Everything’s far away. Everything’s a copy of a copy of a copy.
—The movie Fight Club
If you read my fiction, you will find a character named Grandma. In real life, she is dead. This is the story of her death. A story this writer, the main character—T—began drafting the moment she knew Grandma was not long for this earth. A story more like a performance—the sensation of watching yourself from outside your own body, when everything feels unreal, like living in a dream. Or, at least for me, for T, like living in a story.
This story begins with T walking nursing-home corridors on her way to see her very recently deceased grandmother. Nauseous from a too-sweet Starbucks latte and chocolate cookie, T is sick with worry, wondering if nausea means she has diabetes. She probably does. It is what killed Grandma, you know. Complications of eating like a poor person: McDonald’s, Captain D’s, Wendy’s, Walmarts fried chicken and mac ‘n cheese. T eats like a poor person who is no longer poor and thinks she’s too good for fast food: Starbucks, Chipotle, delivered Chinese, wine, wine, wine. Just more expensive ways to die.
She chugs at the end of a grief train behind her mother, her mother’s friend, her stepfather, and her little brother. T disconnects from the real world. Muffled click-clacking shoes on black-flecked white tile, voices hushed, drowned by the roar of insufficient air-conditioning and surreality, this facility is a prop or a set—fiction. Real life for T feels like fiction, especially in difficult times like this that day. T had, in fact, begun drafting this tale in her mind on her way from Maryland to Virginia. Her writing music—Sam Cooke and the Allman Brothers—played on her Pandora app. She headed back home to the country, and the country gathered to meet her, trees racing past I-95 South. Alone in her truck, she remarked to herself about how beautiful the day was, how her grandmother s death was an example of natures beauty—or some other trite lie. Later in the evening, guilty over her lack of grief, her too-rational, academic frame of mind, she asked friends if there was something wrong with her, if this lack of empathy, driven by a palpable desire to write, meant she was selfish. It wasn’t the appropriate response T decided, despite her friends’ reassurances.
Shuffling through winding nursing-home halls, T’s nausea becomes acute, now directly related to the smell of old. Every “elderly-person dying” story has a scene where the narrator is sick from the nursing home or hospital smell. It is a cliché. This writer knows it. And if this were fiction, T would find some clever, not-so-overused way of representing this reality. But it’s a cliché for a reason. Real life is a cliché.
They arrive at Grandma’s room. Behind a white curtain … beyond the veil (yes, this writer could not help herself) lay her grandmother or the vessel that carried her grandmother, now stiff and empty, a snail’s shell. T’s uncle and his girlfriend are already there. For an inmate, Uncle is clearly very much free, and he taps his ankle bracelet when T enters the room with the rest of the grief train to indicate he must head back to confinement, his work-release over at three. Uncle was Grandma’s favorite, so she waited for him to arrive before she died. T cannot help but be miffed at this, although she tries to tamp down her anger. It is just like her grandmother, impatient and calculating till the day, to die the moment T finally arrives in Virginia, after a two-hour drive, yet before she reaches the nursing home, because Uncle, Grandma’s favorite, had finally made it there, and he was all she needed to move on. Fuck the rest of us.
The smell in the small room is a finger prying T’s mouth open, trying to shove its way down her throat. No one has opened a window, and death has made it hot and damp and stale in the room. With hardly any space to fit them all around and next to the bed, T’s mother, the recurring character you may recognize as “Ma,” shimmies past Uncle and Girlfriend, and pulls the curtain back. T stands behind them, on the other side, as close to the hallway as she can be. Ma stands inside the curtain, her husband’s arm around her shoulders. Blocked by drapery, T can only hear sniff sniff, see her mother’s hand move to press a tissue to the inside of her eyes. T stares at her feet. She has not shed a tear.
Ma stands there less than a minute. “You want to see her?”
