GRANDMA by Deborah Gordon-Brown

I was never comfortable in my Aunt Esther's house. It was a ranch house somewhere in Queens, in some fairly new series of tract homes built for families who required several bedrooms, a basement, enough of a backyard to feel like property and enough of a front yard to allow its owners to decorate it in a way that would differentiate it from the others. I remember plastic flowers on the front lawn near the door but that could have been Esther's house or another. What I experienced each time we went there was a sense of being lost in a land of sameness, a sense that didn't leave me even inside the house.

Grandma had moved to the house with Aunt Esther and her husband Eddie. She had asked my mother if we would buy a house to share but my mother had said "No". I knew only because on the day we all trooped out to see the land on which Esther & Eddies house was to be built, Grandma and I walked away from the group. We walked toward one of those wire fences through which one can see but clearly speaks of borders and boundaries. We stood at the fence. I think I curled my fingers around the wire, cold in the March air, the trees beyond it still winter bare, although had we looked I'm sure we could have seen the faint color of buds.

We weren't really looking though. We were quiet. Then I heard my unusually silent Grandma sigh, a deep sigh unedited for the 11 year old at her side. I remember looking up at her then taking her hand. "You mustn't tell", she started softly, not looking at me, seeing probably nothing. Her eyes looked clouded. I moved slightly so that I too stared off again through the fence, also unseeing.

We had a special relationship Grandma and I. It wasn't that we had secrets, but that we could share thoughts that others might consider impolite, so Grandma's asking me not to tell wasn't shocking. What was shocking was the depth of the place it came from, not memory or a story but from a place of monumental importance. The moment was truly frightening.

I remember her coat, a nubby gray wool and her scarf. I remember the damp cold and leaning closer to her, wanting to make whatever it was that was troubling her go away. "I don't want this," she said quietly. "I asked your mother. She said 'no'. Your mother is proud, too proud, but she is who she is. She is honest. I hoped that your mother and father would buy a house in which I would have an apartment. I would give them the money. Your father thought it would be a good idea but Evelyn [that's my mother] wasn't ready. I don't want to live like a guest, like a child."

There were other words, there had to be, and I'm probably not truly remembering the exact words that buried themselves in my heart. Like the cold of the March day my grandmother, whose house was always warm and full of heavy furniture that would last forever, was becoming a piece of something else in someone else's house, and helpless, helpless the way I was with my family. Everything in my house was careful and loving but the real heat of life was tucked away. I didn't know about Esther and Eddie. I wasn't comfortable with them so when my Grandmother spoke, her head turned away from anything familiar, I knew more than I could know: We were both lost in a way and we loved each other, trusted each other.

I remember feeling ashamed of my mother, angry with her, although we never spoke of that time in our lives until years into my adulthood.

We visited Esther and Eddie and Grandma in that house in Queens, not a lot, but certainly a number of times. Susan, my cousin, a year older than I and Esther and Eddie's daughter, insisted we play together as did her parents. I just wanted to visit Grandma who would shoo me away to be with Susan. When I snuck a moment to ask why, why couldn't we just be, Grandma taught me about what one does in another person's house, you don't make them angry. You try to live in a way that is comfortable for them. They wanted me to play with Susan. It would be good for Susan. We would get to talk. And we did, we did talk sometimes on the phone, but that's not the same of course.

And then we went to the house in a very solemn mode one day, my parents quiet in the car on the way up. Grandma was very sick. My parents were going to see her. But when we got there, when we got in the house, the house that was all sameness and like all the other houses except that my Grandma was in one of its rooms, I wasn't allowed to see Grandma. I asked. I was told she was too tired.

I remember the emptiness then, the cold air, the hushed voices, the fake antique furniture and Susan's self importance. She held a secret she finally whispered to me, "Grandma is dying" she said, her voice full of her special secret knowledge.

And then it was too much. I begged to see my Grandmother, then I wept, then totally uncharacteristically I threw myself against a wall protesting until they had to let me in, couldn't keep the noise away. I had to promise I would stay "just for a minute" but I didn't. Sometimes you just have to lie.

