Evelyn

You keep a framed picture by your bed (“the marriage bed,” as your mother once insisted on calling it). It’s a photograph of your dad’s mother, whom you called, inexplicably, ‘Mimi.’ But in this vintage photo that you adore, she is pure Evelyn—unburdened with thoughts of generations to come. You doubt she could have guessed she would have two grandchildren, who would rename her.

In the picture, Evelyn is enjoying being 21 years old—or at least, so it seems. She is standing in a meadow, trees on the horizon behind her, eyes casting a coy sideways glance as she leans against a wood post in a tunic bathing suit, the kind your thighs and you wish were fashionable now.

A tan suit? White? Black-and-white photographs leave many questions unanswered. They serve the past well, leak few of its secrets. The past sits nearby but untouchable on its haunches, smug. There is no getting to it, if it doesn’t want to be gotten.

You know she had red hair, liked a good lipstick, and was always singing and dancing in skits and holiday shows that she and her work friends would put on in the company cafeteria. She was a great singer, a terrific hoofer, they said.

You pick up the picture, as you often do, to get a better look.

Her flaming hair is crimped, parted in the middle. Her arms are akimbo, hands perched prettily on her waist. Her then-lively eyes complement a flirtatious grin. The back of the photo reads ‘To Ben, 1935.’

She married a Joe, not a Ben. You wonder if she would have been happier if Ben had stuck around. Who was he? You never heard of Ben; neither had your brother when he named his first son Ben.

You never heard much from your grandmother. By the time you were old enough to try to know more, to draw her out, she was far, far from you, even as she sat beside you on her stiff couch.

Joe—her husband, your grandfather—called her Red, because of her hair. The supposedly vivid, true red that goes unknown in all black-and-white photos.

They loved each other, you are told, with a passion. But they destroyed each other first, before they made peace near the end of your grandfather’s life in 1977. Like her, he was deeply depressed; unlike her, he turned to drink to ease the pain. He finally managed to give it up, proudly making toys for you, and belt buckles for himself with your toddler photo decoupaged on them, at the rehab center. Joe and Evelyn eventually reunited, resumed sharing a household, and fell back in love, over plates of bony fish. In their case, the fish and the alcohol lost; their love won. That’s real romance.

You know that much. But you only know what you have been told by others, as your grandmother was rarely the one doing the telling.

Evelyn died in 1987, in May, the day after her birthday. You were 17, she was 73. On her birthday, she phoned your house and asked to talk to you; you declined, telling your mother to tell Mimi you’d talk to her the next day, when the family planned to celebrate.

To say you regret this would be a clumsy understatement.

The next day your mother found Evelyn dead in her wrecked apartment, sheets off the beds—thrown, your mother said in a hush. It appeared as if your grandmother had torn at the beds, clawed at the sheets. Spots of blood. Mattresses shoved off their boxsprings. My mother confessed to you that the scene was deeply unhappy, suggesting that Evelyn found no peace in her passing.

As she lay dying (or perhaps she had already died), you had been calling and calling, trying to reach your mother about the party plans. The line had been busy. It was busy, your mother explained gently to you later, because your dead grandmother was lying wracked and rigid on the floor of her apartment, stiff fingers still clutching her beige telephone. It took a while to sink in: While your mother was frantically finding the super to let her into your grandmother’s apartment, you were dialing, irritated, getting a busy tone from a dead woman, a dead woman you never appreciated as much as you should have, and certainly never understood.

At the end of her life, a life fraught with increasing anxiety and despair, she left notes in the sugar bowls, in the cereal boxes, asking ‘them’ why they were there, why they could not leave her in peace. She left them for ‘the circus people’, the circus people she thought had come for her—they, and the man with the axe. And Pan, with his flute.

She once whispered urgently to you over the phone—that beige rotary telephone—to come over, to come and tell him to go, to leave her be, to give her peace. It frightened you. You rushed to her apartment, you checked all the closets and under the beds for her, but you could not make the circus people and the others leave her. Her eyes were glassy and wild, lost in the fleshy face that steroids and precarious first-generation MAOI drugs had left her with.

Your family told you it was, at that point, to be expected. This sort of thing. Hallucinations.

It was attributed to anything but sense, anything but demons. Drug paranoia, mental hospitals, poor care. She stayed at a Philadelphia psychiatric hospital, long-stay, several times. You only remember visiting her there once or twice. Her worsening depression and agoraphobia were more than severe at that point.

You did not think it would touch you. Such a thing did not even occur to you, hair-sprayed and flippant and removed from compassion to the point of betrayal at 17 years old.

At her funeral, you laughed as your high-school friends approached you, in bewilderment. She looked inflated, you told them. Her face had been like that from steroids, anyway, but truly, it was unreal, surreal.

“That’s not my grandmother,” you said to your friends, smiling, they said later, very strangely. “I don’t know who that is,” you said, gesturing to her open coffin.

Looking at her 1935 photograph, you now know her better than you ever thought you would. You understand now what you could not possibly have understood at 17, when she passed away. You are terrified of what you will perhaps understand in five years, in ten, in twenty.

You will not deny her again, not ever. Evelyn—your Mimi—now watches over your bed. You have placed her there as a guardian, because only she would have understood this darkness that threatens to eat you whole.

She was lively. She loved to dance, they said. She was witty, so smart. Read constantly. Very fashionable. That hair! And what a voice! (Sylvia Plath’s friends remembered her as “full of hope,” after all.)

If Evelyn had only known you would give your secondborn the name “Hannah Evelyn.” Can you imagine? The joy of such a thing, so unexpected? She would have been pleased, but skeptical.

You pause the next morning as you open the sugar bowl. Blessedly, it is empty of all but Splenda. You take a deep breath, and spoon and stir the pure sweetness into your hot tea. You think you remember that she liked tea.

You think you remember. British tea. Red Rose? Green plants. A stainless-steel plant spritzer. Timid African violets that only liked her. Weebles playsets, for you and your brother, Joe. Card games. Books everywhere—mysteries, British tales—but less as time went on. Cut crystal bowls. Fruit-and-marshmallow salad at Thanksgivings. Always, her erosive self-doubt, her self-deprecation. Her brokenness. She had lost faith, in her mind, in her health, in her reason for being. She did not believe she had anything left to offer.

Yes. You think you remember now.

But you are more certain that you are beginning to understand.