A look of pain crossed her mother’s face, just faintly. “Okay. Okay,” she said, patting Langston’s hand. “One hill at a time. Today it’s Grandma Wilkey.”
“Yes! Today it’s Grandma Wilkey.” Langston was relieved, without knowing why. For the next hour she helped her mother vacuum the lamp shades and pound the arms of the sofa and chairs, which sent her into a nearly asthmatic fit of wheezing. Then she left AnnaLee to her panic, and went up to the attic to her own work.
*
The attic was too hot. The windows were all open, the fan was on and complaining mightily, and the room was too hot. Langston took some time to study the fan, the brand name of which was Tornado, and then she took some time to consider how Hoosiers are virtually free of irony. When she was in kindergarten a tornado had killed twenty-six people in a town of five hundred just a few miles down the road. Violent storms were a constant threat, and thus her father had given her a fan by the same name.
Her bed looked a bit untidy, and so she straightened the counterpane made by her paternal grandmother, the sweet and dead Nan Braverman. Then she studied the stitching, trying to discern how Nan had found the patience to finish it. She could not. Langston’s pencils were all slightly too dull, so she sharpened them in the old-fashioned sharpener her daddy had hung on the wall for her, and a tag in the back of her T-shirt was causing her a bit of a rash, so she removed the shirt and cut out the tag. Her braid lay heavily on the back of her neck, so she lifted it and stood a few moments in front of the grinding Tornado fan, then let the braid fall. Lifted it. Let it fall.
She lay down on her bed and thought of Mrs. Dalloway throwing open her windows on the morning of her party
(What a lark! What a plunge!),
the cool dampness of London, and lovers lost, and the stones in Woolf’s pockets, the river, which somehow led her to think of the summer all the soldiers were marching and the dust on the leaves, and how could it be that she was left in a world without . . . At least there had been Hemingway’s sentences, and at least the little boat finally took the children to the lighthouse. Langston sat up with a start, her face damp with sweat, then looked at the clock and saw there was just enough time to take Germane for a quick walk before settling back down to more neurotic housecleaning with her mama. She stood and stretched and Germane instantly stood, too, and then they descended the stairs, quietly, so as not to make AnnaLee think they were making unnecessary dirt, and snuck out into the day.
*
When they returned home, the house was very quiet, which seemed ominous. Langston and Germane walked in on tiptoes. The living room seemed finished, in more ways than one. AnnaLee had cleaned and polished it as far as it could go, which was about an inch from threadbare and inexpensive to begin with. Langston had often mentioned to her mother that it seemed preferable to have no furnishings at all—to live a life of austere beauty—than to live with “things” that assaulted the eye and battered the aesthetic conscience. AnnaLee ignored her.
Langston took in her surroundings as if she were her Grandma Wilkey. It was painful. Her grandmother was inordinately proud of her ability to hold on to items of quality, and critical of everything other people owned or did. She was possessed of the instinct to zero in on the sorest place in AnnaLee’s life and grind her heel into it. And in addition to all that, Grandma Wilkey’s house was genuinely beautiful, and she had, in fact, held on to every lovely thing she’d ever owned, including gifts from her wedding to Langston’s grandfather, almost sixty years earlier.
The carpet in AnnaLee’s living room was dark brown, worn down to the nap in many places, and stained. Grandma Wilkey had hardwood floors throughout her house (except in the bathrooms, which were porcelain tiled), accented with oriental rugs. The walls of the Braverman living room were covered with fake wood paneling, in dark wood halfway up the wall, and then in sheets of decorated panels the rest of the way to the ceiling. The upper panels had originally been white, and were now ivory colored, with a pattern of Civil War bugles and drums, and something that looked like scrolls, in avocado green. The original ceiling had been tin, but Walt had taken the tin down and thrown it away, probably in the early sixties, when people all over the place, in Haddingtons around the world, had believed they could do without the outré, and destroyed it. Now the ceiling plaster was mottled and water-stained. It had never really recovered from the violence done to it. AnnaLee had recently talked about installing a ceiling fan in the center of the room, where currently three forty-watt bulbs were covered by a frosted glass dome filled with dead bugs. The Wilkey walls were, in some cases, paneled with sheets of oak taken from Wilkey land. The hearth in her parlor was carved of native sycamore. Her tin ceilings remained where they had always been—on her ceilings.
