Three Photographs of My Grandmother as a Young Woman

 Three Photographs of My Grandmother as a Young Woman

Anna Chotlos

Word Count: 583

 


 


You call this one your courting picture and I imagine you slipping the crisp rectangle into Grandpa’s broad palm, flushed, giddy, hoping he feels the same way about you. Maybe he’s driving you home after an evening out. Maybe you are lingering together on the front porch, not ready for the night to end.

We’re sitting side by side on your red couch, photo album spread across our laps. You are peering through a jumbo magnifying glass with LED lights dotting the rim.

“This photo earned me my MRS degree in one semester,” you giggle. I mumble the letters to myself, the abbreviation unfamiliar.

“M-R-S. Missus,” you nudge, and I force a quick laugh. You’re joking about dropping out halfway through your freshman year to get married.

“Glamourous, huh?” You smile and suddenly, your walker, the glass dish of stale butterscotch hard candies and half-played game of solitaire on the coffee table, the mauve drapes and greige carpet and granddaughter visiting all recede. You are nineteen and tan, someplace with palm trees, wearing a white sundress. You are getting ready to go back home to Marietta, Ohio and catch yourself a husband.

“Do you ever wish you finished college?” I ask.

 “College wasn’t for me anyway,” you muse. “I think I’d have liked to be a florist. I’d have been good at that.”

 

 

In my favorite picture, you are somewhere between motion and stillness, faces a blur of thick-framed glasses and carefully posed smiles. Winter-bare trees crackle against the horizon, hair slicked back, hands tucked in pockets, touching shoulders. I linger on the gap of exposed leg between girlishly rolled socks and the hem of the long wool coat. And that gleaming car, the 36’ Dodge. First and favorite of the all the cars my grandfather would ever own, the only thing he inherited from his parents.

“We were so young, then,” you whisper, smoothing the page in the album. “He loved that car and it broke his heart when he had to sell it. We had some good times in that car.” You sigh, staring out the window past the birdfeeder. I sit and wait, studying the shadows and the spaces in the image, as if  a hidden meaning might emerge from the tree branches, or the place the soft, dark coat shoulders blend together, or in the patches of light glinting off the Dodge. I’m about to get up and get a glass of water when you reach for my arm and tell me,

“Don’t get married, babydoll. You do what you want in life.”

 

 

 

I am still thinking about the time you leaned close and told me that when you were a teenager, the neighbor girl would come over and you would kiss each other in the shed. (Is she the person standing just outside the photograph’s frame? Are you smiling nervously at her?)

“Some girls like girls,” you pause, as if you were on the cusp of revealing a lifelong secret. “And that’s when I knew I wasn’t one of them.” You fidget with the plain wedding band now dangling loose on your soft, creased finger. “Oh, but we had fun in that shed.”

I can’t find the right thing to say, so I just smile, thinking of the ways that I underestimated and misjudged you. To me, your revelation feels like a promise that someday, when I bring a girlfriend to meet you, you’ll understand.

 

             

 

Comments

  1. Jordan FloydAugust 26, 2020 at 1:46 PM

    Anna, this is really, really striking. I feel a sort of narrative arc, moving from section to section, but one that for both me (as reader) and the persona is ever more fascinating by what's left unsaid.

    ReplyDelete

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