I spent the night before her funeral in Meridian, Mississippi, with my mother-in-law, and in the morning made the short drive to Jackson. There was a rainstorm on the way that made the last leg of the journey harrowing, but just as I got to town the weather cleared and cooled. I picked up Barry and his wife, Emily, and the three of us went to the church together, a full two hours before the service was scheduled to begin. We went that early because we were certain it was the only way we would ever get a seat. I expected people to be waiting in the streets. I was ready to stand in the street myself, but we were the first ones to arrive, and while the church was full in the end, there were still a few empty seats around the edges. The coffin seemed tiny to me, but Miss Welty, never tall, had been shrinking over the years. There were plenty of stories about her being barely able to see over the steering wheel of her car.
If you have ever been to Mississippi in July, you know there is no reprieve from the heat, and yet on this particular day the rain, which under normal circumstances only makes the situation worse, had somehow made it better. When we went to the graveside it was no more than seventy-five degrees, and thus the closest thing to divine intervention I have ever experienced. When the hero of my life was buried, I had a discreet cry among friends standing there in the cemetery. A woman approached me and introduced herself as Mary Alice Welty White. I knew who she was, of course. My beloved Collected Short Stories had been dedicated to her and her sister, Elizabeth Welty Thompson. I had seen her name every time I opened the book. Mary Alice Welty White asked me my name. She asked me if I was a friend of her aunt’s, and I said I was not. I told her I was a great admirer and had come to pay my respects. She asked me where I was from. Then she took my arm. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”
We took small steps. The ground was soft and we were both wearing heels. She led me to the line of cars that had driven over to the cemetery, and to a group of teenaged boys who were leaning up against those cars. Their ties were loose and their jackets were off. They were ready to get out of there.
She introduced me to one of the young men. He didn’t seem like he was especially interested to meet anyone. “This is Ann Patchett,” Mary Alice Welty White told him. “She drove all the way from Nashville to come to your Aunt Dodo’s funeral. She didn’t even know her, and she drove all this way. That’s how important your Aunt Dodo was.”
The boy and I exchanged an awkward how-do-you-do and shook hands. Mary Alice thanked me for coming.
Even at the funeral of the greatest short story writer of our time, a member of her own family needed to be reminded of her standing. The short story never was one for calling a lot of attention to itself, but in the face of so much brilliance, I think it’s time we started paying our respects.
Best American Short Stories is the short-story Olympics. It is the short story’s moment in the sun. I am grateful to Houghton Mifflin and to Katrina Kenison Lewers for making sure that at least once a year we put the short story front and center where it belongs. As for the arrangement of this volume, I am partial to the democratizing effect of the alphabet. It seems to me the fairest way to line things up. However, this year the alphabet put Ann Beattie at the front of the line, and while she certainly deserves to be there as a writer, her story, which is not exactly a story but maybe some sort of novella, performance piece, and massive example of creativity and nonconforming genius, seemed like the heft the book needed at its back end. By reversing the alphabet, Paul Yoon’s beautiful story “Once the Shore”—which is the first story he published, and the first story I picked for this collection—floated effortlessly up to the front. When I was a girl in Catholic school, the nuns were forever doing that to us, getting everyone in a line and then making us reverse our places so that the first should be last and the last should be first. It seems like a good lesson for the short story. Enough with the humility. Move to the front of the line.
(from The Best American Short Stories 2006 [Houghton Mifflin])
Love Sustained
PEOPLE ALWAYS WENT out of their way to tell me how lucky I was for being able to spend so much time with my grandmother. If I mentioned that I had to take her shopping or to the doctor or that she was waiting for me and so I had to rush away, someone would inevitably slip into a long revery on the subject of my good fortune. “My grandmother lives in Peoria . . . Tacoma . . . New Brunswick,” they would say. “I only see her once a year. I haven’t seen her for three years now. I couldn’t make it home last Christmas, but I think about her all the time.” Then there would be a great deal of pining and sighing. How sad it was that time and geography had separated the speaker from this baker of cookies and keeper of happy childhood memories! They would put a hand on my shoulder. They did not want me to miss their point. “Enjoy every minute of it. Soak up her wisdom. I only wish I were you.”
