and amulets, brightly dyed pieces of fabric, small and elaborately carved sculptures, and wished that I had brought something magical with me. I wondered if gum or plastic was strong enough to be a talisman; I thought of fashioning the wings into a protective necklace. My own interactions with my grandmother had been limited: my mother avoided family events whenever possible, and at the handful I’d accompanied her to, my grandmother had barely spoken to me. She was the only thing in the world I’d ever seen my mother scared of, my mother who told offhand stories about living through monsoons in Asia and military coups in Africa and near encounters with poisonous foot-long centipedes in South America the way other people’s mothers talked about what they’d had for dinner the night before. Every time she got off the phone with my grandmother, my mother drank a glass of wine, followed by three cups of Zen tea. My father, who almost never yelled, raised his voice at her from behind their closed bedroom door when she made plans that involved seeing her mother, telling her she ought to know better by now and refusing to go with her. They’d fought over sending me to my grandmother’s in the first place, an argument I’d strained my ears to hear and silently hoped my father would win.
Usually when my parents traveled, I stayed with my aunt Claire, my father’s sister, but she’d been in poor health, and my mother worried that having me for the summer would be too much for her to keep up with. My father pointed out that I didn’t need much keeping up with: I read books, I ate when compelled, I sometimes wrote embellished accounts of my day in a leather-bound black diary. I was the sort of child who generally had to be coerced into playing with other children—the kind whose parents took her to anthropology department cocktail parties so often that their colleagues referred to me as their youngest graduate student—but my mother had said it was too much to impose on Aunt Claire, and anyway, it wasn’t me my grandmother hated, it was her, to which my father had responded, Give her time. I rolled the words over and over in my head, willing him to be wrong, but if I thought my grandmother would like me better when my mother wasn’t around, our reunion quickly disabused me of the thought.
“Unbelievable,” was the first thing my grandmother said when she saw me. From the airport to her house, it had been twenty minutes of loopy, winding roads, packed so densely with trees that looking out the windows from the backseat of the car, I could often see nothing but the green canopies that shaded us. My grandmother’s house was at the end of a circular driveway, a white wooden old southern masterpiece, with columns on the front porch and a veranda above it. Coral vines crept gently up its sides, and although it was only four bedrooms inside, at the time I thought of it as a mansion: it could have contained at least three town houses the size of the one I lived in back in Camden. The driver removed my bags from the trunk and walked me up the stairs to the front door. Instinctively, I held his hand as he rang the bell, and squeezed it tighter as the door opened to reveal my grandmother behind it, squinting at me as if her eyes were playing tricks on her.
But for the expression on her face, the way her eyes went from startled to angry as she said Unbelievable, she looked remarkably like my mother. They had the same delicate upturned nose and wide brown eyes, and the same fine blond hair, though my mother generally wore hers loose, and my grandmother’s was held back in an immaculate twist, and threaded with fine streaks of gray. She stepped out of the doorway and gestured toward the driver with one hand, motioning for him to take my suitcase up the spiral staircase. She ushered me into the house, shutting the door behind me. She gave me a perfunctory kiss on the top of the forehead and reached a hand out to tentatively touch one of my cornrows. She shook her head. “Did your mother do this to you?”
“My hair?” I asked. I looked down at the polished hardwood of the floor beneath me. My mother could barely do my hair herself, and knew