Domestic Affairs Read Free Page A

Audrey’s best dress on her for our visit to Winnipeg, the way the best dresses were always put on me for visits twenty years before. I made sure Audrey’s stomach was full so she’d be in good spirits, and I filled my pockets with animal crackers in case she started to cry. I scrubbed her face mercilessly (never having been quite clean enough myself to please my grandmother). In the elevator going up to her room, I realized how much I was sweating.
    For the first time in her life, Grandma looked small. She was lying flat with an IV tube in her arm and her eyes shut, but she opened them when I leaned over to kiss her. “It’s Fredelle’s daughter, Joyce,” I yelled, because she didn’t hear well any more, but I could see that no explanation was necessary. “You came,” she said. “You brought the baby.”
    Audrey was just one year old, but she had already seen enough of the world to know that people in beds are not meant to be so still and yellow, and she looked frightened. “Does she make strange?” my grandmother asked.
    Then Grandma waved at her—the same kind of slow, finger-flexing wave a baby makes—and Audrey waved back. I spread her toys out on my grandmother’s bed and sat her down. There she stayed, most of the afternoon, playing and humming and sipping on her bottle, taking a nap at one point, leaning against my grandmother’s leg. When I cranked her Snoopy guitar, Audrey stood up on the bed and danced. Grandma couldn’t talk much anymore, though every once in a while she would say how sorry she was that she wasn’t having a better day. “I’m not always like this,” she said.
    Mostly she just watched Audrey. Over and over she told me how beautiful my daughter is, how lucky I am to have her. Sometimes Audrey would want to get off the bed, inspect the get-well cards, totter down the hall. “Where is she?” Grandma kept asking. “Who’s looking after her?” I had the feeling that, even then, if I’d said, “Audrey’s lighting matches,” Grandma would have shot up to rescue her.
    We were flying home that night, and I had dreaded telling her, remembering all those other tearful partings. But in the end, when I said we had to go, it was me, not Grandma, who cried. She had said she was ready to die. But as I leaned over to stroke her forehead, what she said was “I wish I had your hair” and “I wish I was well.”
    On the plane flying home, with Audrey in my arms, I thought about mothers and daughters, and the four generations of the family that I know most intimately. Every one of those mothers loves and needs her daughter more than her daughter will love or need her someday, and we are, each of us, the only person on earth who is quite so consumingly interested in our child. Sometimes, when she was a baby, I would kiss and hug Audrey so much she starts crying—which is in effect what my grandmother was doing to my mother all her life. And what made my mother grieve, I knew, was not only that her mother would die in a day or two, but that once her mother was dead, there would never again be someone to love her in quite such an unreserved, unquestioning way. No one to believe that fifty years ago, she could have put Shirley Temple out of a job, no one else who remembers the moment of her birth. She would be only a mother, then, not a daughter anymore.
    As for Audrey and me, we stopped over for a night in Toronto, where my mother lives. In the morning we would head for a safe deposit box at the bank to take out the receipt for my grandmother’s burial plot. Then Mother would fly back to Winnipeg, where, for the first time in anybody’s memory, there was waist-high snow on April Fool’s Day. But that night, she fed me a huge dinner, as she always does when I come, and I ate more than I do anywhere else. I admired the Fiesta-ware china (once my grandmother’s) that my mother set on the table. She said (the way Grandma used to say to her of the lamb coat), “Someday it will be