The most important guest arrived Saturday morning. She was carried in a quilted knitting bag next to gnome doll whose red-white-and-blue top hat affectionately earned him the name Sam. His blue eyes were painted on and from beneath his white curls, he stared uncannily at the first arrivals and party guests. Does he notice that I am still not married? Does he know that I haven’t been home in a year, or seen my Grandma in the last three?

“We drove with him in the backseat next to me the entire way,” Aunt Monica drawled, her Alabama accent at ten decibels. She was marked with a catatonic frenzy that only death brings about: doling out tasks to her sisters—schedule the mass, order the flowers, reserve the space for the luncheon— while her singular concern was the residues of the body that lasted over 90 years. Monica placed the box containing Grandma on top of the piano.

As I descended the mass spiral of stairs, from beds slept in once a year, the living room, foyer, and dining room had been transformed. Grandma’s clothes were spread along the tops of the sofa. Her jewels and trinkets adorned all of her daughter’s various tables: coffee, granite end, dining glass. Here was Grandma’s life, its progression marked by increasingly childlike objects— gnome dolls, finch salt shakers, angel figurines, angel wall hangings, angels, angels, and more angels— and childlike comforts— knitted hats, fleece gloves, velveteen slippers, silk scarves. Whatever existed of Grandma was within these things. And, since memory has a way of being molded, compressed, manipulated or forgotten, the essence of the woman was to be passed along in these material objects.

I hovered between rooms. Drifted as far as possible from the frightful flyers— angels, gnomes, birds— who gazed at me with dead, ceramic eyes. In a way, they were like me: I’d flitted far away, never staying in the same job or apartment for more than a year. And maybe then, like them, I was frozen.

I toyed with Grandma’s jewelry, the brooches and pendants. Made my way into the kitchen and sat for coffee with Aunt Monica and Joelle, my cousin. They sat in the awkwardness that accompanies the death of the elderly, of someone who has lived out their life and lived it well. The small talk of daily lives was hushed over with fear of political correctness— the idea that we must speak of the dead in order to honor them, that we must be sad, that we must grieve.

In actuality, I didn’t have much to say. To anyone. I hadn’t spoken to my extended family in years; except for the occasional “like” on Facebook, a scoff at their conservative, Republican comments, we were strangers. But despite that chasm, blood made its way much like the working of the internet: it connected us. Curiosity, not sadness, drove what I wanted to say. What was it like to find your mother lying there? Did you hold her in your arms? Was she blue, like we all were once, blue from screaming at the deafening roar of sudden life, or in this case blue from the silence of death? I was curious to see her lying there, eternally still.

I couldn’t ask that, of course. That was the horrifying view that separated Monica from the rest of us— that she had been there. The being there, too, even separated my cousins from me and my sister, Rachael. We were the New York twins girls who spoke too fast, and then became the unmarried, childless ones who still spoke too fast, while my cousins grew up in Florida, around the corner from Grandma and Grandpa’s and so their visits were more than school and summer vacations.

“What are you up to now, Joelle?” I asked instead. I listened with indifference to Southern life filled with children and baseball games, with Wal-Mart trips and motorcycle rides. I wasn’t sad that Grandma had died. I was sad I hadn’t seen her I hadn’t seen my grandparents in years. I was sad that on her 90th birthday I was in a basement classroom with 13 year olds, convincing myself that by being there I was making up for what was completely, utterly, beyond my control— my birth.

*

I’m nine. Last year I got the downstairs bedroom, and it is always dark because our house is on a hill and the floor-to-ceiling windows open up to the latticed underside of the porch. I see the entire belly of the above-ground pool. Sunlight breaks through the lattice and casts diamonds along my blue carpet. It is cold, quiet, and beautiful and very much like being submerged under water. My walls are white and I ask What can grow here and Mom tells me Ivy so I have one fake ivy plant along the floor and another on top of the TV. Barbie dolls still occupy the entire walk-in closet and I let my sister come to play with them whenever she wants. I’m nice and the favorite, I hope.

