Visiting Grandmother's house is a little like high-end camping. The beds are narrow and hard, the sheets scratchy and age-stained, the foam pillows too round and bulky. The inside climate sways a bit too much with the season; too warm in summer, too cool in winter. There is one bathroom, adjacent to the kitchen and den, with a slatted door, so that if the occupier forgets to flip the fan switch, all manner of groans and effort are heard without trying to listen. One has to remember to ask if anyone needs to use the toilet before showering - showering: installed sometime in the early 90's, a fancy, 6-option massage head (still in place) where only a bath was available before - and hope others consider you when doing the same. And to drink? Mountain Dew, sweet tea or well water, rich in minerals and tasting of stone, perfectly drinkable, but leaves one homesick for the familiar flavor of chlorinated city water. I'm a city girl, born and raised in the largest metropolis in America (in land terms) in a spacious house with so many bedrooms and bathrooms my sisters and I never had to share.
On every camping trip I've ever taken, some primitive, some outfitted with private tent, air mattress, clean linens and down comforter, toilets a hundred feet away, I've risen early, with the sun almost. But at Grandmother's we sleep straight through the morning hours, the heavy curtains always drawn to a cocooning quiet, staving off our temporary reality with closed lids. It's a time warp.
This is the house my mother grew up in, shared bathroom and well water, with her father, mother, brother, and for some time, a Grandmother. My upper-middle class citified upbringing adorns my shoulder like a girl scout badge.
I am named for my Grandmother Christine, which my own mother calls me only occasionally, in a gently mocking way, when I parrot, unconsciously, Christine's insistence that nothing she cooks (always a tremendous success from where we're eating) is ever quite right or even edible, or when I get caught in a cycle of obsessive out-loud thoughts. On the second day of our visit last week, a woman drove down the dirt drive, off the highway my Grandmother has lived on since 1956, turned around and left hurriedly, as if embarrassed for having made a wrong turn, or fearful someone might come out with a shotgun, being Georgia and all, the proud South. For half an hour Grandmother insisted she couldn't imagine who that was, why they didn't come in. "Maybe it was Lucille, but I cain't imagine she'd be back this soon." I don't know who Lucille is, but I think she's a neighbor friend. "It's just someone turning around, wrong driveway, Grandmother," I said. "We don't know her." This is how conversations go with Christine. They always have.
"Do you want lettuce on your sandwich?" she asks. "No thank you," I answer. "Huh?" "NO. THANK YOU!"
Five minutes later: "I got lettuce in the drawer there if you want it." "No, I"m fine," as I bite into my lunch. "Huh?" "I DON'T WANT ANY LETTUCE. THANK YOU!" "You want some chips? I got chips there in the pantry." "No, thank you." She shuffles to the pantry, pulls out an array of chips. "I got Lays, Cheetos, I don't know if you like any of these." I say, "I'm OK. I don't want any chips." "Huh? I got Cheetos, you want some Cheetos?" "NO!"
Twenty minutes pass and she says, "I don't know who that was coming down the drive." But here we stop playing along and ignore her, put our noses into a magazine, or in more recent trips, our iPads. Maybe we eat a few Cheetos.
The day after the mystery driver turned around, lost, my Grandmother fished out an old .38 that had been resting in a dresser drawer for maybe ten, fifteen, twenty years, longer. We'd gotten on the subject of telemarketers and the calls she'd received from home security companies wanting to sell her an alarm system. Grandmother tells them no, no, no thank you. "And then the girl tells me," she says, recounting the conversation, "well what are you gonna do if someone breaks in?" Grandmother's voice is rising, with alarm and disgust, a voice we've heard countless times over anything from the boys who mowed the lawn or raked pine straw to arranging a visit with someone in a nursing home to baking cookies; "Now tell me how I'm supposed to bake cookies without tasting the batter!" She was always a phenomenal baker, but she's tired now, and diabetic.
"What did you tell her?" we ask. We're interested in the conversation she had with the pushy security system sales girl, if only because it's a fresh tale. "I told her they'd have to carry them out!" We laugh. Christine is still feisty, still picks pine cones out of the yard, getting what exercise she can at 82. The conversation led, naturally, to a discussion of firearms, and did she have any in the house, we wanted to know. She didn't, my aunt, who lives next door, flies (and this is new since our last visit in August) a confederate flag over the horse pasture, took the shotgun and rifle a long time ago. "I don't want that stuff in the house," Grandma said. A few moments of quiet, then Grandmother plods off to the back of the house while Mother and I sit around the kitchen table, which we do for hours, as on every visit, taking turns playing Spill and Spell and listening to the list of cancer victims in Grandmother's life, who died, who's funeral she didn't go to last month, much of it we've heard already, earlier that morning maybe. It's like sitting around a campfire after dark, waiting out the hours until sleep takes over.
Grandmother returns to the kitchen with a rusty pistol, lodged firmly into it's holster, stuck.
"Mother?" Mom says. "Huh?" Grandma says. Mom and I exchange glances. "I thought you said there weren't any guns in the house." She's pulling hard to remove the revolver from the moldy holster now. "I forgot this was in there," she says. As she struggles with the piece, we both urge her to leave it alone. "Grandma, let Christie (my aunt) take care of that for you. She knows all about guns." "Huh?" And then the pistol is free of it's holster, the barrel loaded - I can see the shell butts from my seat across the table. "Grandmother," I plead, "why don't you just put it down and let Christie handle it." "Huh?" She's worried about it being loaded and want's to empty the barrel but doesn't know how, except to fire it. "It's too rusty. It could backfire, Grandma. It needs to be cleaned. It's dangerous."
And then she pulled the hammer back. Mom put her head down, as if to say, I have no part in this, and later claimed she's seen that determined look a thousand times, knew better than to get in the way. I come from a long line of stubborn folk. It's apparent, if you look close. Christine left the kitchen, heading for the yard, and I was happy to see her go, to be out of harms way.
POP, POP, POP, POP, POP. Our dogs, good travelers, protest from the den. Aunt Christie's dogs howl across the pasture.
As she walks back into the kitchen Mom asks, beating me to it, "feel better?"
"I didn't know a pistol could be so loud!"
Our camping trip turned wild west and all Grandmother can say is she didn't want a loaded gun in the house. Three minutes after the shootout the phone rings. It's my aunt, joking, "that ya'll shootin' over there?" She thinks it's the neighbors behind us. "Yeah," Christine says, deadpan, unemotional. "Just straight up," she says. "I had no idea a pistol could be so loud!"
My aunt retrieved the gun later that evening, at my request, in part because I wanted to know what caliber, for story accuracy. "Sounded like a .38," my aunt said. She was right. I dug one of the .38 Special shells out of the trash for keeping, a memento, a reminder of who I could become.
I got to cook for Christine this trip, for the first time ever. There has always been a feast laid out for us when we visited and since she quit cooking we either pick up something from Publix or my Uncle feeds us. I insisted this time and she loved it: baked mac & cheese, roasted turnips in butter, and collard greens, which I grew and picked the day before. "I haven't had collards so sweet and tender in a long time," she said.
Aside from target practice ("just straight up"), she was quieter than usual. I can see how lonely a person can get, how resigned to waiting. I know she enjoyed having us, having the dogs visit; they can be very entertaining. I hope she will let me cook for her when we make the 370 mile journey again in a few months. We can take another look through the handmade quilts she can't remember the origin of, and the old children's books that belonged to Mom or her siblings, and admire Grandmother's wedding suit with a twenty-inch waistline. We can sit around the campfire and try to make each other laugh, try to avoid the dismal tales of life, eat a little more, and together watch the hours tick by.
