her grandmother had died she’d asked who killed her. A person didn’t kill her, cancer killed her, I said. I sat on the edge of her bed and waited for the questions a normal child would ask: What’s cancer? Where is Grandma now? But they didn’t come. No more questions, no tears. She stared at a spot on her wall, then reached up to pick it off. She seemed angry when she realized it wasn’t dimensional, pulling at it with her nail long after someone else would have given up. Well, I thought, she’s determined, anyway. After she fell asleep I thumbed through the picture book on her bedside table, scanning the pages about a family of flowers to see if the word “kill” was in it. To see if a vine strangled the baby rose. If an evil gardener chopped its blossomy head off.
Aunt Caro and I sat for a few minutes while she finished her drink, then she asked if I wanted to look at some old pictures, to reminisce, and I said no.
“It’s too sad looking at everything she used to have,” I said. “She was so happy in all those photos.”
“A person has to learn to be happy in all circumstances,” she said quietly.
“I think she did, to some degree.”
“I did what I could, Ann. Within sensible limits, I—”
“Aunt Caro, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m just saying the photos make me sad, that’s all. It’s going to be years before I can look at them again.”
She nodded slowly. “If you look carefully, Ann,” she added, “you’ll see she’s not always happy in the photos.”
I blinked. “That can’t be true.”
“Look carefully,” she said quietly, and we watched her guests pick at the trays, as if they were considering eating the wet doilies, too.
May 19, 2010
Betsy called and suggested I take Ellie ice skating. Said there was a new rink open near the old township building, and that there was rumored to be a disco ball and something called laser tag, which sounded just dreadful. Usually Betsy is the friend who reminds me of how easy it is to break a hip, and that I should stop using bath oils in the tub, so I was starting to wonder about the state of her aging brain.
“Well, I used to be quite good, as you know, but I haven’t skated in years,” I mused.
“Oh, Ann, I said you should take her there, not that you should skate, too. Dear lord!”
“Well, what fun would that be?”
“You could give her pointers.”
I wrinkled my nose; I remembered trying to teach my daughter to skate when I was pregnant with Tom; I’d call out instructions from the sidelines and she’d travel two steps and then flop down like Bambi, legs akimbo. When she got up, she glared at me as if I were an instrument of the devil. No; the only way to teach them was to skate along backward and hold their hands in front of you.
Who knows, maybe Betsy is finally losing it after all those years of smart and steady. Maybe she got tired of always being right, of always having the answer, of always knowing what was best. When my mother died, she was the only one who understood. She stood with me at the grave site and held me as I sobbed. I kept saying I didn’t expect it to hurt so much; I didn’t know why, with her death imminent for so long, that it affected me so. And she said, “It hurts because when your mother dies, your whole childhood disappears. It’s as if it never happened.”
Betsy could have been a psychologist or a priest, but now she’s telling seventy-year-olds to go to ice-skating rinks, and last week she actually bought a contraption that allows her to play tennis on her television set via some sort of handheld device. When I stopped by on Wednesday, she was swinging a white remote in the air and complaining about her backhand. Through the window it looked as if she’d taken up interpretive dance.
Though I hadn’t been on ice skates in many years, I reluctantly mentioned it as an option to Ellie, in a list that included bowling, pottery painting, and going to the movies. When she hesitated I was afraid I’d have to think of a new list of things; I supposed if push came to shove we could always play tennis on Betsy’s TV.
“Can’t I just come over?” Ellie said.
“Well, certainly,” I said, relieved. “We’ll make