At the funeral Big Chan gave a moving eulogy.
I don’t know how he did it, my dad said. It showed true courage and grace.
Big Chan, who was large and square and wore cowboy hats and a mustache, and whose too-tight shirts made it seem as though he were bursting from a tent. Perhaps we’d all underestimated Big Chan. I didn’t realize he had it in him, either. He was a man I completely identified with his physical appearance, I knew that he’d been the best player on his football team, a rancher, a cowboy, a thick-skinned Texas man, whiskey-drinking and rifle-shooting, no doubt good at building a fence and that kind of thing, but this situation had now transformed him into something else. To be the man who gave a moving eulogy to his wife before she was lowered into the ground next to their daughter. Transformed him into himself, maybe. Had shown him to us, unfolded around him and revealed him as the person he truly was.
•
After the funeral, Big Chan left the ranch and moved up to Minneapolis. Little Chan wished to spend what was left of his life with his boyfriend whom he lived with. At the end, Big Chan moved into the house and helped the boyfriend take care of Little Chan until he died. That was the last of the phone calls I got from my dad. A year and a half had passed since he’d called about Peggy. Big Chan went back to Texas with his son’s ashes, so he could be buried with Kendall and Peggy in the family plot. Big Chan was now completely alone in the world, he didn’t have a single family member left.
◊
I didn’t get the detail about the ashes on the airplane from the telephone conversation, but from a letter my dad sent shortly afterward. When we spoke on the telephone, he didn’t have time to do anything but share the sad news. My cousin Little Chan was dead. We had a short conversation, and then he had to run, he was going to be late to an important meeting.
The letter was also short. All it said was that Big Chan had been there till the end, and that he’d brought the urn back home to Texas. And then he went on to say that he’d heard from my mother that I was planning to take a break from university, or as he put it: Drop out of college.
I had to read the sentence several times. It was true that I’d contemplated, in a very loose way, taking a semester off to scrape some money together waitressing, but at no time had I planned to drop out of college. That was behind me now, such thoughts had been in my head only temporarily, a solution among multiple solutions, and since then I’d forgotten all about them. But here they were on a sheet of paper, twisted unrecognizably, after having crossed the Atlantic twice. With these plans, my dad continued, he found it difficult to defend sending my mother the monthly hundred dollars that he’d sent her since their divorce.
Defend? Against whom? Reading between the lines, it was clear that he viewed my mother’s alimony as an indirect assistance for my studies. The misrepresentation of my thoughts, which honestly weren’t worth the paper they were written on, the money that was my mother’s, which I was now being made responsible for, this money infuriated me, but above all, it made me furious that he would mention the money there, on the same paper—these trivial money matters, alongside Big Chan sitting on a plane with his son’s ashes on his lap.
I knew Big Chan probably hadn’t sat with Little Chan’s urn directly on his lap, but that was how I pictured him as I read the letter, staring into space with one of those uncomprehending faces you get when you lose everything and are still trying to grasp it. What had actually happened. And what will happen now, trying to concentrate on what was imminent, on the practical, the burial of the urn in the family plot. Joan Didion has described such a face somewhere, invoking the image of someone with glasses suddenly being forced to remove them. That was precisely the kind of face I imagined on Big Chan. The situation had removed his glasses from him. A moment ago his wife had complained of stomach pains (when? yesterday?), and now he sat here with his son in an urn.
I imagined that if you sat in an airplane with the remains of the last family member in an urn, you would envy anyone the luxury of financial worries, the luxury of scolding the eldest of your five living children via air mail for a presumed interruption of her studies …
I wrote him a letter. Later I referred to it as The Letter, with a capital L and in the definite form, a letter that casts a long shadow into the future. I slept on it that night, but ought to have slept on it another night, or a week, or a year, or the two years that passed before I reached out to him again.
Do all families have such letters? These kinds of exchanges? Perhaps others don’t write them down but speak them instead, letting the air do with the words what the air does with things, polish and smoothen and wear away the edges until there is nothing left.
We never discussed it, neither my letter nor the letter that had been the impetus for mine. He continued to write his usual letters with the usual frequency, sometimes including a check that was to assist my studies, buy books or help pay rent, and I acknowledged them, polite, friendly, and curt, like someone who’d given up the conversation. I had given up the conversation. I no longer asked about his plans for the summer, or whether he was coming to Denmark. I no longer saved money to fly to St. Louis.
I continued to study at Roskilde University without taking a semester off. I continued working weekends as a waitress, and alongside my studies I wrote and published my first book, a philosophy textbook. My dad sent a postcard. I heard from Gussie and Carissa the exciting news about your book!
I didn’t respond. I was convinced there was something about him that made conversation impossible.
Then one Christmas he sent me a Hallmark card with a Santa Claus waving a white flag. peace! it read. Inside was the usual pale blue Christmas check, with love and hugs from Dad. My sister was right. It’s his special talent. I wondered what the Hallmark designer had had in mind when he or she developed the concept of the card. About all of the complicated relationships in the world, of which some are best resolved, perhaps, with a greeting from a Santa Claus waving a white flag.
