My grandma looks like a flapper in her wedding photo from 1919. She smiles coyly into the camera, her large round eyes looking up from under the fringe of her bangs. Her hair is bobbed short and a long veil fits close to her head. It’s held in place by a wide satin ribbon wrapped low across her forehead like Cleopatra’s crown, just above her brow. On either side at her temples are clusters of beads and small flower blossoms, just starting to peek open. Those tiny buds cascade from her bouquet too, like they’re trying to escape from the ribbons and long strands of feathery ivy. Her creamy drop-waist dress ends daringly high above her ankles, showing off her narrow white leather pumps with their saucily curved heels.
I’m looking at this image one summer day in 1966 while I’m at my grandparents’ house, and it plays tricks with my eight-year-old eyes. The photo is old but the people in it are young. And it’s hard to reconcile the glowing young woman in the photo with my round-shouldered, silver-haired grandmother.
I am supposed to spend that whole day with Grandma, just the two us. None of my cousins are there and Grandpa is at the VFW, so I’m wondering what in the world we’ll do. I know Grandma likes to cook big holiday meals for everyone, and play canasta with her church ladies. I’m not looking forward to doing either of those things.
But my grandparents’ walls are covered with landscapes and portraits that Grandma has done, and this day she takes out a box of pastel sticks. She shows me how to swoop the rich pigments across stiff heavy paper. We make gardens appear with sweeping bursts of color. Up close, they look blurry. But when you step back, the patches of different colors look like flowers and leaves, even though we never drew them out exactly. I love seeing the shapes bloom across the page almost as much as I love watching the intense indigos, violets, and emeralds swirl together down the chipped porcelain sink when I wash my hands for lunch.
After we eat our tuna fish sandwiches and sweet baby gherkins, we’re not sure what else to do. I have always liked to examine the objects in her kitchen cabinets—she has platters with gold painted edges, and thin coffee cups with saucers you can almost see through. This day she asks if I’d like to look at some other old things she has, and I tell her I would.
When she opens her bedroom closet, the sweetish chemical smell of moth balls makes my eyes itch. Hidden among the clothes and shoes are stacks of cardboard boxes of varying shapes and sizes. She takes out three of them and carries them to her bed.
The boxes have striped pink and cream lids that look thin and brittle. Grandma lifts the lid off of the largest one, and inside is a puffy bundle of long, wavy chestnut brown hair, tied with a string at one end. I’m leery of it, but I can’t stop myself from reaching out to pat the soft pile. It’s strange the way it seems dead and alive at the same time.
Grandma tells me her hair used to flow down to her waist, but she wanted it short for her wedding. Her mother told her to keep it long—but Grandma cut it anyway. It was the modern fashion, she said, and she had a hunch it would frame her face nicely. She says she thinks she was right about that and winks at me with her good eye, not the blind one. And then she smiles, almost like the smile I saw in her wedding photo—like she might start laughing because she knows she pulled off something tricky.
The next box holds some of the adornments from the wedding picture. It feels odd that the fancy things from that old yellow and brown photo can be in my hands right now. The flowers have withered away, but there is still the wide satin band with its clusters of beads. The beads are heavy and make bright tapping sounds when I move them. I try to imagine them clicking next to young Grandma’s ears as she swayed around in her curvy high heeled shoes that day. I wonder if she listened to what everyone was saying around her, or if she mostly concentrated on those quick sparks of sound.
Grandma pauses before she opens the last box. She asks if I know about Mary Lee. I have heard the name but not much more. She tells me that Mary Lee was her baby who died when she was two years old. I want to know why she died, and Grandma talks about pneumonia and how there wasn’t penicillin back then. If you caught a cold, you could die, especially if you played out in the rain too long with your brothers and sisters, and didn’t get into dry clothes right away—like Mary Lee.
In the box, there’s a tiny pair of scuffed black leather shoes with little straps and miniature silver buckles. We marvel at how small they are. There are also several framed photos. In one of them three smiling children are sitting on the top step of a porch, wrapped in bulky sweaters and scarves. I recognize the boy as my dad and one girl as my Aunt Carol, but I’ve never seen the little girl with the round face pressed close between them. That, Grandma says, is Mary Lee.
When I see the next photo, my breathing stops. Mary Lee is wearing a lacy white dress with flowers spread around her, and her eyes are closed. I know that in this photo she’s dead.
Grandma and I both run a finger along the frame, and then she arranges the things back in the boxes and closes the lids. She makes a teetering tower of the boxes on her dresser. I don’t think she’s really worried about keeping them too neat. Maybe it’s like the pastel gardens we drew—even if they’re not exactly perfect, she still knows what they mean. When she’s done with that we go into the kitchen to fix dinner because Grandpa will be home soon.
After dinner, Grandma sits down at her sewing machine to make me a paisley mini-skirt like one we saw Twiggy wearing in a magazine. I’m not sure if my mom will think it’s “appropriate,” but Grandma and I like it anyway. It’s very mod. Grandpa and I play checkers, and he pretends that he doesn’t see me setting up the jumps. He lets me win, like I’m still a little kid.