grandmother said. “From Brazil. Amanda’s down there now. She always did have a good heart.”
Here are some things I didn’t know then: The summer she was fifteen, my mother was forever banned from the premises of the Palisade Hills Country Club, after what was later described to me as “a small vandalism incident,” in protest of the golf course’s de facto segregation policy. The summer she was sixteen, my mother, bristling under my grandmother’s restrictions, ran away from home for several months. While she was gone, my grandfather died unexpectedly, and no one knew where to reach her until months after the funeral. My grandmother and my uncles buried him alone, and never let my mother forget it, because no one ever let them. Almost two years before I came to visit, a small cyst in my grandmother’s breast had turned out to be cancerous. My grandmother underwent a mastectomy, radiation, and reconstructive surgery, and was only recently back on her feet. My mother had promised to visit her in the hospital; she didn’t.
When we played in her yard, my grandmother usually sat on the porch to watch us, but eventually the phone or some other thing within the house called her away. Allison and I ran. We went for the trees, for the gravel path, for the wonders of the neighborhood or the seclusion of the nearby lake. Away from our grandmother, we mimicked the lives we imagined our parents having in our absence. We’d pretend to be my parents, carrying Natural Wonders of the Amazon Rain Forest around the northern Tallahassee suburbs, fancifully misidentifying dozens of plants, insects, and reptiles. We’d harass gardeners and mailmen and occasionally knock on the doors of my grandmother’s increasingly bemused neighbors, calling ourselves ethnographers and asking them to tell us about their people. Then we’d pretend to be Allison’s parents. Those afternoons we stripped to our bathing suits, slathered ourselves with coconut tanning oil (though I was already browner than the woman on the bottle), and made over our faces with Allison’s pilfered makeup kit. She swore her mother had so many cosmetics bags that she hadn’t even noticed one was missing, something I found shocking, having a mother who practically considered ChapStick ornamental.
After our makeovers, Allison and I would climb to sit beside each other on a branch of the biggest tree above the lake, pretending it was a ship’s deck, and the water beneath us the Atlantic Ocean. We imitated the way we’d heard adults talk, complained about our imaginary jobs, the scandalous behavior of our friends and coworkers, the way our families drove us crazy, and about—we never forgot this part—how much we missed our daughters and wished we’d taken them with us. I liked our pretend cruise ship days because I imagined us glamorous, like Allison’s parents. When I pressed her for details about their travels, she’d just shrug, and say “How do I know? They never take me with them.” I knew better than to say that my parents never took me with them, either, but they talked to me enough that I knew all about where they had been.
When our secret days were finished, we’d cool off by dipping our bodies in the shallow end of the lake, and then sneak back into my grandmother’s house, dripping some combination of muddy lake water and suntan oil and high-end cosmetics across my grandmother’s floors. On those occasions that Allison couldn’t manage to charm forgiveness out of her, we accepted our increasingly restrictive punishments with some combination of amusement and grim determination: we cleaned bathroom tile with a toothbrush; we were not allowed to accompany my grandmother to the city on shopping trips; we ate Brussels sprouts for dinner for an entire week; we were spanked, which was new to both of us. My grandmother blamed me more than Allison for our expeditions.
Though we were equally guilty, I accepted the blame, knowing that whenever it was possible, whatever punishment she gave me Allison would take along with me. Once we spent an entire morning locked in the bathroom. I’d been ordered not to come out until I had done something with my hair. We thought she was kidding us at first, because the door only locked from the inside anyway; but when we stopped laughing and tried to open it, we found she’d actually taken clothesline and looped it from the doorknob to the banister in order to shut us in. Originally it was supposed to be for