I replied to the card and revived my portion of our correspondence, without completely setting my reservations aside. I still had a feeling that one day, in the final hour, the astronaut’s hour, he would look back on his life filled with regret, that maybe he’d be remorseful at some of what had occurred on the path from baby to old man, some of the choices he’d made, and that some of all that would involve me.
Two years had passed since The Letter. I’d gone to New York City, went to New York University just as we’d once discussed on the bench, not to study art but philosophy. I’d borrowed the tuition money from the bank. In my spare time, I worked as a waitress. My letters were brief. I began with phrases like: Such a lovely surprise to hear from you …
After a lot of back and forth, again about money, we succeeded, while I lived in New York City, in spending three days together in my grandmother’s house in Texas. It was spring break at the university, and it was the first time I visited Gussie, something I’d dreamed of doing ever since the only thing I knew of her was her handwriting. Something happened to time in her little white wooden house in Lockhart. It felt as if I’d always sat in that kitchen. My dad had always sat in the kitchen, in that house, or in other, similar houses around Lockhart, and my grandmother had always walked back and forth between the stove and the kitchen table, whistling. What came out was mostly air, a faint whoosh like a gust under a drafty door. My dad sat on the other side. The table was pistachio-green, from the fifties, with rounded metal corners. Today it would sell for sky-high prices at an antique store, but from the way my dad and grandmother sat at the table, it was clear that it was simply the green table to them, a place at which they’d sat, eaten, conversed, and whistled for upwards of forty or fifty years. My grandmother brought out this and that, meatloaf with gravy and long green beans, and in the morning ring sausage with hardboiled eggs and melba toast that had been buttered and sprinkled with cinnamon and toasted in the metal oven, no larger than a transistor radio, that stood on her kitchen c
ounter.
•
On the doorframe of a little pantry, my grandmother had notched the children’s height with a pencil and pen. A line with a date and a name. They were all there, my siblings and Marcel and Kendall and Little Chan, in ever-increasing heights.
I stood in my bare toes, my back against the frame, and my dad removed the yellow pencil from his pocket and made a mark, and now my name was added to the board with a date: April 1, 1997.
My dad said that Marcel had given the board a special name.
He called it the Board of Growing Pains.
Gussie had smooth white hair, which from time to time lifted up and floated searchingly around her head. Her face was full of folds, but there could be something joyful about it. I would say that it gave the impression of profound mischief. The word I most often heard her described as is bossy. She had her own will, and it was stronger than everyone else’s, and she knew it. Maybe that’s why she had a very warm way of getting it, her will, an affable boss she was, a boss full of humor. Everyone who’d gone to fourth grade in town knew her. Which is to say: every person who’d grown up in Lockhart. Her dark-brown eyes sparkled. She didn’t glide soundlessly through life, she made an impression. She was indifferent to what others thought about her. Just as I associated my dad with his breast pocket and yellow pencil, I associated my grandmother with her house, her kitchen, and the small bedroom in the back. In her kitchen, I witnessed firsthand what I’d suspected in the letters and during my summers in St. Louis. In St. Louis we’d all been subjected to the shifting moods in the house, but here, in her own element, it was clear. My dad was the son of a formidable woman.
She had survived her husband and daughter and two grandchildren. In her letters I sometimes sensed that the birds that used to hover over Peggy now tried to settle on her. But she had an indominable spirit, and that included the will to love everything close to her, to engage in the practical life. She was an optimist. She whistled when she baked. She wrote about everything she produced in her kitchen, pecan cookies and lemon cookies and chocolate chip cookies and oatmeal cookies and also something she called fudge, which I now got to taste in her kitchen, a calorie-rich, caramel-like chocolate treat the size of a loaf of white bread that you cut thin slices from. She’d made a business out of it. There were plenty of customers. She saved all the empty coffee tins and oatmeal canisters she could find and filled them with cookies, and then she drove around town delivering them, a cardboard cylinder to the bank manager, or she went to the post office and sent packages to remote parts of the country, like Oregon.
The cookies weren’t the only thing she’d turned into a business after she’d retired. She made Easter eggs, she sewed quilts and pillow covers with appliqués, and she collected old junk from neighbors and friends and invited folks to a garage sale on her lawn. She invested her money in stocks, and the returns she invested in additional stocks. I have five hobbies, she said, raising five fingers, but I won’t tell you which one I lost money on. When she spoke, her voice was the sweetest music. I recognized the music from her letters, she had written them in exactly the same voice I now heard in her kitchen. I could listen to her tell stories all day long. She clattered around whistling. She warded off Peggy’s birds. But sometimes, when she sat at the green table between all the sacks of flour and oatmeal canisters and wrote on the parchment-like airmail paper, nostalgia crept in. She’d think about what had been lost too. That was the feeling I sometimes got. That she missed Preston and Peggy especially, and that she also missed what hadn’t been, or had almost been, but which never really became, such as her grandchild in Denmark. The letters ended with things like: I wish we had gotten to enjoy you some more …
•
There was no air conditioning in Gussie’s house, and in the evening we sat on the back porch where it was a little cooler. There was a pecan tree, and during the day it provided wonderful shade, and in the evening, what little wind there was rustled in the leaves.