My grandmother's eyes were open when I came in and she smiled. She was frail without energy but when I sat on her bed and put my hand next to her she took my hand in hers, her fingers cool, her embrace warm. "Debbie, Debbie", she said. I bent toward her and she reached to touch my face. Of course I told her I loved her. How could I not have. I was bursting with love. I hugged her and I asked what was wrong because, no matter what anyone else said, she would tell me the truth. We talked a little bit, about her illness, about me. And the she asked if she could tell me something. I nodded, of course she could, and we were alone again. We were safe. "I'm dying, Debbie," she said, "and I am afraid."

My heart rose to fill the space between us. "What are you afraid of?" I asked, worried. "Of dying", my grandmother said, her blue/gray eyes so deep, "Of death." And my heart opened even more. I didn't want to see my grandmother suffering, frightened. "Please, Grandma, you don't have to be afraid," I assured her with everything I knew. "Lots of people have died, Grandma. It can't be that bad if everyone does it." That seemed so logical to me, so full of truth that what I said next seemed equally possible, "I will stay with you, Grandma. I will hold your hand and you can travel with me. I know you won't be alone." It was an easy promise to make. I would be with my Grandma as she had been with me. I was unafraid.

They tried to get me out of her room but they couldn't until Grandma fell asleep and even then, when they forced me to leave, I begged for a few more minutes. When the door was shut again I pulled a ribbon off my braid and tucked it into her loosely opened hand, gently closing her fingers over it so she would know, if she woke up, that I hadn't really left. I would never leave her. She would know that and be comforted.

ANOTHER KIND OF HISTORY by Polly Howells

It is the McCarthy era. My father is the chairman of a state-wide organization called the Liberal Citizens of Massachusetts, or LCM. My mother reads to me at night, “The Little Maid of Concord and Lexington,” one of a series championing the heroic deeds of little girls during the American Revolution. In this book Paul Revere rides down the road from Lexington to Concord, knocking furiously on people’s doors. “The British are coming, the British are coming! Wake up!” There is something about John Hancock’s response that makes my mother weep. She says to me, “Oh, we had such good men in our country then!” I take her feelings to heart. I know that she cares, deeply, about the state of our world, and is grieving for some imagined past when the values of our leaders and her values lined up.

Actually, it wasn’t an imagined past. It was a past they had only just lived through, but one that existed before I was born. An iconic story Mother told was of waiting for Father at the Alexandria Virginia train station and hearing on the radio that FDR had died. She burst into tears. They did believe in FDR. Mother’s memory of her sudden, unexpected, grief lives in me as sharply as if it were my own.

Mother and I would go to the parade on the Concord Lexington highway, every April 17th, the anniversary of the “shot heard round the world,” the day on which the Boston Marathon is now run. We stand in front of one of the tumbling down but still beautiful stonewalls that line the road, and watch men in revolutionary uniforms march by, whistling their fifes and drumming their drums. I feel a deep excitement, a sense of belonging that is probably fueled in part by stories of my some number of greats grandmother watching the soldiers march by in 1775 from her window on that very same Concord-Lexington road.

In back of that house on Wellesley Street, between the house and the golf course, stood three white pines, providing a barrier between us and the 17th tee. It says something about how my different my family felt from golfers, from people in the “ordinary world,” that Toni and I took it upon ourselves to hide beneath these thick and scented pine trees and “spy on the golfers.” We actually took pads and pencils out there and wrote down everything we heard the golfers say. In my memory we didn’t learn very much about how ordinary people lived, if that was our goal. “Oh shit!” was probably the most exciting comment we ever heard, as someone’s ball traveled into a sand trap or far away from the green.

