Peggy, My Love

How important are the things we store away, allow to gather dust and forget we have altogether? Does discovery gives us a right to reclaim, or do we give things up the moment we set them up on the high shelf, turn off the light and close the door?

That’s a question I’m struggling with now, as my uncle is in the process of selling my grandmother Peggy’s house on Long Island. It’s a sad place, with a long history of loneliness, unanswered echoes, and still the news of its impending sale turned my stomach to stone and I hope that wherever good old Peg is in the afterlife she is righteously disgusted.

Peggy wasn’t born in that house but she may as well have been. Her mother grew up there before her, a German family wary of the growing Nazi influence leaving behind their homeland to make their way in New York; most everyone they knew back home would die in the war. That was the house she came home to, first from the hospital, later, after her divorce from my alcoholic grandfather, moving her suitcases from another house on the same street mere blocks away. It is a house you read about in books, as much a person as a place, a character in a novel, a setting that takes on a life of its own. Such a small house that looms so large in my heart and in the dusty eaves of my memory.

The house is under contract now, so I’m not sure I’ll ever get to see it again. I’m trying very hard to remember, on my own, without photographs, though I’m sure that very soon I’ll be desperate for all of the albums from the late 80s and early 90s I can get my hands on. I never tire of my mother with her feathered hair, grandmothers and great-grandmothers with gigantic glasses, me so small in white lace passed around from lap to lap, eyes huge and blue before they settled into their plain brownness.

The house. There are places I walk into where I am instantly taken aback because they smell like Peggy’s house, and I am at once at home and affronted, because how dare any place mimic this home of my heart. How can I possibly describe it? Like the ghosts of women, living and dead. It’s the smell of a house where the carpet is fifty years old, threadbare and the color of split pea soup. And that’s only how I see it in my head; I would not be surprised to hear it was a different color entirely. But I am fairly confident it was green, with flecks of brown, orange, yellow. Maybe the smell was mold, maybe underneath that carpet, behind the wood paneled walls, was a vast, miniature forest.

We never used the front door, the one that faced the street, because the driveway pulled up to the garage out back, a concrete path and patio, a little step up under a tin awning into the ugliest kitchen I have ever seen. Large, yellowish laminate flooring with a busy, woodland -- or was it fruit? I vaguely remember pears? -- themed wallpaper. Everything was brown. The oldest double oven you’ve ever seen that was not to be trusted, but the best blueberry pancakes you’ve ever tasted. Juice out of old jelly jars. Bagels and rolls and donuts from Stanley’s Bakery in a box tied up with red and white string and liverwurst sandwiches and fresh clams.

As a very little girl, the house was like a magic box. My grandmother slept on the second floor, all wood paneled walls and a low-sloped roof. There was a landing that served as a sitting room, with a couch piled high with dolls and stuffed animals; a giant lion, little teddy bears wearing tee shirts from their places or origin, and a cabbage patch doll born around the same time as I was. She loved them like children and I was allowed to play but never take, but oh, how I coveted that lion. There was a huge walk-in closet that was part hers and part storage: shelves full of photo albums and knick-knacks, which I could pick from sometimes, hangers burdened with my great-grandmother’s faux-fur coats and stoles. I loved playing dress-up.

Sometimes my parents would stay in a hotel, or in the camper in the driveway if we hauled it, but I always slept in a cot in Peggy’s room set up right next to her bed. I loved falling asleep there, facing the window, the rattle of the radiator and the noise of the cars passing on the street below so different from home.

Growing up though, changes things. Into my pre-teen and teeange years, I never liked going there, and dreaded the long drives that felt dramatically like a death sentence. It was painfully boring at my grandmother’s house. I did not know what to do with my great-grandmother, who was called Nanny, who was a complicated woman I will most likely never fully know but will probably only ever know as selfish when it came to her daughter, Peggy. She was too old, fussy, and her arthritic hands had always frightened me as a young girl. She had once played the piano beautifully so now I was expected to perform for her, and I was afraid to disappoint.

