The Gift
When I was twelve, my grandmother started talking about death. She brought death up like this: we were driving in her car, swerving back and fourth across four lanes of a South Florida highway, when she turned towards me and shouted (she was hard of hearing), “Lucy! Promise me this—when I go, you be the first to get to the jewels.” Torn between my wish for her to keep her eyes on the road and the pressure of death, I nodded my head quickly and assured her that I would. She smiled, and patted the steering wheel lovingly, “They’re all for you, you know. You were always my favorite. Even when you were a whiny little bitch, you were still my favorite.”
She was a brusque, fashionable lady and a terrible driver but the men just loved her. My grandfather died when I was three; in the wake of his death, and for many years after that, a troupe of dashing graying gentlemen, alike enough to have all been twins in some sprawling freakish family, strolled one by one in and out of our Thanksgiving dinners. I distinguished them by the presents they gave me: a tiny wooden dollhouse rocking horse, a leather elephant with jeweled eyes, a book of German fairy tales and a string of seed pearls. The men were a fog of thick white eyebrows, wrinkled hands and faintly britified Harvard accents. The presents never melted together: even now, I can conjure up the designs stamped on the elephant’s silk saddle or remember the look the German princess gave her lover after he’d been up the snowy mountain. It was a cool look, unbelievably cool considering the journey he’d undertaken for her—to fetch a pretty apple from between the paws of the sphinx—and I wondered about it. I wondered a lot and ate very little and grew to be quite queer: sallow skinned with large eyes that always gazed a beat too long at whomever I was speaking with.
Every night, in my room, in the dark, under the lace canopy (which grey-brow number seven or eight brought back from Turkey) I would arrange the gentlemen’s gifts into a makeshift caravan. The elephant and the seed pearls and the maroon velvet hippo and the soapstone rhino and the glass quill from the French stationary set. They journeyed North across my down blanket and I would try to dress them for the cold and talk them through their journey, even though it always seemed that all of them had more to say to each other than they had to say to me.
My grandmother never seemed to like anyone, and I don’t know if she liked these men. Over thanksgiving dinners she complained about the weather, swore about the rising price of diamonds, criticized my mother’s marriage. She always seemed completely oblivious to the delicate ballet of rising grayish eyebrows and melodic “hmmmms” (punctuated with the occasional sophisticatedly smooth laugh) being performed in the seat next to her. But the men must have meant something, because when Grandma Joan turned eighty-three she came to the table alone and it was then that she started talking about death.
When she died, ten years after our fateful car ride together (three weeks ago), she left no will. We are uncertain without her, and my mother and her sister, estranged for many years, have awkward heated conversations about potential trips to Florida. I think my grandmother liked the idea of all of us fighting it out to the bitter end. Long after she’d been buried, she’d like us to still be scrambling around her palm-tree ridden condo, looking for the rare pale gold pearls and ruby rings that were scattered under the bed, in the stove, sunk to the bottom of the swimming pool. My family, we’re not giving people.
A list, Gifts received:
An Onyx ring on my thirteenth birthday, too big to wear around my thumb, stored in a jewel box with a pop-up ballerina dressed in a pink tutu.
The aforementioned jewel box, stored in the back of my closet at my parents house, which held for a number of years, along with the onyx ring, a considerable supply of marijuana, magic mushrooms, assorted amphetamines, and sleeping pills.
A corset on my sixteenth birthday, (I fainted), now lost.
Large brown eyes which some people say are pretty pretty,
A lot of clip-on earrings, various styles
Scoliosis of the spine and a genetic tendency towards macular degeneration (blindness)
A developed sense of impending doom
Soot and coal and unicorn ashes from which to cast magic spells (just kidding).
No, seriously, of all the gifts I’ve ever received from anyone, this one might be the best: one Thanksgiving, we were all staying at a huge, plasticy hotel in Florida and I (age 15) started crying at Thanksgiving dinner. The dinner had started badly because I had made a fuss: I wanted to eat at a restaurant that served turkey, but no one else seemed to care, so we were eating Chinese. A Chinese buffet to be exact, the kind where the food looks more like biology than cooking and there is grey pudding for desert. A reader, by this point in the story (if you can call it a story), may have been under the impression that my family has some money. And we do, we do have some money, but that doesn’t mean we need to spend it and it doesn’t mean that if there is a cheap early bird special at the local Chinese restaurant we turn it down, even if it is Thanksgiving and the whole family is only together this one Thursday every year.