We went to Maine for three months every summer. One summer we came home to find the house on Wellesley Street had been broken into. These were the days before alarm systems or house sitters. Our house had been left alone. The window of the sun room was broken, and cigarettes had been crushed out on the dining room floor. But the only things that were disturbed were the card files of LCM. I can see those cardboard boxes, mottled black and white, with colored 3x5 cards in them, each with a name and address neatly written either in my father’s or mother’s hand, and in this scene they are spilled on the floor of the closet off the dining room with its glass dining room table. They were not after jewelry; they were not after clothing or my mother’s fur coats. They wanted to know who were the members of LCM. I see my parents’ long faces, and I feel with them the dilemma they are in. We live in a Republican town; the police probably sympathize with the FBI agents who have invaded our house. So do we call the police? What’s the point? My father does call the police, but he doesn’t tell them he knows who broke into our house. He just files a report, and leaves it at that. They have the window replaced.

Do I feel unsafe? I’m not sure. It is so much the context of my life, this sense of moral responsibility, this sense that my parents are heroic crusaders for democracy and civil rights. I feel proud of them, almost as if by association I am one of those little girls I read about in the “Little Maid” books. I also feel the weight of keeping these stories secret. I know my classmates, and their parents, would not understand.

A few years before this, I am standing in the kitchen of our house in Belmont, the house we lived in before we moved to Weston. I am five years old. I know it is in that kitchen because I am looking down at the terra cotta linoleum on that kitchen floor. My head is about at the level of my mother’s thigh. She is giving me a glass of Coca-Cola, as she always did when I got home from school. I say to her, “Mummy, will we be in history?” She looks at me, surprised. Dumbfounded. She says, “Well, I know I won’t be in history, because in order to be in history you have to be famous. And I know I will never be famous.”

But I think now I wasn’t asking about that kind of history, the history that is written in books, the history that made so many of my ancestors famous. That is one kind of history. I was already so aware that my parents were active in present-day history, trying to change the course of this country. They had just been through a presidential campaign in which they fought tirelessly to get the Progressive Party candidate, Henry Wallace, elected. They had traveled into Armenian neighborhoods in Arlington, knocked on doors, signed petitions, sung songs. He had lost, but in living through this with them I was already one of the foot soldiers in the war to make the world a better place. I didn’t really need to ask my mother if we would be in history. In my feeling, I already was.

NETWORKING SKILLS by Kathryn Spencer-Licht

1969 was the best year of my life. I was fifteen years old. It’s when I first became aware that I was well liked. I knew how to make friends, and lot’s of them. It’s when I knew I’d always have friends.

The skills I had developed by then, are the best skills I have even now. Everyone went to school with a girl like me. You didn’t observe me at the desk, raising my hand with the answers when the questions were asked. There was hardly a sighting of me in class at all. I had better things to do with my time. Much more important things.

When entering the girls’ room, right off the gymnasium, I was the girl at the sink. I was the ‘meet and greet person’ with all the hot gossip about everyone in school. I was the girl you’d confide in, and go to for advice…the original Ann Landers. Ann Landers with dirty jokes, and card tricks.

I would teach you what really mattered, like, how to smoke, and how to look sexy lighting a cigarette. I did everyone’s hair and makeup, and maybe their nails. I’d have you go inside the stall, stuff your bra with toilet paper, and roll up your skirt. “Make it a mini-skirt. Take off those stupid knee socks. Never stuff your bra with knee socks. It looks fake.”

I thought of myself as a mentor. I looked after everyone. I cared about them, and they knew it. When the girls got talked about, I’d tell them what was said, and who said it. We’d hold court in that girls’ room, and decide how to carry out our revenge accordingly, and always with an audience. We made examples out of them.

In time, lots of girls followed my rules. Rule #1: “Never date the boys from here. They all have big mouths. And whether you’ve done anything with them or not, they always tell everyone that you did, so don’t go out with them. Don’t even talk to them if you can avoid it, but be nice about it. Buy yourself a guy’s ring, and say that you have a boyfriend in the next town. Tell those ‘big mouthed’ boys, he’ll beat you up if you talk about me.” It always worked.

I also knew all the kids with the cars. You’d think we ran a taxi service, the way we’d transport all those pretty girls to the next town to meet the exciting, mysterious boys in Franklin, Ohio, a town with a zip code! A place where anything could happen!

