She was what you would call
a “character” if you were being kind, something else if you were not. We didn’t
use the B word back then, lest we find ourselves gagging on the curious flavor of
Irish Spring soap. Manly yes, but I did not like it. We called her Ginny, which
was her name, a nickname for Virginia, the virgin grandmother. Grandma, Granny
or Nana was too soft a moniker to stretch over that tough exterior, arms always
crossed, black patent leather purse in the crook of her arm, plain woolen dress
and dark plastic eyeglasses resting on the end of her nose. Her fire red hair
was the one colorful accessory, a warning of sorts. Hugging her was like
wrapping your arms around the wrong end of magnetized iron, you always felt as
if you were being repelled.
“Great heavens above,” she
used to say, cigarette perched between the tips of two fingers, which she held above
her right shoulder, à la Bette Davis.
She could bend that phrase to
suit almost any emotion, shock, disbelief, disappointment. But whenever she
said it, it always felt as if she was summoning an army of angels to judge my
sorry, sinful ass. And I was a sinner, because every time she asked if we still
had that Martin guitar, I’d lie and say “Oh yes!”
“It was your grandfather’s guitar
and then your father’s, you know that don’t you?” she’d continue the
interrogation.
“Yeah,” I’d reply.
“Yes ma’am,” she’d correct
me.
She’d take a puff of her
cigarette, narrow her eyes and say “You’re too skinny. Doesn’t your mother feed
you?”
My mother sold that Martin guitar years earlier for the express purpose of putting food on the table after
my father, Ginny’s cherished only child left us. But the phantom guitar
remained. Sometimes my brothers and I would embellish the story and breathe a
little more life into the fable. “We just had it re-strung,” we’d say or “It
sure does sounds pretty.”
“It’s valuable. Don’t let
your mother sell it,” She’d command.
Though we were children, my
brothers and I understood that somehow my grandmother knew the guitar was as
gone as my father. But we clung to the numinous fantasy, in part because we
feared her reaction and perhaps more so because as long as the guitar remained,
there was a piece of my father in the house.
We probably would have
gotten away with the ruse had my grandmother chosen not to make a rare visit to
our home after the divorce. It was strange to see Ginny out of her environment
of stiff Victorian furniture and oriental rugs without “the help.” She was like
a piece of antique furniture appearing all the more displaced in a room of
orange shag carpeting with a brown corduroy upholstered sofa where four
misbehaving boys were scattered about the floor like throw rugs as our mangy
dog, Tiger farted.
During dinner, we attempted
to steer the conversation from tumbling down the road we all knew it would
eventually take. My older brother Chuck regaled us with his adventures in Boy
Scouting and the call of the wild. My younger brother John secreted away the
obligatory three bites of vegetables into his glass of milk. Matthew, the
youngest, batted his eyelashes that were as thick as a girl’s and then, without
thinking, I offered to play a rousing rendition of “Hot Cross Buns” on the piano.
“What?” I asked when my
brother Chuck kicked me under the table.
“Why don’t you get the
guitar and make it a duet?” Ginny asked.
My mother scanned our faces
and then asked Ginny to join her in the kitchen while she washed the dishes,
relieving us from our usual post dinner clean up. We sat in the den in silence just
as we did while listening to my mother’s one sided phone conversations begging
my father not to leave. “You never could make my son happy,” we heard Ginny accuse
my mother in the same kitchen where my mother sobbed over many a phone call
from women confessing to affairs with my swarthy, handsome father.
And then, Ginny appeared in
front of us, like one of those birds popping out of a coo-coo clock her body stiff
as a daguerreotype portrait.
“You don’t have the guitar
anymore do you?” she asked.
“No ma’am,” I said as her eyes
became watery and red-rimmed.
Shortly thereafter we heard
the tires of my father’s car pull up the gravel drive and then Ginny was gone.
If I had been a good Christian boy I might have felt guilty, but I didn’t. I
was just so relieved to be rid of that God damn, worthless guitar.
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