But this morning it isn’t my sister Rae who comes in to wake me. It’s Mom and she smells sweet like scalp and onions and thin, straight hair, which I don’t have and always want.

She leans over to give me one of her tiny kisses, the ones the come in rapid succession and occur on forehead or neck. (They are the same ones I will give my tiny dog many years later.)

“Grandmama died last night,” she whispers after the last kiss. “Go say sorry to Dad.” She leaves.

I watch the sunlight pour through the deep brown lattice, the April grass fighting its way in, my ivy plants remaining still.

At the funeral we sit in the second row. I wear my purple dress with the white lace collar.

A few years later it will host a bleach stain on its chest like portal to another world and I only realize it’s there when I’m on my way to my first party, age 12, and there will nothing worse than going to a party in a stained dress, absolutely nothing, not even physical death.

After the funeral we go to pack up Grandmama’s condo and Dad gives us perhaps the greatest gift you can give to two little girls. Grandmama’s toy poodle is there and he must be sad and confused, wandering, looking for her amongst the white walls that remind me of the nail salon she would take us to when we got to visit and have Girl’s Day. But the gift is not the dog.

“Go through Grandmama’s closet and see what you would like to keep,” Dad whispers. He’s been quiet the whole time, which is not unlike him, but it seems as though he almost says this in his mind and we understand. Or maybe Mom says it because it’s more something she would say anyway. But most like not, no, Mom doesn’t say it because it isn’t her place with my aunts, Dad’s sisters, here. They are in charge of the closets and the clothes, the houses, the will, the jewels, and of the little dog, Bijoux, whose name means jewels in French.

Grandmama had three periods in which I remember her: fat, skinny, and sickly. But even in all of these periods, she remained ever chic, adorned with hats and scarves, pointed shoes and asymmetrical belts. These are what me and Rae take. Each silk scarf widens the smile on my face as I become imbued with every ounce of my Grandmama’s memory. I wrap them all around my head and neck, my wrists and waist. I snuggle my size 8 feet into her narrow size 7 alligator print flats and insist they fit.

“My feet are smaller than yours!” Rachael screams and pulls at them, like fairy-tale step sisters and we fall on the plush carpet in a fit of giggles and punches. We laugh-fight on the floor until Dad’s older sister, Aunt Monique, thunders in.

“What are you doing? How can you find this funny?!” she screams to us. We stop mid- giggle, arms and legs embraced over one another amongst Grandmama’s beautiful garments, the only pieces of her we can, and will, hold on to.

*

I’m constantly questioning if it’s fitting: to remember both of my grandmothers by their scarves, belts, and earrings. Is it so typically American?

Here’s what typically American: I lost the alligator skin flats 10 years later after a drunken fight with my first college boyfriend. They were too small, as Rae clearly pointed out, and I hazily recall ditching them underneath a dew-laden bush as I stumbled home from his frat house. At that point, their scales had peeled and the heels were chipped, but I still remember how wearing them felt like I could pretty much death roll anyone with my sass, how I could survive the tropics or Massachusetts winters or even love.

*

Did you forget about Sam? No, he’s not the college boyfriend, but my Grandma’s stuffed companion. Funny, because that’s how memory is: it wraps us into stories that wind like mazes thru English fields we’ll never go to, 80s movies we wish we could have been a part of. So before we continue with Sam, here’s another story of forgetting, because aren’t those the best ones?

*

Sap coats our feet like glue. It holds sand between our toes and onto our ankles as though we are an arts and crafts project. We make our way through through the pine needles and almond trees to the picnic benches, wedged between the parking lot and the sand dunes, protected by layers of branches. Here the seagulls have less of a chance of finding us and swiping our potato chips, biting our fingers to get some sandwich.

