By Kenley Ellis
/ Nonfiction /
The story of my grandmother did not always make peoples’ eyes wrinkle in pity. It was one just like any other, filled with sunshine and long days and too many sweets. My limited memory offers an image from the first summer: my parents waving goodbye and driving away down a dirt road, saying, “We’ll see you in a week”; my brother and me looking first at each other, then at our grandparents’ house by the lake, our imaginations spinning with endless TV and no bedtimes.
My grandfather built that house himself. It’s this tiny place, three rooms with a deck the size of the house. Back then, though, that deck was yet unbuilt: just a couple of planks of rotting wood. A narrow staircase that I wasn’t allowed to walk alone led down to the garden, which was Waigong’s real pride and joy. The garden was an enchanting place. It was always a mystery to me, how one small, aging man could raise so much life—cucumbers, raspberries, tomatoes, squash, pumpkins sometimes, and more I’m sure I’m forgetting. Perhaps it was my own small size that added to the grandeur of the place. Every afternoon I would slide on my Skechers and venture into the raspberry bushes, which towered over my head. From under the leaves I could hear my grandparents arguing behind the screen door.
“Why do you let her go in there with all the bugs and the dirt?” my grandmother would complain in Shanghainese, a language that has always sounded to me like gagging. I could imagine her scrubbing at an invisible stain somewhere on the spotless counter, then turning and wringing her hands in the old wash towel.
“She’s completely fine.”
“Yeah? Then when her mother comes back asking why her daughter’s sick you get to be the one to say, ‘I fed her the grimy food from my garden and told Shan that she’s completely fine.’”
I would hide my head in the bushes, and the day would carry on.
* * *
My grandfather had two great loves in his life—his garden and his fishing. Over time his priorities would change, but a decade ago this truth was quite apparent.
This is not to say that Landon and I were not loved by him as well. We felt the thrum of Waigong’s love as sure as the swarms of mosquitoes in those lake summers. It was in his pancakes, in his building us a tire swing, in his bone-crushing hugs and, of course, his offers to pull out our wiggly teeth. Most of all I remember feeling his love when he brought us along to fish.
In Minnesota, catching one’s first fish is a rite of passage. Past that, though, it’s about how often you keep up the habit, and how you deal with the results. My grandfather preferred to eat his fish, gutting and cleaning them in a grimy sink in the unfinished basement as Landon and I watched in horror. He sliced them open deftly, avoiding all of the bones, no matter how small, no matter the fish. Sunfish, trout, walleye; practice turned them all to butter in his hands. As a result, the basement was doomed to smell perpetually of scales that never quite washed down the drain.
Each morning the three of us would troop over to the dock in the freezing sunrise to fish. Occasionally we would take a boat out, but sadly another one of my grandfather’s loves, fierce independence, coupled with his impressive frugality, got in the way of that, because none of his fixer-upper boats would run. We’d always end these morning adventures by dragging ourselves back to shore with the wooden oars we’d long learned to keep handy.
Most days we would fish off the dock. Or rather, Waigong would try to, and Landon and I would squabble and scare the fish away. One of these mornings we were particularly quarrelsome. Landon had recently received a Swiss army knife from his Cub Scout troop, and I was feeling left out. I wanted to play tag, but all he wanted to do was sit and polish his new toy, a toy that for some reason, he wouldn’t share.
“You never want to play with me,” I whined, pulling on his arm. Landon shook me off, looking annoyed.
“This is important,” he said. “If I don’t keep this knife very sharp, it could be dangerous. A dull knife is more dangerous than a sharp one. Dad told me.”
“I know that,” I said. “I’m not stupid.”
“You look stupid when you hang off of me like that.” He had an infuriating grin.
“Stop it!” I said, my eyes brimming with tears. “You’re so mean!” And I went to hit him on the arm, but I was clumsy and angry and five years old, and I missed in my cloudy frustration.
