The Tea Service by Claude Monet. 1872

When I was a boy Grandma’s piano playing spilled out her house over the dark grass lawn the hired man Harvard kept mowed short the summer long. While she played from Water Music, Orepheus and Eurydice, and pieces of The New World Symphony, green hails of cut grass flew over the whirring reel of the push mower. That Harvard was one strong man, and Grammy was very good, and at one time played in a big city symphony orchestra. I forget where. She had hundreds of records too, and one of those players you could put a stack of LP’s on and then do nothing for hours. The first time I heard Bolero blasting out the screen door, I thought the Gods must be making music. 

Gram was old ever since I can remember. That’s the way grandparents are. When I was young old skin scared me. At Gram’s wrist where the bracelet lived the skin cracked, and when she lifted her arm the flesh jiggled like jelly. Last summer she’d broke her ulna stopping a fall near the kitchen sink. It could have been a lot worse if she’d gone down all the way. Naturally some in the family speculated what if a hip, which was like a sentence to the guillotine someone snarked. 

She reached for the new Whitman Sampler, a triple decker box of chocolates where each one comes in a wrinkled paper cuplet. She kept that trove of sugar on the table beside her chair and nibbled on them all through her waking daylight. Sometimes she said help yourself, but unless I got the one with the cherry inside I was disappointed. 

Eleven gold charms thinner than dimes dangled from her wrist for the grandchildren. She rubbed the charms between her fingers. This was an absent minded, dreamy sort of behavior that in their minds pointed to confirm things they thought they knew about her and old Gram she knew and did nothing to change that.

The initials engraved on the gold discs were in calligraphy. Below the initials was the child’s birth date. The dates spanned from the late 1940’s to the mid 1960’s, evidence she had spawned a bunch of baby boomers. Makes you think about biology and how all that stuff happens when once you have one woman, and then fifty years later you got sixteen all told children and grandchildren, and counting. Those child bearing years not a large chunk of time for an old woman, but a window of somewhat happiness in her life if she thinks back a certain way. Maybe. At least life in those days felt predictable to some degree. Her husband, Grampy Freddie, was alive then and they weren’t unhappy. Which was more than most of her friends could say. Then again, would they say they were unhappy, or just, you know, check that one off and move on.

The grandchildren of the charms mattered because they were young and they loved her and there were never any problems like often happens between a parent and child. There was that certainty with the grandchildren, with great odds they would long outlive her and carry on something that made her feel all was not lost, or about to be lost. She felt a comfort when she rubbed the bracelet charms between her fingers with lemon colored fingernails.

So when the wolf tooth turned up among the thin gold discs attached to the bracelet with a loop of rusted wire not crudely tied but expertly they wondered, what? She was vague, but her fingers went  to the tooth - round it and round it, and from that tooth onwards more often the gold forgotten. 

Strange what is going on with her.  

Grandmother, what is that wolf tooth doing with your gold?

She liked black English tea and sipped from a thin rimmed tea cup painted purple violets. A cup and saucer, in that tradition, along with a silver tray of sugar cubes piled like a broken Egyptian pyramid, and silver tongs to lift them with made in the image of a long billed bird. The aroma of tea mingled with the old age redolent about the house. Her dresses were of a certain age too. Flowery prints in muted mauves were favorites and nothing much changed about anything much for years, more or less like that for years until that wolf tooth came to the party. When someone asked her a question she pursed her lips and took such a careful sip of tea.

Even with all the dates on her charm bracelets she hated birthdays and refused to acknowledge hers or anyone else's. It would make it so easy to remember all her grandchildrens’ birthdays, but the bracelet had never been her idea in the first place. Even so, I went to see her a few days after her eighty fifth birthday. There was a setting to the farm and Grandmother that drew me. It was August, and warm, but a gift of afternoon breeze ruffled the elms and the house sat in the darker depths of their shade the way they spread so high and wide. I saw Harvard out back pushing a wheelbarrow near the barn. He was bent over, with his shirtsleeves rolled up past his elbows. I was surprised his thick arms were covered with tattoos. A John Deere tractor on one, and of all things a staff with several quarter notes on the other. 

