Archive for the 'Tell me a story of Ducky' Category

Dignity

Published on Wednesday, March 3, 2010 in Tell me a story of Ducky. 64 Comments

In those last days, she taught me dignity.

Tiny, hunched over, with piercing blue eyes, my grandmother was nonetheless excruciatingly intimidating.  No one called her by first name — no one.   And beyond a polite hand shake — a kiss hello to the cheek if you were her descendant — you didn’t touch her.

She would receive you in an easy chair amid a pile of books and papers. She would invite you to sit across from her and if you were her descendant, you tried to sit up straight.  If you were a descendant of the female variety, you thought about crossing your ankles, and keeping your hands in your lap.

And then you talked about books, and what the river was doing, and polite news of friends.  She was very careful how she asked about personal matters, because she wanted to know, but it wasn’t drawing room conversation, and  — far more significantly to her – it was none of her business.

But she wanted to know.

So she would ask delicately.  “The last time we spoke, you were considering graduate school,” or:  “you seemed tired our last visit, I hope you’ve had some rest.”  (Your last visit, you were fighting tears and regaling her with the horrors of new professional life, but she totally forgot that whole part and just remembered that you seemed fatigued.)

And if she suspected a pregnancy?  Well, she so desperately wanted to know about that — but absolutely would not violate your privacy so would say, “How are you feeling?” with a sidelong look at your figure.

When the nurses in the hospital called her “Mary,” it made my skin crawl.

“OKAY MARY,” said the women banging into her room, pulling gloves on.  “YOU NEED A CHANGE, HUH?”

It was the very early morning of our second day in the hospital.  I had buzzed twice for help.  She needed fresh sheets.  She also needed medicine — her body was popping with contained pain and spasming muscles.  She was whimpering.

“OKAY, HONEY,” they said.  “I THINK YOU’RE DUE FOR A SHOT ANYWAY.”

And then they put their hands on her and talked about their weekend plans, while her body popped and she fought tears.

“IT’S OKAY HONEY,” they said.

And I understood that I wanted too much.  I wanted them to know that the person they were calling “honey” was the only woman of her generation to pilot a sloop through the waters of the Gulf of Maine alone.  That she had served her country in uniform because the only thing she hated more than war was Hitler.  That the week her sister — her best friend — had died, this tiny wrinkled frame of woman had sat for exams at Radcliffe and passed with honors. 

It had long been my routine to step discretely out of the room whenever an aid was helping her.  Her dignity was a family commodity — she was unflappable, super-human, and that was the way we all wanted it.

So I made for the door while the women chatted and prepared to change the bed, and my grandmother writhed quietly. 

 ”I think changing the sheets is quite painful for her,” I said.  “Can we put in an order for pain medication right now so it’s ready when you’re done?”

“Sure,” said one, yanking the hospital johnny, stripping my grandmother naked, cold, wet.  The woman brandished a damp washcloth in her gloved hand.

“How about you call for the medicine,” I said.  “Let me do that.”  The aid shrugged and handed me the washcloth and water bowl.

I looked down at my grandmother.

  “Okay?”  I asked.  She nodded.  I washed her as I had washed my babies a million times, carefully passing a warm cloth over precious, vulnerable flesh, patting her dry.

“Let’s get the bed made,” I said to the other aid.  “I’m worried that she’s cold.”

“I can’t do it alone,” she replied.

“Just tell me what to do,” I moved to the head of the bed.  I had seen them do this, turn her on her side, pull the sheet under her gather up the old, yank on the new, lay it flat. Someone had to hold her shoulders.

“We’re going to turn you on your side,” I said into her good ear, “and in a minute you’ll be all warm and fresh.”  I put my arms on her naked shoulders, lifted when the aid said lift.  My grandmother cried out.  I turned her into my chest,  wondering whether my presence was making it better or cosmically worse.

That was when she inhaled.  Deep against me, nuzzling, just like my babies did.  And it occurred to me that I was probably the first woman to hold her like that in about eighty years.  I rested my cheek against her head, stroked her hair.

“Almost there,” I soothed into her good ear.  “This will be hard for a minute and then we’ll have you settled and you won’t believe how good you feel.”

She whimpered, we turned her back, she cried out, and then she was settled.  A fresh hospital gown, pillows tucked carefully around her, a new cottony blanket.  The medication finally came, and while it took effect, I brushed her hair and someone brought soup.