Langston walked through the parlor (which she avoided looking at; one could only take in so much) and back into the kitchen, where she found her mother sitting on the floor, sobbing. AnnaLee had, apparently, tried to bake an apple pie from scratch. It had been an unwise ambition, not least because of the amphetamines, which probably hadn’t allowed her to recognize when the crust was ready. Langston sat down in front of her.
“Have I ever told you about the time I asked Ja— . . . one of my professors why it would be that I kept dropping things? I was having a terrible week, running late everywhere. In one day I spilled coffee on my pants just before I was about to leave for school, and then dropped my car keys in such a way that for a few minutes I couldn’t see them, and then got out the door and dropped a pile of papers I was carrying and they scattered all over the porch. I thought I might weep. I got to school and saw my professor and I said to him, ‘Why? Why is this happening to me?’ And you know what his answer was? He looked at me as if he couldn’t imagine how I had missed it. ‘Gravity,’ he said. Gravity.”
AnnaLee covered her face with her hands, then tipped over and bonked her head against the cabinets under the sink. They had originally been cherry, but Walt painted them avocado green. “Sweetheart, please.” She cried harder.
Langston searched her mind for another way to say it, but she knew she was up against not just intellectual resistance, but substance abuse and decades-old wounds. Taoism, perhaps? But how to say “The Pie that can be made is not the true and eternal Pie” in such a way that wouldn’t cause AnnaLee to chase her with a broom?
“Mama, it’s just gravity. It’s just a pie.” That seemed a fair compromise.
“It is not just a pie,” AnnaLee answered, snuffling behind her hands.
“Then what is it? Tell me straight out.”
Her mother lifted up the hem of her dress and wiped her face. Langston politely looked at the stove.
“How could you ever possibly understand it, loved as you are?”
“I don’t think it’s love you weep for.”
“Oh, good God. Obviously.” AnnaLee straightened up and began to breathe deeply, a sign that she was trying to regain control. And a good thing, too, as the grease-stained clock on the kitchen wall read 3:00, which meant that Grandma Wilkey was due in an hour and would actually arrive in forty-five minutes, in the hopes that she might catch her daughter further compromised.
“Would you like for me to walk down to Lu’s Diner, onerous though it would be for me, and see if I could buy a pie?” Langston asked.
“No, no. It’s too late for that.”
They sat still a moment. Langston waited for an opening.
“Do you understand, Lan, that I just wish I might once be above criticism? That I might arrange things in a way that she couldn’t find anything to say?”
“Yes! Yes, I do understand it, and what that means is that you are on the defensive. You are trying to eliminate Grandma’s ability to harm you, right? But there’s another way!”
AnnaLee rested her head in her hands.
“Do you know anything about the martial arts? Because I don’t really, but from what I understand, part of the principle around, say, tae kwon do, or whatever you call it, is that one deflects blows by eliminating the force of the opponent’s foot or fist or something. Whatever they hit you with. So the principle of fighting is that my fist contains a certain amount of momentum, and pain occurs when my fist encounters an immovable object—in this case your face. But let’s say that I swing at you with all my strength and put behind my punch the whole of my weight and
you simply step out of the way
. What will happen to me?”
“I can only guess,” AnnaLee said.
“That’s exactly right. I’d simply fall down. And that’s what would happen to Grandma as well, if you simply stepped out of the way of her blows.”
“All right, Langston.” AnnaLee smoothed her hair back, ineffectually, and tried to gather herself up enough to stand.
“What do you mean, ‘all right’?”
“I mean I’m stepping out of your way. Now if you want to help me, take some Comet cleanser to that downstairs bathroom sink.”
“Mama, Grandma Wilkey will
never
go into our bathroom, not ever.”
“She will if you don’t clean it.”
