somuchrain

My grandmother is visiting soon, from England, this would, then, be my grandmother from my father's side. She's a miserable person. She's insulted me every time I've spoken to her, as long back as I remember, and she hates my mother because she's Irish, and hates my dad's new wife because she's Irish, and hates the Irish, um and the Jews and blacks too. Once she went to India with my granddad, I think it was a very special holiday for them. This would be soon after the Second World War. She's told me so many times about watching a body be burnt in a river and about how disgusted she was at how public death was there, but mostly about the water supply. She's got such pretences. She grew up on a council estate and was a 'union wife' until my grandfather died a few years ago and she acts as though she's royalty. She wouldn't let me, as a bored child in her house for two weeks, play soccer with the kids from the estate because they were "dirty untruthful types" so I had to sit inside with her and watch Morse episodes over and over with her screaming over everything because she wouldn't turn her hearing aide on.

At any rate, she's visiting and it will, all accounts, be her last trip over here. She's seventy-six and not too well. I'm hard pressed for cash and time, but feel as though I should visit her because of some idiotic sentimental 'family' impulse in me. When my grandfather died I got a call in my "Feminist Philosophy" class. A girl I'd had a crush on for a year without talking to, with blond bangs that, literally, bubbled, over her blue eyes, who did this thing where she touched her chin to her right shoulder when she laughed, and who always reminded me of a shark, came to the door and told my professor there was a call for me. I didn't know she was a secretary for the school, some office or something. She was wearing a Godspeed t-shirt and I was proud at myself for making small talk to her about their show at the Warsaw a few weeks before. Geraldine, the father's wife, was on the phone saying she couldn't think of any other way to get in touch with me, and was sorry about having me called out of class, that she had the school's phone number written down since September 11th and that it was the only number for me that she had. My dad had just flown home to see his Dad. It went on for weeks; I was always about to renew my passport so I could go over and witness it. In the end my dad told me that it wasn't worth the bother, that my granddad wouldn't recognize I was there, and that there were so many people there my father didn't want to risk overwhelming my grandfather. Good Christ, in my dorm room in Brooklyn, standing pressed against the window to get better cell reception, and about to go to the Greens with Ilana, I was relieved to not have to up and go to England. Besides, it was finals and I had papers to write, right?

I always liked my grandfather, though. He was an artist, after he was an electrician, though it was never a retirement, and tried to teach me about perspective when I was a kid. He had me drawing telephone lines for days on end.