Reruns of Red River

I remember what my grandmother has long forgotten.

She was an integral part of my childhood, yet she doesn’t recognize my name. Details of her own upbringing she recalls perfectly—that she grew up on a cattle farm in Wyoming and used to fall asleep on the porch gazing at the stars. But she can’t remember how to dress herself, nor the family members who button her trousers and cardigans every day.

“Do you remember when I was little?” I’ll ask as I pin her favorite brooch to her shawl. “When you’d fill my bath with so many toys I could hardly see the water? And you’d pretend the letter B was a bear, and hum the Jungle Book theme song as it cut across the bubbles?”

Her eyes will gloss over as if I’m sharing a fiction, and not a memory that belongs to us. It’s times like these I want to scream at the sky, or the wall, or the mirror at myself.

How can the brain unravel so thoroughly?

Sometimes I feel as if I’m the lone keeper of her younger spirit. She used to laugh with her head tossed back, and grip her chest with her beautiful, delicate fingers. She’d clutch the shoulder of the nearest family member in an invitation meant to share her joy. I can never remember what made her laugh in the first place. But the joy, the joy I remember.

So many things she taught me, big and small. I never knew scrambled eggs could be fried in butter until I sat on the kitchen counter beside the stove and watched her make them. She drew a wooden spoon through the yellow pleats like she was parting a curtain.

“Is that why they taste better?” I asked.

“Your daddy cooks them in oil, with no salt. It don’t taste right, but don’t tell him that or he’ll go on about heart disease.”

We hunched together and chuckled, co-conspirators, because she was right. She then handed me a chocolate milk and told me to sit at the table while she plated breakfast.

One time we dolled up to eat at a fancy restaurant, just me and her, while my mother was in the hospital giving birth to my sister. It made me feel special during a time when I was no longer the newest, shiniest daughter. My grandmother pinned a Swarovski clip in my hair, and the facets gleamed in the lights of her vanity as she faced me towards the mirror. Her pearled nail polish too, shimmered.

“Look at that beautiful girl,” she said to me, but I thought she was the beautiful one. I wanted to be just like her.

In fact, all of her compliments are one of the few things that bolsters my inner landscape. Unlike my parents, she gave me unfaltering acceptance during my formative teen years. If I wore black nail polish she didn’t care, whereas my parents scrunched their noses. When we’d shop for clothes, her words chipped away at my self-conscious suffering.

“Get the shorts, honey. You’ve got the legs, might as well show them off. Don’t tell your grandfather we put it on his credit card.”

I remember her pain, too. How she hugged me, crying, after a fight with my mother one time. She called me her favorite little bunny and said she’d love me no matter what, while my mother stormed out of her house and packed up the car, even though we’d just arrived.

I remember the way she held my uncle and father in her arms under the shade of a willow tree after my grandfather died. She cried later that night alone in her bedroom, so late it was almost morning. The rest of the house was asleep. Not me. I slipped through her door and crept to her bedside. When she noticed me in the muted dark, she beckoned me into the covers. I crawled beside her and we held each other’s hands, and wept.

She doesn’t remember these things anymore. She doesn’t remember me. She sits in her armchair, rewatching Red River, asking me for the thousandth time if I’ve seen it too.

C.S. Michelle grew up in Virginia and now resides in Texas with her husband and two sons. She enjoys a variety of creative endeavors in her free time, DJ mixing fun grooves, photography, and writing. The Society Diaries Magazine, Neiman Marcus, and The Knot have published her photography work, and her words have been published by Friday Flash Fiction.