Peggy embarrassed me. She would brag about me to strangers, the person stocking cans in market, she would take me around to her friends, parade me past them, show me off. I’m ashamed to say, have always been ashamed, of how she made me feel, because I always knew how much she loved me with all of her being. I was her favorite, her girl, her only girl, the one she was waiting for. When I was born, she worked for the town of Islip, so coincidentally she was the one who signed off on my birth certificate. She was so proud of me. But I grew up so far from her; though I was born in New York we moved to Virginia when I was two years old, and though we visited often, and Peggy sometimes came down to see us, those visits became less and less frequent as I grew up, after my brother was born, as we developed busy schedules and it all became too much. And there is so much to be said about complicated family histories and resentments and old grudges and.

When Nanny died we were not encouraged to come to her funeral.

Peggy loved me, and I never loved her enough. I didn’t know how to, not growing up and not enough as an adult with my own life established in Baltimore, with my friends and the things that felt more important than visiting my well-meaning but overwhelming grandmother on what I thought of as that lonely desert of an island. She loved me, but she never knew me. It wasn’t entirely her fault. How could she? How could she possibly be expected to really understand who I was, what I liked, my taste, my style? What my art meant, what I was passionate about, how I thought or what I believed in. But still. She babied me, babied all of us, her sons especially, forever infantilizing her precious children as if she could keep us close with talk of ‘going to the potty’ or ‘having a sick tum-tum’ in that high pitched put-on voice instead of pushing away, twenty dollar bills sneakily stuffed into our back pockets as she forever fretted aloud and in letters about not having enough money to pay her oil bill. Suffocate with love, with guilt, love down all the wrong avenues.

She was a large woman, over six feet, truly what the words big-boned were meant for non-euphemistically. Tall and broad, the Germanest of German ladies. She was, fully, Peggy. Not Margaret, not even on her birth certificate. A Peggy all the way. She wore bright lipstick and was always dyeing her hair and cutting it herself, always declaring it a mistake and feeling self conscious. “Silly Peg!” she would say, ruffling her bangs with her pointer and middle finger held together, a gesture reminiscent of her smoking days. The lipstick often found its way onto her teeth, which were not her own. She wore wigs that looked exactly like her actual hair underneath. I have two of them now; one of them is named Rebecca.

She had a friend named Jim, who was of course her boyfriend until he passed away, and I called him Grandpa Jim even though no one ever gave me any indication that he and my grandmother were ever together in that way. As an adult, of course, I reflected it on it and knew, I always knew, but it wasn’t until Peggy was dying of cancer that she became frank about it. It makes me sad that they weren’t open about their relationship with me in the time they had together; as a child, there is something disconcerting about an open secret being kept that you are not quite privy too. Obviously I knew that Jim was my grandma’s boyfriend, but no one said it was so; they never kissed or held hands, he never slept over, so I felt like I wasn’t supposed to know, like maybe it was a bad thing? So it became confusing, that he was around all the time, that I was supposed to love him, call him Grandpa Jim, but he wasn’t really my Grandpa because they weren’t married. And why not? I had a lot of questions. It had made me suspicious, wary. Out with it! I think I could have loved him more, if they had let me in. They took me to see Titanic when I was far too young to see it, but like a lot of young girls I had a Titanic phase so I was obsessed and they didn’t know any better. The sex scene was one of the most uncomfortable moments of my life but I will always love them for never making a fuss about it. At least not one that I remember.

Peggy stayed in that house after Nanny died, after it was just her left. Her ex-husband had died when I was very young. I didn’t know him well; he smelled of cigarettes and alcohol and his skin was like red leather. Jim was gone. We were also not invited to his funeral.

We lived down in Virginia, and her other son lived somewhat as a nomad, coming home in between jobs to his little closet of a room and his doting mother. She missed us, and she was lonely, but she stayed in that house. My dad offered to build her an apartment off our own home for her to live in. To help her find a retirement home close to us. But she stayed; she had friends there she didn’t want to leave. Her friends left, and still she stayed.

We all knew she stayed for that house. She had lived in that house all her life; it had it’s teeth in her, and it was her legacy.

