Every summer my mother and I used to go to Cape Cod to visit her family. Sometimes my father went too, but more often I suspect he begged out, grateful to be left alone for two weeks, grateful to avoid the drama destined to ensue between my mother and her mother and her sisters.
And so for two weeks every summer, on Cape Cod, I became my mother's caretaker. There are much lengthier details, more elaborate stories, that I could divulge in order to paint the picture of why there was tension between my mother and her sisters and her own mother, but instead I will just say that it was like this: tangled and complicated, every sentence dripping with hidden cadences, the real meaning revealed through the slanting eye, the shifting knee.
When I was younger it was never something I was completely aware of, more a feeling that settled over me after dinner, all of us out on Aunt Pam's patio, worrying the stringy bits of corn on the cob in my teeth with my tongue as I listened to them talk, watched them swill the last dregs of red wine from their glasses. My mother's sighes as we stood in my grandmother's pink guest bathroom brushing our teeth later that night, or the way she slept just a little closer to me in the bed we shared, told me there was more to these relationships than I had yet to understand.
The summer when I was seventeen was a little different. It was our next to last summer there together, although I didn't know that then. My mother wasn't doing well. She had been trying but the looming threat of cancer, that eating of her insides, served to chink away at her persona, paring her down until she was sensitive and quick and sharp, biting and taking in her attempts to conceal her desperation.
One night, after dinner, I snuck down to the beach to smoke cigarettes. My mother found me in an alcove between two sand dunes, cupping my hands against the wind to light a match. She was crying.
We huddled together and she took a cigarette from me. I watched her exhale the smoke and the first pieces of who my mother really was began to fall into place. Those pieces you start to put together one day, the pieces that make up a person who you realize isn't just your mother or your father but a person much more fragile than that, similar to you, yourself, and all the things that you are, they too are more than they appear. That realization is always surprisingly simple. How did you never see it before? The weight of their role in your life suddenly makes you feel a little smaller, take a step back, your foot wavering slightly as though you were caught off balance.
I'll tell you why your grandmother never sleeps, she said to me. I scanned her face, searching for some hint of what would come next. I had made some off-handed remark the day before about how every night when I got up to pee, walking past my grandmother's room I noticed that she was always awake, no matter what time it was, I could see her in the gloom, off-center in her pink canopied bed, hands clasped at her breast bone, the radio playing softly on her nightstand, her eyes, heavily-lidded, but open, staring.
She has too many demons, my mother whispered. She can't close her eyes, she can't drift off, for thinking about all the ways she hurt us, for all the things she did wrong. Now I can see that this explanation was really more my mother's wish for the reason behind my grandmother's insomnia but then, back then, it seemed much more visceral. I could see them, these ghosts of malintention, reaching between the gauzy curtains, interwining themselves around her ankles as her eyes closed, as her breath grew deeper.
I exhaled my cigarette and leaned my head against my mother's shoulder, a rare moment of physical closeness between us.
One afternoon, a few days after that night in the dunes with my mother, I fell asleep on my grandmother's bed watching television. My mother and grandmother were out, at the thrift store or the market, and stretched across the pink-satin bedspread, lulled by the warm breeze, salt and sand, my skin still warm from the day's sun, I fell asleep. I dreamt of the devil that afternoon.
In the dream I was exactly where I was, stretched long and young, across my grandmother's bed. It was late afternoon and the room was filled with a warm glow. The lightest breeze pushed at the shade on the window, gave move to the translucent curtains around the bed. In the dream the devil appeared by the bedside, huge and gleaming and red, crimson red. He was muscular and sexual and deeply intimidating in his size and presence. And it was as though I was watching it all from the doorway, could see my chest rise and fall with even sleep-breaths, my hair fanned out across the pillow, the light and the red, red against pink. He was furious.
He had come, finally really come, for my grandmother. And found me instead. I woke in a sweat, my heart racing, the sound of the screen door slamming behind my mother as she entered the house.
Last night I tossed and turned. Every waking moment felt like the one before, as though I had not yet fallen asleep at all. I slept, off-center, in the bed. It was cold and I pulled my limbs in tight, trying not to stray from the warmth I created underneath the covers. I could feel the apartment, huge and empty around me, my life a little bit huge and empty around me.
