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Show disappointments and regrets wear you down like water on stoneJHer drinking grew gradually, like my father's, like his father's, like so many, growing in exact proportion to the water beating down. Everything about my grandmother was severe, the way she pulled her hair into a chignon, the line where her eye shadow ended, her tolerance for noise. She spoke in complete sentences, handed out French expressions as if they were mints, and smoked Pall Malls by the carton. My guess is that she spent her life in a state of shock, painfully aware of the cliches she embodied. What she wanted, I imagine, was the past, the years during the war when soldiers hungered for the company of beautiful women and dancing with men was a wartime duty. Even though she was married to my grandfather and had my infant mother to care for at home, what sustained her in the sleepy towns of South Dakota in the war years were the dances held for the soldiers home on leave, dances where men spun her twenty-two- inch waist and watched her scarf flutter like a flag. Late at night, after the baby was in bed, she would slip out to the dance hall, a building aflame against the Black Hills, and dance the Lindy until dawn. In fact, the night my grandfather came home from the war, a soldier having served his duty, it was to an empty house. He set down his duffel bag, fixed himself a drink, and waited in the living room for his young wife to return. When she entered the room sometime after midnight, he thought he was being visited by an angel, having forgotten just how beautiful she was. Only later did he consider where she had been or begin making plans of his own. When my parents were in the Philippines, my mother received a letter that would change her life. Her father had fled to Mexico with the maid and harbored no intentions 38 |