The Archeological Dig
A manila folder with third grade spelling tests. A brown folder with fourth grade arithmetic homework. Two hairbands, one leather with brass horses on it and one blue with edelweiss embroidered on it. A golden bracelet, bent and corroded, with my family nickname etched on it. A hairbrush that was bought in London when I was 14, hand carved, with boar bristles. It was considered very expensive. My sorority lavaliere.
These items are lined up on the kitchen table, saved from my excavation of a box marked "Guest Room Drawers". Other things from the box include a half-used box of talcum powder, some handmade Christmas ornaments (made by me) chewed ragged by tiny creatures, a few bud vases and bed linens chewed by larger creatures. There is evidence of habitation by creatures that stocked their nest with seeds and things. Just about everything in the box will be tossed in the trash. The things on the table, except for the brush and the necklace, will go with the rest.
But the collection on the table confuses me. Nearly 40 years ago, when she became incapable of living alone, my grandmother was moved to live near us, from the home she and my grandfather built when he retired. She was set up in an apartment with whatever of her furniture she wanted around her, and the rest of the household boxes were stored in my parents' attic and never given another thought. This was one of those boxes.
In the years since my mother's death, as I've spent time here caring for my father, I've started clearing out that attic, which has been an enormous undertaking. The house is large, and the attic is atypical in that it has the same footprint as the house. My parents threw nothing away and gave nothing to Goodwill. It was all stowed in the attic for later consideration. Said consideration never happened by either of them.
Every piece of clothing my mother bought since she left home, every piece of clothing my father bought since they married, every piece of clothing I ever owned till I left home was in that attic. Every piece of furniture they ever owned, or that my grandmother owned, and a few antiques that were bought and never found a place in the house below was in that attic. Six mattress/boxspring sets. Every toy I ever had, and quite a few my mother had (among the Grandmother Boxes). Pet dishes. Bolts of fabric. A two-and-a-half-foot tall (I measured) pile of carpet remnants from four houses I can recognize and some I have no idea where they came from. A three-foot-tall pile of the old-fashioned brown carpet pads, folded up and stacked. They crumble to dust when I try to grasp them. Broken lawn furniture. Three boxed-up chandeliers. A walker, a wheelchair, three canes and a plastic bedpan with the bottom broken out.
Things were stuffed into available space with no planning. Under a broken chair, I found a brown grocery bag full of baby clothes; my mother’s baby clothes from 1924. I tried to pick up a silk shirt and it vanished in a puff of dust. Oddly, two wool sweaters, sweetly embroidered, were intact.
And close to the top of the steps, small packages were tucked between boxes in a hurry. They were brought there to be hidden while the house’s occupants went away for the weekend, and they were never retrieved. Each package was filled with glittering jewelry: diamond earrings, charms bracelets, everything. The first of these finds told me I had to be careful. I couldn’t just grab a half-rotted shoebox and heave it in a bin. I needed to check the insides of the shoes.
Slowly, the space has increased. In the beginning, there was a walkway only as wide as my Dad’s shoulders from the steps in the middle of the house to the windows at either end. Now I can see the slope of the eaves on the south side.
I’m less than halfway through.
I contemplate the collection on the table. They are from a drawer in my grandmother’s guest bedroom. They are all mine. When I was in grade school, my mother would collect tests and papers at the end of a school year, tuck them in a manila folder and put them away. When we moved to this house, we went through the pile and saved out things we wanted to keep like stories I was proud of. I didn’t notice a lack of third grade papers and I don’t know if Mom did. I don’t remember losing the hair bands, but when I lost the hairbrush, I went into a panic. I had begged for it, and I loved it. I used it every day as I remembered two weeks in England. I was afraid to tell my mother I’d lost it. I mourned. A few years later, I hunted madly for the necklace. I was expected to wear it to sorority functions and halfway through my senior year, I was reluctant to pay for another. I was furious with myself.
But neither event was my fault. My grandmother had pilfered them so that she could take them home with her and be sentimental about them. The brush still has my hair on it. (Ew.)
I don’t understand this. Her house was full of things we gave her, gifts we bought or ornaments, vases, bowls, embroidery I made for her. She craved attention to a degree no one could satisfy and we showered her with gifties like nervous offerings to an irritable goddess. She talked by phone to her daughter every day, and to her granddaughter nearly that often. We drove the 250 miles to visit every other month, and she’d come for a month in between visits. What was the value of math homework? This is a rhetorical question.
I turn my attention to some other things I remember. Mom moving through the house before her parents were expected to arrive, putting things away, not where they usually went, but in drawers that locked. The good flatware was neatly and tightly tied up in satin ribbons, stacks of spoons and forks resting in the silver drawer in a display that Martha Stewart might call charming. The satin bands were hard to untie, and after a fancy party, they were carefully re-tied, but not by me. As a child, I thought this was normal. As a teen, I thought it was pretentious. Now I go back to another box waiting for Goodwill-or-trash decisions and dig out a beaten up dessert fork in the same pattern as Mom’s sterling, and I go count the dessert forks in the drawer. One missing. I tuck the abused fork next to its fellows.
In another box full of letters, most of them from my grandmother’s brother in the Old Country, I find a few letters that were written to my mother, unopened, their return addresses from Navy wife friends who were out of the country in the Philippines or wherever. Why did my grandmother have these? She never opened them. But she’d kept her daughter from reading them, these letters from people she didn’t know who would take her love away from her.
There are some items in the Goodwill box: an ashtray from a museum gift shop, a set of china flower earrings. A few other things, carefully tucked into a shoe box, still with price tags on them. I thought she’d bought them to use as gifts for friends but now I wonder. I remember Mom leaning over her mother before going to the cash register in a silver and china shop. “Let’s put the things in your purse on the counter so the lady can ring them up”. That moment has a whole new meaning to me now.
There was a lot wrong with my maternal grandmother, and there are stories that could fill a book. Maybe two. But I can’t help but conclude that I’ve learned something new about her. That there was a mild case of kleptomania sewn into the whole mess, wrapped around her craving for sentiment and jealousy. I can see where some of these things had a significance to her that I don’t understand. The spelling tests were valuable because she stole them. Surely Mom would have given them to her had she asked, but she didn’t have to ask, she simply helped herself and outsmarted someone. And knowing her as I do, that “outsmarting” meant more than the “A” grades on her beloved granddaughter’s tests. I know it. I can predict her behavior. I don’t have to understand it.
I look at the brush and it hurts my heart. I’d loved it so. She took it away because she knew it was something I loved, so it had more ‘sentiment’ for her. That losing it made me so unhappy wasn’t her problem. In fact, if she’d known that, I suspect she would have valued the brush even more.