They’d bought the house, the family’s first, when my dad was twelve. Until then they’d lived with Preston’s mother, Grandma Clark. Shortly after they’d moved in, my grandmother walked around the yard and found a sapling poking up from the grass, no more than a couple of feet high. Gussie was furious. She confronted Preston. They’d finally gotten their own house with their own lawn where the children could play ball, and they weren’t about to take care of some newly planted tree. Preston had no idea what she was talking about. He pretended as if the sapling had emerged on its own. He never did admit he’d done it, my grandmother said. He just pretended it had nothin’ to do with him.
My grandfather died from a stroke long before I was born; he’d been in his early fifties. Now that he, Kendall, Little Chan, and Peggy were all gone, the pecan tree had become my grandmother’s family. We sat on the wooden bench on the porch and looked at it. It looked as if it had always been there, it was hard to comprehend that it had once been a stick in a lawn.
It gives about twenty pounds of nuts a year, my grandmother said.
Like a walnut, a pecan nut resembles a brain, though it is longer, narrower and more harmonious than the walnut in its shape. She used the nuts when she baked, they were wonderfully soft to bite with none of the walnut’s bitterness. Once, in one of her letters, I recalled, she’d complained that it had only given eleven pounds.
She gave me a mischievous look. When I go to heaven, she said, the first thing I will say to Preston is, I know it was you who planted that pecan!
there is something i’ve never written about, even though I’ve tried many times. One day, I think when I was about twenty-six, I threw all my letters out. All the letters from my dad, and all the letters from my grandmother. I lived in Nørrebro, in an apartment on the fifth floor. This was before I moved to New York City, and before I visited my grandmother at her house in Lockhart. So, I live in Nørrebro, I’m twenty-six, and I have two attic rooms filled with moving boxes, and for some reason it bothers me. Knowing that they’re there. All of the times that I’d moved, and now the boxes were there. Somehow I reached the point where I’m standing up there sorting the moving boxes that I’ve dragged around and which I’m tired of dragging around, even though they are resting peacefully right now and aren’t in the way. But already I’m exhausted by the thought of one day dragging them somewhere new, and I work on reducing them. I remember standing up there with my Danish grandmother’s handknitted napkins, having looked at them god knows how many times before, taking stock of them, trying to decide whether they should stay in the box or ought to be passed on. Every time I’d stood with them in my hand, I’d thought the same. That I couldn’t throw my grandmother’s handknitted napkins away. They were a product of her, twelve violet napkins, twelve peat-green, twelve Easter-yellow, etc., but on that day in the attic a new idea emerged. My grandmother is not those napkins! It was like a Greek eureka moment, a discovery on par with Archimedes’ discovery of the law of hydrostatics, my grandmother wasn’t the napkins! My grandmother was in me, in my memories of her, in my thoughts, not in the napkins. I could pass them on without passing my grandmother on! I no longer needed to drag my napkins around with me in those moving boxes! It was over! A relief, a liberation, to be unburdened of those napkins!
And that’s how I continue through the boxes, gripped by old Greek euphoria. I take stock, and each time I come up against something, I think: X is not Y! I gather momentum in my evermore frenzied tidying ecstasy, all sorts of fine earthly goods are being passed on, boxes are systematically emptied, collapsed, and leaned up against an increasingly bare wall, and when I get to the moving boxes filled with letters, once only two boxes but have now grown, over the years, to become four, twenty-five years of letters, letters from my entire life, and I think: Gussie isn’t these letters! Daddy isn’t these letters!
So they were dumped into black trash bags. I removed them from the boxes, handful by handful of long, striped envelopes with my changing addresses, bundle by bundle that I’d o
nce bound with silk ribbon, and I threw them out. I threw them out.
I threw out my dad’s and my grandmother’s letters.
I thought: Gussie isn’t these letters. Daddy isn’t these letters.
Even though they were.
Gussie and Daddy were indeed these letters.
And yet I threw them out.
Like Moses parting the waters: with a hand gesture.
That’s what I was never able to write about, what must be the opposite of Paul Auster’s tie-moment. A black, inward feeling, an anti-redemption, the word letter alone makes me dizzy and sick. It’s as if all air is pulled out of me from within. All of my memories are sucked out of me from the inside. Instead of walks in the woods and fishing trips, I had those letters, and now they are gone. My dad had taken time to write them, my grandmother had, the letters were momentary glimpses, snapshots of their thoughts, their lives, they were their contribution to the conversation, and I treated them like something that took up space, like paper, something I no longer had the strength to drag around, and I filled the bags, so many that I needed help carrying them down the backstairs to the trash room. Or maybe I threw them directly into the dumpster? Opened the lid and swung the bags up one by one? I don’t remember that part of it. All I remember is that, except for a few handfuls that I saved as samples, I threw everything out. And I didn’t even do it on purpose. That is: not as a conscious act, a break with the past (as in: I don’t want anything more to do with it, I’m going to free myself from my dad, etc. etc.), I did it because of the flattest, most heedless idiocy, because of something as foolish as an urge to tidy up.
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