T has seen a dead body before. She saw a person die. Unlike her grandmother, her great-aunt, Grandma’s sister, waited until T arrived to die. Great-aunt also perished in a nursing home, and now it occurs to T how similar Great-aunt and Grandma’s deaths are. If this story were made up, T would use this fact as the basis for some contrived scene of parallelism too convenient to not be deliberate, a narrative construct. But coincidences like this are all too common in low-income black families to be intended narrative devices.
Yet, fiction never gets real life right. It’s always the parts of real life written in fiction no one seems to believe. What does T consider reality? A childless great-aunt who was more grandmotherly than the formerly loose and slutty grandmother? A grandmother so selfish she intentionally leaves nothing for her family? Takes it all along to the other side of the veil with her last and dying breath? A woman who allowed her granddaughter to be molested in her own home? So jealous, they physically fought? So jealous, Grandma told her the abuse was her fault? A woman who. . . T can go on for days, she knows the stories so well. The memories are too raw for her to feel real now. So vivid indeed that she wonders whether she made them up. Oh, if only she had.
∗ ∗
In the back room of her grandmother’s house, T learned how to escape. Watching Reading Rainbow, devouring Sweet Valley High, Choose Your Own Adventure stories, the Babysitter’s Club, feet planted flat against the bedroom wall, T read books above her face, sometimes hanging her head off the edge of the full-sized bed she shared with her aunt. She read at night when the noise from the living room was too much to watch television. There was a party going on. Always a party going on. She wasn’t allowed to leave the back room, but when she did—to go pee or to get a glass of Sprite—her eyes watered from the cigarette smoke. It hung solid in the air, blocks of gray cliffs floating through the small rooms. Even then, before she wrote, she imagined the smoke was a gas attempting to invade her body, choke her to death. And at night, when they were all gone, but the smoke lingered, it turned into a man, tall and dressed in black, coming to take her life away. He stood in the door crack or at the foot of her bed watching her sleep. She felt his presence, although there was no one. She learned to sleep lightly so she could always see if he was coming. Was he coming? No. He was already there. Was always there. An amalgamation of those men who on those party nights danced in the living room with Grandma or her aunts or her cousins. Those men who drank and waited for her to leave the back room and come out front so they could grab her wrist with hard, dry hands grinding into the tender flesh of her forearm as she tried to wrench away. So they could laugh at the scared little girl interrupting the grown-folks’ party. So she could run to the back room, put her feet on the wall, open a book, press the scratchy paper to her face, harder, so she was almost inside it, harder, so if she pressed more, she would end up on the other side of it, harder, on to the inside where the story was now real life, and far, far away.
∗ ∗
If this were fiction, we would’ve gotten to this part by now. The part where T pulls back the curtain and sees her dead grandmother’s body, sitting up in a Craftmatic-style hospital bed. Grandma’s silver, thin hair stretches across her head, brown scalp peeking through the lines of white cotton. Her body is stiff, and her eyes are closed. But what T notices first, what T becomes irritated by, fixated on, what will haunt T in the middle of the night as she tries to sleep, is her grandmother s open mouth. An oval slimming her face downward. The Ghost screaming in the Munch painting. T knows it’s where Grandma’s soul escaped from. She crept out of her own mouth, the snail shell now rigid.
“Can they close her mouth,” T says.
“They had her on oxygen,” Ma responds.
But it doesn’t answer T’s question. “Well, why can’t they close her mouth?” The heat of irrational anger replaces her nausea. Why would they leave her looking like that?
Ma sits hesitantly on the neat little bed of Grandma’s missing roommate. “The funeral director can fix it.”
T glances at her grandmother one last time before walking out of the cramped room and to the benches outside. In no way does Grandma resemble Great-aunt in death. There is agony on her grandmother’s face, the silent scream of a person taken before she wanted to go. And indeed, she had suffered more than Great-aunt, who had cancer and was prepared, mentally and spiritually, to die. T had conversations with Great-aunt. Had been there to tell her she loved her. Had held her hand, was given a pearl ring in remembrance. The hospice nurse was a Christian, T’s former classmate. They prayed and prayed to themselves, filling the silent room with the noise of their thoughts, their own fear of dying suspended when confronted by the real thing. Great-aunt took a breath, then life fell limply out of her, a crumpled tissue dropping from an open hand.