*
The bathroom was worse than Langston had expected; more porcelain had chipped away from the sink and the toilet seemed to be listing toward the basement. Langston pulled the shower curtain closed on the invincible black mold that grew in the tiles, and straightened up the tragic little throw rug in front of the tub. It had once been an expensive rug, but the edges of it had been shredded by generations of cats, all currently deceased. The sink was just a small basin attached to the wall with nothing hiding the pipes beneath it. In the corner under the sink AnnaLee kept a bucket of cleaning supplies, and even they weren’t glamorous. There were no fancy nozzles or interesting bubbles or surgeon general’s warnings: just Comet cleanser and the kind of toilet bowl cleaner desperate criminals tended to drink in prison. Langston scrubbed the porcelain and the fixtures, which were reversed, so that when one turned the tap that said hot, one actually got cold. She scrubbed with an energy she preferred not to examine, because it contained a protective pity for her mother that made her wretched.
The mirror was the door of a white metal medicine cabinet from the fifties, covered with toothpaste splotches and beginning to lose its silver at the edges. Langston used the old hand towel that hung on a hook above the sink to clean the mirror, then dug through the little cabinet next to the toilet where AnnaLee kept linens, looking for a more attractive towel. She found a lovely red one, clearly intended for Christmas, and draped it so the holly didn’t show.
There was a knock at the door. Langston glanced at her watch; it was three fifteen.
*
Grandma Wilkey sat on the very edge of the couch, so that as little as possible of her person touched the nubbly brown upholstery. Langston could tell her grandmother didn’t want to lean back against the afghan AnnaLee had placed on the back of couch, which was made from little knitted squares, put together by Nan Braverman. Nan had chosen colors she thought would match AnnaLee and Walt’s furniture, and unfortunately, she had been correct. The army green, red, brown, and yellow squares, mixed together in the most frantic ways, resembled nothing more than a terrible gastric event involving a pizza. The afghan threw Langston into a tailspin, too, but her grandmother’s all too obvious disdain was irritating.
“Perhaps you’ve noticed the lovely afghan behind you, Grandma.”
“Where’s your mother?” Grandma Wilkey demanded, smoothing out the cream-colored linen skirt over her knees.
“Nan Braverman made it just a year before she passed away. She was a fine woman. Salt of the earth.”
“She knew I was coming, didn’t she?”
“Mama’s just getting dressed, I think. You are quite, quite early.”
They sat in silence for a moment, and then Grandma Wilkey twisted around and looked at the stairway. “Where’s your mother?” Her voice was growing progressively shriller as she aged, and she spoke more loudly as her hearing deteriorated. Langston could imagine small animals taking flight in terror every time her grandmother spoke. Germane lay at Langston’s feet with his head on his paws, worried.
“She’s upstairs getting dressed, Grandma. You are quite early.”
“She knew I was coming, didn’t she.”
“Oh, yes. We all did. Can I get you some tea while you’re waiting?”
“No. I’ll wait for your mother.”
Langston allowed her to stew for three minutes or so, a painfully long time to sit in a silent room with someone.
“That’s a lovely suit you’re wearing. Linen, isn’t it?”
Her grandmother held out one arm and admired the cut of her summer jacket. “Yes, yes it is. I bought this suit from Jacob Taylor’s, an excellent women’s clothier, in nineteen and fifty-six. Your grandfather was taken aback by the cost, but I just told him: this suit will outlive
you
. And it certainly has. I store my seasonal clothes in mothballs in my attic and have them dry-cleaned once a year. I still have a number of fine pieces from when I was in high school, if you can imagine.”
“I can imagine.”
“They mostly still fit me, but of course are completely out of style. If you buy fine things and take care of them they’ll last you a lifetime and people will always know you’re that sort of person. What is it you’re wearing, by the way?”
“Oh. Well, this is a white cotton T-shirt made, I believe, by the Gap. An excellent shirt. And these are blue jeans—dungarees, I think they used to be called. I dress very simply, because I read that Albert Einstein owned something like seven white shirts and seven pairs of black pants, and then he never had to think—”
“Where’s your mother?” Grandma Wilkey twisted again and looked at the stairs.
“She’s getting dressed in her room. You’re still quite a bit early.”
“I have a number of things to do today! I have to see John Warden at the bank, and I have an appointment to get my hair done at five-thirty. I can’t just sit here and waste the entire day.”
“Your hair already looks quite nice.” Her hair looked like it belonged on a Mrs. Beasley doll, but Langston would never say so.