“You know, when Dad was going to have a club and we would dance around the apartment, all four of us, and . . .” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Like it was.”
I knew what she meant and I understood how she’d come to believe it. We lied to ourselves as much as anyone lied to us. You have to, when you’re a kid, if you want to get through it.
I held Dixie’s wrist and expected her to jerk it away. But she kept still.
“Dixie,” I said. “It was never like that.”
When I told Dixie “never,” I really meant never.
The second part of the family history I wrote for Mr. Bergstrom was about our grandparents. Or grandmothers, I guess. Before I read it to him, I said, “This is the end because this is all I know, and I only know what my mom and dad and uncle talked about, or what they told me, or what I heard my mom tell her friend Roxanne.”
“Looks like you have a lot to say,” he said, noticing again how many pages I had.
“I don’t know if it says anything,” I told him. “Or if it’s even true. It’s just what I know.”
Grandma Alice, my mom’s mom, raised her and my uncle Ivan mostly by herself. She worked as a bank teller and they had a little house in a suburb of Portland. Mom and Ivan ate frozen dinners in front of the TV, and Grandma Alice gave them each a list of chores to do so that she didn’t have to spend all her time after work cooking and cleaning. When she came home, she’d make a drink and put her feet up and smoke cigarettes while they all watched TV, and she’d make another drink and another, then go to sleep. On Friday and Saturday nights she went on dates. On Sunday mornings, sometimes she took Mom and Ivan to the Greek Orthodox church and sometimes she let them do whatever they wanted as long as they didn’t bother her while she slept. Sunday afternoons she’d phone her own mother and make the kids talk to her, and then take the phone back and end up talking loud in Greek and crying, and Sunday nights after these conversations she’d go to her room and stay there until Monday morning, when they’d do the whole week over again.
I don’t think any of that stuff made her a bad mother or person. Not food from a microwave or going on dates or anything. She provided for her kids way better than my parents ever provided for me, and she never walked out on them. But she still left them. Because of how she went to her room or drank when she was sad, how she carried pain all by herself and didn’t show them how sometimes other people could help. How she fought with her mother in Greek and never told Mom or Ivan what they fought about or what made her cry. That’s the same as being left, in some ways, or it feels like it. I know.
Grandma Alice hated my father from the first time my mom brought him home. She saw the grunge clothes and long hair and told my mom she’d wind up getting left, like her. Mom married Dad anyway and Grandma Alice still hated him; three years later, when I was two, she found out she had pancreatic cancer, and four months after that she died.
So that’s my mom’s mom.
My dad’s mom, Grandma Jacobs, never had a career or anything. She depended on the men that came and went—including my dad’s dad—to give her enough money to get by. She fought and scratched for it. “Fought and scratched” was how my dad put it when he talked about her to me and Dixie. Sometimes he’d say it with pride, like she was his hero, and sometimes he’d say it like he hated her.
The other thing I know is that she cooked. She got up every day and made breakfast for my dad. He was an only child. She packed him lunches for school and made his dinners.
Grandma Alice didn’t tell Mom and Ivan anything, but Grandma Jacobs told my dad everything. I don’t know which is worse, because when she didn’t have a man around to take care of her, my dad was supposed to do it and she told him so. “You’re all I’ve got, Rusty. Me and you.” She wrote up lists of careers my dad could go into that paid a lot. That way he could take care of her. Pilot. Dentist. Investment banker.
“How about rock star?” he’d say. “Don’t forget to put rock star on the list.”
He said she told him he didn’t have that kind of talent, or that kind of luck. She got older and had fewer boyfriends, and the ones she did have were mostly married. For my dad, being the man of the house meant he stayed home with his mom when he was in high school even if he wanted to be with his friends. Being the man of the house meant breaking his date for his junior prom because his mom was getting over being dumped by a guy and needed him home with her. It meant coming up with money somehow when they were short and bills couldn’t wait.
When Grandma Jacobs got mad at people, she cut them off. That’s what she did with her parents. She used to give my dad the silent treatment if he did something that made her unhappy. Usually what made her unhappy was my dad not giving her enough attention, or him caring about anyone other than her. She must have thought there wasn’t enough love, to take or to give, like there was always a shortage one way or another.
When my dad met my mom, Grandma Jacobs thought all the love that belonged to her was going away, and she gave him the permanent silent treatment. To her, my mom was just the person who took away her son and then ruined his life by encouraging his rock star dreams. After they got married, Grandma Jacobs never talked to my dad again. I don’t even think she knows Dixie or I exist.
I guess both my parents learned from theirs that men leave, and women stay around but don’t really want to. They wanted to be different, but there was no one to show them how.
13.
DIXIE AND I walked the avenues. At each corner, I looked down toward the water. You’d think someone who spent her whole life in Seattle would get sick of seeing water, but we couldn’t see it from our apartment, our neighborhood. I always knew it was there but it was for other people: tourists, professionals, people with money.
We were people with money now and we could claim it, too—the view, the blue-green expanse of the Sound, the slice of crystal-clear sky between the water and the layer of quilted clouds.
Dixie got slower and slower until I realized I was walking alone. I turned around. She was on the phone. I went back to her.
“. . . so I told her I’m staying with you tonight, okay?”
Lia.
“Thanks. Not like she’s going to ask, but.”
She listened, and glanced at me.
“Me and my sister have to take care of something. We won’t be at school tomorrow, but don’t worry. Just say we’re sick if anyone asks.”