Forty years later, we still keep in touch. We often write and call each other, referring to 1969, and how nothing has ever topped it since then. They’re all still in Ohio, and I’m here in New York, still giving them marvellous advice!

DO YOU, MR. JONES? by Mel Rosenthal

Something is happening, and you
Don't know what it i-i-is,
Do you, Mr. Jones?

This old Bob Dylan song, dating from sometime in the sixties, is one I haven't thought of for lo, these many years. I don't recall it getting all that much play or attention even when it first appeared, but, at least in retrospect, it could well be considered a sort of counter-cultural anthem, the expression of a distinctive conflict between generations. While nothing is said explicitly about Mr. Jones's age or stage of life, as an embodiment of the archetypal square he is clearly middle-aged, like the parents of the young and hip whose words and actions so mystify him. And for myself at the time (and since), a key question was: Where exactly did I stand in relation to this generational conflict? And the truthful answer: somewhere in the middle. In spirit I could say, or at least tell myself, I was on the side of the hip young, sharing in their amused scorn for someone so clueless, so irredeemably lacking in awareness. In terms of how I actually lived, however -- working at a 9-to-5 job in an office cubicle for one or another publishing firm, living alone in a small studio apartment, spending many weekends visiting my father in the arch-middle-class suburbia of northern New Jersey, and, perhaps most unhiply, suffering from social awkwardness and sexual inhibitions -- I was forced to concede that I had far more in common with Mr. Jones.

A small incident: I was returning to the City after one of my periodic weekends in New Jersey with my father, wearing a suit and carrying an attache case, and a young guy, presumptively hip, yelled at me from the window of a passing car, "White-collar fascist!" (True, he said it with a smile.) As it happened, the attache case contained chiefly soiled underwear from my weekend visit.

THE FOOL by Dermot McGuigan

Once again, I wake from the nightmare of being trapped in a vortex of water emptying down a black hole - I strain away but cannot escape. I want so much to be back under the sheltering tree, to see again the stars and feel the breeze on my face ... and that dream has gone.

Mother has brought me to the entrance to the schoolyard, framed on three sides by the red brick school and on the fourth side by a long concrete lean-to shed. It is cold, austere. Next to me a boy stands crying, clinging to his mother. I cross the empty yard alone and enter the school for the first time.

I know none of the other boys. My friends go to a different school. These boys speak with a different accent. We must sit still at our desks, all day. At our break we march in columns in the courtyard as teacher shouts “left, right; left, right” in Irish. I ask teacher questions, he is angry, saying: “You do not ask questions, I ask - you answer.”

Teacher has a strap made of stitched layers of leather. The first time teacher uses his leather he takes the small hand in his and unrolls the boys’ fingers with his thumb. The boys’ eyes are wide and watery. Teacher slaps the opened palm. Above teacher, high on the front classroom wall stands the Virgin Mary in a glass case. She looks serenely out over the class. Under her heel, the Virgin crushes the neck of a snake; the jaws of the snake are open, its fangs are white, its mouth bright red. The Virgin is oblivious to the pain of the snake she is crushing.

We chant our times tables. Teacher writes on his blackboard, and every now and again he silently swirls around flinging the chalk stick into the class of fifty boys. He says we must pay attention. Tiring of the chalk he flings the duster until a boy’s forehead is cut open on the wooden block, blood runs down the boys face from above his eye.

Long days, hypnotic with stultification, broken by the sing-song of other classes reciting alphabets and tables, and the echoing lashes down the long corridors as an infuriated teacher works his leather on an open hand. I count the lashes, six, twelve, on each hand.

I ask mother “Can I go to the school my friends go to, I don’t like this school.” Her response, when I ask again is no, adding that father also went to a Christian Brother’s school and I am to stay there, that it is a good school. Months pass. One day teacher calls me to the head of the classroom saying he has a task for me to do. He chooses me out of all the other boys in the class. I am excited and fearful. Teacher says it is a very important task.

