My brother and I were toting our stuff. “Whatcha got there?” asked Big Jim, and my brother began showing off whatever handheld game console he’d traveled with that year.
“Oh, this is just my blanket,” I explained, holding it up. “I’ve had it forever.”
My grandmother’s face soured. “You’re what? Fifteen?”
I nodded.
She frowned at me. “Much too old for that stuff.”
She turned for the kitchen. The turkey had been cooking for a while, but there was no lovely aroma. Mom sensed trouble. “When did the bird go in?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Ginny was a disaster on the domestic front, but she did not pretend otherwise. My dad told a story about the harried night she took cans from the wrong shelf, opened them into a pan, and served warmed Alpo on noodles to her sons. Ginny laughed. “And you liked it.”
My grandfather had a few tricks with children, most of which involved snookering us about our bodies. He’d tweak your nose and then exclaim that he’d taken it, displaying his fist with the thumb protruding from the fingers—such a reasonable facsimile that anyone under six reached a hand to her face to check for damage. Or he’d threaten, if you angered him, to lift you up by your ears. No child could resist this, so we’d anger him right away. The way to make my grandfather mad was to call him “Grandpa.” The title made him feel old. We walked right up to him and said, “Hi, Grandpa!” so he’d do his trick—stand behind us, grab our earlobes one in each hand, and lift us up, bearing the weight of our bodies by pressing his chest against our backs, even though it looked like being hung by your ears. But the business of not being made to feel old was deadly serious. “Don’t you all rush to my hospital bed,” he liked to instruct us. “If I wake up and see you there, I’ll know I’m dying. Don’t you ever do that.”
When my grandfather really was dying, in his eighties, my father and his siblings visited his hospital room one at a time. Big Jim also specified that to avoid competition none of his children should be permitted to speak at his funeral service, so no one did.
My grandfather’s greatest trick, though, and the one that made us squeal, was the one he called the Indian Death Lock. We’d sit with our legs crossed, in the position called Indian style by white families like mine. He’d reach an arm down between our legs and grab the bottom ankle. Thus clamped, it was impossible to uncross your legs. You ended up just grinding your joints into each other—there was no way to free that bottom leg with his hand there. The claustrophobia was quick and terrifying, and his release a moment later made a kid giddy.
My brother was going through just this exercise, my grandfather pinning him on a chair, while I tucked away my bag with my mixtapes, Walkman, and Nigh-Nigh. Mom confirmed with my grandmother that my uncle Michael and his family would be joining us too.
“And the turkey is how big?”
Ginny rounded her arms. “Oh, like this.”
“Only one of them?”
“Anyway,” said my grandmother. “Who’d like a drink?”
My parents didn’t care for martinis, but my brother and I got soda pop. That’s what it was called in St. Louis. Our favorite was Mr. Pibb. It made Mom wince.
My grandfather released my brother and turned to me. “So, how’s that school in, ah, New England?”
“It’s fine, thanks.”
“You learning a lot up there, are you?”
“Yep.”
The fuse sputtered. “Well, good,” he said. “Virgie, I’ll make drinks.”
I wandered back into the kitchen. I always paused before coming into this room, where my father had been a child, as though if I were quick and quiet enough, I could catch a glimpse of him hopping up into his chair—big-eared, athletic, a legendary student. I’d have settled for a scribble on a wall or a ding in a baseboard.
We were greeted in the kitchen by Rose, the African American housekeeper who had worked in my grandparents’ home for more than thirty years. Rose moved silently and had no front teeth. Her hair was a tiny knot at the back of her head. By then she would have been well into her fifties, and her skin was unlined, creamy to the touch. Beside her we were a snappy, swaggering, mottled crew. Rose had been night nurse to all of my cousins, most recently Alison, who that year was just four, and she had sat long afternoons with two of my great-grandmothers before their deaths—one the January prior, and one just that spring. I can’t complicate the Mammy cliché with any information about Rose’s life or character because, of course, I don’t have any. She was an angel to us. And I knew nothing about her except that she was the only person in my grandparents’ house who came down to the floor to talk to a child.
I showed her Nigh-Nigh. She rubbed a corner between her fingers and said, “I remember.” I believed her. She hugged me and my blanket close, my bodacious ta-tas smashed against her thin chest.
In her elegant and sophisticated memoir Black Ice, Lorene Cary, St. Paul’s School Form of 1974, writes of her bravado upon arrival as one of the first African American students and one of the first girls to enter the school:
I had no idea that wealth and privilege could confer real advantages beyond the obvious ones sprawled before us. Instead, I believed that rich white people were like poodles: overbred, inbred, degenerate. All the coddling and permissiveness would have a bad effect, I figured, now that they were up against those of us who’d lived a real life in the real world.
I’d have