Then they would go off to their lunch dates and tennis courts, and I would get in the car and go fetch my grandmother.
The counsel I received from nearly everyone (those with dead grandmothers were as bad or worse) was a never-ending source of irritation to me, in the same way it’s irritating to cook Thanksgiving dinner while someone is leaning against the kitchen door telling you what a pretty picture you make wrestling the turkey out of the oven. Hard work is first and foremost hard, and whether or not it’s ultimately rewarding is very rarely the thing you’re thinking of at the moment. The worst of it was that I had planned to be one of those people myself. I had planned to live far away from my family and miss them terribly. I had every intention of feeling simply awful that I wasn’t with my grandmother in her years of decline, because I loved my grandmother, loved her more than anyone, just as she loved me more in return. In this faraway city in which I would always be compelled to live due to some unknown necessity, I would meet perfect strangers who took tender and constant care of their elderly loved ones and I would feel such a pang of envy that I would be forced to tell them, “Appreciate what you have! She won’t be here forever. I only wish that I was as lucky as you.”
In 1994 I was thirty years old and finishing up a fellowship at Radcliffe College. My grandmother was eighty-five and living in a small apartment on the side of my mother’s house. By then she had been living there for eight or nine years. In all the time that I was far away I wrote her letters and called her regularly. I went home to visit. I sent books, thoughtful presents. If there was an average level of long-distance involvement with one’s grandmother, then I felt safely above the median range. I gave myself a nice pat on the back for it. But then something happened. On my way out to Los Angeles to start work on a new book about the Los Angeles Police Department, I came back to Nashville for a longer than usual visit. While I was home, I went out on a date with a man named Karl. I liked him, even though he lived in the city where I had grown up and therefore planned on never living again. It was because of Karl and the promise of something that could be fun for a while (and because the book project I had been working on was falling apart) that I finally decided to put off the move out west. I saw it as a temporary postponement. I rented a studio apartment for six months, took an old bed and a desk out of my mother’s basement, and started to write another novel. I stuck my foot in the tar pit with every expectation that I would be able to get out again.
The best thing about being back in Nashville was the time I got to spend with my grandmother. I’d pick up the horrible fried-fish planks from Captain D’s she loved to have for lunch, and we’d watch her soap opera together and then take a mile-long walk through the neighborhood. Or we’d skip the walk and spend an hour pushing a cart through the aisles of Target. “Heather always went to Wal-Mart,” my grandmother would say wistfully, believing that Wal-Mart was less expensive just because it wasn’t as clean and was farther away.
“But Heather lives in Minnesota now,” I said. My sister, who once looked like she’d stay in town forever, had suddenly figured out how to be the one who was far away. “You’r
e stuck with me.”
Her eyes fell on a package of washcloths, the thin kind she liked, but she kept walking. “Heather really looked at things. We’d go to the fabric store and look at patterns all day. You’re not like that. You know what you want and you go in and get it.”
“We can go to the fabric store,” I said.
But my grandmother wasn’t paying any attention to me. She was still weighing out the pros and cons of winding up with either me or my sister, knowing good and well she’d never have both of us. She decided to make the best of it. “You’re always on time. If Heather said she was coming at ten she’d never be there until noon. That drove me crazy.”
“Exactly.”
“We’d always stop for ice cream on the way home. You never stop for ice cream.” This was a point she really worked on because she loved ice cream. “But it’s better this way. Neither one of us needed the calories.”
