Unmaking Grace

by Barbara Boswell

  “Your mother is dead. She’s not coming back. But you are alive,” she said. “Live!” She paused for a second to let the words sink in. “If you don’t, I will send you away to a home.”

  Grace collapsed back on the bed, feeling the first flutters of a will to return in her chest. Yet she didn’t know how to take back command of her limbs and her voice. The weight of Ouma’s expectation made its home on her chest, and she sank deeper into the bed, with eyes too heavy to open. A doctor came to see her and prescribed vitamins and rest. Grace would come out of it, in her own time. But Ouma had grown tired of her.

  A week later Aunty Joan arrived. Grace had seen pictures of her, but this was the first time she remembered meeting her mother’s sister. She packed all Grace’s belongings into a weathered suitcase she had brought with her, and bundled both Grace and the suitcase into her car. Almost no words were exchanged between Joan and her mother. Whatever war raged between them came to a silent truce so that Joan could enter the house and collect Grace.

  “You’re coming to live with me,” was the only thing Joan said on the five-minute drive from Ouma’s house to hers. Grace wondered why they hadn’t just walked, and later she would also wonder why Joan never visited Ouma’s house. She knew why she’d never come to Saturn Street though—Patrick had banned her from setting foot in their house. But that day in the car, with the huddled-together houses whizzing by, was not the day for questions. The answers would come only years later.

  Grace walked into Aunty Joan’s two-bedroomed flat and marveled at the sufficiency of her space. Joan had a comfortable, neat home. Art and framed photographs adorned almost every wall. Here was a young Mary framed in gold against an orange wall; there a picture of a chubby baby she recognized as herself. There were pictures of Ouma and Oupa, and of Joan and Mary as young girls. Grace was amazed that someone she’d known so little about—they were not allowed to mention Aunty Joan’s name in front of Patrick—had traced, with photographs, a full family genealogy, Grace included, against the walls of her living room. The frame in which Grace’s baby picture sat was embellished with delicate, lace-like flowers. It warmed her that someone had put thought into choosing a frame in which to put her image, one that matched a detail in the dress she was wearing in the picture. Aunty Joan had thought about her and had cared enough to display her image with obvious care.

  “Sit down.”

  Grace obeyed, and Joan disappeared into the kitchen, emerging minutes later with a slice of chocolate cake and two glasses of Oros. Grace devoured the cake feverishly, ignoring the cake fork on the plate and digging in with her hands. She licked every crumb and every scrap of icing from her fingers, something Mary would never have allowed, and surprised herself by asking for a second slice. Joan laughed quietly and told her no, she could have another piece later on, one was enough for now. They sat across from each other in silence. The suitcase stood unopened at Grace’s feet.

  “I live alone,” Aunty Joan said then. “Have done for years. You’re welcome to stay—I’ve got enough space.” She gestured around the room. “But if you don’t want to, I’ll take you back to your Ouma later today.”

  Grace looked around. The sun was splitting shafts of light on the wooden floor. No dirty carpets. No dirty anything. For the first time she looked at her mother’s sister directly. She looked nothing like Mary. There was the same thick, curly hair, tied back in a way Mary would never have condescended to, but other than that, nothing. Joan wore no makeup or jewelry. Dressed in a simple cotton blouse tucked into a long skirt, she was like a moon to Mary’s sun—she emitted a cool glow to Mary’s amped up heat and painted lips. Her eyes were softer, calmer, without those desperate, erratic flickers of light in her mother’s that Grace loved and loathed at the same time. Here was a woman who did not need to be seen, who didn’t need to have her beauty validated to feel alive.

  “I will stay,” Grace declared, as if she had a choice.

  “I’m glad. I was hoping you would.”

  They sealed the arrangement by finishing their Oros together in silence.

  The first thing Joan did was buy Grace new clothes—loose shirts and pants that were easy to get in and out of and easy to clean. Grace had never been allowed to wear clothes like these at home. Joan gradually got rid of Grace’s stuffy, frumpy clothes. Mary had loved her little girl as a copy of herself, and Grace had never objected, but the high-necked chiffon blouses Mary favored for her inevitably sent her into a hot and sweaty mess. Mary’s clothes stifled, whereas Joan’s freed her up.

