“Who else’s eyes would I use?” I’d asked.
Gran had laughed again. “You’d be surprised, honey. You’d be surprised.”
To my delight, Gran had hung my painting right over the Van Gogh print in her bedroom—and she’d taken to framing and hanging each summer’s crop of paintings in the “art gallery” between two of the three bedrooms upstairs.
“You shouldn’t encourage her,” I’d overheard my mother say one evening years later, between my sophomore and junior years in high school. She and my grandmother had been sitting in the kitchen, and I’d been in the dining room, sketching a mural on the wall. I was listening to my CD Walkman, but I’d pulled the headset off for a moment, and the solemn tone of my mother’s voice had made me put my ear to the door. “She needs to start thinking about colleges and majors, and art isn’t a serious career.”
The words had knifed me in the heart. My mother was an investment advisor, all about P&Ls, track records, and potential.
“She seems pretty serious about it to me,” Gran had said.
“Come on, Mom. There’s a reason the word ‘artist’ is usually paired with the word ‘starving.’”
“She could always teach.”
“Then she’d be starving for sure. Traditional female roles don’t allow a woman to make a decent living.”
“Well, dear,” Gran had said, “making a living isn’t the same as making a life.”
I’d failed at both, I thought now. My shoulders slumping, I left the main door open so air could circulate through the screen, shuffled into the living room, and flipped the switch for the overhead light. The old chandelier cast a soft glow over the cypress floor, the floral chintz curtains, and the hodgepodge of furniture that ranged from inherited Victorian antiques to 1980s-era “modern.” My eye went to the crowded collection of photos that covered the walls—a rogue’s gallery of my family, with a special emphasis on my mother and Uncle Eddie as children.
Centered over the sofa hung an old sepia-tone photo of my great-grandmother and great-grandfather. In the manner of old photos, they were formal and unsmiling. Next to it was a photo of them sitting on the back porch, playing cards and laughing. If Gran hadn’t told me who they were, I never would have recognized them as the same people.
Gran had taken the porch picture with a Kodak Brownie when she was seventeen. She’d told me she’d hidden in the bushes and caught them unawares so that they wouldn’t stiffen up like a couple of corpses.
As long as I could remember, Gran always had a camera handy. In the back of the house, she’d had a darkroom, where she used to let me help develop close-ups of flowers and bugs and leaves. I inhaled deeply as I stepped further into the house, hoping to detect a hint of darkroom chemicals. No such luck.
I’d once told my mother how I loved the smell of Gran’s darkroom.
“Oh, I don’t,” Mom had replied. “I think it smells like thwarted dreams and female repression.”
My mother had been big on female empowerment. Gran said she was a women’s libber, although Mom preferred to think of herself as a feminist. She was certainly a glass-ceiling breaker, a role model for women who wanted more out of life than a home,a husband, and children. She’d told me that Gran had worked as a photographer for the New Orleans newspaper during World War II and had dreamed of being a travel photographer, but she’d been the victim of a “misogynic era” and a “chauvinistic husband.”
My mother had been talking, of course, about her father.
According to Mom, he’d been withdrawn and silent, always hiding behind a newspaper or a TV program. When he did talk, it was usually to offer some kind of “helpful” criticism, usually about her appearance or demeanor. She needed to smile more and study less. Her hair always needed combing, or her clothes needed pressing. He was dismissive of her deeply held political convictions or even her stellar grades. “No man wants to marry a know-it-all,” he used to say.
Mom said he lacked respect for women. Gran said he was just old-fashioned and stubborn and sincerely believed that he knew best. He’d been raised to always please his parents, and he couldn’t understand children wanting a life beyond their family and hometown. Gran said the fact he was paralyzed in his late twenties had left him out of touch with the changing world. My mother said there was no excuse.
He’d died before I was born, so I don’t have any memories of him. I do have a memory of Gran and my mom visiting his grave when I was about five. They’d taken some roses, and I recall Mom crying as if she were trying to squeeze her soul out of her tear ducts as Gran laid the bouquet on the headstone.
The savagery of my mother’s grief had scared me. Mom was always in control, always logical, always practical. I thought she was above sentiment. Where had this storm of emotion come from? What could I do to make it stop? Was it somehow my fault?
Years later, when I was a teenager—I must have been fifteen, because I was driving my mother’s Mercedes and she was in the passenger seat, and the only time she willingly relinquished control of the wheel was when I’d been a student driver—she said something disparaging about her father.
“If he was such a jerk,” I’d asked, “why did you cry so hard that time we visited his grave?”
“Because I never had a chance to impress him.” She’d smoothed her already-smooth hair, which was an unusual thing for Mom to do.
“You wanted to impress him?”
She’d lifted her shoulders. “‘Impress’ might be the wrong word. I wanted to—oh, I don’t know. He just always made me feel...” My mother, who was always so sure of herself and never at a loss for words, had an uncertain wobble in her voice. “... inadequate.” She’d clamped her lips together and turned her head to the passenger window. I’d kept my eyes on the road. I was afraid she was crying again, and the thought of my always-together mother crying scared me to death.
Mom never said that her father was the reason she disliked spending time in Wedding Tree; she said Gran loved to visit us in Chicago and that there was a lot more to see and do there, which was true enough. Besides, she’d always add—Wedding Tree was too rural, the people too nosy, and the pace of life too slow.
Which were the very things I’d always loved about Wedding Tree. The community was like a fuzzy blanket—it made me feel safe and relaxed and cozy. In Chicago, I always felt hurried and pressured. Maybe it was because Mom packed my after-school life with activities and appointments and play dates. When we were at our apartment, she was always working on something, and I felt like I had to be constantly productive, too. “It’s important to make something of yourself, to become someone,” Mom used to say.
“Isn’t everyone already someone?” I once asked.
