Some More Truth

Remember when I told some truth? I'm doing it again.

***
My grandmother, who is dead now, who died two months before I got married, just before the seams came unstitched, just in time, her name was Ruthie and that's what we called her, not Grammy or Gramma or Nana or Tootoo, but Ruthie. We called her by her name.

Ruthie loved sirens from cop cars and fire engines. If she heard a wail of adventure, she'd snuff out one of the two butts she had smoldering and race to her car, a Ford Bronco with blue shag carpet on the floor boards. Sometimes she'd take me.

Oh damn, she'd say. A false alarm.

Ruthie loved storms most of all. When one would whip up in the summer, she'd cover me and my cousins in plastic tarps and wrap us in rope onto a wicker couch that sat on her partially covered porch so we could feel the fury of a storm on the ocean. She was sober then, she was sober all my life, but when I got drunk for the first time, I wondered: could anyone be that passionate -- sober?

She could be. She was.

She tied us to a bench, on a porch, because it was awesome in the most literal sense and because we wanted her to. She untied us before the wind ripped off our faces.

The rope was to keep us from washing away, my cousins and I said. But Ruthie knew better: we would never wash away. The rope was just a candle for a ghost story. It made the thing more scary, the danger more authentic, and when we shuffled inside, wet and brave and confident, I bet she snubbed her cigarette out, self-satisfied and proud.  

(I am only guessing at the cigarette part, because I don't know for sure. I don't know a lot of things for sure. Memory and reality rarely meet. Sometimes one pulls for the other.)

Ruthie was a matriarch who ruled with a sponge. She was an engineer and an artist. She was function in a whirlwind of her own chaos. Her capacity to charm us was second only to her ability to know us.

It all collided in the gifts she gave. Like the sewing trunks filled to the brim and the blank cassette tapes (twelve of  them!) and the giant, massive Christmas cookie dough ball wrapped in Saran, wrapped in a bow, tempting me and my cousin to devour in one sitting. Her gifts always had a note on the outside that hinted what was inside: "You will 'ache' to leave this behind."

She was a drunk for most of my mother's life. Her husband was a drunk too. They got sober shortly after I was born -- in a city on another ocean with other storms that had different names, very far away from them both.  While Ruthie's daughter was biding her time with a man whose promise was bigger than any typhoon, I was being born at the exact stroke of midnight and choices were made.

Years later, after I left for boarding school and my parents owned my grandmother's house, my mother and father would tie themselves together with another rope, trudge off the porch against the wind and surf that had already eaten up half the sea wall and most of the lawn to get a better look at the storm. It was a hurricane that time. They would soon retreat for higher ground through waist-high water, a soggy rope between them, binding them, with the potential to kill them both. I wasn't there, but I saw the pictures and mostly what I saw is a version of a three-legged race that would eventually, metaphorically, go unbearably wrong.

Ruthie died before her daughter's husband failed her daughter.

She tied us to a wicker couch with rope so we would see how beautiful lightening can look on the ocean and how ferocious the wind can be when it forces boats into submission. I'd like to think she did it because she knew how foolish we would be the older we got, how over confident and stupidly secure we'd become: our legacy, our heritage, our genetic fucking code.

I'd like to think she was bearing us up for what we could not control, for what was bigger than us, as if her version of the storm could steel us from everything else. 

It didn't. It couldn't.