He tells me to go to another classroom and ask for the round square for drawing triangles, saying to be sure to remember the correct order of the words. The words are meaningless and difficult to remember.

In the long corridor there are tall doors to one side, high windows on the other. I knock on the classroom door. A teacher opens the door and listens to my request. The boys in his classroom are older. He tells me to come in and to say out loud what I have come for. I ask for the round square for triangles.

A few of the boys giggle, others laugh. I don’t know why they laugh? He tells me to say out louder what I have come for. More boys laugh. The teacher shakes his head and says he does not have it, that I should go back to my class.

I return empty handed. Teacher tells me to go to another class and ask again. In one of the classes I hear the word ‘fool’. And so it went, class by class, not all the classes in the school but many.

Walking alone in the long corridors I feel hopeless. I am not special, I am a failure. At one point teacher has me repeat what I am asking for and boys in my class laugh, something has changed, something about me must be wrong.

Finally, teacher dismisses me, sends me back to my seat. Nothing further is said about the instrument, and he does not ask another boy to get it. I have failed. Each day I wait, expecting teacher to ask another boy to go for the important instrument. I wait for three weeks as resistance settles in me. I speak of my failure to no one, not at school, not to mother or father. I must hide that I am a fool.

Teacher marches us in the concrete schoolyard, shouting “left, right.” To his ‘left’ I step to the right. I fear and hate him. I give him nothing, I stop doing homework; I roll my eyeballs at him in contempt. And then the lashes begin, red-faced and angry. As the thick strap hits the open palm the shock ricochets within. I do not give him tears, I show him nothing of the pain. Afterwards both hands are numb, then a throbbing pain begins and slowly moves out.

The days pass with my barest compliance so as to avoid being sent to the reform school. Teacher tells us of reform school, where the disobedient and the truant are sent. I daydream that the headmaster announces that we have five minutes to destroy the school. Over and over I imagine myself smashing the windows and in my fantasy I smash the most, I have a plan.

Nine years later the annual school report suggests I be removed from the school, that I will not pass the intermediate exam.

More than four decades later sitting with mother, I finally tell her what happened that day and that, with hindsight, I assume it was April 1st., when I was six. Mother, once again, tells of how she nearly lost a finger when she was a child and that in those days there was privation and pain, real pain.

Another day I tell father the story. He knew nothing of it, he is saddened and says: “That was cruel!”

LIVING THE STORY: THAT’S THE HARD THING by Daniel Marshall

The subway. A group of friends. Front of the first car, behind the cab where the engineer sits. I’m carrying sheaves of papers. I lay them on the floor and sing to a little boy who stands among us—something sweet and instructive like “Tommy Lad” or “Danny Boy”. Not my son, but the son of a friend. When I leave, passengers clap, and I collect my papers from the floor, but incoming passengers flood the car as the door opens, treading on my sheaves of papers. They know nothing of me.

I totter to the bathroom trying to focus and clear my eyes of sleep. After reading, I return to our darkened bed and strive to drift again toward trance and dream and the unpleasantness of sleep. I wonder whether I’ll lie awake as sometimes I do thinking of Elizabeth’s departure, Arthur’s cruelties. Wondering is mother to the thought. Besides a prayer, I know only to call my senses to attention upon the moment, scanning our environment for simple sounds of traffic and machines that might distract, smells of sleep and night air that’s been filtered through the air conditioner, eyes shut awareness of our dark room, and the soft pressure of latex through wool pad and pillow cover and of cotton in sheet and coverlet.

I reach into space and touch Dee, who stirs after a moment. We closed our eyes at bedtime touching each other. After a few minutes, I felt her withdraw her hand and turn. Later, I woke. Last night’s “Bachelorette” episode comes to mind, and my still near-dreaming thoughts are about love. I remember from the Bachelorette episode an enamored, infatuated look that this bachelorette gave somber Wes, who sang country songs to her, accompanying himself with a guitar—but we viewers suspect him to be a quiet and reserved bad boy, a type to which she’s said she’s vulnerable. We suspect there’s something that he’s not telling her. I touch Dee and take her hand, and a wave of utter grief and sorrow, shame and guilt sweeps over and through me for all the dreams and loves that I have lost, stopped pursuing, or failed to win—from an engineering degree to the women I’ve courted. No one shared the dreams. They flower alone. Thought returns of one great culminated passion—my eight-year marriage with Elizabeth. Of how, many times, she looked enamored, infatuated into Arthur’s eyes—as numerous times before she had into mine before meandering away, fickle in a hard time, from me to him. I force my mind to return to Dee and fall asleep.