  Then one day Aunty Joan brought home giant strips of canvas, procured from an artist friend, along with oil paints and brushes. She moved all the furniture in the living room against one wall, and sat Grace down in the middle of the room with these supplies, giving her one command: “Paint!”

  Grace tried to protest about not knowing how, but Joan assured her that it didn’t matter.

  “Just paint a picture for her or about her. It doesn’t have to look like her. You know abstract art?”

  Grace didn’t, and Aunty Joan explained that all she had to do was color the page with her feelings. There needn’t be lines or recognizable shapes; Grace should let the paint take over and let the feeling of it guide her to tell a story.

  “Let the colors and textures lead you. Play with them. Feel them. You don’t have to stick to the brushes. Use your fingers, your elbows, your feet, if you like.”

  No one had ever told Grace to play before. She struggled to let go of herself but slowly, gradually, after weeks of Saturday afternoons sitting on the newspaper-covered floor and allowing the brush in her hand to lead her, she settled into it. Grace relearned breathing. Week after week, her canvases lightened from somber greys and blacks to radiant swathes of green, yellow, and ochre. Is this how her mama had felt when she’d made her paintings all those years ago? She wished she had Mary there beside her to ask. But when she got lost in this world of color and smell, the loss of Mary felt, for moments, bearable. Gradually the moments of bearing it moved closer and closer together, like pearls on a string, until there were hours and then whole afternoons when the loss didn’t rasp at her.

  She never kept the paintings, was happy to let them go off with Aunty Joan. Once they were done, Grace was happy to release them and the feelings embedded in them into the world. She didn’t feel ownership or a need to cling. She learned, without language, catharsis; a blessed release that moved things through her, and the events of that dreadful day away from her, so that Mary’s death became a part of her life without obliterating her. Joan offered little instruction during these forays onto the canvas, leaving Grace alone with the brushes and tubes.

  One afternoon as she knelt beside her to help gather up the newspaper after a particularly long painting session, which Grace had started in gloom but completed with a contented glow, Aunty Joan smiled at her and said: “Never forget what you did today. You created something. Don’t ever forget that you have that inside you, the ability to create an entire universe out of nothing. I did it. You just did it. We all have it in us.”

  Grace didn’t understand what Aunty Joan was on about. She had made a color backdrop on a page and then overlayed a few squiggles on top, adding, for the first time, white paint over dried orange, and here Joan was calling it a universe. She said nothing, and because she’d loved the sound of Joan’s voice as she’d said that, smiled obligingly at her aunt.

  Slowly, very slowly, under Joan’s hand Grace came back to life. Joan was not an overly affectionate woman, and never again would Grace hear the words “Grace, darling” or be covered with a multitude of butterfly kisses in a fit of affection. But nor would she be frozen out and ignored when the tide turned. Joan had an abiding calm about her, and in her presence Grace felt calm too.

  On rare occasions Joan would tell stories of Mary as a child, how she loved to paint, how her eyes had an insatiable hunger for color. Mary could take a simple geranium flower and get lost in the universe of its hues. Joan’s
eyes went soft, but her mouth turned down at the corners when she told such stories, and as much as Grace loved to hear them, she never pressed or asked. She grew adept at the art of waiting for these tales. To her they were beautiful gifts that would drop from Joan’s lips at the most unexpected times. Grace would listen, breathlessly, trying to take in every word. This was the mother she had never known, as she was before Grace existed. Mary had lived independently of her and had loves and passions that had nothing to do with her. The thought saddened and enlivened Grace. In these moments she learned so about her mother that she hadn’t known.

  “She told me she loved painting. I always wondered why she didn’t do that at our house.”

  “Well, she was busy looking after you.” Joan was quick to defend Mary.

  “She always told me how much the boys loved her.”

  “Yes, they did,” Joan laughed.

