Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

Debra Gwartney
In November of 1974, I stood in my family’s kitchen in Boise
making a ham and iceberg lettuce sandwich on Wonder Bread. I was
thinking about the things that once surrounded my grandfather, the
splintered nutshells, the evening cocktail, a box of sugar cubes on a
high shelf, the hum and whir of his press. My mind tried to stay on
Grandpa Ron, but my mother on the other side of the kitchen counter
was making too much noise, telling me to hurry up, hurry up. It was
time to go see her father’s body at the funeral home. I was to put
away the bread and screw the top on the Miracle Whip and right this
minute; I was making everyone late to Grandpa’s viewing.
I shut my sandwich, the top milky slice pressed on crunchy
lettuce until dressing squeezed out the sides like toothpaste, and
didn’t glance up at her, didn’t answer—though surely my mother saw
me flinch at the irritation in her voice. It wasn’t exactly annoyance I
aimed back at her insistence, but something close to that. I’d already
cancelled plans with my high school friends, our night out replaced
by all this talk of funeral and graves and already the thick smell of
mums in the house, not to mention neighbors dropping by with green
bean and hamburger casseroles and my white-haired Mamie frail on
the edge of the sofa, raising and lowering her coffee cup to her lips
like a pump.
From this vantage of many years, I can say it wasn’t entirely
teenage callousness, myself as center of the world, that made me wish
my grandfather wasn’t dead that day, so I could call my friends to come
get me for hours of aimless driving while we searched for boys and a
rumored kegger in the hills above town. I also simply didn’t want him
to be gone and had no other way to cope with his absence than to hold
to a desire to keep things plodding along as usual. I hadn’t sat in his
chair with him or visited his newspaper for a long time, many years,
but I still needed Grandpa Ron to be the fixture he’d been. I needed
to know that he and Mamie were in Arizona golfing and drinking Jim
Beam cocktails on the stroke of five, walking down to the country club
for steaks and dancing once the saguaro they’d planted out front got
silhouetted against a black sky. It seemed to me at the time that nothing
was safe unless my grandparents were going about their normal lives,
and, up here in Idaho, we were going about ours.
My mother told me again to put the meat back in the refrigerator,
her fists balled up now, and to go down to my room to put on a dress
and good shoes. I picked up my sandwich and headed toward the
stairs, ignoring her determination that I stare at a dead and casketed
Crab Orchard Review ◆ 169