Pretty Mess

by Erika Jayne

  She worked running the bookkeeping and accounting machines for companies like A&P and Kraft. Ann was quite the clotheshorse back then. She shopped at a fancy boutique called Joseph’s. She was such a good customer, they would call her when they got new shipments in.

  My grandmother met my grandfather when they were both in Atlanta. She rode the bus every day to work with a woman named Kay. Kay was married to my grandfather’s older brother, Harold. She brought Ann along for a double date with her husband and his brother and the rest, as they say, is history.

  My grandfather Hollis was a handsome, quiet, and stoic man. The few times he told me about his childhood, the stories were harrowing. He grew up poor in Decatur, Georgia, during the Depression. One month, all they had to eat was peaches. Sometimes his mother would wait until nightfall and then go to the neighbor’s house, where she would steal tomatoes out of their garden to feed her family.

  Hollis had four siblings, and his youngest sister died of diphtheria when she was two. His father never forgave himself for not getting her to the doctor in time to save her. He became a raging, abusive alcoholic who would disappear for months at a time. He told me that once his father had been gone for weeks and then showed up drunk, knocking on the front door to ask if that was where he lived. Unfortunately, it was.

  One hot summer evening, while my grandfather and the family were sitting around having dinner, his father pulled out a gun and started pointing it at each of them.

  “I’m going to kill all y’all tonight,” he told them, pointing the gun.

  Everyone got up and ran from the table—everyone except my grandfather. He just sat in his chair and kept eating his dinner. “Why aren’t you leaving?” his father asked him.

  “You’re not going to kill anyone,” he said. He was used to his father terrorizing the family. His father stared at him menacingly for a minute and then laughed, put the gun away, and started eating again. The two of them sat there in silence and finished their meals.

  My grandfather only had a sixth-grade education. His father was a plumber and taught Hollis and Harold the trade. They had to quit school and start working to support the family when their father couldn’t any longer.

  Harold and Hollis started their own plumbing business, but Harold wanted to spend their money while Hollis did all the work. They dissolved that partnership and my grandfather struck out on his own. He did the plumbing and my grandmother ran the business, taking care of billing, invoices, the books, and everything else a small business needs. They never got rich, but they did very well for themselves. My grandfather supported a lot of people and he never complained about doing it.

  Ann was a small blond woman with icy blue eyes and very pale skin. She was maybe five feet tall, but she had an aggressive personality and was domineering. We all called her “The Little General,” because that is how she ruled her house. Not following her orders would cost you. Her house was always spick-and-span, her yard manicured within an inch of its life.

  After she died, I consulted with Tyler Henry, a clairvoyant on the show Hollywood Medium. He could feel her presence. “This woman is going to be heard or else!” he told me. Even in death, my grandmother was trying to get her own way, because she honestly thought it was the best way. Ann was always bossy, but she had a southern charm about her, too. Even when she was barking orders, it didn’t seem rude. However, everyone knew that she had her particularities and they had better be obeyed. She would try to boss my grandfather around, too. But he would just keep quiet and do whatever he wanted, regardless.

  Ann had my mother when she was twenty-five, and she had another daughter two years later. She was really hard on those girls. My mother says that Ann’s perfectionism was oppressive. They had to take two baths a day, were never allowed to sit on their beds, and they had to look and act perfect all the time or else face their mother’s disapproval. She said they were sometimes allowed to have Popsicles in the summer, but they had to eat them in the bathtub in case they dripped.

  My grandmother didn’t really have much respect for her daughters and had seen them mess up a lot. Frankly, she thought they were stupid because she had bailed them out of foreclosures, missed car payments, divorces, and all sorts of other trouble so many times—even when they were adults.

  It was always different with me, though. I was unequivocally my grandmother’s favorite. She and I communicated on a much different level. I was not her child, so I think she was somewhat softer with me than she was with her girls. I was the only person who wasn’t afraid of Ann. When I was little I told her, “Don’t talk to me like that, because I’m not going to take it from you.” I think she saw a lot of herself in this independent child who was not going to be bossed around.

  I could be just as defiant as my grandmother. I started cussing when I was five and have always had a mouth like a sailor, even though no one else in my family spoke like that. She would hit me with a belt to try to knock the bad words out of me. It never worked. I just kept running my mouth, no matter how many beatings I took. Eventually, my grandmother gave up and let me say whatever I wanted.

  I wasn’t exempt from beatings, though. If I talked back, tried to sass her, or didn’t do something she told me to, she would still get that belt out. Sometimes if we were outside, she would get a switch and light up the back of my legs. This was the South. Back then, that is how they raised kids.

  In my entire life, we only got in one huge fight. My grandmother had a big backyard, and in the middle of the lawn, there was a fishpond with flowers around it. On the side of the pond, there was a small stone statue of a little boy fishing. You could even put a little fishing pole in his hand and have the line go into the water. In the wintertime, she knitted him custom hats and scarves to keep him warm.

  One day when I was in middle school, I was playing in the yard with my two young cousins. One of them pushed the statue into the water, and it broke. I wasn’t there when it happened, but they blamed it on me.

