My dad was pretty mopey over the next two -days. But I was just the opposite of mopey. I was overwhelmed with" excitement. I told all my friends about my grandparents and the complicated story of my childhood. They thought it was pretty wonderful that I"d discovered my long-lost grandmother. Dawn helped me pack and on Friday afternoon I was on a plane headed west toward Iowa.
As the plane flew above piles of clouds, I felt close to my mother. It was almost as if I were going to visit her. I"d see where she"d grown up. I might even stay in her bedroom. And I would learn so much about her from my grandmother. My grandmother and I talking about my mother. I couldn"t wait.
It was easy to pick out my grandmother in the crowd of people waiting for Flight 652. She looked just the way she did in the photos I"d seen. My grandmother recognized me, too. I ran over to her. We hugged and hugged. I thought, the woman who has her arms around me is my grandmother. Of course I was crying my eyes out.
"Let me take a good look at you," she said. She held me at arms" length and looked me over. Her eyes filled with tears. I thought she was going to say how much I reminded her of my mother. But instead she cried, "Oh, if only my Bill could have seen you!"
She handed me a Kleenex and we both wiped away tears. "I cry so easily," I said.
"Me, too," she said.
We both laughed at that and hugged again. "Let"s pick up your luggage and I"ll bring you home," my grandmother said. She sighed. "My, but the old place is so empty without my Bill."
My grandmother seemed lost in thought as we started out on the trip from the airport to the farm. I wanted to ask her questions about my mother, but it didn"t seem like the right time. I would be there for two weeks. There"d be plenty of time to talk. So I looked out the window at the landscape instead.
The first thing I noticed about Iowa was that there are no hills or mountains. The sky reaches all the way to the edges of the fields. Iowa - at least where my grandmother lives - is as flat as a pancake. The next thing I noticed about Iowa was that the houses are spread far apart, and that in between the houses are miles and miles of cornfields.
"It"s pretty here," I said. "It looks a lot different from where I live."
"Bill used to say, "Verna, we live in the most beautiful place on the face of the earth." "She smiled at me, but there were tears in her eyes again. "Your grandfather had a positive att.i.tude and something good to say about everything and everybody," she said. For the rest - of the drive to Maynard she described Bill"s funeral and shed some more tears.
Finally, she changed the subject. "Here we are in downtown Maynard," she said.
"Where?" I asked. We"d just pa.s.sed a gas station and a store and were driving by cornfields again.
"That was it," Verna said. "Bill used to say if you blinked when you drove through Maynard you"d miss it."
I turned and looked out the back window. There were three other small buildings besides the gas station and store. "That"s the whole town?" I asked.
"What you see is what you get," she said. "Remember how your grandpa used to say that all the time?"
"No," I answered quietly. "I don"t remember being here."
In a few minutes we drove up to a big white farm house. It was surrounded by fields of corn. "They"ll be harvesting the corn over the next few days," she said. "Bill used to love harvest time." She sighed. I didn"t look, but I was sure her eyes were filling with tears again. - "Here we are," she said as she opened the kitchen door for me to go in. "Home sweet home."
I walked into a big, friendly looking kitchen. "It"s nice," I said.
"It"s terrible not having anyone to cook for, and eating alone," she said. "I"m glad you"re here."
"Me, too," I said, though I wasn"t sure I meant it. Suddenly I was feeling nervous and shy. As my grandmother showed me around the downstairs of her house, I realized that I didn"t feel any special connection with this woman, that my grandmother was a stranger to me. I didn"t even feel like calling her "Grandma."
I wondered how I"d feel when I saw my mother"s room. I imagined it would be decorated as she"d kept it, with the things she loved best on the walls. Maybe I"d feel more at home in my mother"s room.
"Am I staying in my mother"s old room?"
I asked.
"You"re staying in your own room," replied Verna. "But certainly before it was your room, it was hers."