T doesn’t know what happened when her grandmother died. She wasn’t there. She imagines it was less graceful. Grandma must have been pleading or tried to breathe—take in as much air, oxygen, life as she could to make a mouth so broad and stiff. Later, T went home to her father s and tried to sleep, but when she closed her eyes all she could see was the black hole of her grandmother’s gaping mouth, waiting to suck her in.
∗ ∗
There was a wino who hung around her grandmother’s house. T can’t remember his name or where he came from or whether he was related to her or why he was there. He walked their dirt road, Mad Dog 20/20 or Wild Irish Rose, sweating inside his palm. He smelled of rust and piss, onions, and stale alcohol. Sometimes Grandma would let him inside the house. If he had money, he could come to the party. Fifty cents for a shot, a dollar for a double. Grandma and Aunt Bee kept the liquor in the back room, T’s bedroom, where she wasn’t allowed to leave. T in her room, feet against the wall, in her underwear, staring at a black-and-white page, and Grandma or Aunt Bee would come in with a wino, sometimes that wino, and sell him a shot. The men always looked at T. She would crawl under the covers to avoid their staring, peek at their shapes through the burgundy and gold-flowered pattern of her bedsheets, hear their slurpy speech, their wet begs for more, “come on, give me a double,” and wish them away.
This man told T he would tie her to a tree. He sang “Sexual Healing” loudly in their front yard, winding his hips in her direction, pants almost to his ankles. Her mother, cousins, uncles, would run him off, but he would always find a way back. His red, glassy eyes watched her. She cried she hated him. They scolded her, told her he was playing. Don’t be stupid, he just playing. And even after he died, T thought she saw him, thought she smelled him, standing on the other side of her bedroom door, waiting to take her and tie her to the tree so he could wind his hips on her while singing “Sexual Healing.” Even now, she won’t listen to that song.
So she reads, and one day decides to pick up a diary. A new page, a new place, where he doesn’t exist, never existed. Except when she needs him to. Except when she’s writing about him and all the rest.
∗ ∗
The exit at Lewistown Road off Virginia I-95 used to be easier to navigate. Large Mack trucks barrel toward T in a turn-off lane wide enough to fit three of the monster-sized vehicles beside her in a row. If you take a left at the exit, you’ll pass the truck stop. The large orange and blue “76” sign approaching her on the highway gives T tingles in her stomach on her way down for Grandmother’s funeral.
She makes that left, goes to the stop sign, turns right onto Ashcake Road. Dead, golden grass, small houses with concrete rocks as gravel for driveways, homes made of cinderblocks with a semi parked out front line Ashcake. Egypt Road is on the right, but she almost passes by it. There used to a dilapidated white house at the start of the road. The white family who bought the land on Ashcake right next to Egypt claimed the particular spot was on their property. Claimed it was an eyesore. They didn’t know how long the house had been there. How long the house had belonged to Egypt and the people who lived on it, pedaled bikes down it, walked it to get to work. Those white people, they didn’t know, and they tore the house down before anyone could do anything about it. And now, the first sign that always greeted T when she came home is gone forever, and no one alive remembers who used to live there.
The absence of that house has only served T’s purpose of forgetting this road exists. T has refused to drive it since Grandma made them lose the house T grew up in. Before Grandma had a stroke and was placed in the nursing home, Ma offered to arrange for Habitat for Humanity to come in and remodel the house, or rather, tear it down and build a new one. T had given birth to twins, Mas’s first grandchildren. Ma wanted there to be a home in the country where they could come and stay, know their family, play with their cousins. All Grandma had to do was add Ma to the deed. Ma would take care of it. Grandma didn’t have to do a thing. Grandma said no. It was her house. And that was it.