So there we were, cousins and aunts and Grandma, all seated around this big round table in this crappy Chinese restaurant. Our table was in a little alcove, and around the edges of the alcove, there were eight or nine red and gold dragons, three feet high and made of plastic, propped up on their hind legs, posed to breath fire, but not fooling anyone. They were not so much ugly-looking as malicious, and each time anybody got up to go to the buffet we’d knock one sideways and they’d all domino down and our server (otherwise mysteriously absent) would hasten over to scream at us in Chinese. The table was too big and the alcove too small and my family was growing more and more nervous because we’re all claustrophobes; not because we hate the small spaces but because we can’t stand to be in a small space with each other.
I leaned towards my father and whined as quietly as I could that I hated the dragons, and besides, I wanted cranberry sauce this year. But my voice, for better or for worse, is the kind of voice that carries, and the alcove had excellent acoustics. My mother heard. My mother (who normally lives on asparagus and skinless chicken) had ordered waffles for breakfast and a milkshake for lunch; around my grandmother she became a little girl. She heard and she leaned across the table and gripped my wrist, and I could tell that she was trying to be casual about her gesture and that she didn’t want my grandmother to see, but her knuckles turned white and I could feel the bones in my wrist crunch against each other. “What did you say, Lucy?” I shrugged and tried to remove my hand, she gripped it tighter. Crunch. Crunch. She repeated her question. “Cranberry sauce,” I said.
She narrowed her eyes and clenched her teeth, “Try the duck sauce.” I looked at her skeptically as a dragon toppled in my periphery. “Lucy, don’t you dare.” She paused for breath, resumed, “don’t you dare make this about you.”
I tried not to. I scrunched down into my chair, tried to make myself smaller, shorter, emptier; she released my wrist and I froze, as a blue and purple darkening tinge rose up and spread into a bruisey bracelet to fill the spaces her fingers had left. That is how things worked between us, in my Grandmother’s presence my mother lost her adultness but received a Midas gift in exchange: everything she touched turned to bruise. I pulled my sleeve down and mother looked away.
I tried—I tried to fold into myself and think about the leather elephant journeying north across my bedspread. I thought about how I could best protect him from the cold. Last year, I cut up socks and sewed a trunk cover for his nose. Was that enough? What of his tail? His gentle leather hooves? I would have eaten the grey pudding, okay? But that turned out to be unnecessary because well before we got to dessert my mother was off and running. About how I never showered and how bad my grades were and how she had no idea what I did when I went into my room for hours because it sure as hell wasn’t homework. And then my Grandmother raised her voice, she had a deep gravelly voice—unmusical but powerful, and glaring at my mother, told her to leave me alone, that it was none of her business, and that besides, all of us were disgusting, disgusting, and then everyone was yelling at everyone and I ducked under the table and wrapped myself in my mother’s shawl and looked at everyone’s feet.
The feet, I thought, looked like happy feet. They were all wearing nice shoes, comfortable but also beautiful. My Grandmother’s in particular impressed me: grey leather bootlets with grey pearl buttons. The shoes had looked out of place outside in the balmy Florida air, but under the table, in the dark, resting on the dark brown plush rug, they looked at home. I felt at home, and thought of my velvet hippo, Moomers, and how happy he might have been here. Or, if not happy per se, how the forest of legs might have excited him, how the brown plushness would have pleased him, how the journey North had wearied him and he longed for someplace dark and moist and secret. My family forgot that I had gone and I spent the last two hours of the meal under the table.
But that wasn’t the present. The present came later that night, after dinner, when I went down to the hotel bar. I was sitting sipping a margarita when this guy I had been eyeing that morning at breakfast (real good-looking in a thirty something business suit kind of way) walked up to me, bought me a drink, told me he wanted to hear about my problems, and fucked me. And when he was fucking me, when he was coming, for the first time all day I felt sure, completely sure, that it wasn’t about me, that it didn’t have a goddamn thing to do with me, and I was glad.
