NOT A FAIRY TALE

I grew up in a family of strong women on the lookout for calamity. My grandmother, nicknamed Ensie because she was tiny, was a natural storyteller-both the main character and narrator of her life. Ordinary events triggered memories that were more present for her than the present, so while Grandma endured many losses in her long life, she was never at a loss for words. Born in 1885, she grew up in Salt Lake City, the oldest daughter of a physician and the first woman state senator in the United States, a suffragist who defeated her polygamous husband running for the same office. When I was eighteen, Grandma gave me $15 to register as a member of her mother’s political party. Her father, my grandfather, belonged to the other one. There was always drama and sometimes violence in my grandmother’s unexpected revelations, or so it seemed to me as a young child. I also came to understand certain truths about language and intimacy. Having been told about events that shaped and sometimes shattered lives, there was a current under the surface that percolated like a potent brew.

My dad bought a used green and white Chevy camper when I was eight and when Los Angeles was hot and so smoggy in hurt to breathe, we slept in our clothes and left before dawn for our annual two-week vacation. My sister and I held onto Grandma, who rolled like a cork on the bunk above the cab, the spot which offered the best view of what lay ahead. Our destination was Lake Tahoe, a crystalline lake surrounded by pungent Jeffrey Pines and meadows bright with wild daffodils. My dad, usually a slow driver, took Route 89's steep curves with reckless abandon, and the tiny burners on the camper stove bounced up and onto the floor. Our laughing became screaming, so great was our pleasure in the unexpected chaos. Eventually, the road lengthened to unending, hypnotic lines, and Grandma told us about the world populated by the living and “her” dead. The precarity of lives ran through her stories like quicksilver. We were her captive audience; she was our colorful fabulist. Her hair was a wispy halo of bluish-white curls; she wore a tropical muumuu, white oxfords, and a purple sweater, the color of royalty.

I remember the first glimpse of the fade-proof lake in the summer twilight, the deep woods, the meadow with its purple lupines, and the smell of pine-laden air. The air was close, and our voices softly reverberated in the camper. Outside, the sky was choked with stars, and time seemed infinite. I was a fidgety girl, worried about all sorts of real and imaginary things. At eight, I also stated paying attention. Sprawled beside my sister on our narrow bunk, I asked Grandma, “Where did you go on vacation?” It was a long moment before she spoke. When she did, her face changed from powdery-smiling softness to sorrowful resignation. "Oh my…there were no vacations. Roy died when your mom was a baby." Raising myself on my elbows, I peered over the bunk and swallowed hard, pushing the rock in my throat into my heart. I managed, “What happened?”

“Roy had a headache; lay down, and died. God is big on burdens. He makes sure everyone gets one.” The incandescent light was harsh on Grandma’s face, and her gaze shifted to something out the window that wasn’t there. After a few moments of immovable gravity, she looked directly at me and added with a tragedian’s sense of drama, “The undertaker said, ‘Roy was the most beautiful corpse he’d ever seen.’” Yes, Grandma knew how to turn a phrase, and I conjured up a naked man with a cleft in his chin under a white sheet on a cold slab in the mortuary. Grandpa Roy never lost his muscular physique or wavy brown hair. But after seven years of marriage, Grandma lost her cheerful husband, brawny and smart, the bliss, the difficulties, the infinite distractions of human love, and the hoped-for things even she couldn't imagine. All that beautiful life!

Without Roy, and armed only with a degree in literature, Grandma was ill-prepared to run a 100 acre ranch. She once told me, “The steers were warm and breathy, and had melting eyes.” For five years she managed her affairs through stopgaps and improvisions, then followed her brilliant mother and difficult brother to California for the promise of steady work and decent housing all bathed in abundant warm sunshine. But first, she made arrangements for her eight-year-old daughter, my aunt, to stay temporarily with her dead husband's parents in Mill Creek, Utah in a nice house close to a good school. After seeing their daughter-in-law struggle, grieving, and buried by the endless work at the ranch as entirely as their only son was buried in the family plot, Roy’s parents told Grandma they could provide everything Martha needed while she was getting settled in Los Angeles. And since they were getting older, she could be of help to them as well. "Children's children are a crown to the aged…." they said. Scripture was truer than life for them and providing a home for their granddaughter would be a blessing for everyone. This temporary arrangement lasted years, and the blessing became a heartache because no matter how nice the house was or how good the school was, my aunt was the daughter left behind.