It was this act of selfishness that stopped T from caring anymore, the reason T avoided visiting Grandma at the nursing home. Later, when Ma had to sell the house because Medicare would not allow Grandma to have any assets, Ma shared the bill of sale and the deed with T. Another great-aunt had “sold” the house to Grandma in the ’80s for ten dollars.
So, on the day of Grandma’s funeral, T is forced to drive by the house for the first time in a long time. The grass is a mile high. The house, a small rancher of no more than five hundred square feet with four rooms and a bathroom seems sunken, halfway hidden by the bush with only the upper half sticking out like the tip of a cat’s head peeking through the grass before it pounces. T tries not to imagine herself inside there, especially in the back room where she slept. But the memories are as real as the grass, although as faint as the house hidden within it. She fights the familiar comfort of this place, especially the joy wanting to creep inside her, wanting to attack the anger she desperately will not let go.
Here, in this memory, her grandmother sits on the living room couch, sharing some gossip she’s heard about a cousin. They are laughing. She hears her grandmother’s laugh, and it isn’t a cackle. No, too convenient. Her grandmother’s laugh is sly, knowing, indulgent, a smile you know once dripped of cognac and music and heavy eyelids, of being fabulous and young and adored and all the things T had felt inside herself at one point or another. Worldy. Grandma’s thoughts—smarter, wittier, faster than yours—always betrayed the smile and sound from her mouth through the slant and glisten in her eyes. Not sinister or nasty, despite the way it sounds. But admirable, the way a grown-ass woman ought to laugh, when you think about it.
T heard her laugh the most when her grandma’s brothers and sisters were around and the late-night parties included everyone on Egypt Road, or everyone in Brown Grove, the name this community of black folks calls itself. A whole generation is gone now with her grandma. All eleven Coleman children, Grandma, and her siblings, each one raised on that plot of land with the sunken house, are dead, evidence of their existence hiding in the woods of Egypt Road: their bones beneath the ground. T might cry for the first time since her grandma passed at the thought of this. But, she doesn’t.
T drives past Grandma’s down to her cousin’s house situated next to the suspended wooden platform that used to be attached to her Great-aunt’s home. Great-aunt lived in a trailer at the end of the road. Now only the porch remains. T does not want to be there. She sits in her car, only getting out to greet her family as they arrive, then returning to her safe space. She is afraid if she leaves this space, she will no longer be able to hold on to her anger. Anger is all that feels real to her. If she lets it go, the glass screen separating her emotions, tethering her to this third-person narrative, will shatter and break. She is not ready to feel anything more, not yet.
She stares at the thin air that used to be Great-aunt’s home. It’s better that the trailer is gone now instead of still standing like her grandmother’s house.
They had to sell Grandma’s house.
You know, she died the day before closing.
∗ ∗
There were stories about her grandma, how she lived her young life before she came back to the county in her late thirties because of diabetes. T believed the stories, especially the ones Grandma told herself. Right after Grandma lost her leg because of diabetic complications and bad circulation (like the rest of her brothers and sisters), she was still thin and had her looks. She drove her car, using one foot to pedal the gas and the brake on her shadow gray 1989 Nissan Datsun. Grandma was full of stories. Frankie Beverly from Caroline. You know he our cousin. We partied with Marvin Gaye. We danced all night at Studio 54. Ain’t no one have nothing on me!
T learned the power of a woman from watching the women in her family, and even with one leg, Grandma dated men half her age. She always seemed to come alive around young people. She offered drinks to T and her college friends when they came to visit, gossiped with T when they were alone—somehow the sick and shut-in knew everyone’s business. Dyed her hair honey-blond until it turned gray, jet-black until it fell out, then continued to perm it perpetually straight. Kept herself up until she finally gave up, when her self-esteem and selfishness collided, and she could not bear to be seen in public morbidly obese with only one leg.
