Annabelle
Storm Chasers
My grandmother, Lovey, says that there are two types of people in the world: the kind who flee to the shelters at the first threat of a hurricane, and the kind who wait it out, hovering over their possessions as if their fragile lives offer any protection against a natural mother that can take them out of the world as quickly as she brought them into it.
I come from a long line of the hovering kind.
As I sit across from my grandmother in her stately living room, the dimmed bulbs of the chandeliers reflecting off the scotch that I most certainly will not drink, I laugh as she says, “Well, why wouldn’t I go to the beach? I’ve ridden out every other hurricane of the last half century there. Haven’t blown away yet.”
Her accent, Southern, proper, moneyed and with that particular Eastern North Carolina flair, is one that you rarely hear anymore. And I would listen to it forever. It is the voice in my head, imparting her wisdom, and I know it will remain so for the rest of my life.
She pushes the stylish bangs of her silver hair, cut increasingly shorter as the years have gone by, and I can’t help but see that glimmer in her eye, the one of her mother, a grand lady whom I met only a handful of times but whose presence is stamped in my memory like the check endorser at my daddy’s office. It is the same glimmer of my grandmother’s sister, my great-aunt, one of those sturdy forces that, during the Second World War, moved with her war correspondent husband. While the bombs rained down on London every night, she refused to flee or even gather her children into the bomb shelters under the street. Instead, she bathed her small sons, scrubbed their dinner plates, laid her damp dischcloth over the sink and steeled her jaw against the Germans attempting to take her right to parent as usual. She sealed her fate by signing every letter to my great-grandmother, “I’ll write you in the morning.”
My own mom, nearly a foot taller yet lacking those long, thin, graceful features of my grandmother’s, chimes in, “Mother, that is absolutely ridiculous. You will stay right here. There’s nothing you can do if a storm comes, and I’m not going to sit around here wringing my hands that you’re floating down the street in the rushing floodwaters.”
I smile into my buttery scotch, as my mother has never been one to flee from the storm. At least once a day the city manager she handpicked to advise her on all political dealings will say,Mayor, I suggest you refuse to comment on that matter.
But she, like the women before her, is incapable of turning the other way, of snuggling warmly in the cellar until the tornado passes.
“Have you forgotten who’s the mother and who’s the child here?” Lovey asks.
It is then that I begin to wonder: Am I a storm chaser too? Would I walk to the market in spite of the shrapnel? Now I know. Sometimes it’s best not to ask the questions if you’d rather not learn the answers.
Lovey
The Light
My momma always told me that honesty was the most important thing in life. But I’ve never understood why people are so hell-bent on honesty. It’s not the truth that sets you free. The truth is the thing that destroys lives, that shatters the mirror. The truth is selfish and shameful, and better kept to oneself. In fact, I’m quite sure that the only things that paper-clip any of our lives together are the white lies. They are the defibrillators that bring us back when we were on the brink of succumbing to the light.
As I lie in my four-poster mahogany bed with the giant canopy, the one I made love to my husband in for decades, I raise myself onto my elbows and study his features across the room as the moonbeams stream through the crack in the curtains, pouring into the open, snoring mouth, revealing the secret that the teeth seen in the daylight are only another ruse, that time has taken yet another one of my husband’s rights; the confinement to the hospital bed is not the only indignity.
He startles awake and, as so often happens in the middle of the night, turns his head from side to side, almost frantically, searching for me, the one who has been beside him since he was scarcely more than a boy. It is a clear reminder that, though I have always perceived myself as completely dependent on him, the leaning goes both ways. “Lovey,” he says, in his almost devastatingly lucid middle-of-the-night voice.
“Yes, my darling.”
“Can I get you anything?”
I smile the heartbreaking smile of a master who knows she should put the dog down, allow it some peace. But the bile soars at the thought of him being gone from me, and I steel myself once again. “Not a thing, sweetheart. Are you all right?”
“As long as you’re here, I’m perfect.”
As he settles back down to sleep, to the snoring that is my morning rainfall, I remember the last time he whispered that in my ear, only days before the stroke, as we danced slow and close in the kitchen after a nightcap on the patio.
Short-term memories,I remind myself, not letting my mind wander back to those early years together, to the days we met, to the nights I knew I’d found my true love. Living in the past, I’ve always thought, is a sign of dementia. Slipping into those old memories, dwelling on the “what was” instead of the “what could be” means that it’s almost over. And so I will myself to stay in the here and now, though it becomes harder and harder.
Tomorrow,I remind myself,we have an appointment with that new neurologist. He’ll have some answers. He’ll have a cure.
And as I relax back into a pile of down pillows, the thought, though I have willed it not to, crosses my mind: The lies that matter most are the ones we tell ourselves.
Annabelle
Fanfare
My Lovey is the one who gave me my name. Annabelle. When she gave birth to my oldest aunt, the first of five daughters, she received Tasha Tudor’sA is for Annabelleas a gift. She had dreams of petticoats and pantaloons and parasols and all of those other prissy “p’s” that a woman dreams she might lose herself in when she is expecting her first child, those fantasies that can only ensue before one has experienced the realities of spit-up and cloth diapers and sleep deprivation of levels that boggle the mind. It became apparent five daughters later that the Annabelle in the story really was nothing more than a beautiful china doll, a representation of something that didn’t exist in her hair-pulling, clothes-stealing, fighting-over-the-bathroom home.
But when I was born, all of that was going to change, thought my grandmother. I was a bit of a miracle baby, the result of a lot of prayer and some rather primitive, cost-prohibitive fertility treatments. So, this time, Lovey had those Tasha Tudor dreams all overagain with a granddaughter that could be free from the burden of sibling rivalry. Lovey dressing me in the finest, most impractical fashion and saying, “‘A’ is for Annabelle, Grandmother’s doll,” is my earliest childhood memory.
I was telling my husband Ben all of this, lying beside him in our bed at Lovey and D-daddy’s beach house.
