Homing Instincts by Sarah Menkedick

Author:Sarah Menkedick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-01T16:00:00+00:00

MILDRED, MILLIE, GRANDMA MENKEDICK

THE STORY I TELL most about my grandmother is one I did not know when she was alive. It is the most dramatic and evocative of all the stories about her, and the shadow of its implications falls over her whole life and consumes her. The story begins with her husband dying a prolonged and painful death from meningitis. She was left with two sons, ages two and four. It was 1952.

When the nuns came to her door, she was facing a life of single motherhood and the scrutiny and pity of her working-class neighbors in Cincinnati. I picture the nuns as long faced, one short and one tall, all dour inevitability and efficiency.

“Mildred,” they said, “we’ll take your boys.”

And my grandma, standing alone on that threshold, replied,

“I will never give up my sons.”

I could play this story over and over like a chorus. Ba dee da dum, the day the nuns came to her door, ba dee da dum. I have its beat and rhythm down. It offers such a crisp break between past and present, such an intoxicating swell of commitment, defiance, and certainty. This is who I am. This is where I belong. I crave this like salt, with a stark, dry lust. It is the essence of storytelling, one moment that crystallizes and changes everything. It is the story as touchstone: I can almost reach out and stroke its smoothness.

It encapsulates the fact that my grandmother worked full-time and raised her kids as a single mother in the 1950s, and makes of this fact a decision, an identity, a fate. At her funeral we unspooled all of her life from the thread of that single story: her role as a mother and grandmother, the sacrifices it entailed, her toughness and resilience.

And yet there was also the woman I knew from the photo albums I thumbed again and again, in search of clues to who I was and where I came from: the woman who stood alone beside a purple seascape; the one laughing out of the blackness of a hotel balcony in Europe; the one who posed with an obscure sense of duty before a swath of gaping wilderness, her hair bound by a thin plastic rag. The one who went to Hawaii by herself, made friends with a fellow septuagenarian from Michigan, and hit up every bar on the coast. This was the woman who, when I asked what were the best years of her life, answered, “My sixties and seventies.” The years we knew her least.

I used to go to Grandma’s apartment in Cincinnati and drag all of her McAlpin’s boxes of photos and itineraries and travel literature onto her kitchen table, where I’d dig through them and ply her memory for stories. She enjoyed it, but her enjoyment came less from wallowing in the past than from the immediate pleasure of spending time with her granddaughter. She paid less attention to the yellowing photos, the creased missives from the Sycamore Seniors to please bring a hat and arrive promptly at 8:00 a.

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