Tuesday, Jul 8, 2008
Upon entering the house, I'd stand and look up. Floating above were windows that seemed impossibly high, their curtains controlled by an electric switch. On another wall was an Oriental rug so vast it seemed to have come from a palace. Hidden doors, a glass fireplace that warmed rooms on both sides and faucets spouting water in high arcs fascinated me during each visit. In the basement, I'd roam through a virtual labyrinth of rooms filled with the possessions of relatives now gone. Butter urns, antique dolls and photo albums of stern-faced people competed fantastically with the intercoms and other gadgetry of the house.
I see now that it would have been a great setting for gaggles of cousins: having pillow fights, trudging through the snowy woods, dressing up in my grandmother's old gowns and coonskin hat. Instead, I recall holidays as having a museum-like hush. Alone with the friends I'd created in my mind and the belongings of deceased generations, I was content. Upstairs, a football game hummed from the TV, a mixer whirred in the kitchen and the stereo piped one of my grandmother's classical music 8-tracks from room to room. But the house, with its carpeting and wallpaper, absorbed it all. As I'd seen in an illustration from one of my books, I could picture the house as a cross-section, looking into each room where, alone, my family members read, cooked, watched TV and napped. Pulling the camera farther away, the great house glowed in the violet of early nightfall, as smoke from the chimney wafted through the woodland and then over the endless dark fields, a scattering of tiny, precise stars overhead.
The moment that brought us there together -- my grandparents, mom and dad, my uncle and his partner, and my great-grandmother -- was perhaps the most quiet moment of all. Thanksgiving supper, held in the dim light of late afternoon, was a restrained meal, as though it were a play and we had all lost our scripts. Only the clank of silverware, the passing of dishes and the sharing of small talk seemed to carry us around and through it.
If I could go back in time and enter the minds of everyone at that table, I would not be surprised if only my great-grandmother and I were really happy to be there. My grandfather: walking in his fields, calculating numbers from stocks and commodities, fixing a piece of machinery. My parents: with friends in a warmer climate, "The White Album" on the stereo and some unexpected cash in their wallets. My uncle and his partner, Bob: willing themselves back home and beyond this annual homage. (Bob himself was a mystery to me, a barrel-chested man who laughed a lot and wore -- at least in the one mental snapshot I have of him -- a wild patterned smock top and a gold medallion. No one had explained Bob's relationship to our family, so I assigned him a role in my own universe, much like the cartoon characters at the campground or the sentinel rock. I made sense of him and marveled at his ebullience.) And then my grandmother: thinking she should enjoy this, but tired from the cooking and management of the meal, more looking forward to a game later in the evening.
That left my great-grandmother and me. Both of us were happy to have this time with family, this mythic meal in which we both believed. And, really, everyone else was there for us: to instill tradition in me, to uphold it for her. Isn't that what most holidays are about? Everyone in the middle gets left holding the bag, squirming in their seats, while the young and old enjoy it.
Within a few years, though, by the time I hit adolescence, I'd had my fill of tradition. Not the boulder, the huge house with its secret niches nor even the golden turkey served on an antique platter that my grandmother unearthed every year from the depths of a buffet held any appeal. Gone was my ability to see the world through the almost psychedelic rose-colored glasses of childhood. I also hadn't gained any of the empathy that comes with age. Instead, I was stuck with one foot in cynicism and the other in hypersensitivity. The beloved, magical house now looked to me like a looming example of misspent money and greed. My great-grandmother, so tiny and helpless at this point, now struck me as macabre and frightening, her papery white skin on the verge of tearing.
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