, with trees for privacy and a wide lawn in back where we could sunbathe.
After nine months of Grammy’s criticisms and my impatient frustration, Mom secured a government loan for low-income, first-time home buyers. With that and some savings she had scraped together, she purchased a plot of wooded land—two acres, not so big for rural Maine—out on Route 93, a narrow, paved but unlined road that extended from 302 on the northwestern side of town.