Grandma and my mother settled into a crooked bungalow on a minute lot on Griffin Avenue in Central LA. This was a far cry from “The Oasis.” The foundation sloped and it’s questionable whether the house was decent or not. Still, Grandma named their new cottage “The Doll’s House” and planted hardy, weed-like flowers that survived for years: purple morning glories by the front porch, rainbow hollyhocks next to a weathered fence, yellow sunflowers, and orange trumpet vines that eventually took over the yard. She rented out the ranch, which wasn’t easy in 1925 from 700 miles away. A year later, Grandma received an unwelcome letter from one of her thirty-plus cousins (her mother was the fourth of six wives) disclosing that her tenant was injured after falling into the irrigation ditch, drunk on moonshine he brewed in the barn. She decided to sell, severing her tether to Utah. For the first time in years, she gazed fully into her future, the one she would make.

As a young widow, she planned to be eternally loyal to my grandfather, and after a while, it may have been her loyalty she was loyal to. Perhaps she even felt some pride in her devotion.

Still, she was amusing and though not a beauty, had petal-soft skin, a commanding nose, and waist-length auburn hair she twisted, looped, and secured on the top of her head with a copper comb. Grandma had weathered the long years of her widowhood, but they call it weathering for a reason. It erodes. And she was lonely. Slowly, she turned her attention to all the beautiful, small things she hoped to understand since eternity wasn’t one of them.

My mother was lonesome, too, and of all the needs a solitary child has, the one that must be satisfied if there is any hope of wholeness is the unshakable need for an unshakable parent. Grandma was, by nature, interesting and interested, a provocative combination. She wanted to be steady, but sometimes her life swerved a little out of control. At times like that, my mother tried to provide, even enforce, some stability. So, while Grandma served dinner to one of her beaus, my seven-year-old mother, determined to put the kybosh on this gentleman’s unwelcomed advances, slipped out the kitchen door and hammered nails into the tires of his Model-T. I suspect dinner wasn’t great either. Grandma probably served the only meal I’d ever seen her make, a chicken stewed with thick noodles she rolled by hand, flour to her elbows, powdering her bright cheeks she rouged with lipstick.

Grandma married two more times. There was a short-lived marriage she called her "misadventure.” Her divorced husband, sleeping on the flat roof of his desert adobe house in Yuma to escape the heat, rolled off the edge to his death. My mother was not sorry she did not like this man more, but his death was shocking all the same.

Grandma’s next husband was a large Irishman who worked for the railroad. He had a lively temper, was utterly devoted to her, and developed a winning strategy. Mac took over the kitchen and befriended my mother. He looked amused in all his pictures confirming that he never took anything in life seriously, including himself. He called Grandma Babe, and she loved him dearly. She was widowed again at 67.

Husbands die, and children leave home. Thank goodness there were books, and Grandma always had more than could be read. Stacks towered around her as if she were a librarian on strike, refusing to process returns. She devoured them. When she felt the stiffness of a book's cover, she knew what it was to have a spine. Rows of words were like heartbeats. Pages fluttered like a beckoning hand. In return, literature gave her a voice. As a young woman, Grandma taught at the Mormon Colonies in Mexico and came to realize that what she knew about Cortez was distorted by the suspect motives, sensibilities, and scruples of colonial interpreters. There was another reality to the Conquistador; he was sly and cruel as he appropriated land for Spain and plundered the Aztec empire for gold. So, she wrote a novel to set the record straight. He would have failed if not for the help of his ambivalent interpreter, guide, and consort, Donna Marina. Sold to the Spaniards as a young girl, La Malinche, is now remembered as the embodiment of treachery, the quintessential victim, and, having given birth to one of the first Mestizos in New Spain, the symbolic mother of the new Mexican people. If trouble is the backbone of all great literature, Grandma’s life story, like that of this conflicted Native American Princess, was a tragic novel, not a fairy tale.

