Wear Red

My mother and I are staying at the assisted living facility where my grandmother lives, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I have had to go back to our room for some reason and on my way back to Grammy’s “apartment” I get lost. I ask directions of one of the aides, who is pushing a resident in a wheelchair. “Are you visiting family?” she asks, and I say yes. She says my grandmother’s name and asks if that’s the person I am visiting. “I knew it,” she says. “You look just like your mom and your mom looks just like her, I knew it, I could tell. You’re all real pretty.” I have never thought of myself as looking like anyone on my mother’s side of the family. Later my mother does my grandmother’s nails and I notice that their hands look similar, and I wonder what my hands will look like in thirty years, in sixty years.

My aunt, uncle, and two cousins, one of whom I haven’t seen since she was twelve but who is now a recent college graduate and a music writer and about five feet taller than me, come to visit from Ann Arbor. I am stunned by how much I enjoy them all, how easy it is to talk to them, especially Marisa. We all eat a picnic lunch and take a walk in the facility’s woods, talking about politics and traveling and music, and I think again about what it would have been like to grow up near my kind Uncle David and my beautiful and funny Aunt Connie, in whose wedding I was the flower girl. I think about what going to a show with Marisa would be like, wonder if I could get away with hanging out with someone ten years younger and quite a bit hipper than me. We try to speak Italian together but I have forgotten most of what I knew.

My mother and I make dinner for my grandmother and her friend Mickey, who also lives at the facilty and in fact encouraged Grammy to move there about fifteen years ago. Mickey is 99 years old and just finished up her most recent bowling season a couple of weeks ago and loves my grandmother dearly. They were roommates in 1938, before my grandmother and grandfather got married and before Mickey and Katherine (their third roommate) bought a house together. Katherine died at age forty-one and Mickey never partnered again, has been widowed for sixty years. She tells a story about how they chose a house together: “Katherine just said, ‘Well, Mick, if you like it, I know I will,’ and that’s how we got that first house.” I want to sit her down and make her tell me every detail of her life with Katherine and without her, want to hear about my grandmother at twenty-three and try to understand what she was like then. My mother can only tell me what she was like as a farm wife with a big family and I mostly know her as rather frail and confused; I want to know what she was before any of that happened but she will only give the smallest hints and glances and I doubt I will ever understand.

We take a drive to my mother’s childhood home, which I remember as much bigger than it appears to me now, on the side of a two-lane highway with a bright red “LIVE BAIT” sign by the driveway. I think about the summers we spent there as very young kids, my sister and I and our various boy cousins, running around what was left of the old farm and catching fireflies and playing Knights Of The Round Table and writing our names in sparklers on the Fourth Of July. We stayed in the room my mom and my Aunt Diane shared when they were little. “She loved nice things,” says my mother later, as we take a walk together before I get on the plane, ”but there wasn’t any money and all she could take pride in was her clean house.” She tells me that something she learned about raising children from my dad’s Italian family was to show more affection, to kiss and hug more. As we drive back to the facility my mother points out who lived in each house we pass. “That’s our land,“ she says, meaning before they had to sell. “My father planted those trees. My sister and I would ride our horses all the way to the lake. My grandparents lived across the street from the country school. None of these houses were here then.” I think about the child my mother was and wonder if the child I was would have had anything in common with her.

Sunday morning at breakfast I ask my grandmother if there’s anything she feels like doing for the afternoon, before I leave. She was very alert and aware on Friday when I got in but has dwindled a little each passing day.

“Die?” she says, smiling and shrugging her shoulders.

I raise my eyebrows. My mom has told me that Grammy speaks quite openly about this.

“Socially that’s a little awkward!” I say, trying to be respectful, trying to keep it light, because if everyone who wanted to die, just because of being sick and tired of being exhausted and confused, because of feeling like they’re just done with the whole mess, were open about such things, who knows what would happen and how the rest of us would survive.

“That way you wouldn’t have to make a second trip,” she says, laughing, referring to her funeral.

“Welllll…I do have a pair of black pants with me,” I say, laughing a little too, not knowing what else to say.

“Oh, no, sweetie pie,“ she says, shrugging and making a “Pfft” face. “Don’t wear black. Wear red.”

I will, I promise her in my head, over my scrambled eggs, as she smiles and nods and breaks my heart.