  As the years stretched by, stories of Mary became less sad and more celebratory. They remembered the best in her: her humor, her wit, her great beauty. The other things were locked in a room of Grace’s heart that she never examined.

  During the last months of her pregnancy, Grace worried about this fractured knowledge of an absent mother. Would it be enough for her to find her way as a mother? She ached for both Mary and Joan, and felt freshly bereft.

  Her worst fears dissipated with the first breath her daughter drew. Grace fell absolutely, unequivocally in love the instant she laid eyes on Sindi. Never in her life had she seen anything more perfect than the puffy pink face or felt love’s tug more insistently than when the baby’s chubby hand curled tightly around her little finger. Sindi was perfect. Perfect. She brought a flood of love into Grace’s life. Sindi was the current that pulled her further along into safety, further away from that day. Grace’s experience with love was that it always came with a price—you gave up a little of yourself, always, in order to get the love you wanted from people. Not so with Sindi. No part of her was diminished or relinquished by loving the child. Grace felt she could give and give and give again of herself without feeling used or depleted. Sindi brought peace, a feeling that she could live in this world, with each breath a gift, as long as her daughter was in it. With Sindi nestled against her, each moment was complete unto itself, needing nothing more than two pairs of eyes gazing into each other. The rhythm of her baby’s breath, the seasons of her sleeping and waking, became the metric by which Grace structured her days.

  When Sindi was five months old, Grace reluctantly returned to work and life took on a different cast. Already tired from waking every two hours to feed at night, she found being away from her daughter for nine-hour stretches excruciating. She began to retreat deeply into herself, but when venting her anger and grief was unavoidable, she found a convenient target in David, who rapidly learned the art of tiptoeing around a sorrow he couldn’t understand. Outbursts he could deal with. It was the unrelenting, moody silence, the irritated flash of an eye, the sullen turning away from him that left him floundering, babbling, following Grace around like a dog seeking a kind word from its master.

  What she would give to have one more day with her mother; one more hour with her daughter and mother, together.

  She nipped the thought along with her cigarette. Better not to go there. She still had to put in a full day’s work. After straightening the kitchen and liberally spraying herself with perfume, she set off for work in the city center.

  As she waited on Main Road for a taxi, it became clear after a few minutes that no taxis were running. A fellow commuter explained that the taxi drivers were on strike and said that their best option for getting into the city would be the train. The train station was another fifteen-minute walk away, but with no other options presenting themselves, Grace joined a group of taxi-less workers trudging down to Station Road. Soon she found herself jammed in the middle of a carriage, swaying along to the sounds of the morning commute’s symphony with a host of unfamiliar warm bodies on their way to work. Within minutes the train had unloaded its bustling cargo in the heart of the city. Grace disembarked and wove her way through throngs of commuters, scuttling like ants, in and out of Cape Town station. She flowed with the mix of people exiting the station concourse and came out into Strand Street, which was alive with bodies and cars intent on getting where they needed to be with maximum speed. She still had time for a quick coffee, which she bought at a stall on the Parade. She had a quick smoke too.

  The energy of the city lifted her gloom. Some days she still couldn’t quite believe that they had won, had voted, had overcome. With the dark days of Casspirs, teargas, and bullets behind them, the city belonged to her now. Grace felt part of its life-blood, flowing along its arteries, bonded to the army of workers that made it run smoothly. She loved it, and it loved her back. As she walked along Darling Street, the city opened up to her. It throbbed with life, flirting with her, welcoming her—a muscular lover, energetically wooing her.

  At work she took her accustomed seat behind the huge glass desk with three different phones. She made notes on her desk calendar of everything she’d have to do by noon in order for her manager, Mr. de Vries, to have a successful shareholder meeting in the afternoon and depart to the airport for an overnight trip to Johannesburg. Catering was confirmed; reports had been copied and collated; the driver for the trip to the airport had been confirmed. She made sure of his reservation at his favorite hotel and booked a late dinner for two at a new steakhouse he’d been wanting to try. His wife wasn’t accompanying him on this trip. Grace tried not to think about his dinner companion. She had set up no dinner date with any business associates.