Grandma missed Utah, so when I was eleven, our family packed the camper and headed for Salt Lake. We drove between the Angeles and San Bernardino National Forests, rolling down our windows so there was nothing between us and the fragrance of chaparral shrubs, thickets of Douglas-fir, and massive oaks resting their irregular limbs, like elbows, on the ground. The strata of the Grand Canyon blushed golden and orange in the afternoon sun, and I stayed well clear of the edge, remembering the fate of Grandma's second husband.

My father set up walkie-talkies so we could hear my parents in the cab when they yelled, “Someone is going to get hurt!” This wasn’t a threat, only the expected outcome of our roughhousing. Grandma was in the truck's cab with our parents, and we heard her warble off-key about her “Beautiful and Beloved Mexico.”

"To my Mexican land

I sing of its volcanos,

Of its meadows and flowers.

They are like talismans,

Of the love of my lovers."

Southwest of Salt Lake, Grandma directed us to an undeveloped area near the city's landfill and decided a broken slab of concrete was a remnant of the Oasis’s foundation. The blue grama grass was brittle and cracked beneath our feet. This land, an 18,000-year-old lakebed was like iron, and the encircling Wasatch, Uinta, and Oquirrh Mountains were so sharp against the bright blue sky they would cut your hand if you touched them. In this empty place that once held so much coming and going, working, laughing, talking, and loving, my grandmother was reminded of who she once was.

She leaned on her cane, the weight of age upon her, and looked beyond silver sagebrush into the distance. It was hot. Green and yellow grasshoppers filled the air, popping up like corn. Grandma shaded her eyes and said, “The land was so flat, I could see Baldy a day away, circling the cattle.” My mother never knew her father, but she knew and loved her sheepdog, a protector and friend with velvet ears and wind-rushed, silky fur. He was left behind with the tenant rancher, and when nipping at a calf’s heel separated from the herd, Baldy was mistaken for a coyote, shot, and killed. His bones were here, buried in an unmarked grave. But where?

“There was a window that looked south over the vegetable garden," Grandma’s busy hand gestured where the farmhouse would have been as if the scenes of her Oasis were continually before her. “In the winter, we lived in the kitchen.” She sounded apologetic when she added, “…and ate a lot of fried hominy. And every Saturday night, we took a bath in the same tub.” Grandma stepped over the broken ground and told my mother, her bedrock. "I was first, then Martha, and then you." She stumbled. Mom caught her, and they laughed. A helpless infant, a mourning widow. In truth, they saved each other in 1919.

I wondered what else Grandma felt, saw, and heard in this intimate, abandoned place: maybe Roy’s embrace, her laughing babies, pink roses on a wooden trellis, the marks of hooves between splotches of dried, flaky manure instead of asphalt. I hope the undertaker's foul parlor, with its severed flowers and bleached curtains billowing like cartoon ghosts, had faded, and the thought of Roy’s muscular physique conjured remembered pleasures, not the terrible image of his beautiful corpse. I’m sure Grandma left something behind besides a few grains of corn between the planks of the hardwood floor. Something in the walls of the Oasis, sweet and pervasive, like freshly cut summer straw, would have lingered. There is sponginess about plaster, which absorbs love.

My mother and Aunt took turns caring for Grandma after a stroke left her an invalid. In my mind, however, she was always quick-witted, quick-moving, and generous. Every visit, every holiday, every vacation was an event, and she nourished me with her ranch, art, and life with its volcanos, flowers, and lovers. Her hardships warned me about rough weather ahead, and I’ve had my share. It is hard to trust the self-inflicted and random cosmos. Grandma once said, "Life is a mystery. People who try and plan it surely end up disappointed.” Knowing how to live well, not afraid, not performative, not a shrunken life, is a conundrum. Each of us is more than the tragedies that befall us, what we've done, or the best things either. So, we write our own novel, and each word follows the one before because it is that book and not another.

Sharman Ober-Reynolds was born in Los Angeles and completed a master’s in fine arts at Arizona State University. For over thirty years, she worked in health care as a family nurse practitioner, primarily in autism research. She is primary author of The FRIEND Program for Creating Supportive Peer Networks for Students with Social Challenges, including Autism. In 2023, Sharman was the first-place recipient of the Olive Woolley Bert Awards and has published creative non-fiction in bioStories. Sharman now lives and writes in an old house in Salt Lake City with her family and Cadoodle.