  My grandmother accused me of pushing it into the pond. I didn’t do it, and I was ferocious about defending myself. “I know you did it and you’re not admitting it,” my grandmother said.

  “I can’t believe you would even say that,” I said. “How dare you talk to me like that. You know that I have been nothing but honest with you my entire life, and for you to sit here and say something to me like that is devastating. How dare you.”

  “Well, I don’t understand why you can’t take responsibility for it. They told me you did it,” she said.

  “Oh great. So, you’re just going to believe a couple of liars over me?” I asked her.

  I thought she and I were going to come to blows because of this little fucking statue. We were up in each other’s faces, going at it like street fighters.

  My grandmother was used to everyone backing down from her, but I absolutely refused.

  It got so heated, Renee finally came out into the yard. “The two of you need to calm down,” she said, not helping at all.

  “Fuck you, too,” I said. “You stay out of this. This is between us.”

  That fight really damaged my relationship with my grandmother for a time. I thought, How could you do this? I’ve been nothing but honest with you. You and I are so close. You’re believing someone else over me.

  One of my cousins eventually confessed to the unforgivable crime of murdering the little fishing boy. My grandmother said to me, “I am very sorry. I apologize.”

  “I am still very angry that when I came to you and told you I didn’t do it, you chose not to believe me. You took their side and didn’t hear me out,” I said. Now I was the one not letting her off the hook. As with all things, we eventually got over it. But it still gets me heated now to think about that argument.

  I spent a ton of time with my grandmother when I was growing up. She would drop me off at dance class and pick me up from rehearsals. We would shop together, buy patterns to make costumes, and she would wait for me at Saturday morning dance company. We
would garden and play with our animals together, and go to their lake house and spend afternoons on the water fishing. In high school when I would cut class, I wouldn’t be riding around smoking in the back of cars with a bunch of bad boys. I’d go hang out at my grandmother’s house. She’d always tell me not to, but I think she was glad I was there.

  Gramby was very creative and resourceful. She always won “Yard of the Month” at the garden club. She would pick up the most raggedy furniture from the side of the road and take it home and reupholster it and make it absolutely beautiful. She made incredible draperies, too. She was an excellent seamstress who could make a pattern for a dress out of newspaper. She and my grandfather always had projects going. They would buy houses, fix them up, and sell them. They were flipping houses long before HGTV had made it an entertainment staple.

  When I was fifteen, we went to Belgium for a high school trip and she flew out to meet me. Recently I found a note I left for her in our hotel room to greet her. A few days later, we went to Paris along with the rest of the class. She took me to see Le Lido, the famous Parisian cabaret with women in ornate costumes. It was the same show I was captivated by as a child after Renee saw them in Vegas and brought home the program.

  Even though I got beaten when I misbehaved, I could do no real wrong in my grandmother’s eyes. Even when I was off the mark, she would tell me calmly, “You know you’re wrong, don’t you?”

  “Yes I do,” I would say.

  “Okay then,” my grandmother would relent, happy that I knew the score.

  She never let me off the hook, but for whatever reason, she never crucified me like she did with her two daughters. She would even consult me sometimes before making decisions, something she never would have done with my mother or my aunt.

  After I moved away from Atlanta, I used to talk on the phone to my grandmother every day for about an hour, just catching up and chitchatting.

  Eventually, things started to change for my grandmother. I first noticed something was amiss with her handwriting. She always had the most perfect penmanship, but it was getting sloppier and sloppier. Then there started to be small money mistakes: late payments, forgetting to pay some bills entirely.

  Once, my son and I were visiting and she was driving us home in her minivan. We were going down these dark country roads, which are so rural that they all look the same. “Erika,” she said, “I forgot how to get home.”

  “Do you want me to drive?” I asked, sensing she was starting to panic. She said yes, and I got into the driver’s seat. Wherever we were, my phone wasn’t getting any service, so that wouldn’t help. “Okay, Ann,” I said. “I don’t know where the fuck we are.”

  “I don’t, either,” she said.

  “All right. Which way do you think is home?” I asked. We started driving in that direction and eventually found a landmark I recognized. From there, I was able to figure it out. But that experience crystalized that something was really wrong with her. I’d never seen her so unsure and scared in my life.

  She later went to the doctor and was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She had been trying to keep her deteriorating health from the rest of us. Ann’s mother had died of Alzheimer’s disease. She had seen firsthand what this cruel disease would do. She knew what she was in for, and this knowledge made her both terrified and secretive. She would suffer with the disease for ten years before she died in 2014.

  We still talked on the phone every day, but her personality started to change. She’d get mood swings. She’d be perfectly fine one moment, but then suddenly be scared or upset. She started to get oddly paranoid about my safety and that of my son.

  A few years after my grandmother’s diagnosis, my grandfather Hollis broke his hip. He was later diagnosed with stage-four stomach cancer. When he got the results back from the doctor, it was clear that he had been suffering in silence for quite some time. He didn’t want to take the focus off of my grandmother and her needs.

  Renee moved in with her parents to help take care of them when they were both sick. Eventually, my grandmother had to be placed in a home. She got thrown out of the first home for fighting. She said that another one of the patients pushed her, so she pushed right back. That was just like Ann.

