"And she giggled, and she laughed and she died of it," my maternal grandmother intones quietly, She sits with her back to us in the thickly padded chair, its tapestrylike upholstery of woven colors a busy contrast to her monotonous, one tone voice.
Maybe the thick cotton padding of the chair has blunted our cries behind her as we fight to stay quiet. She makes no move to look behind her, nor does she say anything to us. Atop the mirror in the blue leather jewelry box sitting on the chest of drawers beside her chair, a tiny ballerina dances to a minuet. The rocker is suddenly still. We cannot see my grandmother, and now we cannot hear her.
A quiet interlude of perhaps 30 seconds ensues during which we alternately look toward, then away from, each other, since a direct look renews the silent spasms of laughter. It clearly is becoming painful to both of us. When I look at Marie, her face is red, her cheeks filled with unreleased air, and I can feel a hot prickly blanket of heat moving up my own face. It has reached from my upper neck, where it joins my head, to the space right above both eyes. I feel it creeping up my forehead and think my head will surely burst if it reaches the pinnacle.
The rocker begins to move noiselessly, rhythmically. We hold our breath, looking at each other, wonder in our eyes. The voice seems detached, otherworldly; it floats to us not over the back of the chair, but rather around it, enveloping us in a sad cloud that suffocates our laughter.
"And she giggled, and she laughed, and she died of it," Granny says softly to no one. "YES," she says emphatically, "she giggled, and she laughed, and she died of it."
We are suddenly terrified, the kind of fright that comes when curiosity leads you too far into something you don't understand. Like walking too far into the woods on a dark night, then hearing a night scream that you can't immediately identify. Running as fast as our short legs would carry us, we race toward the kitchen where my mother is cooking lunch. The smell of fried chicken fills our noses and brings some small comfort, the familiar partially replacing the terror.
It is a school day, and at five, Marie and I are too young to attend public school with our siblings. We round the corner of the enormous walnut dining table, knocking over the captain's chair that Granddad always occupies at meals, and run smack into Mother in the kitchen doorway. We both burrow into her apron and wrap our arms around her tiny waist. Even after six children, she maintains the shape that seems to define her extended family: long, tall, and thin. Marie has burrowed in just as close as I.
"Girls," she says, "a slight admonition in her voice. What were you doing?'
I sense she already knows.
"Nothing," we lie.
"Granny is fragile, girls. She must be left alone. She'll come have lunch with us in a while. For now, you girls must not bother her."
We occupied ourselves for the next hour on the "side porch," a screened area with padded wicker couches and chairs, just off the dining room, but near enough the kitchen that we could not help but overhear some of the conversations that took place there.
Often, it was my grandfather, talking about the price of commodities. And in those conversations, always, always, talking about soybeans. It was the early 1950s, and all my parents talked about was cotton. My grandfather spoke like a professor teaching a class on soybeans. He read a lot, and the conversations sometimes took a bend toward the last book he had read, and I always tuned out when he started on his erudite discussions of this subject and that subject. He had lots of ideas, most not conventional. And he dressed every day like he was going to work, with a tie and sweater and dress pants, but he had been retired as long as I remembered.
My mother listened to everything in rapt attention; she adored her father. He was the only person who called her Libby, his special nickname for her. But her own life now, taking care of six children and a husband who had grown up as an only child, left her precious little time to dwell on the "what ifs" of the latest philosophies put forth by idea sellers. She filled each day with cooking, washing, keeping books for the gins, looking after the younger children, taking part in school activities, and sponsoring the local 4-H club. On Sundays, she and the six children always went to Sunday School and church, where she often taught or assisted in teaching a class.
Still, you could tell she really enjoyed the intellectual stimulation Granddad provided. His ideas were less conventional than hers. He studied various philosophical ideas, but Mother had come to her own belief and faith. As a child, she had attended church, but her father never took her or attended. A lady took her to the Christian Church where Mother learned the foundational principles of Christianity. As an adult, she was baptized, expressing her faith in Christ publicly. Because she loved her dad, she listened to him respectfully,but she had her own strong beliefs.
"And she died, Dad? Just like that?" I could hear the concern in my mother's voice.
"Yes. Our first baby- Lenore. She was sick, and we took her to the doctor. He held up some keys, dangled them over her, and she giggled and she laughed. He sent us home, saying she'd be okay. She died a day later. Your grandmother never really got over it, I don't think, even though she had seven of you kids after that."
"She never got over it, maybe that's why when we were growing up….."
It was Mother's voice. My ears perked up like a dog hearing the first mournful notes of a siren. I silently motioned to Marie to follow me.
We crept through the door from the side porch to a storage room just off the kitchen. One door led from the storage room to the side porch, another from the storage room directly to the kitchen. It was dark and cluttered, and the door to the kitchen was tightly closed. One table-like shelf ran the length of the south wall, and another the distance between the two doors on the north and east walls. They looked like gangly preteens, with their unusual four foot tall legs, spaced about three feet apart. The aged wood, with its gray, well- worn boards, looked splintery, so we edged carefully up under the one on the north wall by the kitchen door
. It wasn't easy. We had to step over several rusted gallon cans of paint, an assortment of small garden implements, well-used by my Granddad, who always had a beautiful garden each year with fresh vegetables that he shared with us and with his neighbors.
As we sat there under the shelves, with their voluminous stacks of newspapers, the Ennis Herald, Dallas Morning News, and years and years of magazines, Time, Life, Reader's Digest, National Geographic, all read cover to cover by Granddad, I looked up and imagined that the shelves were weakening under that weight like a swaybacked horse carrying a heavy rider. Marie saw me looking up and immediately tilted her head up and back, bumping the wall softly.
"What was that?" I heard my sharp-eared Mother ask.
Too long a pause.
"Maybe a rat," Granddad said loudly.
At that, Marie and I scrambled out from under the shelves toward the door to the side porch, knocking over paint cans and garden tools, each of us hitting our head, but on different things. She hit the support post, which slid silently away toward the middle of the room, while I banged full body into the edge of the door leading to the porch.
We scrambled over each other and had already slammed the door and sat down breathlessly on the wicker couch, propping our feet up, our toes meeting in the center, as if we had been there all day., when we heard the groan of the shelves giving way, nails pulling from the wall, wood collapsing. The whoosh sound made by the four-foot fall of the newspapers and magazines caused a rush of air that jiggled the door on its hinges and sent a strong puff of wind out under the doorjamb, little bits of paper, dirt and dust flying out with it.
I heard a little cry from my mother in the kitchen, then the squeak of the door from the kitchen to the utility room as it swung open and banged against the wall.
"Oh, thank goodness, Dad. They're not in here."
"Well, it's just a little mess. It won't be much to clean up," Granddad said.
Marie and I looked at each other, rolled our eyes. Twenty years of buildup, stacks and stacks of newspapers and magazines. My kind grandfather didn't think it'd be much to clean up.
Mother suddenly appeared and opened the door to the side porch from the dining room.
"Come to lunch, girls. Dad and I are starved." Then she moved to the master bedroom to escort Granny, my diminutive Granny, with her silken brown hair swept loosely into a French twist, to lunch.
I could still hear the strains of the minuet in my head. Eerie somehow now-its tune accompanying a tiny porcelain ballerina who endlessly spins and spins and spins.
Installed
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