Monsters

On most nights, it was a monster of some kind threatening us from the TV in my grandparents’ bedroom. This time, however, a woman’s head protruded from a 4 x 4 metal box that sported a variety of colorful switches and buttons. She was clearly displeased with her mad-scientist husband, who had acquired a beautiful new body for her and was preparing to remove the body’s current head and replace it—carefully, of course—with her own.

Precisely at that moment, the automatic timer—my not-so-mad-scientist father’s invention—switched the T.V. off, and I realized Grandma was asleep. As always, I rolled over onto my stomach and pulled a lock of blonde hair over my exposed ear (so the bed bugs PawPaw had told me about couldn’t crawl in). I tried not to stare at PawPaw’s false teeth, which sat like a glowing disembodied smile in a glass of water beside him.

The year was 1967, and I was 3 years old. Surrounded by strange, scary things, but safely lodged between my bodyguards.

Many of my most vivid memories of my days and nights with Grandma involved giant rubbery Godzillas stepping on models of New York City or Tokyo, spaceships filled with bug-eyed Martians landing in a park, or strange shadowy figures consuming carloads of screaming teenagers. None of it seemed to bother Grandma. She was usually laughing, either at me or at the TV.

Grandma was not one of those pleasantly plump, cookie-making types. She smoked cigarettes, laughed until she cried, could drink a whole pot of coffee by herself, and loved slot machines. As a child, I thought that’s the way all Grandmas were. As an adult, I realize she was a paradox in many ways: inspired constancy, fragile strength, comic gravity. She is the one who rocked my baby-self all night when my parents finally brought me “home” to her after a long trip, the one who took me fishing and taught me how to be quiet. She was the one who cried when I gave birth to my daughter and then, the next morning, told me I should “put that baby down” because I was spoiling her, just so she could pick her up, giggle, and spirit her off to the rocking chair.

I remember Grandma’s mother, a bit more like the typical grandmother because she was big and liked to hug. But no one ever mentioned Grandma’s father. Ever. One time, when I was about five or six, I asked her about her father.

“I never knew him,” she said.

Wow. Everybody knows their dad! I thought. But, after considering the situation for a moment, I said, “You never even met him?”

She took a long draw on her cigarette and let the smoke out slowly, pointed away from me. “Nope,” she said with finality. Then she took an unusually large swig of coffee and attacked her crossword puzzle.

That was that.

Shortly thereafter was the “we’re gonna play all night” incident, as my sister and I still refer to it. I was six and Peggy was three. When Peggy had finally gotten old enough to sleep in a big-person bed, I had to sleep with her instead of getting to snuggle all night between Grandma and PawPaw. After a full day of making mud pies and smearing PawPaw’s face with Grandma’s cold cream, we would be far too happy to go to sleep, so we inevitably commenced giggling.

One night, we discovered the hilarity of hanging over each side of the bed and rolling a ball between us under the bedsprings. This increased the pitch and level of the incessant giggling. At around 11 p.m. or so—I would guess because the automatic timer on the T.V. had already gone off—Grandma suddenly marched into our room and told us to “get up” because we were going to “play all night!” She wasn’t kidding. She stomped into the kitchen to make a whole pot of coffee, pulled all the toys into the middle of the living room floor, and told us to “Play!” If she had been accustomed to using cuss words, she would have used one then.

We tried our best to do as commanded. We built a rustic castle with Lincoln Logs and colored way outside the lines in the “Great Coloring Book.” But we just weren’t up to snuff apparently. She kept saying, “Play!” Peggy finally fell over on the floor from a straight-up sitting position, so Grandma must have figured we’d had enough. I can now imagine her telling that story over and over again when we weren’t listening. She would laugh until she cried, no doubt.

When I was about nine or ten, I decided it was time to try again on the issue of Grandma’s dad. By then, I had learned the hard way to always think before I spoke. So I thought—for a long time. I waited until she was deep in her easy chair and intently concentrating on her crossword puzzle.

“Whatever happened to your daddy, Grandma?” I blurted with no warning whatsoever.

She looked up. Glasses on the tip of her nose. Pencil in hand. For the moment, her coffee and cigarette remained untouched on the table beside her.

She sighed, looked at me kind of sideways, sighed again. “He left when I was really little.”

“Where did he go?”

Coffee and cigarette still sat untouched. “I don’t know and I. . . well. . . I don’t want to know.”

“Why?”

She reached for her cigarette. Took a long draw. Tapped it twice in the ash tray and left it there. I knew I was about to get my answer.

“I only have one memory of my father.” She looked off somewhere. “I was very small, and my baby sister and I. . .

“You had a baby sister?” I interrupted.

I discovered many years later that she had never told anyone what she was about to tell me.

Peering down at me with resignation, she let a few tense moments slip by. “She died when she was. . . still a baby.” Grandma leaned forward and put her elbows on her knees so she could look straight at me. “All I remember is hiding under a table with my baby sister. We were hiding from my father.” Grandma had a way of looking at me that made me understand things.

I didn’t have to ask any more.

After Grandma died, my father and I felt compelled to do some genealogy research. We could never have done it while she was alive because she had no intention of looking back into her family’s past. We discovered that she actually had two baby sisters who had died mysteriously. Grandma’s father disappeared in 1925, when she was 6 years old, and was never heard from again.

Now, at about the age she was when we had that conversation, I look back at her laughter, the scary movies, the games and mud pies, her total, unconditional love for me—and I understand her in a new way. I have my own granddaughter to tell my secrets to, and she is the one who will save them in her heart when I am gone.