My Grandmother suffered a stroke when she was ninety-three. She had surgery and died three weeks later. My mother sat up with her. At the funeral, dressed in a black tracksuit and sunglasses, my mother told me this: “She kept thinking the pain was in her scar. The Doctors kept telling her no, that scar had no nerves left; it could be anywhere else, but not there. Her pain was always in the wrong place.” I thought of the men, the present-givers, how they’d come, how they’d disappeared, and wondered if that was what my mother meant by ‘in the wrong place’, but I didn’t ask her. My family, we know about misplacing things. The corset, for example, where is it?
The memory of fainting is still palpable. It was the evening of my sixteenth birthday, and I was going to have a party; but first, Grandma Joan was over to wish me a happy birthday. I was seated bare-chested at my mother’s vanity, wearing jeans and a messy ponytail, pale under the rosy light bulbs. Grandma Joan presented the corset, a fancy lace and bone deal, and started lacing me up. As she pulled the strings, she instructed. “This is not for the men, Lucy. It’s never about the men.” I nodded slightly at the mirror, trying to meet her eyes, but she was focused on my back. If I’d had any breath, I’d have asked more. Like: then for who? Or, does it hurt like this for you too? Or, will dying feel like this? Or, if you were journeying to the North Pole, would you bring a corset? “Men” she went on, sneering, “give intimacy for sex,” she tugged; “Women give sex for intimacy. It’s a terrible thing, Lucy, to misplace your intimacy.” Our family, I would have liked to have said, we know nothing about giving, only about trading. Reader, smart reader, will have read this at least: this is a story about getting gifts that aren’t really gifts. What’s the opposite of a gift? But then I felt a crushing sensation around my heart and lungs, the denseness of the darkness when all the lights go out at once, and when I woke up the corset, and my grandmother, were gone. My father told me later that my mother (a staunch feminist) was convinced her mother was trying to kill me. The women in my family, we’re none too stable.
My mother, for example, has a bad back and an instability in her eye that may turn into blindness at any moment. I mentioned the funeral, yes, but not how my mother, who for years has been advised by doctors to abstain from lifting heavy things, was the first to shovel dirt onto the grave. I mentioned her black tracksuit, but not how she wept holding the shovel, how we all heard her back crack when she lifted the dirt. I didn’t write about how this image of my mother holding the shovel, the dirt falling on the wooden coffin, her hand immediately searching out her lower back, ignoring her tears, the breeze stirring the oak tree behind the grave, has haunted me and that nothing, no books, no elephants, no sex, no journeys North can keep it out of my dreams and empty moments.
I didn’t write how that night, when my mother sat up and my grandmother died, a blood vessel ruptured in my mother’s eye and that the resulting blood clot still lingers, waiting to move over her retina and switch off her lights, but for good. And I can’t explain the awful part, the thick part, the thick mean fact that if my mother goes blind I will have to gift her my eyes; and I don’t want to, I don’t.
To spare the reader from any lasting tension or suspense, I’ll come right out and say it: no, I have not received the family jewels. The thing to do, I think, is head North with Moomers and never look back. Aged ten, my grandmother introduced me to her next-door neighbor’s granddaughter, a flighty little girl with messy hair and wild eyes. When the grandmothers had retreated I smiled tentatively and the girl walked over to me. Her name was Arielle and she was a witch. “A real one,” she informed me smugly, “with magic and everything.” She paused again and examined me. I looked back at her, hoping I’d measure up. “Want me to teach you?”
I avoided her eyes and looked at the pool, half covered in brown leaves. The deep end was leaf free, and the surrounding palm trees were reflected perfectly in the greenish water. A cloud passed overhead and the reflection of the branches faded; a ruby ring glistened darkly from the depths. I dipped one finger into the pool and sent ripples towards the reflections. “Don’t you ever wish you were those branches?”
Arielle considered. “Nope. Not me. I wish I could stay right side up.” She grabbed my hand and walked over to a low shrub and tore a branch off. “This is your wand,” she whispered.
Otium
