When he asked Mom, her face had gotten very still, and her hands had paused over the solitaire clockface of cards she had been laying out.
Do you think that’s a good thing for you to be doing, Georgie? Do you and your brother make a habit of eaves-dropping over the register?
George, then only nine, had hung his head.
We like Aunt Flo, Mom. We wanted to listen to her a little longer.
This was the truth.
Was it Buddy’s idea?
It had been, but George wasn’t going to tell her that. He didn’t want to go walking around with his head on backwards, which might happen if Buddy found out he had tattled.
No, mine.
Mom had sat silent for a long time, and then she slowly began laying her cards out again.
Maybe it’s time you did know, she had said. Lying’s worse than eavesdropping, I guess, and we all lie to our children about Gramma. And we lie to ourselves too, I guess. Most of the time, we do. And then she spoke with a sudden, vicious bitterness that was like acid squirting out between her front teeth—he felt that her words were so hot they would have burned his face if he hadn’t recoiled. Except for me. I have to live with her, and I can no longer afford the luxury of lies.
So his Mom told him that after Granpa and Gramma had gotten married, they had had a baby that was born dead, and a year later they had another baby, and that was born dead too, and the doctor told Gramma she would never be able to carry a child to term and all she could do was keep on having babies that were dead or babies that died as soon as they sucked air. That would go on, he said, until one of them died inside her too long before her body could shove it out and it would rot in there and kill her, too.
The doctor told her that.
Not long after, the books began.
Books about how to have babies?
But Mom didn’t—or wouldn’t—say what kind of books they were, or where Gramma got them, or how she knew to get them. Gramma got pregnant again, and this time the baby wasn’t born dead and the baby didn’t die after a breath or two; this time the baby was fine, and that was George’s Uncle Larson. And after that, Gramma kept getting pregnant and having babies. Once, Mom said, Granpa had tried to make her get rid of the books to see if they could do it without them (or even if they couldn’t, maybe Granpa figured they had enough yowwens by then so it wouldn’t matter) and Gramma wouldn’t. George asked his mother why and she said: “I think that by then having the books was as important to her as having the babies.”
“I don’t get it,” George said.
“Well,” George’s mother said, “I’m not sure 1 do, either… I was very small, remember.
All I know for sure is that those books got a hold over her. She said there would be no more talk about it and there wasn’t, either. Because Gramma wore the pants in our family.” George closed his history book with a snap. He looked at the clock and saw that it was nearly five o’clock. His stomach was grumbling softly. He realized suddenly, and with something very like horror, that if Mom wasn’t home by six or so, Gramma would wake up and start hollering for her supper. Mom had forgotten to give him instructions about that, probably because she was so upset about Buddy’s leg. He supposed he could make Gramma one of her special frozen dinners. They were special because Gramma was on a saltfree diet. She also had about a thousand different kinds of pills.
As for himself, he could heat up what was left of last night’s macaroni and cheese, n he poured a lot of catsup on it, it would be pretty good.
He got the macaroni and cheese out of the fridge, spooned it into a pan, and put the pan on the burner next to the teakettle, which was still waiting in case Gramma woke up and wanted what she sometimes called “a cuppa cheer.” George started to get himself a glass of milk, paused, and picked up the telephone again.
“—and I couldn’t even believe my eyes when.. ” Henrietta Dodd’s voice broke off and then rose shrilly: “Who keeps listening in on this line, I’d like to know!” George put the phone back on the hook in a hurry, his face burning.
She doesn’t know it’s you, stupe. There’s six parties on the line!
All the same, it was wrong to eavesdrop, even if it was just to hear another voice when you were alone in the house, alone except for Gramma, the fat thing sleeping in the hospital bed in the other room; even when it seemed almost necessary to hear another human voice because your Mom was in Lewiston and it was going to be dark soon and Gramma was in the other room and Gramma looked like (yes oh yes she did) a she-bear that might have just one more murderous swipe left in her old clotted claws.
George went and got the milk.
Mom herself had been born in 1930, followed by Aunt Flo in 1932, and then Uncle Franklin in 1934. Uncle Franklin had died in 1948, of a burst appendix, and Mom sometimes still got teary about that, and carried his picture. She had liked Frank the best of all her brothers and sisters, and she said there was no need for him to die that way, of peritonitis. She said that God had played dirty when He took Frank.
George looked out the window over the sink. The light was more golden now, low over the hill. The shadow of their back shed stretched all the way across the lawn. If Buddy hadn’t broken his dumb leg, Mom would be here now, making chili or something (plus Gramma’s saltfree dinner), and they would all be talking and laughing and maybe they’d play some gin rummy later on.
George flicked on the kitchen light, even though it really wasn’t dark enough for it yet.
Then he turned on to HEAT under his macaroni. His thoughts kept returning to Gramma, sitting in her white vinyl chair like a big fat worm in a dress, her corona of hair every crazy whichway on the shoulders of her pink rayon robe, holding out her arms for him to come, him shrinking back against his Mom, bawling.
Send him to me, Ruth. I want to hug him.
He’s a little frightened, Momma. He’ll come in time. But his mother sounded frightened, too.
Frightened? Mom?
George stopped, thinking. Was that true? Buddy said your memory could play tricks on you. Had she really sounded frightened?
Yes. She had.
Gramma’s voice rising peremptorily: Don’t coddle the boy, Ruth! Send him over here; I want to give him a hug.
No. He’s crying.
And as Gramma lowered her heavy arms from which the flesh hung in great, doughlike gobbets, a sly, senile smile had overspread her face and she had said: Does he really look like Franklin, Ruth? I remember you saying he favored Frank.
Slowly, George stirred the macaroni and cheese and catsup. He hadn’t remembered the incident so clearly before. Maybe it was the silence that had made him remember. The silence, and being alone with Gramma.
So Gramma had her babies and taught school, and the doctors were properly dumbfounded, and Granpa carpentered and generally got more and more prosperous, finding work even in the depths of the Depression, and at last people began tt talk, Mom said.
What did they say? George asked.
Nothing important, Mom said, but she suddenly swept her cards together. They said your Gramma and Granpa were too lucky for ordinary folks, that’s all. And it was just after that that the books had been found. Mom wouldn’t say more than that, except that the school board had found some and that a hired man had found some more. There had been a big scandal. Granpa and Gramma had moved to Buxton and that was the end of it.
The children had grown up and had children of their own, making aunts and uncles of each other; Mom had gotten married and moved to New York with Dad (who George could not even remember). Buddy had been born, and then they had moved to Stratford and in 1969 George had been born, and in 1971 Dad had been hit and killed by a car driven by the Drunk Man Who Had to Go to Jail.
When Granpa had his heart attack there had been a great many letters back and forth among- the aunts and uncles. They didn’t want to put the old lady in a nursing home. And she didn’t want to go to a home. If Gramma didn’t want to do a thing like that, it might be better to accede to her wishes. The old lady wanted to go to one of them and live out the rest of her years with that child. But they were all married, and none of them had spouses who felt like sharing their home with a senile and often unpleasant old woman. All were married, that was, except Ruth.