Breach
by Susanna Space
My mother’s mother was tall and slender. Like a tulip, I thought, pink lipstick a fleshy bloom around her soft mouth. The sounds that came out of that mouth were soft too, younger than her age, as if the muscles that produced them had been underused, saved for something better. She was quick to smile, but never too widely, her rare laughter a small bell ringing. She dressed in a way that was feminine without being fussy, Katherine Hepburn-style corduroys hemmed to a half-inch above the spotless floors like expertly measured curtains, the brim of her sun hat folded against her French twist. She cooked roasts and trays of brussels sprouts. Before we ate, when the dining room that looked out on the bunch grass and clusters of trees swelled with the aroma of beef and herbs, the warm pillows of her fingertips rested against mine as she breathed the prayer that hardly sounded like words: Olordmakeustrulythankfulforthisfoodandeveryotherblessing. PardonoursinsandsaveusforChristourredeemer’ssake. Amen.
She and my grandfather moved to the Connecticut woods around the time of my parents’ divorce. Hillyndale Road was a fresh, stripeless curl of blacktop through a dense grove of pine and oak, the house brand new and modern, sliding glass doors open to the grass, the trees, the milky sky. The air inside smelled clean and nutty. A fireplace built into the living room wall turned on with a switch.
My grandfather was the one my mother resembled with his olive skin and sharp features, his darting gaze and quick wit. He wore bow ties and suspenders, and he loved riddles and games. He and I often played together. Checkers, crazy eights, rock, paper, scissors, whatever we played, we played for the World Championship. He nearly always won. Sometimes Granddad called Grandmom his girlfriend, and at this the pink lips turned upward in a coy smile.
My mother had bought a house not far from the apartment with a woman in her dancing group. The affair was over. At her new house she was restless, eager for a walk to the park or a drive to the ice-skating rink or a bike ride to the natural foods store to pick up a block of cheddar or eggs to scramble. But on Hillyndale Road she seemed comfortable in a way she wasn’t anywhere else. Maybe it was the familiar order of Grandmom and Granddad’s lives, a predictability she knew from her childhood. Maybe it was the relief of being with her children without having to figure out what we were going to do together or say to each other.
My father was rarely spoken of there. When he did come up it was like someone had sworn or spat. There was little talk of my and my brother’s new life with my father; my mother’s new work and house went unmentioned, as if nothing had ever happened. But privately Granddad called my father a queer duck. Now I wondered whether, in leaving my father, my mother had shed the weight of a person who’d never quite measured up, whose tentative nature and love of Bach and Telemann was no match for Granddad’s authority and command.
But then too, maybe putting my father down softened the blow of the divorce for my grandfather. Perhaps now the superiority he’d always felt was his due helped him cope with what my mother had done. Susie, his firstborn, the straight-A student, the Grace Kelly girl, was not only divorced. She had left her husband and children, and now, nearly 40 years old, she lived with another woman. Shameful, he might have thought sitting beside Grandmom at the episcopalian church, to abandon her children. It was against God. Shameful, Grandmom would whisper to me. I was in college stopping by for dinner in the powder-blue dining room of their retirement home. Between her prayer and the pudding, I had said something about my mother, our lives back then, offhandedly. My grandfather was distracted for a moment, and Grandmom, those pink lips, that fleshy bloom, leaned in to say the word to me.
The alliance with her father surely comforted my mother, even if she knew it was a breach of the new rules, the ones that made it possible to leave her husband. Granddaddy’s loyalty may have been a necessity, even: he had saved his money, held stock in a large corporation. She would use some of it to secure her freedom in those early years after the divorce. Together on the sofa after dinner warmed by the blue flame or buttering bread as he chopped mushrooms at precise angles, he and my mother performed a wedding in reverse, the bride stepping away from her groom, locking arms with her father, and marching backward up the aisle.
Susanna Space is a writer of literary essays and memoir. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Longreads, The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.