In 1994 my grandmother was able to shop in Target. With an enormous amount of cajoling, she could be dragged into a department store once a year to try on clothes. My grandmother could walk a mile. She could follow a program on television and issue an opinion about what she wanted for lunch. She could think of her nieces back in Kansas, find their phone numbers in her address book, and call them up to talk. She did her own laundry, flossed her own teeth, caught a ride with a neighbor to a monthly Bible study meeting even though she was not a religious person. Every single one of these things seems so unfathomable to me now that I might as well say my grandmother did a high-wire act in her eighty-fifth year, or sat around in the living room writing out math proofs. Neither one of us knew it during those halcyon days at Target, but we were just at the beginning of the clearinghouse then, the time when every ability and pleasure my grandmother had would be taken from her, one by one by one.
As is true in every life, there was for my grandmother a long, slow pull up to the top of the hill before she began her rapid descent. She started out as Eva Mae Nelson of Ogden, Kansas, the second-to-last of nine children. The family lived in an abandoned hotel, and the children were forbidden even to open the doors to any of the rooms where the floors had fallen through. The younger children spent whole afternoons playing in the top floor of the hotel, which had once been a ballroom. On the top floor (which was completely intact) they could do anything they wanted. They could hoist up boxes of dirt and rocks from the ground on a long string or write on the walls. When Eva was nine, her mother sent her to live for several years in Kansas City with her older brother Roy and his wife, Sarah. Roy and Sarah had no children of their own and they needed one to keep Roy out of the draft for World War I.
Eva Nelson was a beautiful girl. I have seen the pictures. All the soldiers from Fort Riley lined up to dance with Eva and her sister Helen on Saturday nights. They ran a laundry from home with their older sisters, Mary and Annie and Daisy, and they told each other jokes while they boiled vats of water and hung the heavy, wet sheets on the line to dry. Eva got a job in town at the Coffee Cup, working first as a waitress and then as the night manager. She loved to tell me a story about a doctor who ordered his piece of apple pie with a slice of cheddar cheese and how she refused to give it to him because it was illegal to serve pie with cheese in the state of Kansas because the combination was thought to be poisonous. Later on she got an even better job as a governess for a baby named Juanita. Juanita’s parents moved to California, and it was Eva’s job to take the baby later on the train. California is where she met my grandfather, a widower with two children who needed a nice reliable Kansas girl to look after them.
Every day I drove over to eat lunch with my grandmother while my mother was at work. I’d get a big sandwich somewhere on the way between my house and her house and we’d split it. Every day she’d tell me that I shouldn’t be spending so much money on sandwiches. I’d take her to the grocery store and keep up a running dialogue through the aisles. “Do you need tuna? Do you need oatmeal? Do you need apples?” But before long that didn’t work, because she wouldn’t admit to needing anything. Nothing sounded good to her. Her sight was getting worse and she was terrified to have me walk away from her even to pick up a jar of peanut butter that was five feet away. “Do you think I’m going to forget that I brought you?” I’d say. “Do you think I’d leave you in the grocery store?” I would write out her check for her and she would sign it, but then that was too hard. She found it humiliating not to be able to keep her name on the line, or to run out of space before she’d finished her last name. More and more we relied on cash.
“This is my granddaughter,” she’d say to the bored teenaged checkout girl. “I don’t know what I’d do without her.” I’d give a smile and count out the change. “You’re never going to have to find out,” I’d say. A few months later my grandmother refused to go to the grocery store with me anymore. She said she was sick of it all. Then she refused to give me a shopping list, and so I bought the foods I thought might interest her. Every day, Los Angeles was further away from me. I got a dog and a better apartment. It was becoming increasingly clear that I wasn’t going anywhere.
This wasn’t because of Karl; in fact, Karl and I had broken up. It was because I just couldn’t imagine telling my grandmother that I wouldn’t be coming over for lunch anymore. I couldn’t imagine telling my mother, who did the lion’s share of the caretaking—booking the doctors’ appointments and filing insurance papers and fixing her dinner—that I was leaving. I couldn’t tell my mother or my grandmother that they were on their own when in fact I was a novelist and that was something that can be done pretty much anywhere. So I stayed put. Karl and I started talking again, and after a while we got back together. I always told him he had my grandmother to thank for that. Without her I never would have stayed.