She’d had her first child at sixteen by a married man twice her age. Left her children to be raised by her sisters or given up for adoption. Let that white man visit her during the day alone, and when he left, took his money. And, in her death, she seemingly left us all with nothing. Not even those stories (Frankie Beverly is from Philadelphia, you know, not Caroline County, Virginia).
Yet, T sought the seduction that thread through her grandmother’s stories. There were no Marvin Gayes or Frankie Beverlys, but spring break on South Beach, topless on the sand. Many boys, then later, many men she used and let use her because sex was all each other was worth to one another. Dancing and drinking herself into blackouts. Wandering the streets alone until she ended up in strange hotel rooms, waking the next day with only a headache, and no remorse. A self-indulgent fantasy, T now the antagonist. Her childhood diary lost, she had no way to escape except to live her own fiction.
∗ ∗
Cars and pick-up trucks crowd the church’s parking lot where the funeral will take place. Black suits tipped with freshly shaven brown faces dart from the ground. Braided crowns and ISOPLUS-gelled weaves cluster in cigarette-smoking hives near open car doors across the road. Sunglasses, sweating faces, laughter, do-gooding, hugs, all exposition to her story. Grandma is the main character today, whether you knew her or not. Whether she was the same character for you as she was for everyone else, or not.
T considers Grandma’s legacy while lined up in front of the church before the funeral. It is surprisingly packed. Behind her are Uncle’s children. One of his daughters has a son who looks so much like Uncle; he could’ve spat the boy out.
“You wait,” she says to her half-sisters, “see what happens when you have one.”
“That’s why I’m not having any kids,” one of the others responds.
T’s cousins, Uncle’s kids, comment on how they never met Grandma, didn’t know her. They know T’s mother. One of her cousins sounds as if she is about to say something smart or nasty about T’s mom, but another cousin silences her sister because T is standing right there.
This is the real story Grandma has left behind. One of loss, evidenced by the fact T’s first cousins don’t even recognize who she is standing less than two feet away, and by the fact Uncle is also within earshot of his own children talking shit.
They march into the church and sit. T is at the end ot the pew, glad to be alone. The pastor preaches about being right with God, and Grandma told him when he visited her in the hospital she wanted to be “right with God.” His implication is she wasn’t before. His sermon, in fact, implies a whole lot: Grandma was a sinner, she lived a fast life, and she had much to repent for. His voice rises and falls in the fake cadence of someone who imagines himself a great orator, but he is no Martin Luther King, no T. D. Jakes. He strains to pull emotion from the audience well before the eulogy even begins. Anger burns T’s face, her shoulders and arms. This is not his story to tell. The tale of Grandma’s indiscretions belongs to T and her cousins, to Ma and her uncles. How can this so-called man of God, who says the Almighty is the final word, sit at the altar of our Lord and Savior and announce Grandma’s sins to the world? T wishes she were sitting next to her mother right now. She would squeeze her mom’s hand, stare her in the eye, trying to communicate her thoughts about this mess, then they would shake their heads in unison at the ridiculousness.
But, Grandma’s three children are sitting in the first two rows far from T. Ma is in the front pew crying. Behind her sits Uncle, a man who has done hard time. He also cries. Next to him is Grandma’s other son, the one she officially gave up for adoption. He cries too. Grandma never raised him, in fact, she only raised Uncle, for the most part, yet all of her children weep. This unnerves T, surprises and shames her. Did she not have the story right? Yes, the pastor was wrong in putting Grandma’s sins out there in the world, but still, even still, T knew the man’s account of the woman wasn’t too far off. And in that case, what was there to cry about? Was there something about her grandma, about this character, she missed?
In the days before the funeral, when T and Ma were working out the issues caused by Grandma’s unexpected passing, Ma mentioned she believed Grandma had died the day before the house closed on purpose. T laughed, thinking her mother was referring to her grandmother’s unwavering stinginess. And in a way, she was. “You know your grandma was always tight with a dollar,” her mother’s voice light, “that’s why she died before anyone else could get her money. She made sure her children could keep it.”