And then she was propped up, eyes alert, fumbling to set a napkin into her collar.  I leaned over and helped, spreading it smooth over the clean johnny.

“Thank you,” she said to me with a warm smile.

“You’re welcome,” I answered.   

Her eyes went to the little stack of books on the table.  At the top, a new one I had brought her, filled with anecdotes and jokes about sailing.

“Would you like me to read to you while you eat?” I asked.

“Yes, please,” she said. So I read to her, and she laughed more than once, which made me laugh (because I know nothing about sailing).  We had a few more weeks together, and there were many more horrible nights.  But I never again wondered whether caring for her basic needs threatened her dignity.

 All she ever said to me about it was “thank you.”  And that was how I learned that’s all you ever need to say.

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For Better, For Worse

Published on Monday, December 14, 2009 in Conversing With the Rain and Tell me a story of Ducky. 16 Comments

“I am willing to live with your mistakes,” Ducky said.  We were sitting in the living room of her apartment, looking out over the river. 

I was living in The House, and had just finished telling her the latest details of the construction project next door.  It was a massive undertaking that involved a portion of Ducky’s land.   She had been on that land her whole life, her parents had been on it all of theirs.  It was the beginning of the end.

We had the power to deter the project, but if we abused that power we’d be in a lawsuit that could destroy us.  However, the land would have to be sold when Ducky died, and the project could drastically lessen its value.  Someone needed to advocate aggressively for her interests and protect the asset for her children and grandchildren.

“We need you to do this,” she said.  There was no urgency in her voice — there almost never was.  Just a pragmatism: I was too young, but she was too old, and it had to get done.   “We need you,” she repeated.

I told her what I thought the best move was.  She nodded.  I suggested instructions for the lawyers and she said to go ahead.

“But I could be wrong,” I cautioned.  I could be really, disastrously wrong. 

The House weighed heavy — but far worse was the specter of failing her.  What would it be like to destroy what she had devoted herself to build?

“I am willing to live with your mistakes,” she said.  She was sitting back in her chair, leveling an arctic blue gaze on me.  “You will make them.  You won’t be perfect.  But I think your chances are quite good and I am willing to live with whatever happens.”

“Okay,” I said. 

The House started to lose its magic for me at that time.  The meetings, the e-mails, the constant weighing of strategies.  I couldn’t look out the window without wondering whether I had made the right call about this aspect or that.  I couldn’t go down the driveway with the kids without running into someone I was in an adversarial relationship with. 

Every week, I made the drive to Ducky’s apartment and reported on developments.

“So what’s the next move?” she would ask.

I would outline my plan, the possible faults with it, the reason I thought it was the way to go.   “Very complicated doings,” she would say, setting aside the folder.  “How is Young Mary enjoying preschool?”

I wondered whether maybe she was losing her mind a little.

She wasn’t.  She retained the facts from one conversation to another.  Sometimes she was waiting with the file open and a question.  She always trusted my answer, nodded, and then changed the subject.  Sometimes her question would make me consider an alternate route, but she never told me what to think and she never offered an opinion of my choices. 

I was on my own, but her hand was warm on my back. 

My last years at The House were a deathwatch that consumed my life.  I despised living there and I dreaded leaving.

And then it happened:  the project was complete, Ducky died, and The House was sold (value intact), all in about two months.  La Casa Loony Tunes moved to the Tilty Floored Farmhouse to begin again. 

Cute Husband asked me many times over the course of those years whether it was worth it.

The answer always was that I wasn’t going to abandon Ducky, no matter what.

But I didn’t expect the gift she would leave me in return.

There is no perfection, no life without sorrow, no relationship without its wrong turns.  The romantic surrender to love has no depth.  It is the surrender to imperfection that builds life. 

She taught me that in those last years, when she taught me what it is to know that someone has forgiven your mistakes in advance of your making them. 

“Nikki is my frenemy,” Mare says.  She is writing a note to Nikki in dark crayon.

As the baby that Mary was disappears further into the past, that baby-love I had for her fades, too.  It will always be there, buried in that little body I grew and nursed and carried on a hip for so many months.  But an increasingly complex person is occupying that body now, and an increasingly complex love develops between us.