“More powerful than a Google search, friendlier than a wiki, and the best natural language processor on the market.” This is how Erica Olsen, the founder of Librarian Avengers, has characterized librarians. The words cross my mind. Another day calls this librarian avenger to move mountains and accomplish the impossible, which with interruptions takes a little longer than immediately. Grim smile at this humor that has flickered through myself. A hook, upon which to hang grit, with which to climb from bed.

I am standing, late at night again, under fluorescent light on the subway platform at 34^th Street. Trains shriek as they brake and start. I have just done the dangerous thing that I regularly have done and maybe shouldn’t—scanned my surroundings to ascertain that I am by myself, planted my feet, and gingerly leaned over the track to see whether a train is approaching. Not yet. On the platform people hover; they walk, talk, stand at the booth that recently after a couple of years was re-opened, where a man sells newspapers, candy, and glaring popular magazines that display pictures of shapely pumped, barely clad flesh and muscles and contain articles about how to change one’s image and attract lovers.

I acknowledge what I have and don’t of muscles and attraction; and the thought comes that I am to love faithfully regardless. I embrace the thought, committing determinedly to it; and for doing so I feel calmer and more present to these lights, this platform, this moment. I pray silently.

A TIME CUT OFF FROM TIME by DeAnn Louise Daigle

That’s how it felt when I went to Fran’s place out in Mattituck on Long Island. We did whatever she felt like doing or we did nothing at all. I ran a few errands for her or defrosted her little refrigerator. It was our time together and as the end grew closer, she told me how much she looked forward to my coming on the weekends.

There was no knowing how long Fran would live after she renounced the chemo and radiation. The pain grew bolder and she fed herself her own meds. Fiercely independent, she maintained control for as long as she could. Hospice grew tired of her calling them. She was afraid of being alone, I’m sure. She knew I’d come whenever she wanted me to, but she would send me away too – wanting me to go back to the city. She’d be okay.

“Let me know,” I’d tell her. “You know I’ll come.” I used up all my sick time and personal days from work and I was hoping to hang on to my vacation days. But, I had those for her as well if she wanted and needed me to come out to her.

I guess I’ll always feel I could have done more, I should have gone out there to be with her, but I needed my job too.

Because she wasn’t a close enough relative I couldn’t take a leave of absence to be with her. But, I would have stayed anyway if she needed me to. She didn’t want me. She kept saying, she was saving me for later.

But, the weekends were ours. I grew to looking forward to spending time with Fran. She was easy to be with. She probably held back on her meds so that she’d be alert enough for us to go riding. She had to give up her driving – a really big deal, but she did it. She was brave and so dear. I drove her van. We went to the shore – the sound, the bay, and on good days and when Jim was free to come, we went to the South Fork to see the ocean.

I tweaked her big toe. “I’ll see you soon, Baby Doll,” were my last words to her when Jim and I left the hospital on Sunday. I spoke with her briefly on Monday. “I love you very much,” I told her on Monday afternoon. “Who said that?” She responded on the other end of the line. “DeAnn,” I said. “Tell her I love her very much too.” “I will,” I said. She was confused from all the morphine, I knew.

On Tuesday morning I called her. “I can’t talk right now,” she said. “I’ll call later, Sweetie,” I said. When I called she was asleep.

On Wednesday, I waited and called the nurses’ station when I knew they would have checked in on her. “She’s resting comfortably.” “Thank you,” I said.

At 11:20 A.M., Dr. Emanuele called, “Fran went to heaven at 11 this morning.”