We Are Okay(13)

I used to wonder what kinds of letters he wrote. I’d caught glimpses of old poetry books stacked on his desk. I wondered if he quoted them. Or if he wrote his own verses, or stole lines and passed them off as his own.

And who was this Birdie? She must have been the sweetest of ladies. Waiting for Gramps’s letters. Composing her own to him. I pictured her in a chair on a veranda, sipping iced teas and writing with perfect penmanship. When she wasn’t writing to my grandfather, she was probably training bougainvillea vines or painting watercolor landscapes.

Or maybe she was wilder than that. Maybe she was the kind of grandma who cursed and went out dancing, who had a devious spark in her eyes that would rival Gramps’s. Maybe she would beat him at poker, smoke cigarettes with him late into the night once they found a way to be together instead of several states apart. Once I wasn’t holding him back anymore.

Sometimes the thought of that kept me up at night, gave me a sick feeling in my stomach. If it weren’t for me, maybe he’d leave San Francisco for the Rocky Mountains. Besides me, all he had here were Jones and Freeman and Bo, and he didn’t even seem to like them much anymore. They still played cards like they always did, but there was less laughter among them.

“May I interrupt your reading? I got something very special today,” Gramps said.

He was back in the living room, smiling at me.

“Show me.”

“Okay,” he said. “But I’m afraid you won’t be able to touch it. It’s fragile.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“You just sit here, and I’ll hold it up and show you.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Now, Sailor,” he said. “Don’t do that. Don’t be like that. This is something special.”

He looked pained, and I was sorry.

“I’ll only look,” I said.

He nodded.

“I’m excited,” I said.

“I’ll get it. Wait here.”

He came out with fabric folded in his hands, a deep green, and he let it unfurl and I saw it was a dress.

I cocked my head.

“Birdie’s,” he said.

“She sent you her dress?”

“I wanted to have something from her. I told her to surprise me. Does it count as a gift if you ask for it?”

I shrugged. “Sure.”

Something struck me about the dress. The straps were scalloped; white and pink embroidery decorated the waist.

“It looks like something a young woman would wear.”

Gramps smiled.

“Such a sharp girl,” he said approvingly. “This dress is from when she was young. She said she didn’t mind sending it, because she isn’t as slight as she used to be. It doesn’t fit her and it’s not appropriate for a lady of her age.”

He took another long look at the dress, and then he folded the sides in and rolled it down from the top so that it never left his hands. He hugged it to his chest.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

Later, while he washed the dinner dishes and I dried, I asked, “Gramps, why don’t you ever talk about Birdie with the guys?”

He grinned at me. “Wouldn’t want to rub it in,” he said. “Not everyone can have what Birdie and I have.”



A few days later, I was on the floor in Mabel’s living room, looking through photo albums. “I was not the most beautiful newborn,” Mabel said.

“What are you talking about? You were perfect. A perfect little grasshopper. How about that one!” Ana pointed to a photograph of Mabel wrapped in a white blanket, yawning.

“I want something more . . . alert.”

All the seniors had been tasked with submitting a baby photo for the yearbook, and the deadline was soon. Eleanor, that year’s editor, grew closer to a nervous breakdown with each day that passed. Her voice over the intercom during the daily announcements had become shrill. “Please,” she’d say. “Please just email me something soon.”

“Have you chosen yours yet?” Ana asked, returning to the sofa to get back to the drawing she was doing.

“We don’t have any.”

She turned to a new page in her sketchbook.

“None?”

“I don’t think so. He’s never shown me anything.”

“May I draw you?”

“Really?”

“Just a ten-minute sketch.”

She patted the sofa cushion next to her and I sat. She studied my face before she touched charcoal to paper. She looked at my eyes, my ears, the slant of my nose, my cheekbones and my neck and the tiny freckles across my cheeks that no one ever noticed. She reached out and untucked my hair from behind one of my ears so that it fell forward.

She began to draw, and I looked at her as if I were drawing her, too. Her eyes and her ears and the slant of her nose. The flush in her cheeks and her laugh lines. The flecks of lighter brown in the darker brown of her eyes. She’d turn to her page and then look up at some part of me. I found myself waiting, each time she glanced down, for her to look at me again.

“Okay, I found two,” Mabel said. “This one says I’m ten months and I finally look like a human. This one is less baby, more toddler, but it’s pretty cute, if I do say so myself.”