Grandma’s music preferences changed over that summer. Remember she’d been a concert pianist at one point, and played every day from an early age. Well, suddenly she up and sold the piano. No explanation, nothing. She put the ad on Craigslist herself and the new owner came with a friend and a piano board and dolly and they moved it out that same day. Gram and Justin, the new owner, hit it off and chatted about composers they liked: Respighi, Ravel, Copeland. After that Gram threw in her sheet music. She couldn’t explain later how the topic of drums came up, but Justin was a drummer, and something caught Gram’s fancy during that brief meeting. Just like that, out with the piano, in with a drum synthesizer set. The next day neighbors who didn’t live all that close started phoning the police to complain.

Around then a startling vine hung thick with teeth, furry paws, stones, and black feathers showed up around her neck. A long sleeved black velvet shift with a high collar under her chin replaced the mauve dresses. When she stood up and walked several feet of fabric followed her on the floor. 

Grandmother, Grandmother, what are all those things around your neck?

We’re afraid you’re going to fall, Grandma.

The chocolates disappeared. No one could have imagined that. They wondered if it was time and they talked about it but not in front of Grammy. Between the three of them there was something of a scale, each one in a different place with no agreement. There was more than no agreement, there was disagreement. No one wanted to be the one to say it. Things went unsaid and made things said sound crazy. 

I never said that.

You said it. 

I didn’t. 

You said it and if you didn’t you’re lying. 

What ! You’re the one. 

What. Liar. 

For her part Grandmother didn’t fuss about the things she used to. She stopped complaining about the paperboy missing the porch with her newspaper. Then she stopped the newspaper. She no longer brought up the horrible habits of young people these days. She said she was done with the con job and wasn’t putting up with their shit anymore. The drum machines played all day long.

What con job do you mean Grandmother? 

Grandmother took passing care on the inside of the house. She swept, and sometimes cleaned a low window. Every summer Harvard painted some of the barn. He bought white paint from the traveling paint salesman Walter, but nothing ever matched up due to the weathering of the last year’s paint, and the year before that, and so on. Some of the family complained but Grandmother took no notice. On the porch off the kitchen sometimes Harvard’s jacket hung on a wood peg, and in the summer heat sometimes his shirt, right next to the screen door. 

She threw out everything in her refrigerator and stocked it full of raw red meat. She requested the market, where they knew her well, to precut her prime rib in bite size pieces, similar to how the chocolates used to be. A plate of meat cubes piled like the ruins of an Egyptian pyramid, same as the sugar, sat on the table beside her chair. The children and some of the nearby grandchildren and one who studied nutrition predicted raw meat would be a tsunami in her stomach but, but if anything Grammy sat up straighter and her skin got tighter. She claimed more energy and said she could wrestle a bull. 

By way of her drumming she got interested in Africa. She read somewhere in the jungles of the Dark Continent people ate monkey meat and wondered aloud to one grandchild’s horror if she might be able to get some. As if on cue she began muttering to herself, “the horror, the horror.” She purchased some African pots with a burnished orange glaze and abstract designs of black lines and ate her cereal and salads from them with her fingers. She bought a genuine Maasi spear and stood it against the wall beside her chair. 

What Grandmother?

Not long after she acquired the Masai spear, Grandma threw it into the television. It wasn’t on, but she said the screen just sitting there bothered her and she’d had enough. Harvard told me later he heard the crash and came inside and pulled the plug on the TV, just in case. And while he was still there, she went after the sofa chair where Harley used to sit, when he was alive. Obviously when he was alive. But it wasn’t too late for the chair and she threw the spear as hard as she could, which wasn’t very hard, aiming for the antimacassar still stained with Harley’s hair oil after all these years. The point of the spear penetrated the horsehair several inches and the shaft sagged to the seat. After that Harvard took the spear out to the barn. 

Grandmother?

They wondered if they were being irresponsible leaving her alone. They talked about it but never got anywhere talking about it. Harvard’s there, they said. 

Harvard’s taken to jogging in a languid lope between the barn and everywhere else as if driven by the drums. Sometimes he carries the spear. Grandmother watches from her chair, chewing, and keeping time in her mind, rattling the bones on her wrist. These days she’s pretty much stopped talking. But now and then she mentions, “the horror, the horror.”