“Go with your Grandmother and get in the tub, Lizzie. And when you’re done, grab the brush and cold cream and come sit in my lap.” Lizzie was my Papaw’s made-up name that he called me by, never my given name. My brother had one too. My Mom named him Robert, but he was Rusty in my Grandparent’s house. It wasn’t until I was in high school that I learned my Grandmother’s name was not, in fact, Charlotte, contrary to the giant granite stone erected in front of their house that boasted in a classically etched font, “Charlotte House”. Her real name was Louise. Despite my unworldliness, it was easy to separate the special from not-so at my Grandparent’s house, as my parents were born and remained Patricia and Lynn.
Growing up, my parents worked for colleges so they had big swaths of summertime off. One of our summer trips out of the Piney Veil was always three hours west to my Grandparent’s house in Killeen. My parents would bookend two weeks with an overnight visit, but my brother and I were on our own the days in between. Their house was full of mesmerizing, very delicate pieces of art, semi-precious rocks and minerals, perfume bottles and porcelain tchotchkes: collectable, breakable, forbidden. There was a room with two glass-walled curio cabinets that showcased many of these shiny treasures, lined by a white carpet with a pile so dense that my Papaw developed a technique to vacuum himself out. This pleased him immensely. I, too, was fascinated by the lines the vacuum made in the carpet like it was its own piece of abstract art. “Off limits,” and Papaw was firm. Not definitive, but this very well could have been the moment I internalized the philosophy that rules were merely suggestions. One day, I determined to creep into that room to get a better look at the shelves of crystals, propped as if they were floating like sparkly clouds of lavender, butter and snow. As I turned to light-foot it back out is when I realized that I’d been outsmarted by the carpet. It was a snare! The same gentle hands that demonstrated the proper way to pat the Ponds under the eye so as not to pull the skin would pleasure in spanking my butt, and thus demonstrated on many future occasions. Taking risks was my first drunk, and it’s the intoxicated that always think they’re impenetrable.
If I’m unsure that my Grandparent’s house was the birthplace of my risk-to-consequence theory, I certainly had many opportunities to practice it. It was also the place to earn an advanced degree in the Art of Secret-Keeping. In some instances, I was surprised by these adults and their flagrancy. They drank their toddies right out in the open. At precisely four o’clock, my Papaw would pull down the heavy-bottomed etched crystal vessels, clink would go the ice cubes followed by a golden liquid poured from an unmarked, matching decanter. And then they’d have a second round, no more but never less. Papaw was also never shy about his delight of Liberace, expressed by his record collection (always the Happy Hour soundtrack) and loved to tell the stories of their many excursions to Vegas. He’d also blather on about Tom Selleck and when he slowly unspooled a poster once at the kitchen table, first to reveal Tom’s mustache, his glistening torso and to my Mother’s wide-eyed relief, a white bath towel, I had to admit his ardor was contagious. I wanted to be in this club and for a while, I was. But there was one person who had no interest and that was my Mother. Besides, she’d already blown her chance.
It happened before I was born, Mom following the conversation and my Papaw to the back of Grandmother’s lemon-curd Caddy so he could pop the trunk and retrieve the Sunday paper, a ritual that I’d also experience every Sunday post-church lunch. Only this time with Mom was not supposed to happen the way it did, the way the paper was hiding a couple of Beefcake mags that she wasn’t supposed to see but saw, and he saw her see. Had she any reaction other than the one I imagine she had, her name would have surely been Trixie or Bunny instead of boring old Patricia.
I always got the message that my Grandmother was just the puppet-master. She never did the punishing but she never did the loving either. She may have well been in one of those glass curio cabinets as unreachable as she was. It was always assumed she’d be the first to go, being twenty years my Papaw's senior. They met at the motel she owned that was located outside of a military base. A freshly discharged Army cook, he channeled that effort into care for her and did that dutifully until the day she died. Her cause of death was Parkinson’s disease. We weren’t allowed to see what Parkinson’s looked like on her, as she was ridden to bed and too vulnerable to be witnessed. The only visual we were given was my Papaw’s description of his hand massaging her throat to help get her spoon-fed bites down. After the funeral, he walked away without a hug, handshake or eye contact and except for the letter threatening litigation, I never heard from him again.
*This is a lyric from “(I Just) Died in Your Arms” by Cutting Crew and I have zero permission to use. In fact, all of the titles of “Special: A Serial Memoir” use 80s song lyrics or titles, also of which I have zero permission to use.
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