Verna led me upstairs anti opened the door to a large room at the end of the hall. "I bet you"ll recognize it," she said.
I walked into a sunny room. The walls were pink. There was a big fluffy pink throw rug. Even the bedspread was pink. And instead of posters of rock and roll stars such as the Beatles, the decorations in the room were from nursery rhymes. I couldn"t imagine my mother living her teenage-years in a room with cutouts of Little Bo Peep, Humpty Dumpty, and Mary with her lamb. Floppy-eared bunnies were painted on the bureau.
"This was my mother"s room?" I asked.
"When you came to live with us, Bill insisted that we redecorate for you," she said. "We never bothered to change it. I gave your crib to a neighbor, but otherwise it"s the same as it was eleven years ago. Do you remember this room?" - I shook my head.
"I bet the bunnies painted on -the bureau look familiar to you," she said. ""Bun-bun," was what you called bunnies. Bill was teaching you how to hop like a bunny when your father took you away from us. Do you remember?" Verna looked at me expectantly.
"No," I replied. "I don"t remember being here - ever." She looked disappointed. But at the moment I didn"t care. I didn"t like the way she said that my father took me away from her and Bill. She made it sound as if he"d done something wrong.
"When you"ve cleaned up, come down for a snack," Verna said. "Then I"ll show you the fields and barn. I bet the goats will jog your memory."
But I didn"t want to remember living with Verna and Bill. And I didn"t want to hear any more about Bill and what he used to say and do. I wanted Verna to tell me about my mother.
While I ate my snack, Verna explained some of the things she"d planned for us to do together. Most of it revolved around food. She was going to teach me how to bake. And she"d invited three of her closest friends to lunch the next day - which she said I"d help her prepare. "Marion, Ethel, and Janet will remember you," she said. "But I suppose you won"t remember them."
"Probably not," I answered. My hands felt clammy. I hated meeting new people. And for the next two weeks everyone I would meet would be a stranger. I felt queasy. I was already homesick and I"d only been in Iowa for two hours.
Verna showed me every inch of the property. She didn"t mention my mother once, but kept up a running commentary about what Bill thought of this and what he did about that.
Finally we returned to the house.
"I guess we better get on with the baking," Verna said. She didn"t seem very enthusiastic. Neither did I. I hate cooking. Sewing and knitting are fun and interesting to me. But spending a lot of time preparing food is not my idea of a good time. Home economics is the only subject in school that I hated. Well, I thought, maybe when we"re cooking Verna will talk about my mother.
In the next few hours we made a chocolate cake, sugar cookies, and prepared a bread dough. But we didn"t do much talking. Whenever I - asked Verna about my mother she changed the subject. For example, when I said, "Did my mother help you bake, too?" Verna looked at her watch and said, "Two o"clock. Time for my favorite soap opera." She turned on a small kitchen TV and the rest of our baking session was accompanied by my least favorite kind of television - soap operas.
After all that cooking, we still had to prepare our dinner of roast chicken and biscuits. I remembered my mother writing about how wonderful her mother"s biscuits were, but I didn"t even bother to mention this to Verna.
During dinner Verna was pretty quiet. So was I. I didn"t know what to talk to her about. After washing the dinner dishes, I said I was tired and went to my room. I was too disappointed to write letters home. What would I say? "Having a terrible time. Wish I were home."?
The next morning I helped Verna feed the goats. Then we prepared for our luncheon guests. Verna"s three friends were nice, but I had absolutely nothing in common with them. They went on for awhile about how beautifully I"d grown up and what a darling baby I"d been, which embarra.s.sed me. Then- they gossiped with Verna about who would win what ribbons at the county fair, which bored me. When they were leaving one of the women - Mrs. Baily - took me aside and asked me how I thought my grandmother was doing "after her big loss." I knew she meant Bill"s death.
"She talks about him a lot," I answered. "It"s such a blessing that you are here," she said. "See if you can"t get her to make up her blackberry jam and enter it in the fair. Will you?"