When her grandparents bought the furniture after they moved in, they put down the first payment and waited anxiously month after month for the first bill to arrive. No bill ever came. It’s lost to time. Some of that furniture is still there. I guess, not for long.

My grandmother stayed in that house to keep it for her family. The house would go to my uncle when she died. He had never gotten married, never had a family or a home of his own.

After my father left my mother, he moved back to Long Island to take care of his mother. He carried with him over twenty-five years of guilt for moving away, for the lapsed visits, for the time lost. He got to work fixing up the house, old, worn, neglected. Things that my uncle could have done, but hadn’t, chosen to ignore. He painted it, the bright red of my youth now a serious blue-grey. A new carpet; relief and regret. How many footsteps, generations of crawling babies, the indentations of walkers and canes, lives passing through? How many ghosts? At least one, Nanny, after she passed, spotted by my maternal grandmother, at the foot of her bed.

Soon after the prodigal son returned, we discovered Peggy had cancer. Her abdomen was riddled with tumors, and it was a swift decline. Bryan and I went up to New York to spend a last Thanksgiving at the house by way of saying goodbye. Somehow she was still making it up and down the stairs, despite her many falls this was allowed to continue. My dad took care of her but worked long days and often spent the nights with his girlfriend; my uncle shut down, couldn’t deal with a dying mother. He didn’t have a job, hadn’t had one for a year or more, stayed out drinking, came home late, scaring Peggy. My uncle has always had a temper, and he and my father have always been at odds. My uncle is the elder brother, the favorite, despite my father always doing more for the family. Re: family resentment, grudges, etc.etc. When I talked to Peggy on the phone, she told me that she was scared of my uncle, she locked her bedroom door at night. My heart broke for her.

At the end, no one told me that she was in hospice, that it was final days. No one was picking up the phone at her house and I had left an unreturned message. I was considering sending Peggy a letter when my father called me to say that she had passed in the night. There was only so much I could cry; I loved her, of course, my strange, far away giant of a grandmother, but ours was a love I carried in the memories of a childhood long gone, in duty, something that I’m only now wading through, letting myself be charmed by.

She had never altered her will. She could have made it so the house went to both boys after my father came back, but it remained in name to my uncle only. The favorite son. But my uncle is selfish. When my grandmother was dying of cancer, he drained her accounts. This is hearsay, from my father, which I am choosing to believe, because otherwise I cannot fathom where else he might have gotten the money to sustain his unsavory habits and alleged addictions. He is not a family man. He is my uncle, because of blood. And now he has sold my grandmother’s house because he has run out of money.

Decades of dedication to a home I am now convinced is full of magic, wiped out by a man all his life never once deserving of it.

I cannot make out where my devastation comes from. I think there is, to my surprise, much of Peggy in me. I think I am understanding that so much of her love, that big, loud, embarrassing love, was desperation. She had me for a few days out of the year, and she needed to make it count. She missed me growing up, how could I possibly be a teenager, now twenty, now married? Where did that child go, the one with the blue eyes? Where did that little girl run off to, the one from all the stories? There is so little time to show our love, to impress it upon the people we care about. We don’t always do it right, but it’s always better to try.

There are so many days I think about calling her. I often lament to my husband that I wasn’t a good enough granddaughter. I never saw her enough, wrote enough, called enough. But I did call, more than some, maybe. I loved sharing things with here, things I knew she would love to hear about. Classes I taught, parties with friends, trips. She would have loved to hear about our most recent trip to Hawaii; if I recall, she used to go their with Jim. They loved to travel. I dream about her a lot.

And I think endlessly about the house. A place I dreaded, now I desperately want to return to, to sink my heels into. I know it’s not the same. That old carpet’s gone; it was gone the last time I was there too. But it’s not just the house; there’s a reason people don’t leave Long Island. Or when they do, they find each other, other Leavers. It’s a place that holds you. Calls to you. Whispers in your ear. I want to know what it means, where that comes from.

I can’t believe that house is lost to me. I am in a stage of disbelief that hit me like a sudden night.

How long will I mourn, and how will I mourn it?