“Your what, now?” I ask.  I dread this, the Girl Thing that brought such agony to my youth. 

“She told me on the playground that she didn’t like my hair and she’s supposed to be my friend but she isn’t and then she and Robin said I could only be friends with them …” she goes on.  My head hurts.

“I think your best bet,” I say, “is to find other friends.”  And then I can’t believe I said that, because it’s useless advice and every bit of useless advice I utter put me one mark closer to Stupid Mother.

“It sounds very challenging,” I finally say.  And then offer no advice at all.

Maybe it will be her destiny to be Popular.  Maybe it will be her destiny to engage in female politics for a year or a decade or a lifetime.  It isn’t for me to say.

I can tell her to do her homework and to keep her elbows off the table.  I am in charge of how much television she watches and what she wears. 

But I can’t tell her how to think or what to value.  She’s going to have to work that one out on her own.

And I am learning to live with her mistakes.

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The Summer Before They Moved

Published on Sunday, October 4, 2009 in Tell me a story of Ducky. 6 Comments

That summer they began the work of disassembling the house on Sudbury road. Odd ice skates, scrap books, battered and beloved cook pans, miscellaneous scraps of life lined the walls in stacks, waiting for judgment.

Granddad — my Granddad, Dad’s Dad — had contracted an infection and was in a sick bed in the hallway off the kitchen. Ducky was doing the work: caring for him, maintaining the house — organizing the downsizing and the move to the retirement community.

They were 84. I was eighteen.

I visited them a few times, on the way home from the summer camp where I was teaching swimming. I was driving a second-hand convertible, and the commute along back roads took me about a half mile from their place. I stopped in and found it grim — he was alternately morose and angry. She was pale, patient.

“You should stay in bed, Granddad,” I said when I saw him. A wall of a man, even then. Safety on the one side of him, exile on the other.

He scowled at me, and then the unforgiveable: he scowled at her.

“Would you like to go for a ride?” I asked her.

Five minutes later she was beside me in the convertible, hair tucked into a hat, her ankles neatly crossed over Keds, a blue cotton skirt spread smooth over all.

Somewhere in my youth and insecurity I managed to stumble upon the wisdom to stay silent as we ambled the country roads her father had driven her down in horse and buggy, a sleigh in winter.

“Thank you,” she said as I turned for home. We had been gone more than an hour.

“Thank you,” I replied. I was flattered that she had come with me, even more flattered that her hands had remained folded in her lap the entire ride, never nervously reaching for the dashboard.  An act of discipline, I guessed.

I pulled into the driveway and helped her out. She straightened, steadying herself, squaring her shoulders, leveling sharp blue eyes on me.

“Well, you are a dutiful granddaughter,” she said.

“It was fun!”

She nodded, and I walked her to the door and left her there.

She did not know it, but she had thirteen years of life left. Standing in the door, small and tired and grateful for young granddaughters in convertibles, it must have seemed like such a long way to have come already.

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The way she had of being

Published on Tuesday, August 25, 2009 in Tell me a story of Ducky. 12 Comments

“When you were little, did Ducky play with you?” Mary asks me.

“She wasn’t someone who knew right away how to get down on a floor and play. Your Granddad is. No toddler can help but fall in love with him within minutes of his arrival. Ducky wasn’t like that.”

Which made it all the more magical, the ways her house was set up for children.

“Her house was filled with lovely things. Really lovely, old things,” I say. “Paintings. Furniture that had been in her family for generations. She had this gigantic dining table that seated, like, twelve. And when you sat at it, there were rules. Like no elbows not for any reason NOT EVER.”

“No licking fingers?”

“Oh. No. NO.”  The thought of licking fingers at Ducky’s table makes my stomach roil.

“What would she have done?”

“My mind won’t even go that far, Mare. It stops in horror at the very idea of its ever happening and can’t bring itself to move one step past that to consequence.” Mare laughs.

“She kept a box of wooden toys. A little peg set you could hammer. A toy dog with wheels, you could pull on a string. And she kept a box of pretty pictures to look at. Pictures of birds or mountains, or funny drawings. She saw these in magazines or she had received them as cards and she always cut them out and kept them there in that box along with stamps.”