I remember my grandfather shouting at my brother, and Landon’s eyes wide as he jumped back from my blood as it spattered on the ground. I remember that Waigong tried to hug me, which painted his white T-shirt dark red. At some point I tore from him and ran back to the house, where my grandmother fussed over me at the sink and my arm disappeared from view. White gauze took its place. “What even happened?” Waipo asked, her voice pitchy with panic and an unfamiliar tongue.
“I hit Landy’s knife,” I said, looking at her pinched face in the mirror. “On accident.”
“Okay,” she said softly to me. Then she whirled on my grandfather, switched to her own language. Screaming in Shanghainese. “What the hell were you doing?”
“Fishing,” he said. I knew his defensive tone. I squirmed under my grandmother’s grip, and wished I was under the raspberries.
“Fishing? You mean you touched her arm when your hands were covered in fish?”
Before we reached the house, Waigong had attached a few haphazard Band-Aids to my wound.
“What did you want me to do?” my grandfather yelled. “Wash my hands? With what? Lake water?”
“Hand sanitizer!”
“Hand sanitizer? Who brings hand sanitizer down to the docks?”
“Someone who cares about his grandchildren!”
At the time, I was sure that my grandmother was right. But several years later I began to think, right, who does bring hand sanitizer down to the docks?
* * *
After the knife, I began to spend mornings sitting at the kitchen table, reading. I loved carrying chapter books around with me and calling them just that – chapter books. People would ask me, “What are you reading?” and I would answer, “A chapter book.”
Waipo wasn’t concerned with the books I was reading; she couldn’t douse a paperback in Clorox. Anyway, she was more focused on making the oatmeal. Like her, the process was tidy and methodical. She would pour Quaker’s 1-minute oats into a pale blue bowl and stir in too much milk. Then, she would microwave the bowl for far longer than one minute, trying (and failing) to evaporate the milk, and when it came out, she would sprinkle raisins on top instead of sugar because, though she had a powerful sweet tooth, she was afraid that it would rot the few teeth she had left. I would always ask for sugar, though, and because I was good about washing my hands, she let me spoon it out myself.
In this reliable manner, the oatmeal turned out the same every time. It would be mushy and pale, the raisins dry. I could feel the individual sugar granules crunching between my teeth and hear the metal spoon click against the bowl. That was another part of the oatmeal, to be eaten with a flat spoon instead of the Chinese soup spoons we used for everything else. Other than this clicking the kitchen was always silent during our morning ritual. Waipo and I never really spoke the same language. So I would sit and watch her, the plastic lace of her doilies imprinting onto my elbows, and we would listen to mosquitoes buzz.
Later, this moment would come back to me. The silence and the table and the counter, except in this version I was the one standing at that counter, and the pale blue bowls gathered dust in the cupboard as I stood stirring congee in a mug. Waipo, who sat at the table, watched me mutely from her wheelchair. As I lifted the spoon to her trembling lips, I would recall the times she used to shatter the silence to scold me for spilling food, and I would ache for those times, for a moment in which I could be sure that everything would be the same next morning.
* * *
Two years after the knife, my grandmother suffered a stroke on a sidewalk in Dan Dong, China. Landon and I watched as she collapsed. He grabbed my arm, solemnly ending our round of tag, and we were quiet as our uncles folded her into a taxi. My mother flew in a couple of days later and told us gently that these sorts of things can happen when someone doesn’t sleep for years, instead staying up till dawn every night, scrubbing at invisible stains.
* * *
The house by the lake doesn’t hold the magic it used to. We don’t shout or laugh or cry after skinning our knees on the sidewalk. It’s all quiet now. After Waipo passed, my grandfather left the house and drove his minivan around the country for several weeks. When he returned, we bought him a dog. He didn’t like the dog very much and gave it away. He still likes to fish, but my pink plastic princess rod is long gone, and the raspberries are short. There is oatmeal in the cupboard, but no raisins. The enormous deck he built so my grandmother could spend time outside in her wheelchair was only barely used. Now it sits there, a hollow chrysalis, placid and empty.
In recent summers, it feels like most of our sadness stems from her absence. Still, I wonder sometimes about the other silences in that old house. I think that as my brother and I grew comfortable in the quiet, we lost whatever we had to say.