I nodded.
After our guests were gone, I told Verna I thought it would be neat if she entered her jam in the fair.
"I haven"t made it this year," she said. "By the time blackberries were in season, Bill was gone."
"Is it too late to make it now?" I asked.
"I daresay there"re still some berries around. Would you like to make it with me?"
"Sure."
"If it"s important to you, I guess we could," Verna said.
"I think"it"d be fun to go to the fair and see you win a blue ribbon."
Verna"s eyes filled with tears. I figured she was thinking about Bill again and all the times he watched her win blue ribbons. I went to my room.
Around five o"clock Verna walked into my room without knocking (something that drives me crazy) and said, "Don"t forget, we go to bingo in a half hour." She didn"t look too happy about going to bingo. I figured it might be the first time she was going since Bill died and was grateful that she didn"t say it. Well, maybe bingo will cheer us both up, I thought.
It didn"t. I was introduced to all these people who remembered me when I was a baby. They kept saying how nice it was that I was visiting my grandmother "in her time of grief," and how sad my grandparents were when my father took me back. - I hated that evening of bingo and I was hating being with my grandmother. It was nothing like I thought it would be. We didn"t say two words to one another on the way home in the car. I was grumpy and she was sad. We both went to our bedrooms as soon as we arrived home. I wrote a letter to my dad and one to Kristy. But I didn"t tell them I was having a terrible time.
The next morning Verna announced that we were going to pick blackberries for the jam. It was a hot muggy day, and blackberry bushes are full of thorns. I could tell that Verna wasn"t enjoying the project any more than I was. "Bill used to make this task so much fun," she said. Was she angry at me for not making it fun? Was I supposed to be making up for her husband"s being dead?
Making jam - at least the way Verna Baker does it - is a long, hot job. The kitchen felt like the inside of a furnace. And Verna kept criticizing the way I did things. When I spilled jam on the counter, she grabbed the pot from me. "I"ll finish pouring," she snapped. "You can clean up your mess." - As I reached for the paper towels I heard her mumble under her breath, "It"d be nice if someone said they were sorry."
"Sorry," I said. "But I didn"t spill it on purpose. My hands were sweaty and the pot slipped."
"You have to concentrate when you cook. Otherwise there are accidents in the kitchen. What if you"d burned yourself? What do you think your father would do?" She harrumphed. "He"d blame me and never let you come here again, that"s what he"d do." I heard her mumble under her breath, again, "We should never have let him take you back."
"Stop criticizing my father," I told her sharply. "I hate when you do that. Besides, I wouldn"t have wanted to grow up out here in the middle of nowhere. I wish I"d never come here."
I ran out of the kitchen and into the cornfields. I never wanted to see Verna Baker again.
I thought Verna would come running after me. But she didn"t. I walked around the cornfields trying to figure out how I could get home without seeing or talking to her again. But if I wanted to go back to Connecticut I had to tell Verna and my father so they could arrange it. And the sooner I did that, the sooner I"d be on my way. I went back to the house.
I saw Verna before she saw me. She was sitting on the glider couch looking at an opened sc.r.a.pbook. Tears were pouring down her face. As I came closer it looked as though she were crying over a big school picture of me. Then I saw that it was a photo of my mother when she was around my age. For the first time since I arrived in Iowa, I thought about how I must remind Verna of her own daughter. I thought of how I"d been behaving, and realized that she was probably as disappointed in me as I was in her.
Verna looked up and saw me. "You look so much like Alma," she said. "And you act like her, too - even when you"re unhappy about something."
"I"m sorry," I said.
"Oh, child, don"t be sorry about being like your mother. It"s a blessing for me to see that her life goes on in you. A real blessing. I just wish I could be more helpful to you. I"m so full of sadness right now, because of losing Bill. It"s not fair to you. I could understand if you want to go home earlier than we planned."