“And in the dining room there was a tiny writing desk that had been hers when she was little, and her mother’s, too. She loved to sit me at that desk, and ask me to show her my letters. I’ll never forget when she said, ‘Show me your letters,’ and I could. I took the pencil and spelled my name and she smiled and said, ‘That deserves a great reward!’ — and brought me a cookie. It was fun to please her.”

“Did you spend a lot of time in that house with her?”

“I did,” I answer. “Especially right after my parents broke up. We lived there for a while. She made me breakfast every morning. Pepperidge Farm cinnamon toast, and a soft-boiled egg. She brought it out in a little ceramic egg cup and showed me how to tap it with a spoon and scoop the inside out and dip toast in it. She never pestered too much, but I knew it was important to her that I eat that egg, so I did.”

“Why was it important?”

“I think because in her growing up she was privileged to have nutrition. It was important to her to protect children with healthy food.”

“Did she play with you?”

“She did things around the house and I was allowed to do them with her. She had a greenhouse off the dining room. It had a gravel floor, and low shelves. She took care of long lines of plants out there. I would follow her and hold scissors and water things. She grew Narcissus. They’re a white-blossomed plant that comes from bulbs, like tulips. They smell amazing. She also grew geraniums. Bright red ones. I didn’t think those were particularly special — I liked big fancy flowers that smelled good. But in retrospect, those were pretty, and I have acquired a taste for them.”

Mare wrinkles her nose. Time and age are funny things. Ducky was an efficient worker, and Doing Things was important to her. I know now that to bring a small child along on any task is a hassle.

I know that a writing desk in a dining room interrupts the aesthetic flow of the room. But it was a sunny spot, near the greenhouse, inspiring and quiet for little minds and that’s why it was there.

“Ducky taught me that being a mother isn’t about being great with kids. It’s not about giving birth. It’s not about providing a perfect child-centered environment. She shared her space with me, the space in her home and her heart.”

“She did that with you, too,” I say. “She lived with us for a couple of summers and you had a special relationship. You used to sit out on the sun porch and eat lunch together. She in her mid-nineties and you not yet two.”

“She couldn’t understand your toddler-speak, and she spoke too softly for you to hear. But it didn’t matter. You sat together in the sun. She ate her lunch and you ate yours and you looked out at the world together and understood each other perfectly.”

That way she had of being with someone would keep her with me long after she was gone.

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100 years

Published on Friday, July 24, 2009 in Tell me a story of Ducky and The Loser Cruiser. 10 Comments

Sometimes when I am anxious, when the mini-van is going to cost more money than I make in a semester, when the house is so gross the cleaners are afraid, when I wonder if it’s ever going to get any easier, I listen to “100 Years” by Blues Traveler.

“It won’t mean a thing in a 100 years,” I remind myself when the stress threatens to make me explode.

Somehow in the middle of all this, I managed to make the costume for the show Mare is in tonight. She plays an ugly duckling who, when all was said and done, grew up to be an ugly duck. I had to sew a damned tail on a pair of brown leggings.

Seriously. Me. Sewing.

I even made a big poufy belly, which I hand-sewed on to the shirt, and then some stringy nasty-duckling things on the neck. I stayed up late into the last couple of nights trying to remember Home Ec and Gran’s sewing lessons long enough to make something that isn’t going to shred at first quack.

Something Mare would be proud of.

I surprised Mare with it and she hugged me and said, “It’s AWESOME, MOMMA!!” and I grinned.

“Are you surprised?” I asked. (Because I really was.)

“No, not at all!” she said. “I knew you’d do it for me. You always do.”

And I thought about That Grand Man and how he made me the mother these girls have. And I thought about Ducky and how she saved him so that he could save me, and it all goes right back to my beautiful girls and I realized that the great comfort — the great joy of life — is that it really will matter in a hundred years.

If you do it right.

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The Story of a Femme Fatale and Her Ninety Year-Old Grandmother

Published on Sunday, July 12, 2009 in Tell me a story of Ducky. 12 Comments

“Was Ducky nice?” Mare asks me. I smile. In some ways, Ducky was the nicest person you would ever meet. But she was never easy.

“She was,” I say. “But she could be horribly critical.”

“What’s critical?”

“Critical means that she could offer her opinion of your choices, even when you didn’t ask and didn’t want it. And it often wasn’t positive.” Mare frowns.

“That doesn’t sound nice.”

