This is my mother’s stern command every night when, after the dishwasher is loaded, I come into the family room. “Turn off the light!” she cries out all the time. Just like Mammy.
“Just go,” my grandmother told me on the day I left Paris as Betty and George waited in our Delta 88 to take me away to college. “Just try to act right,” she told me. She could barely see, never looked quite at me anymore, but only in my direction. I wondered how much of me she could really take in by that point. With her mind as it was, with her sight as it was, I never knew who she was seeing anymore.
When I first went away from home, Mammy wrote me often, her handwriting revealing, more and more, her descent into confusion and blindness. Words left her, and in her notes she would scratch out the ones she feared were spelled wrong. Her letters were full of black marks. She couldn’t trust herself, though she had been an excellent speller and a prizewinning student of Latin.
When visiting at my grandmother’s as a boy, I slept with Mammy in a huge wooden bed she won after discovering a prize ticket in a Quaker Oats box. Her foot always stuck out from under the blanket, too stubborn to be covered up. Since birth, her little toe, surprisingly long, was bent over the others, as if to keep them in place.
Mammy snored loudly, but that is not what awakened me on the night of what I considered our greatest adventure. My nose was stuffed up; allergic to everything, I could not breathe and my nose drops were at home. I watched the snow fall over the houses of the neighbors, wondering if Bassett Humphrey, an elderly friend, was awake across the street. During storms with thunder and lightning, she always came to Mammy’s, bringing her own pillow.
In the middle of the night of the falling snow, I woke Mammy to tell her that I could not sleep, that my nose drops were at our house, that I was sure to suffocate. She squinted her eyes at me, dubious, but put her winter coat on over her nightgown, along with her shoes and the plastic galoshes she pulled over them. From the closet she plucked the dented-in hat she wore to funerals. Her braids hung over her shoulders; she didn’t bother to put them up.
Outside, as the snow came down, Mammy—expressly forbidden to drive—carefully negotiated the porch step with me helping all I could. The trip to the garage, where Bill kept one of his old cars, a yellow-topped Chevy with sharp fins, was a major expedition. The two of us drove slowly down Olive Street in the quiet of a town at rest under snow. Mammy could make out little, but she kept driving. Though it was less than half a mile, the trip seemed to take us far from our known world. It was freezing; the world was white, and when the car swerved, Mammy, confused, slammed the brake and we slid, almost off the road. But I had faith. Mammy would get us home. She was a pioneer and we were making our way across the plains.
When I visited my grandmother not long before she died, she was holding her head, too heavy to lift up by then. She was tiny, faded, a scrap of thin cloth. “Take care of my little girl,” she said.
I am trying.
Mammy rarely left home. She went to Moberly, to Mexico, to St. Louis to see Nona or the eye doctor. Once, though, with Nona and Wally on a car trip to California, Mammy saw the swallows at San Juan Capistrano, some big ships bound for all the world. She saw Grauman’s Chinese Theater, the Farmers Market, the Pacific Ocean. I have her postcards.
The ocean, which she had never seen before, was her favorite.
“It was quite the sight.”
She took her shoes off and waded in.
“Nona kept her eye on me. She thought the waves would sweep me all the way to Hawaii.”
She always said she hoped she would get to see the Atlantic too, but she never made it.
I did. I lived by the ocean for a while. It began in 1990 on Fire Island and I had never felt so free.
. . .
I was working at Simon & Schuster, where I started off as a copywriter. The place was a gallery of characters. Sandra Soliman, an editor perpetually in search of glamour, brought her hairdresser in mornings for a quick office shampoo. She stalked the halls in the wee hours with her hair in towels and kept pink bulbs in her lamps to soften her look. At a dinner with an important author, I watched Dick Snyder, the CEO of the company, charm everyone and ventured one comment that no one seemed to listen to.
“Don’t say shit in front of the talent,” Dick told me afterward.
As the years passed at Simon, I was promoted from nonentity to senior editor. I lived in the office, worked hard, rode the service elevator up at 5 a.m. I believed that if I worked and worked, I would have something to offer my parents to make up for not having children. At a party on the Upper East Side, I was introduced to Lauren Bacall, who put her finger in my cleft and said, “Where’d you get that chin?”
When I called Betty to tell her, she said she was going to go to the nursing home to tell Mammy right that minute because my grandmother always vowed I had her chin.