  In the new home, things could still get rough. Once I was visiting her during lunch and she yelled at another woman in the room, “Stop looking at me like that!”

  “Ann, what are you doing?” I asked. “She’s not doing anything.”

  “I don’t like the way she’s looking at me, Erika. Tell her to stop.”

  I couldn’t convince her the woman didn’t mean anything by it. My grandmother was as small, tough, and vocal as a Chihuahua.

  In 2010, my grandfather died. By that time, my grandmother was rarely lucid and we never told her that he died. I don’t think that she would have understood and it wasn’t worth putting her through that pain. When she would ask for him, everyone would tell her that he was at work. Eventually, she stopped asking about him altogether.

  The worst part of the disease was when my grandmother couldn’t speak anymore. I would go visit her and hold her hand as she lay in bed, silent and mostly motionless. I would just put my head down and cry. She would simply sit there, showing no emotion. It’s like the sickness had frozen her face. Sometimes she would gently squeeze my hand. I took that as a sign of comfort, as if in those moments she was lucid.

  The year before my grandmother died, my mother called to wish me a happy birthday.

  “I’m here with your grandmother,” she said over speakerphone.

  “Hi, Gramby,” I said.

  “She just raised her hand and waved at the phone,” my mother said.

  That was the most acknowledgment I could get, but it was enough.

  It finally got to the point where my grandmother stopped eating, drinking, and swallowing. My mother called me, and I went down to Georgia to be with the two of them.

  My grandmother was a conservative Protestant. She always forced my mother to play hymns like “How Great Thou Art” on the piano so she could sing them. She was an awful singer, but she would sing loud and with conviction anyway. The Lord was gonna hear her, honey. She also listened to those hellfire-and-brimstone preachers on TV and would even send them money occasionally. But she and my grandfather brought me up to love everyone and not to hate people or believe some of the other harmful things those preachers taught.

  I would always ask, “How can you listen to this bullshit?”

  I was the only one in the family raised Catholic, thanks to my stepfather. She would always ask, “How can you pray to Mary with these Catholics?”

  When we were planning her funeral, we found the most gorgeous burial ground. It was on the grounds of a monastery we would always pass on the way from my grandparents’ house to their lake house.

  They place the body in what is essentially a wicker basket and bury it in the ground to decompose naturally. We filled my grandmother’s basket with flowers and placed my grandfather’s ashes in there as well, so the two of them could always be together.

  On an episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, I visited her grave with my mother. Some viewers were confused because it looked like we were in a park. It’s in a thousand acres of permanently protected wetlands in Conyers, Georgia, in the Honey Creek Woodlands. Instead of a traditional cemetery, the bodies are buried under trees, near streams, and in unspoiled nature. Rather than large headstones or monuments, there are only small grave markers that won’t spoil the natural beauty of the place.

  The kicker is that although it’s a nondenominational burial ground, it’s overseen by the Benedictine Monks at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit. I got the last laugh on Gramby, because she’ll be spending eternity in the care of a bunch of Catholics.

  I miss and think about her every day. She was really the most influential person in my life. I wish she were here to witness Erika Jayne’s journey and talk to me about Housewives. She would have the best take on it and the w
hole circus would make her die laughing. She’d say something like, “Oh no, Erika. This is what’s really going on. Watch out for this woman. Keep your eye out for that one. But this other one, you can trust.”

  It’s sad that she’ll never get to see the show or my continued success, my son’s, and that of the people she loved. But everyone goes through this. It is the natural order of things. As sad as this makes me, it could have been a lot worse for us. She was always the person I was closest to, from when I was a toddler and we were both calling bullshit on all the fools in our lives. I learned a lot from the Little General. I’ll always miss being her most faithful lieutenant.

  8

  KNOWLEDGE IS A POWERFUL APHRODISIAC

  When I moved to Los Angeles, I was twenty-five years old. All I owned was the red convertible my grandmother and I drove across the country in and a trunkful of clothes. I found a cute one-bedroom apartment in Hollywood on Orange Drive, below Sunset Boulevard. I went to Ikea and bought the basics: a bed, a kitchen table, and some dishes and utensils.

  My life was bare bones, and I was very content with that. I didn’t feel as if I needed a whole of bunch of stuff. This was an interesting time. I felt very excited about the possibilities of a new city, getting a fresh start, and working to achieve my career aspirations.

  Recently my son and I were driving by my first place. I pointed it out and said, “That was my first apartment in LA.”

  “Mom,” said my son, who is now a police officer in LA, somewhat in shock. “This is kind of a fucked-up area.”

  “You think it’s bad now?” I said. “Imagine what it was like twenty years ago when I moved here!”

  When I lived in that apartment, a part-time pimp/crack dealer lived across the way. Retired 18th Street Gang members lived next door. They were all cool with me, though. They didn’t give me any problems. The building was very cute with a lemon tree out front. It had the fifties-style architecture that made it seem like old Hollywood. Even the apartment itself had quaint little details, like shelving built into the closets, that gave it some warmth.