∗ ∗
One of my favorite scenes in the movie Fight Club is when Edward Norton’s character violates the fourth wall and speaks directly to the camera about all the ways Tyler Durden fantastically does not give a shit. Previously, the unnamed narrator recounts his life inside what the viewer imagines is his head. We hear a voice speaking, telling us what is happening on screen while the person who is talking acts out what the voice is saying. The other characters on screen behave as if they cannot hear this voice, which mimics how real life thoughts occur, and therefore, we as the viewer understand this to be the recounting of a story in someone’s mind or, another possibility, to someone who is off camera. Just not directly to us. This is how the first person works in a film. And when we read a story or essay, never do we consider the narrator is speaking to us. Nor do we recognize our participation in the telling of his story because, even as we watch a story or even as we read a story, we imagine it is being told to the character’s unnamed friend, someone other than ourselves. To recognize the story is being told to you spoils your anonymity, the voyeurism involved in watching a movie inside a dark theater or enjoying a good read while in bed.
But, when he turns directly to the camera, to those watching, and speaks, we are forced to acknowledge the performance of the previous narration. We are watching a show. And we are part of the show. No more hiding.
I find this quote from Seymour Chatman, film and literary critic who studied narrative and narrative structure, illuminating to my personal ruminations on why I write. He said, “When I enter the fictional contract, I add another self: I become the implied reader.” It bothered me, truly saddened me how I was more concerned about writing about my grandmother dying than I was about her actual death. And when I sat to write the story, an unrealized grief over my lack of empathy drew me to the third person. So different from our self-aware narrator from Fight Club, yet he turned out to have multiple personalities. It is all so confusing, this being a writer and being a human being, and wishing your real life weren’t true sometimes. But, as Chatman suggests, it boils down to the audience and the fictional contract. If the narratee and the implied reader coalesce, if we are narrating our own stories, a story unique to our own lives, a story in which only we can know the real meaning, one in which we know only the past, present, and future, then, who are we writing for? Why does my own story sound better in the third person?
I thought this essay was about the question of why I write, primarily why I deflect emotions by writing instead of feeling them. Oftentimes it takes the ability to detach from a situation before I know how I feel about it. But in the course of considering whether or not I write because I want to feel or because I want to forget, I’ve at least identified who my ideal reader is. She is black. She is educated. My reader is of any age, but whatever age, she is mature. She is not easily offended, nor is she a doormat. She understands my references; I don’t have to explain myself. She reads not only for entertainment but for enlightenment, so she may go “huh” at the end of an essay and run her fingers through her natural hair and think, “ain’t that some shit.”
My cousin Dawn is called for a solo toward the end of the service. Before she sings, she talks to the audience. Thirty years ago, on this same date, her father, Grandma’s brother, was the first Coleman to die. This day, we honor the life of the last. We are family, she says. As she talks, my vision goes blurry. My face heats.
How long had I held on to anger? Like the white house at the beginning of Egypt, it gave me a road map, a scion to my old life. Yet my grandmother was dead, and I was the only person angry. Yes, upset with her. But, also mad at myself for acting as if I weren’t like her. I am self-absorbed, selfish, calculating, sly, writing this essay an act of selfish indulgence. I wanted to resemble my great-aunt, but I know I am a spitting image of my grandma. Is this essay for her then? Instead of an implied reader, instead of myself? Maybe she is the reason I write.
During Dawn’s solo, I stop ignoring the coffin a few feet in front of me. I never honestly acknowledged the nursing-home scene was real. It was part of the essay, the story I began crafting the moment my mother called and said Grandma wasn’t long for this earth. To me, Grandma was still lying in her nursing-home bed, waiting for us all to come and visit her—even now it’s hard not to imagine her there instead of nowhere I can see. I break through my own fourth wall. I stop seeing myself in the third person. And, I finally weep for my grandma.