My grandmother lived in fear that I would marry Karl and have a baby. If I ever complained of a headache or an upset stomach after a dose of fried fish, she always leapt to conclusions.
“I’m not pregnant,” I’d tell her. “Not now, not ever.”
“Don’t have a baby,” she warned me. “You don’t need one.” What she meant was that she was my baby and I didn’t need another one. My grandmother loved her own baby, my mother. She loved my sister and my sister’s children, but that was enough. She needed my undivided attention. She could no longer see well enough to read or watch her television programs. Books on tape worked for a while. I went to the library every week and picked out anything I thought she’d like, but soon that slid away from us, too. She couldn’t remember how to work the tape player. She refused to knit or crochet anymore, even when I bought her bulkier yarn and thicker needles. She would try to break the needles in fits of frustration and then bury the whole thing in the trash. I started reading books to her in the afternoons after we’d eaten. I read her That Quail, Robert, which she had read to me as a child. In the end, when Robert died, we both cried until we felt ill and exhausted. My grandmother had spent her life taking care of other people, cooking their food, cleaning their houses. It was her proof that she was valuable in the world. Now I cleaned my grandmother’s apartment, which hurt her every single time. My cleaning was an accusation, no matter how quietly I went about it.
My grandmother, who had always been easygoing, was becoming increasingly agitated. Bank statements and doctors’ bills sent her into awful fits of panic. In the evening she would wait by the back door for my mother to come home and then wave the papers around tearfully, saying there was a terrible mistake and she didn’t understand. Some nights it would take my mother hours to calm her. I started to edit the mail when we walked down to the box in the afternoons, pulling out offers for free credit cards, notices that she may already have won, bills that would be put aside for my mother to pay. Anything with numbers I stuffed into my pockets, because numbers seemed to drive her wild.
It was my mother who figured out that the difference between a good day and a bad was often decided by my grandmother’s hair. In h
er states of complete despair, my grandmother’s hair fell from its bobby pins and stood wildly out to the sides. My mother, who was now fixing her mother’s dinner and bringing it down to her on a tray at night, also got up early in the morning to fix her mother’s hair before going to work. When her white shoulder-length hair was in a neat French twist, my grandmother seemed to feel she had a grasp on things. Unkempt hair meant food on her clothes, a forgotten pan boiling down to smoke on the stove, nameless weeping panic.
In this arena I was no help at all. I did not want to touch her hair. I could cook and clean and shop. I could get her to doctors’ appointments an hour early to soothe her. I could leave my work whenever she called and said she needed me because she couldn’t find her radio or she’d dropped a glass jar of molasses on the tiled kitchen floor. I could kiss her and hug her and get down on my knees every two weeks to soak her feet and clip her toenails. I could do anything, except her hair.
Those were the days, around the time her hair became more than she could manage, that my grandmother began to talk seriously about wanting to die. This got worse after her younger brother, Lou, the last of her siblings, died out of turn and left her the only one of the Nelson children. If a train was coming to take her away, I pictured her packed and waiting on the platform, every day waiting, sitting on her suitcase, past goodbyes. She ate less and less. She lay on the couch and cried. If she wanted to talk about death, then I would talk to her. I would tell her I was sorry and that I understood, even though I’m sure I didn’t. It seemed to me, to my mother, and to my grandmother herself, that she was in fact dying, and soon she would go to sleep and slip off into her peace. Some nights I would sit over dinner with Karl and cry. Karl was a doctor. He didn’t think she’d last much longer. Her heart had an arrhythmia. She took blood thinners to avoid a stroke. She seemed held to life by about three silk threads. But she didn’t die. She simply got worse. When she was ninety-two years old and weighed 102 pounds, her doctor put her on antidepressants and we put her into a geriatric psychiatric unit.