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May 7, 2006
Sleeping with Susie
I'm in the little cave under my desk, listening
to the meditative music I've been collecting lately. None of
that wimpy Yanni shit. This is intense. The music of the bloodstream,
with deep bells, bangs and percussion. The room is cool. My legs
are smooth.
Me: " She had a lap you'd
dream about. Ample, soft, warm and embracing. And she smelled
nice."
Ellie: "Why is ample and soft
good for others but not good for you? This is a real question."
Me: "I think it's okay
to at least acknowledge my need for mothering - to live for
a while with my need for a mother's love,"
Ellie: "More than okay, essential."
 When
I think of my grandmother - my father's mother Susie - I think
of her soft lap and wonderful scents. Her hand that cupped my
head. She made me feel safe, and I think she loved me. She divorced
my grandfather in the 1920s because he was an alcoholic. I never
knew him, but in pictures he looks like a dandy. Susie had two
children - my father and my father's sister, Daisy. At some point,
Susie had to put her children in an orphanage, and then when
she was eight, Daisy died of scarlet fever, and later my father
died in the plane crash.
Suzie loved me. By the time I was born, she'd
married a lean, American Gothic bone of a man named Matt, who'd
taken Susie from the city in DC to a small house along one of
the tobacco roads in Virginia.  They
lived on a long patch of land off the highway, surrounded by
fields of tobacco. Matt and Suzie bought me a baby (confused
baby with body again!) lamb, who turned into a pretty sizeable
sheep. That's me standing beside the sheep.
Susie had a room for me with pink sheets, even
though I didn't visit often. Susie's house had an upholstered
rocker with wood grain arms - this is making me cry. Her neck
smelled like powder, and she kept pink bars of Cashmere Bouquet
soap in a little bowl in the bathroom.
 She
had three carved ebony elephants on the shelf in the living room,
and she'd let me play with them. Each night we'd eat a bowl of
ice cream together, and at bedtime she'd take me back to my room
to say the Lord's Prayer together, and then we'd say, "Now I
lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should
die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take."
Susie lived a couple hours away, so I didn't
get to see her often. I think my mother looked down on her. I
think she thought Susie was uncultured. Susie wore soft
clothes and stayed in my room until I fell asleep.
 My
mother would leave me alone in my room in the dark, but before
she turned out the lights, she'd open a pink jewelry box, and
a tiny ballerina with a pink tutu would bounce upright on a spring
and stand waiting on point. My mother would twist a brass key
in the back of the box. It would creak and snap and then tinny
music would start to play. I'd imagine the ballerina spinning
alone in the dark, slower and slower, and I'd hold my breath
until the music stopped and I was completely alone.
I cried a lot in my room the year we moved
away. I was terrified of leaving my friends, and everything I'd
ever known.
In April, Bill went with me to the house in
Baltimore where I grew up. It's a toney address now, with lots
of Volvo 4-by-4s and people wearing madras plaid jackets, but
we drove down the little dead-end road, and there was my old
house, squeezed uncomfortably between two newer bigger houses,
looking small, out of place, barren and lonely.
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