my wee nan
by elizabeth roebling

We’d formed a sort of edgy bond when we first met, neighbors across the little street in The Point section of Newport, Rhode Island. She was an artist, me the child of one. She reminded me too much of my own mother, who was still clawing at me from the grave. I was attracted and scared at the same time. She had a screeching, howling rage in her. It made the rage in me feel less lonely but I feared the amplified sound of the two of us would blow up the neighborhood. I was looking for a mother who would tell me that it was all going to be all right, that it was a sane and ordered place, this world, that my life was going to have a happy ending. Instead a found a sister-in-rage.
She’s dying now. Well, maybe not right away but my oath-sworn sister, who lives now in the little house I used to own, told me that even though they took out the lump, the doctors say the cancer is still there.

That’s the problem with this life, you only find a few real people whom you can love and they get under your skin in a way that makes you twitch a bit and then they die and you wish you hadn’t been twitchy with them, wish you’d just made coffee cake together.

It was the power lines that brought her out. The big Marriott Hotel down the block by the waterfront had strung these huge power lines right down our little residential street. She had read an article in the New Yorker about how they caused childhood leukemia. She was short and feisty and scary with her anger, giving out copies of the article to neighbors on the street, ordering special boxes that would measure the outpouring of electricity, carrying on. I loved the way she carried on. It gave me hope. Didn’t I see? She’d say. And I’d say, yes, I certainly did. She kept right at it, right up until the City Council banned all further installation of the high voltage lines in the town.

Her mother was dying at the time, a slow American death in a nursing home, requiring weekly visits. Her sister and she were fighting. She had, she said, no friends. And she was frightened over not enough money. It mirrored just a little too closely my own life. It’s hard to be around us, we who know that the sky is falling and are actually talking about it.

She took to me because she thought I was smart. We were visiting on the street, the way new neighbors do, circling and not quite sniffing underneath the other’s tails but it was the same dance. She had a sculpture that she had made, placed in her front window, of a series of little white balls and a pig. I looked up into the window and said: “Oh, how lovely - pearls before swine.” She said I was the only one who ever got it, but I never believed that.

We still had hope back then, before the worst had come to pass and the plans for the Empire were unrolled. There were lots of us still who thought we could save the planet, one tree at a time, buying organic and giving up meat. Earth Day, 1990, some committee gave out little pine trees in cans for us to nurture and grow. I set mine in my tiny back yard and neglected it and watched it wither as my guilt grew. If we only could just stop neglecting each other, we could build a better world.

It was depressing to be around her a lot, my Nan, because she didn’t have much hope for the world. I’d try to find some little ray of hope and she’d just shoot it down. Her years as a social worker had filled her with enough examples of injustice to last both our lives. The magazines carried ample evidence to back up her gloom. But she’d drive an entire hour to buy organic food to avoid the pesticides and growth hormones, which I figured was a waste of time. If it was so horrible here, why prolong it? Then you’d go out into her back garden, the land was just about bigger than her house, and it was a little Eden. Cold frames set into the ground where the cucumbers and tomatoes would spend their early spring nursery time. It was the first time I really understood the word “nursery”: that woman loved her plants and tended them better than most people do their children. She knew every bird that visited personally, watched them with extraordinary tenderness tinged with vigilance, as she also had a cat—a psychotic cat who would curl up next to you one minute and then fly into a rage and arch and spit at you the next. If a neighbor had to feed Toby, when she was away, she told them not to try to touch him, just put out the food and leave quickly. Never mind the litter box.

You could barely find the furniture in her house. Every piece was piled high with magazines and books except for the little space in front of the gas heater. It was cozy with self-indulgence, no concessions at all to what anyone else might think, just set up for a one woman show. All around the walls were sketches and photographs and little sculptures that she had done: horses, ducks, still mornings over the pond with the mist just rising. She had won awards for her work in all different media. She had mastered sculpture to the point where the Historical Society would call her in to stand on a high ladder and do a refit in one of the mansions of some rococo fitting from France.

One day when I came to visit, we could barely fit into the living room together because there was a kayak sitting there, between the couch and the heater, taking up all the floor space. She’d had a knee replacement and walked with a limp but here she had gone and gotten a sea kayak and would lift it herself onto the roof rack of her Toyota and go off with little groups on excursions into Narragansett Bay. I was filled with admiration.

She fell down one day and was rushed to the hospital. When she woke up there she was told that they had put a pacemaker in. So now she had this electrical thing running her heart. I could feel the edge of the fear in her voice. When I listened to her, I really felt just perched here on the edge of a rolling ball. Precarious. That’s what life is, just precarious.

And she didn’t have that New England mask around her emotions, hadn’t absorbed the rule that you didn’t talk about these things or let your fears show. If people were mean or inconsiderate, she would howl about it. If she was frightened, she’d let you know it. Intense. Authentic. Genuine.

It was the men, she’d say. I’ve loved them and lay with them and there is something really wrong with them. They don’t love their children; if they did they couldn’t destroy the earth the way they are doing. All they want to do is make money, screw young women and lord it over some other man. That was her summation. And somewhere, inside my heart, I felt the truth of it. For the men were certainly intent on destroying the world. Certainly any fool could see that. Oh, how I felt that. That was the core of my rage.

It turned out that we had met once before, years and years before when she was a sexy young thing and I just barely above a toddler, for there were twenty-five years between us. She had worked in a sculptor’s studio across the hall from my mother’s studio, down on 15th Street on the edge of Greenwich Village. I used to go there and play with the soapstone and little carving knife that the Glinsky’s would give me, making the shape of the seal come out to play. When I learned that, I knew that God had sent her to me, to remind me and watch over me and encourage me.

Finally, her mother died and left a bit of money and she just stopped talking to her sister. When I moved away to North Carolina, she was not to be consoled with long distance phone calls at first. “I love you”, I would say. “You have moved away.” She would answer. Yes, I had. My life had just taken me there. But whenever I came back it was as before, she would give me the one clear space on the couch and make me eggs and something from the garden.

Write, she’d say to me. You must write. Even if you never even publish. It is criminal for someone who has a talent not to use it.

She finally found a friend, a married woman about my age who took her into the heart of her family. Sue and Nan would go off sailing together, off to the Sundance Film Festival, off to Boston for the weekend. Both my sister and I rejoiced that my godmother, her aunt, had found a friend.

She will be buried, she says, in a pine box so that the worms can have her for that is as it should be. I teased her this morning that she would build it herself, out on the sidewalk in front of her house, decorating it appropriately with all the flowers and birds that she would want.

I called to tell her that I heard the news and that I would remember her for the rest of my life because she had made a difference in my life forever.

“Why?” She said.

“Because you understood me and there are not many people who do.”

Sometimes one friend is all that we need.

 

Elizabeth Roebling, who lived in Barnardsville and Asheville, is now trying out life in the tropics, in a beach town in the Dominican Republic. [roeblingelizabeth@msn.com]