The internet draws me and a stranger together but places me and you on opposite sides of the world.
You call my mom four times in one evening, from six o’clock to eight o’clock:
1) Because you need to reset your Yahoo password and can’t figure out how.
2) Because you can’t find the email the Wheel of Fortune sent you when you registered.
3) Because you just realized you never registered for the Wheel of Fortune, your friends just called you and told you you did because someone from Florida with your initials showed up on the screen yesterday.
4) Because you feel there is unfinished business.
I am listening to my mom’s side of the conversation in the living room, from my desktop in my bedroom. She sometimes begins sentences and then falls short. She sometimes bursts out laughing and puts you on speaker because you are explaining how you tipped the priest at church in a little envelope. I have a DJ’s livestream open in one tab and FORVM ANCIENT COINS in the other. I am examining a worn Mother Mary, minted in Ravenna.
Let’s have another example. I am quarantined right now. My roommates are watching Love Island on a laptop in the other room. I am scrolling through blog posts. Algorithmically, I end up on these ones about a mother’s love, and being confused by it. I am reminded of the life I live, free of that drilling weight of that confusion, grateful. And I am thinking of you, Gramma.
Gramma I’m going to be honest I am thinking of you.
I am thinking about you all the time, when there is a free writing assignment, a write-about-what’s-on-your-mind assignment, I write about you. Gramma I am thinking of you.
Gramma I am thinking of you, and your story about stomping around the church graveyard corral, tired, dark, ten, skirt hitched, cross stitch, old fashioned hopscotch, thick sticky marshmallow, bingo, recited Polish jokes to the priest. Something would happen to you soon, in two, in four, in six years, actually no, something is always happening to you. Something is always happening to you, something you can’t tell. You were twelve. It is not my place. It is really not my place.
Something is always happening to you. You began kindergarten at three. Then there was that thing when you were twelve. You were sixteen and bandaging a man’s ravaged feet when you’d already sealed wet red organs I’ve hardly learned of at seventeen. Everything was early, early, early.
Gramma I think we lost something, I think you may have kicked it down the hill at the corral. I think it may have rattled between the headstones. I think if I parted the flowers at the base of some gravestone at the Polish Catholic Church of Woonsocket, I would find it down there. But I would look in the woods behind too.
Great-Babu* could have sputtered it down to the salt water at Wheeler, and it could have rushed into the red, stenched weeds. Maybe my great-great-Babu twisted the lid shut on her canned fruit jars and kept it in there, and let it rot.
Gramma, sometimes your eyes draw the blue shades and your replies grow short. I have never bore the worst of this frigidity. I don’t really feel it’s mine to take and make art with. But I can’t help it.
The internet draws me and a stranger together but places me and you on opposite sides of the world.
Gramma, in your house in Matunuck, there is a picture of you from about 1972, tilting your head and beaming winningly, your hair is in an updo. It is propped against the lamp whose body is filled with blue glass and whose shade is made of bamboo.
I am seven. You say something. I will not remember what it is, there will be a hole in my memory there. But it implies you think you are very ugly and look very old. In the future, I will remember you crying, but this may just be an expression of the weight carried in the room at this time. But as I hear the conversation going on in the other room, I lean on the arm of the couch and watch the picture next to the lamp. I am confused. Gramma, to me, you look the exact same as that picture from 1972. When my mom comes back in the room, I whisper this to her. She says, “if you said that to her, it would make her day.” I say so. Gramma, I say so.
Dress Passed Around
Sometime in the 1990s, you give my aunt your blessings to wear your wedding dress. It is tailored to fit an anorexic form. Then, a few years later, it is returned, surely, it is filed in the closet of the basement in Milford, perhaps with some clutterful Boyds Bears.
Sometime between 2008 and 2010, it must make its way to Providence during the move.
9 days before prom in June of 2022, with your permission, we pull out your wedding dress from the closet in the basement. It does not close at the back, but when I emerge from the basement I feel regal. I keep the white, glittered train bunched in my hands so it does not gather spiders on the stairs. On my way to the mirror, I return the distant, deep eye contact from your 1962 wedding portrait. I look, my mom stands by me, and says, you are stunning.
I look in the mirror, appreciate it like an art piece, then drape it over my chair since it is unwearable for me and that is okay. I nudge the griping cat away from its old train and put back on my street clothes. I forget all about it because fitting into that tiny dress isn’t really a big deal at all.