I stepped onto the porch and sat beside her on the glider. "Do you want me to go home now?" I asked.
"I only want what"s good for you," she said. "That"s what my father always says," I told her. - "I"ve said some terrible things about your father since you"ve been here. And none of them are fair. I"m sorry."
"I haven"t been a very good guest," I admitted.
"It"s a difficult situation. In many ways we"re strangers to one another."
"My mother is a stranger to me, too," I told her. "I came here to find out more about her. But when I ask questions about her, you change the subject. Also, I"m shy. I hate meeting a lot of new people - and besides cooking, that"s all I"ve done since I"ve been here."
"Well, my goodness." Verna had stopped crying and seemed very interested in what I was saying and not a bit upset by it. "Tell me more. I want to know everything that"s on your mind. What else has bothered you?"
"I hate cooking," I admitted. "I love eating and I think you"re a great cook. In a letter my mom wrote me before she died, she said that you were a fabulous cook. And she"s right."
"In that letter did she tell you she was a terrible cook herself?" Verna asked.
"No. Was she?"
"She was! Alma loved sewing, knitting, and other handiworks. But she had no talent for cooking."
"I love sewing, too. How else am I like her?"
"I guess I"d have to come to know you better to be able to tell you that," my grandmother said. "Would you like to look at your mother"s sc.r.a.pbook?"
"Will it upset you?"
"I"d like to look at it with you, Mary Anne," she said.
When I asked where books were, when she blurted out, "I have the most wonderful idea!" Her eyes sparkled and she looked happy for the first time since I"d arrived.
"What?" I asked.
"When your mother died, I was working on a quilt as a surprise for her twenty-fifth birthday. It"s made up of sc.r.a.ps of cloth I"d saved over the years from things she"d outgrown -like her baby blanket and clothes. There"s even a swatch from the fabric we used to make her wedding gown. The quilt was to be something she could pa.s.s along to her own child someday." She paused before going on. "I stopped working on it when she died."
"What"s your idea?" I asked in a whisper.
My grandmother took my hand in hers. "I think you should help me finish it. We could both work on it. If we put our minds to it, we could finish it before you go back."
"I"d love to.!" I exclaimed. "Oh, Grandma, could we? Could we really?"
"That"s the first time you"ve called me "Grandma,"" she commented.
"I know," I said. Of course we both started crying again.
Over the ten days. that remained of my stay, Grandma and I - finished the quilt. I did other things, too. I went on a date with a very boring guy and baby-sat for some neat, but very active, children on a neighboring farm. Grandm.a did the cooking - all delicious -and I concentrated on the quilt.
The day before I went back East was the first -day of the Annual Farm Fair. As we were getting ready to go, I reminded Grandma to bring her blackberry jam for the judging. "I don"t think my jam is at its best this year," she said.
"Uh-oh. That"s because I helped, isn"t it?"
"If you call that help," she joked. "No," she went on, "I think this year I"d like to share a blue ribbon with you. How about we enter Alma"s quilt?"
"Yes!" I shouted. "Oh, yes."
I rushed upstairs and brought down the quilt. Grandma said that whether we won the prize or not, the quilt was a winner. A winner for her and me, because it symbolized my mother, and our grandmother-grandaughter relationship.
When I left Iowa the next morning I wondered when I would see my grandmother again. And I felt sad for all the years that I hadn"t known her.
When I was back in Stoneybrook I told my father about my trip and how much I loved getting to know my grandmother. He looked concerned. "Do you want to live with Verna?" he asked.
"Dad, no!" I shouted. "You"re my father. I love you. How could you even think that?"
My father smiled. "I"m glad you"re home," he said.
"Me, too."
The following afternoon my grandmother phoned to tell me that we"d won first prize for our quilt. "The next time I see you I"m going to give you the quilt," she said. "But I want to keep, that blue ribbon."
I could picture my grandmother alone in her house. I knew she was lonely for her husband, her daughter, and her grandaughter.