  Mr. de Vries was already in his office with a partner. He was a wonderful boss—demanding but always courteous, often playful, and adored by all the women in the large company. He started his work day at 7:00 am, but after her return from maternity leave, insisted that Grace only start work at nine. Maintaining a strong bond with her baby was crucial, especially in the first years, he had told her. Grace was to stick strictly to her working hours—he could manage on his own early in the morning, especially since he used that time to get uninterrupted work done. Grace could have cried when he’d sat her down to tell her this. She had been expecting some kind of complaint about the quality of her work. She tried not to let it show, but her work—her very life—was suffering from lack of sleep. They had settled into a new routine after this conversation, Grace with renewed gratitude and adoration for the man.

  At 9:15 sharp, Grace entered Mr. de Vries’s office with a freshly brewed pot of coffee and a stack of messages she’d retrieved from his answering machine.

  “Morning, Grace,” he nodded cheerfully.

  He had a visitor with him this morning. The man looked at her and gave her a brief nod, eager to get back to the business at hand.

  She left the office, pausing just outside the door to pick up a note that she’d dropped.

  “Not much to look at,” she heard Mr. de Vries’s visitor mumble.

  And then the reply: “Dull as dishwater, I’m afraid. But it’s just as well. Removes all temptation—wouldn’t want it right under my nose.”

  The two men chuckled. Grace moved away from the door as quietly as possible. She only allowed the tears to come in the safety of the bathroom, after she had wiped and packed away the tray on which she had served their coffee. Dull as dishwater. That’s what wonderful, kind Mr. de Vries thought of her. Through her tears she looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. She had struggled with the baby weight, and her slim waist had not returned after Sindi’s birth. Her skirt, which she noticed was faded, was coming undone at the hem; her cardigan was creased. To her horror she spotted a stain Sindi’s bout of vomiting had left on her cardigan. How had she forgotten to wipe that off, or change into an altogether new outfit? The biggest mess in this ensemble of ungainliness was her hair. Before Sindi’s birth, she had gone once a week, just like Mary had done, to the hairdresser for a roller set and blow-dry. David liked to joke that you cou
ld tell the day of the week by the state of her blow-dry: from Monday’s loose buoyant curls which by Wednesday had lost some of their bounce, to limp Friday strands best bunched into a ponytail. On the weekend the hair cycle would start all over again. God help David if he suggested anything that interfered with her time at the hairdresser’s. After Sindi, this luxury had fallen away, though, along with money for new clothes. They were middle class, yes, but only just. Sindi’s birth had swung them precariously to the lower end of middle class, so even their once a week nights out became a fond memory.

  Grace took in the full calamity that was her hair. It hadn’t been cut in months, hadn’t felt the soothing warmth of a blow-dryer in weeks. She had smoothed it over with some pink oil, but it was winter, and the morning mist had “activated” her hair like nothing in a bottle could. Her curl coiled up from her head in an unruly, frizzy mess. For the millionth time, she cursed her father for having inherited his hair instead of Mary’s smooth locks, which withstood every type of weather. What a curse Patrick was, even now. No wonder everyone found her ugly. She was his child, after all.

  Her thoughts turned back to the letter that was still unopened in her bag. Was it from Patrick? Well, fuck him, if it was. And fuck Mr. de Vries too. If only he knew how easy it would be for her to accidently mix up receipts for his wife’s and various girlfriends’ gifts. Cheating swine.

  She cried again for a little while, then composed herself and went back to her desk. The rest of the day passed in a coffee-fueled blur, for which she was grateful. Before she knew it, she was back at Cape Town station deciding which train to catch home. Three main arteries ran from the station to the different sprawling suburbs of the city—the southern line to the affluent southern suburbs and south peninsula, the northern line to the Afrikaans-speaking north, right up to the Boland; and in the middle, the line that transported the working class to the Cape Flats. It didn’t matter which line she took—all the trains passed her destination station before they branched off and snaked their way across the metropole to deliver their cargos to vastly different lives.