What The Movers Found In The Mattress

She was not married. The boy was gone before she knew, run off to work the oil in Oklahoma, and he never knew either, and she wrote that she had made her peace with that and I was not to go looking to blame a boy who was a boy himself and is surely an old man or a dead one by now. The shame of it in that town in that year was the kind of shame we do not fully remember how to make anymore, thank God, the kind that falls on a girl like a roof coming down. And the one who brought the roof down hardest was my mother’s own mother.

Her name was Vivian. My grandmother. I never met her. I had always been told, in the vague way of these things, that Grandma Vivian had died when Mom was young and that the two of them had not been close, and I had never thought to press it, the way you do not press on the parts of the family story that are presented to you smooth and sealed. Now I know that Vivian did not die when my mother was young. Vivian lived another forty years. My mother simply never saw her again after the age of seventeen, and let us all believe she was dead, because to my mother she was.

What Vivian did was this. She did not rage. My mother was careful to write that. There was no screaming, no thrown plates, nothing you could point to afterward and call cruelty. Vivian was a church woman and she did everything in a low even voice. She told my mother that she had made her bed, and that she would not shame the family in front of the congregation, and she arranged for my mother to be sent away before she showed, to a home for girls like her up by Dubuque, run by the kind of people who ran such places then. My mother wrote that the worst part was not being sent. The worst part was the morning she left, when she came down the stairs with her one suitcase and her mother was sitting at the kitchen table with her coffee and her Bible open, and did not get up, and did not look at her, and said only, in that low even voice, “You will not say a word to your father about where you are going, and when you come back you will not have been anywhere.” And then she turned a page. My mother wrote that she stood in the kitchen doorway and waited for her mother to look up one time, just one time, and she never did, and that was the last picture my mother ever carried of her own mother, a woman reading her Bible so she would not have to meet her daughter’s eyes.