“I forgot the cups!” Grandpa laughs. His red thermos is filled with a special concoction: Sprite and water. We eat hungrily. Our fingers are salted and sandy and each bite of meatball sub tastes slightly like home and the sea. Earlier this morning, Grandma piled last night’s homemade gravy with meatballs onto the soft bread, then wrapped each into tin foil. Grandpa got mad I didn’t want gravy on my pasta, washed it briskly in the colander, then slopped it back onto my bowl. Now the sandwich is cold from sitting next to the ice packs and each bite melts into my hot mouth as I clamber around the bench with the uncontrollable chaos of a seven-year- old.

“We’re thirsty!” I declare for every cousin on the bench. My lean on the table becomes more of a climb. We have managed to hide from the seagulls, but the squirrels have found us. They inch closer and closer as my mouth gets drier and drier. Even the bread, thoroughly soaked in Grandpa’s tomato gravy, begins to dry in my mouth, sticking to the roof and coating my teeth in a layer of glucose.

But Grandpa isn’t worried. His training as a World War II fighter pilot soon becomes apparent; he collects the tin foil from our finished sandwiches and begins to assemble a trophy. He rolls the foil into an shiny log, pinches it in half, and begins to twist one side. The stem of the glass appears. He splays out the bottom to rest flat on the picnic table, then pours his concoction into each. We cup the goblets and drink greedily as the remnants of Grandpa’s tomato gravy seem to turn the soda-water into wine.

*

You can’t have a story of Grandma without Grandpa. I don’t remember any of Grandmama with a Grandpapa, because my memory was not strong enough. Aunt Monica’s memory isn’t that strong enough either.

With Sam headlocked under arm, she arrived at the funeral home after everyone, the toll of loss and event planning finally falling in upon her in the last moments of a life. We were all waiting, milling about St. Jude’s church porch. The Florida air was stagnant as expected. I’m sure humidity clung to my dress but I don’t remember what exactly I was wearing. And even though the Florida climate made it seem as though nothing changed, that time went on as expected, one long line of comfortingly, continuous green, wet and fertile, I felt the same sense of panic as I did that day, aged 12, when my purple dress with the white lace collar fell victim to bleach (or more likely, a chlorinated swimsuit).

“Ready?” Mom asked as we gathered around Aunt Monica.

“Yes, I —” Monica stopped mid-sentence and gazed down at Sam. “I forgot Grandma!” She burst out in a raucous laughter and her dark eyes squinted underneath her curly bangs. We all looked at one another, uncertain of what to do. But what was there to do?

“She was on top of the piano next to Sam and I just grabbed him and forgot her,” Monica repeated the phrase again. Tears began down her face, sadness intersected with the hilarity of forgetting the deceased at the very place they were to be remember. Suddenly, we found ourselves laughing too, nervously at first, but then more fluidity. We joined with Monica’s

laughter, the bind of our family laughter stronger than any water molecule in the air. Our smiles spread wide in both happiness and in horror because we all knew that soon, very soon, we all would be forgotten even though right now, for this one moment, we were together.

*

Every month I receive two letters in the mail, one from Grandma and one from Grandmama. They both write in cursive and the letters curl and loop like how I imagine time: each word spinning through infinity, repeated from many mouths into the rain or the snow or the heat.

Where will all the words go? I wonder one night in bed. It’s right after Grandmama died and now I’m conscious of an eternal silence that keeps me up late at night in anxious internal chatter. Could I fit into a word like a shoe? Could I wear words like a belt? (This I’d reconsider many times later as a young female).

Finally, I give up on sleep and go to my closet, where my dolls wait patiently and quietly for me to start their story. I imagine Grandma and Grandmama’s words rolling off the cards and onto my pages, their whispers woven into the fabric of the blazer or left in the leather of a belt. I think: maybe if I keep these items for posterity, the tale of all antique little girls can spin off forgetting for just a little bit longer.

– Christine Aletti