Granny Dee swings the lazy Susan toward me. “Eat more rice,” she says.
“Why you want her to be fat?” says LaoLao.
“Wing.” Granny Dee pauses, looks at me, a small smile in her eyes. “Wing is a growing girl. A growing girl who needs lots of energy.”
“She almost sixteen! She already done growing. She grow too much too fast. She so tall! So big! Too big for a girl,” LaoLao retorts, spooning up more rice for herself.
“Mother,” says my mom, her exasperated tone as familiar to me as my own breathing, “I love how tall she is. I wish I was as tall as Wing.” She smiles at me, but LaoLao’s frown deepens.
She unleashes a torrent of Mandarin on my mother, who sits placidly sipping her tea, until LaoLao has seemingly run out of words. She looks expectantly at Mom, waiting for a response.
“Mama,” says my mother, her voice on the knife edge of patience. “You know the rule. If you have something to say at the dinner table, you say it in English.”
I’m not sure what the desired effect of that statement is, but my LaoLao launches into another verbal attack, still in Mandarin.
Granny Dee leans back in her chair, eyebrows raised. “She sure got a set of pipes on her,” she says. She holds her cup out to me. “Now get your granny some more tea.”
LaoLao passes me her cup without pausing in her diatribe. When I don’t immediately take it, she pauses and looks at me. “Tea,” she says, in English. “For me too.”
Considering how similar they are, it really is astounding that my grandmothers don’t get along better.
After dinner, I’m in my room, stretching on the floor. Eliza showed me some new stretches and I’m trying to figure out how to do them without looking stupid. Everything Eliza does looks effortless. She’s flexible and thin and could probably be a gymnast if she weren’t a runner.
I don’t think I could do anything else but run.
My door opens without anyone knocking. Granny Dee steps into the room, her head cocked to the side as she stares at me on the floor.
“What exactly are you supposed to be doing?”
“I’m stretching,” I say, keeping my voice low. “Now close the door. I don’t want anyone else to see.”
“Please,” says Granny Dee. “Close the door, please.” But she closes the door and then comes and sits on the edge of my bed. Her eyes are so bright and mischievous they practically sparkle.
“Here,” she says, pushing on my back, her small hands firm and strong against me, so I’m stretching farther than I was on my own. “I know a thing or two about stretchin’.”
“How?”
She laughs a little, the sound creaky and unused, like a door being opened that hasn’t been opened in a long time. “Just because I move the way I do now doesn’t mean I wasn’t ever young like you, Wing.”
I pull myself up and look at her. Try to imagine what she would have looked like when she was fifteen. There aren’t many pictures of her when she was young; not many of LaoLao either. Granny Dee was born in Ghana and moved here when she was a little girl. She’s never been back to Ghana. I wonder if she remembers it.
“I used to run too, you know. Not like you, I was never as fast as you, but I loved running when I could. Wasn’t considered very ladylike, so I couldn’t do it much, but I loved it, the feel of the wind on my face, the sun on my back, feeling like I could go anywhere. Feeling free.”
I didn’t know running made other people feel like that. I definitely didn’t know that it made my Granny Dee feel like that. I can’t picture her running any more than I can picture her taking flight. I don’t say that, though. I want her to keep talking.
“That day you showed me what you could do, I saw me in you, Wing. But I feel like I was seein’ you, really seein’ you, for the first time. I remember the first time I saw Marcus throw a ball. He was an itty-bitty thing, maybe four, and he was in the backyard with your daddy, and they were playing catch. Marcus, even then, he was good. He had aim, he had style. It filled my heart to see him. I saw him and I said to your mama, I said, that boy is gonna be an athlete. I wish that I had seen it in you too, because I think you’ve got something just as special as what Marcus has. Not everyone can move like that, Wing. And watching you running on that street like your feet were on fire, I coulda watched you all day long.”
She coughs and looks away. “Well, I got a little carried away there, didn’t I? But you gotta show your mama. And your grandma. You’ve just gotta. I just wish your daddy, rest his soul, was here to see what I saw. He’d be so happy. But I’m sure he’s watching you from heaven.” Her voice cracks and she swallows, taking off her spectacles to rub her eyes. “Your mama could use some good news.”