24: The door at the top of the stairs . . .
Little Follies, “Do Clams Bite?” Chapter 2 begins
2
THE DOOR AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS was fitted with glass panes from top to bottom, and Great-grandmother had hung a gauzy curtain over it. Through the curtain I could see Great-grandmother sitting in a chair by the front windows, where she was always sitting when I came to visit, carving a coconut with a kitchen knife. I knocked lightly, politely, and then turned the glass doorknob.
“Hello, Grandma,” I said.
“Well, Peter,” she said. Her voice was small and thin, but strong, and she had a habit of clicking her teeth in the pauses, so that she sounded as if she were knitting while she spoke. “Are you here again already?”
“Yes, here I am. I came for the weekend.”
“Are you going out on the boat?”
“Yes,” I said. I felt my lower lip tremble a bit. “But,” I added, by way of assuring myself that I still had time, that I’d be intact at least while I was here, at the top of the house, “I’m going to visit you for a while first.”
Her rooms were furnished with odds and ends, some from rooms where she had lived before, some just things that Grandfather had found here and there, things that had been in other people’s rooms, things with pasts that hadn’t included her. She didn’t quite trust these strangers among her furnishings. When Grandfather got her a chaise longue from somewhere or other, she had draped it with a worn rug that she knew well so that she wouldn’t have it staring her in the face all the time, and once she had had me drag a floor lamp into a closet because she didn’t like having it look over her shoulder when she read her mail. The only recent acquisitions she felt comfortable with were the gifts of other children who visited her. She had many little friends around the neighborhood, children I didn’t know, since at that time I lived all the way across town, away from the water, and so didn’t see any of these children at school. I visited only occasionally and didn’t have much time away from the adults when I was visiting. Festoons of paper chains hung over every door and window, and her shelves and tables were crammed with tissue paper carnations in juice glasses and jelly jars, paper baskets, necklaces of painted macaroni, and rows of knickknacks made from clamshells. But pride of place went to the coconuts carved to represent Leroys.
(I mean here not the nut itself, the part of the coconut that one buys at a supermarket and belabors with a hammer and an old screwdriver in an attempt, usually unsuccessful, to draw the milk off cleanly before whacking the damn thing to pieces to get at the meat. The nut has a singularly tough and woody shell that nobody’s great-grandmother could carve with a kitchen knife. I mean instead the complete fruit, the outer layer of which, the husk, is, when mature, dark brown, fibrous, and easily carved.)
The carving of these coconuts was a project that she had begun before I could remember, but it was unlikely that it would ever be completed, since she not only kept extending its scope to include more and more distant relatives but regularly revised the carvings she had already done, working to bring the features closer to what she remembered—or supposed—them to be. She had completed heads of all the major Leroys that she had any memory of, and was now filling out the ranks of minor cousins and people related only by marriage; she had not yet carved a head of herself. Whenever I visited, she would quiz me about the exploits of these Leroys, and I had gotten them all down pretty well, but there were gaps in my understanding of what I repeated for her, enough gaps so that the Leroy history as Great-grandmother presented it seemed to me a perilously leaky affair that was likely to sink if the weather got at all rough. Often, when I was reciting for her, I employed a narrative analogue to a widely used technique for keeping afloat a clamboat with a soft bottom, a boat that leaks more or less all the time. One takes the boat out to the clam flats and there crawls under the hull and pokes sawdust into any visible gaps and, for good measure, gives the whole bottom a good coating. Then one drinks a few beers or digs a few clams while the sawdust floats into the cracks and swells with water, stopping, or at least slowing, the leaks. This is not a permanent solution, of course, merely a stop-gap measure, but some boats have been kept afloat this way for years. The hull provides the form, the sawdust the substance, and the result is an artful deception: the illusion of a solid hull, an illusion so substantial that the boat floats. Sometimes, when I was reciting for Great-grandmother, I threw quite a lot of sawdust into the gaps, but she rarely seemed to notice, or if she did, she didn’t seem to mind.
Soon, I knew, she would ask me if I wanted a candy. She kept a bowl of hard candies on the table beside her, but the first time that I had tried to take one I had discovered that they were all stuck together. I had tugged on one, then another, and they had all come out in a cluster. I had stood with all the candies in my hand, wondering what on earth to do next. I thought for a moment of smacking them on the edge of the table to break them apart, but I could tell that that would not be the right thing to do up here, so I set the cluster back in the bowl, and popped a candy-size ball of air into my mouth. For the rest of my visit, I made elaborate sucking noises and poked my tongue into my cheek to make it seem that I was eating one of the candies. The deception seemed to work, but I learned from it a truth about lies: once we have injected any little lie into our relationship with someone, it has to be maintained. I now went through this candy-ball charade on every visit.
“Take a candy, Peter,” she said.
“Mmmm, thank you,” I said. “Cherry—my favorite.”
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