“Oh, it was horrible. Really, Mare, she was one of the most critical people I knew. When I used to drive up to the House to see her, to spend the week, I was a little afraid. Something would be wrong about me. My manicure, my job, my attitude. She’d find something. It was nerve-wracking.”

“That doesn’t sound nice at all!”

“No one’s perfect, love. I learned — later than I wish I had — that she was critical because she loved me fiercely. She came from a family of brilliant people and she wanted me to live up to that, which was actually a huge compliment.” Mare’s face has clouded.  She does not want to hear that her namesake was not perfect.

“What didn’t she like? About you?”

“Oh, that’s easy. She thought I was too loud and self-centered. I could be gauche. I wasn’t as smart or capable as Dad. And she hated my boss.”

“Helen?”

“Yes. Helen. She hated Helen.” It stings a little. Thank God for my youth. If I had undertsood — had truly known — I would have never have had the nerve to work for a conservative Congressman, to stick to my guns in the face of Ducky’s disappointment.

“Did it make you sad?”

“Yes. I feared Ducky’s criticism.” Mare blinks, pained. That sweet blue-eyed baby I birthed seven years ago is fading away, and the girl facing me is learning that nothing is all good or all bad.

“Tell me. Tell me about a time when she was criticizing.”

“Okay,” I say. I think and then begin: “She had an infection in her foot. It was a cut … I don’t remember how she got it. I was in my early twenties — drove from Washington to spend the week with her. She sent her maid home and it was just us. The infection got worse and I wanted her to get it seen. She agreed, and I drove her to the emergency room.

“She was a horrible patient. Every time they poked her, she winced, and spoke sharply. She trusted no one. And nothing I did was right. I brought her the wrong thing to drink, or didn’t adjust her pillow properly, or was too familiar with the doctor or not firm enough with the nurse. It was really impossible.

“When the doctor was treating her, she whispered to me what he was getting wrong, but I didn’t understand what I was supposed to do about it. I offered to take her to a different hospital, and even that was wrong. The hospital was fine, she said. She just wanted me to know she didn’t think he was hygenic enough.

“I know now, I understand. My Granddad was a brilliant doctor, and he made sure she always had the best care, wherever she was. This was her first trip to the hospital without him. She was in the care of her 24 year-old granddaughter. It must have been really hard.”

Here it is: one of those horrible moments I have where I suddenly see so clearly what I missed at the time.  She must have been so lonely for him that day, in a hospital packed with young doctors fast-talking in a language she barely understood any more.  As scared as she was, she trusted me.  She was critical, and spoke sharply to me, but she did as I said.

“When we left the hospital my nerves were shot. It had been hours and we were both tired and I wasn’t up to making dinner. She suggested a restaurant, and I said fine, let’s go, and we went and sat down and I ordered a glass of wine.

“Ducky didn’t approve of alcohol. I had taken two sips when she said, with a huff, ‘I can see it’s changing your mood already.’” — Here I laugh. Thank God the wine was changing my mood.

“A man approached the table,” I say. “He said to me, ‘You look very familiar, do we know each other?’ – and Mare, that is, like, the cheesiest line ever. And I was so tickled. What a way to end the day.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he was basically saying that he thought I was cute, and he wanted to date me. I was married, sitting there with my 90 year-old grandmother, completely flattered. So I was just about to say something tactful and pleasant when she interrupted. This firm little voice from across the table: ‘I am Mrs. Lamar Soutter. This is Mrs. Franklin Schwarzer. And I don’t believe either of us knows you!”

I laugh. Mary doesn’t get it, but the memory is rich, and I am guffawing.

“Why is that funny?”

“Because that poor man,” I laugh. “It was mortifying and priceless. See, in Ducky’s world, he was completely out of line. I was married. She was my chaperone. It was not okay for him to even remotely question my availability. Shy as she was, she was not tolerating some man approaching our table in pursuit of her married granddaughter. The look she gave him was spectacular, and he was out of there in about five seconds.”

“What did you do?”

“Took another swig of wine,” I laugh.

“What did Ducky do?”

“She looked at me. And I grinned at her.   And she raised her eyebrow and said: ‘Femme fatale.’”

“What does that mean?”

“It means: ‘woman who is dangerous whom men can’t resist.’”

“Oh.” Mare doesn’t know if this is a good story or a bad one.

