Learning Curve

Italy invaded 44 Fenwood Grove Road when I was in eighth grade. My grandmother, Nona, lived with us for nearly five years. She looked like a little old lady, but she wasn’t. Nona was a manipulative bitch.

She followed us around—stalking is probably a better word—and she didn’t look, she stared. When I wanted to leave the house, I had to plan around a half hour of questions. “Where are you going?” “Who will be there?” “Will her parents be home?” “When will you be back?” and the all-important: “Will you be home for dinner?” As a babysitter, those were normal questions—but I was well past the age of babysitting. I was thirteen at the time of the invasion, but the questions continued well past my seventeenth birthday.

Nona threw tantrums and stomped her feet when she didn’t get her way. Rarely did she yell, she preferred to use words like “No!” and “Mean!” Fighting with her was fighting with a six year old. “Don’t call me stupid!” she’d snap, and bang her wineglass on the table. “Don’t treat me like a child!” She wasn’t dumb; she was smart, cunning even. She played dumb to get her way.

Although she feigned interest in a lot of things, Nona cared about acting. Every night, we heard the same stories about acting. Nona’s delivery never changed. “When I worked at Stoffer’s, I met the man himself. He told me I had a face for the silver screen,” she’d say. Or, “My brother painted that picture of the girl playing baseball, that’s me, even then I was noticeable! He painted it from his memory!”

She didn’t tell the stories to tell stories; she told the stories to hear them out loud. I used to enjoy her tales, but when she told them to keep me from leaving the room, they became unbearable.

Our family lived in a two-story house, but I was never alone. No matter what room I was in, Nona was there. She asked questions. She ordered me to change the channel. She demanded we all be home for dinner every night, which would be served promptly at six. Despite the fact that she didn’t do anything to help, she wanted to be in charge. We’d sit down for dinner with Dad at one end of the table, and Nona at the other. She wouldn’t say a single word. She expected us to compliment her on the cooking she didn’t do, and then she watched us talk, eyes and ears sharp. Dinner wasn’t a bonding experience; it was a situation report.

I got argumentative for the sake of being argumentative. “But why don’t you like Rachel Ray?” I demanded in my best “offended” teenager voice. I didn’t care about Rachel Ray, but sometimes it felt good to pick fights. I tried to control my temper. I’d remind myself “she’s old; she doesn’t know better.”

We both knew, though, that she did know better. Nona had always been nosey and overbearing. She was always manipulative. When I came home after school, before she lived with us, she called five minutes after I was supposed to walk in the door. If the bus was late, or I went to the bathroom and missed her call, she would drive over. She called twelve times a day before we moved in. I thought the stalking would tone down once she lived with us, but I was mistaken.

I knew she was wrong, and that it was ok to be angry, but I was guilty all the time. I was her favorite. I still didn’t like her. She delighted in my stories and my “wit.” When I met nurses or doctors, they always looked at me and smiled. They knew all about me. She bragged about me.

I bitched about her.

Living with Nona didn’t get easier. She stomped her feet less, but dragged them more. She lost interest in everything. She was more depressed and more argumentative. Nona didn’t want to die because she was afraid, but she was over the whole “living” thing too. She’d sit in “her chair” for hours and stare at a blank TV. She was the living dead.

Aside from driving us all crazy, having Nona around put a lot of strain on the rest of the family’s relationship. My mom got angry, my dad drank more, my brother never left his room, and I was barely home. I found excuses not to have friends over—when I did, Nona would lie in her room and listen to our conversations. Mom, Dad, Robert, and I were uncomfortable. We itched for an excuse for something else to think about.

Nona, however, made sure that she was always on our minds. When I complained to friends, they didn’t understand. She seemed so cute and feeble to them. I’m sure they sometimes thought I was a bitch. I started to question the way I felt about Nona. Maybe she was innocent after all.

Gradually, she became weaker and so did we. Mom couldn’t be home all the time, she worked two jobs, and dad had shattered his ankle at work and was laid up for several months. I was only seventeen, barely capable of taking care of myself, let alone my dying (bitchy) grandmother.

Nona went to the hospital first. Then the nursing home. I visited when mom made me, but not often. Then she died.

My friends and I were sleeping in the living room that night, curled up on the floor and in blankets. The phone rang at three in the morning, and I knew. I answered, and told my parents the nursing home was calling. I stayed on the line. I sat on the stairs and listened to a sympathetic woman tell my dad that his mother died. I felt relief. Then I went back downstairs and finished the movie. The first time I told someone Nona had died was almost three weeks later.

“…you stole your Nona’s jewelry?” my friend asked me. I told her that Nona didn’t need it. My friend asked me why.

“She died.”

And so began the “I’m so sorry” and “when?” and “do you need anything?” But all I could think was “why are you sorry?” and “a while ago” and “no, not really.” Nona had been a burden. I was relieved, so I didn’t know how to respond to the people who thought I should be grieving.

My relationship with Nona hadn’t been all cookies and sunshine. She never baked, she only used syrup from the bottle, and the pancakes I remember her making me in my youth were Bisquick. She was also the most passive-aggressive person I’ve ever met.

But she was mine. My Nona. Her name was Rose-Marie, but not really. She had some pretty, exotic Italian name that had been Americanized. She probably could have won Oscars, or at least Tonys, had she pursued her acting career. She used to be a Stoffer’s waitress. Once, she was on an episode of the television show Route 66. Her brother was an artist. Her father was an orphan in Italy, but he was probably the bastard child of a Lord in the village. She used to talk to herself in the kitchen when my dad was little, but she was just practicing her lines.

I’ve known all of this for six years, probably most of it for eighteen, but I never really understood how all of it became a person.

Recently, I’ve been getting ready for college. This has involved a lot of moving things around, and tearing things apart, and trying to go through my clothing. I needed more space to organize, so I began moving into her dressers. They were upstairs in the old master bedroom—her room—which I’d taken to calling “the spare room.” It sounded cool, like my house was a lot bigger.

As I was shuffling sheets (why did she keep sheets in drawers?) and sweaters from one dresser to the next to make room for my stuff, I stumbled upon jewelry. Most of it was cheap, fake, costume stuff. Some of it was kind of neat. A lot of it was colorful and I thought the bracelets were beautiful.

I wore two of those bracelets to graduation, and a pair of earrings to the after-party. For the first time in my life, I felt close to Nona.

My Nona.

For the first time in six years, several months after she died, I understood that the resentment I’d felt for her at the end of her life didn’t mean that I didn’t love her. It didn’t mean that I hated her. It simply meant that I was human, that I’d been hurting, and that she’d hurt me. That didn’t mean she didn’t love me either. She may have been a manipulative bitch whose presence confused me and destroyed the stability of my family, but she was mine. My grandmother.

When I was little, she used to read me stories. When I got older, she let me read her the ones I wrote.

So this one I wrote just for her. This is our story. It’s bumpy, and confusing. It’s filled with a lot of hurt and anger. I didn’t cry when she died, I still haven’t, and I don’t think I will. The catharsis that I needed wasn’t getting over her death. It was understanding her life—all of it. Not just the parts I was there for.

I’ve never been great with understanding history, but I’ve begun to understand ours. This is that story. The one I didn’t have a chance to tell her. The one that's taken me almost a year to write. It’s not an apology—she was a manipulative bitch, after all. It’s a compromise. No one gets everything right. Not even Nona.

Not even me.