But Slenderly. . .: It is Margaret I mourn for

I am a loathsome human being today. Here it is, blue skies, an eased up work-load, a reasonably fine hair day, and I am lousy with self-indulgence. There is no good reason. I even slept in, unwilling to leave my dream where I was log-rolling down the hills in Ireland (I think it was Ireland. The sign very clearly said “Kerry County” and it was all very green and misty), but the 8:00 bells tolled and DK came into the bedroom full of cheer, “Sleepyhead, you heard the bells,” and I muttered, “I know, I know, they toll for thee. Thee, me, whatever.” And I rolled out of the sheets and blearily walked into the bathroom, noted my chapped lips and pillow-wrinkled cheek and heaved a mighty sigh.

And proceeded to sour-puss around. No, I do not want any tea. No, I do not want to wear that today. I concluded that the only thing that would make me happy would be the perfect little black shirt dress that would match my new black sandals. I groused about having nothing to wear and finally deigned to put on a spring skirt and idly contemplated a black top that was too wrinkled to get away with. Oh to iron, how could I possibly handle the iron this morning? I’d much rather just stand around uselessly like a vile body, fingering my pearls and saying things like “Really, darling, I am simply filled with ennui, all the parties, all the champagne, all the sparkling pretty bright things. Where’s the meaning in it all, alas?”

So, DK ironed my shirt for me. And delinted it. And asked in much nicer way, what the fuck, girl? And I realized, I had become my grandmother. Today, I am my grandmother in one of her melodramatic funks.

My grandmother was quite a personality. She went to Paris every two years to buy a hat. She never owned a pair of pants until she was seventy years old and she showed them off to me, marveling at how modern she had become. She carefully instructed me and my sisters to always lotion immediately after a bath followed by a thorough dusting of Norell perfumed powder applied with a giant puff. Notably, we always called her “Grandmother” and I probably saw her every single day of my life until I went to college.

Simply, she ruled the roost. My granddad brought her breakfast in bed almost every day of their lives and oh god, she wrote wonderful letters to me at camp and told bitingly funny and sometimes horribly nasty stories and could be a mean drunk and was always, always a drama queen. If you got a hair cut she didn’t approve of, she would lean in and whisper, “Don’t worry sweetheart, we’ll sue! We’ll sue that dreadful man who did this to you.” And lecture me about not going to Pierre, her hairdresser who she visited one a week for a set. My poor little sister never stopped getting grief about “maintaining her figure” and was accused of eating too many of “those damn potato chips.” She was horrified to find a pack of gum in my older sister’s things, whispering that “only cheap girls gob on gum and they look like horrible cows chewing their cud.” When she visited me at college in New York, full of memories of taking my mom to visit the campus when it was all women and served tea in the Rose Room, she had an unfortunate run-in in the co-ed bathroom with a male student who had chosen to shower rather late in the day. She burst back into my common room, exclaiming about the “horrid hairy beast” she was sure was a pervert and who should we call to report him and his suspiciously small towel?

She kept all of her jewelry in its original boxes and I used to stare at all of her beautiful things tucked away in her cabinet in her dressing room, like the encrusted bee pin and sapphire drop earrings with the screw-on clips, and her collection of gloves and silk nightgowns. She dropped one of her diamond rings somewhere in the lawn one summer when she was sprinkling more grass seed because of “those d-a-m-n birds” and we spent hours crawling around on our hands and knees looking for it, even renting a metal detector thingie that made a very satisfying brreeep when it came upon a discarded bobby pin or penny under the grass. Marcelle and I even tried to put ourselves into a trance to feel the ring and be guided to it via divining rod (aka forked stick we found in the backyard). Alas, it was never found. Treasure remains, right there in KCMO just for the taking.

But for all of her occasionally snobby airs and dress-for-dinner particulars, she was still a farm girl from a little town in Missouri whose father died when she was young, and she eloped with her beau to the city and lived in San Francisco during part of WWII by herself and my then-four year old nephew. She called us “little varmints” if we dipped our fingers into her mashed potatoes and prided herself on her garden vegetables she planted every year and her coconut cream pies. And education was everything to her. She felt very strongly that “all my girls” should get the best education and she crowed over report cards and bragged to her friends at bridge club about us. When I started law school, she patted my knee and said “You’ll always have that.” And then asked when precisely I planned on marrying that beau of mine.

I’m not often homesick or sentimental about home, it’s just not my nature. But today I am wistful and today I am missing the her that existed in 1984 during summers outside on her patio, fussing over her roses and showing me how to cut a flower pattern into a homegrown radish.