That’s okay. I am learning how years can pass before you understand a story. You keep them and they seep into your soul and long after a person is gone, she can still teach you things.

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Love is work

Published on Friday, June 26, 2009 in Tell me a story of Ducky. 20 Comments

“What was the best thing about Ducky?” Mare asks. Two years have passed, and I am gratified: Mare still remembers her.

“She was amazing at loving people,” I say.

“What does that mean?”

“I mean that love is hard work. And she worked at it harder and better than anyone I know.”

“And that’s why you named me after her?”

“Yes. And to love her back. So that she knew I was hers, you were hers.”

“Didn’t she know that?”

“She knew that. I wanted her to know that I knew it, too.”

Mare frowns.

“When you have kids, Mare, you never really know what they’re going to be, but they’re your kids and your responsibility and you love them and care for them anyway.

“When you’re a stepkid you lose that sense of safety. Your parent is partnered to someone new, and you’re expected to love that person, and if you do or you don’t you’re betraying one parent or the other. And you’re always waiting for someone to throw you back if you don’t behave.

“Ducky was Dad’s stepmother. Technically — and I HATE this word — my stepgrandmother. But we never thought of it that way. She was my grandmother. When she married your Great-Grandad she took on his kid. And his kid’s kids, and their kids. Her standards were impossible, but on some level it didn’t matter because she’d love you the same whether you met them or not. All she really required was that we be polite. And she never once looked at us and said, ‘You’re a jerk, you must get it from that other woman,’” I laughed, and Mare laughed, too.

“Tell me a story of Ducky,” Mare says. She settles into her seat.

I think and then reach for a favorite. “Your Granddad — my Dad, that Grand Man – he was a very tough boy. He loved sports and he was very competitive and good at it. One sport he loved was hockey.”

“I play hockey!”

“Right. Well, this was a little different. This was a bunch of aggressive young men on skates going after each other with sticks. He tended goal, which meant sitting there getting pucks launched at his face all day long.

“I am quite sure Ducky hated it. Ducky did not approve of violence or aggression and in a lot of ways didn’t find men to be very sensible.

“So it confused Grandad that she showed up to the games. She never said anything, just sat there and watched.

“And then one day he was playing one of the biggest games of his career– I don’t know which one, but it was big. And this one guy — we’ll call him Jim Jones — he was Grandad’s defenseman and all season he was making work for Grandad, letting these pucks get by him and it was wearing Grandad out and he was really starting to get mad about it.

“So it’s the big game, and they’ve almost won, it’s down to the end … and Jim Jones lets another one go by. Last seconds of the game.

“And the next thing Granddad knows, he’s hunkered down, and the entire opposing squad is coming at him with sticks and the whole season hinges on his stopping that puck.

“Ladies didn’t shout at hockey games back then, Mare. And Ducky didn’t shout as a rule. And she did not swear. But she saw that squad go down toward her boy, and she stood up and screamed, ‘GOD DAMN YOU JIM JONES IF IT GETS PAST HIM IT WILL BE ALL YOUR FAULT!’”

Mare grins. I know she is imagining the Ducky she knew — tiny, dignified, wrinkled — standing up and hollering like that.

“She knew the whole time? How important it was and what was going on?”

“Yep. She just showed up, shut her mouth, let him do his thing. She didn’t really approve, but she didn’t need to. He was hers and it mattered to him so she showed up.”

“Did Granddad stop the puck?”

“He did. And his squad won the game, and they carried Granddad off the ice on their shoulders, and she stood watching the whole thing in total bewilderment.”

Mare has enjoyed the story — her hero grandfather and great-heart namesake.

“She always asked after my other grandmothers,” I say quietly. “ And I knew it was because she wanted me to know there was no price of admission. I could and should love the other women who claimed me, and that wouldn’t make me any less hers.”

I feel a stark loneliness for her that has never really gone away, and I know now never will. A badge like the scars of childbirth.

“And I’m hers, too, right?”

“Yes,” I say. “You are hers. You would have been anyway, no matter what. But I think she had a lot to do with the mother you have, and I wanted her to know I would never forget, so I asked her permission and gave you her name.”

Mare considers this, with her crystal eyes and great big heart. I think how feelings are ephemeral, but true love is eternal — and only if you work at it.

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