Mama's Hands (from my upcoming memoir)
My grandparents, Mama and Fritz, were the first in my family to get a television. Rick and I would walk down to their house most afternoons to watch a local TV show called “Captain 5.” The character had a patch over one eye, wore a horizontal striped shirt and a straw hat. Captain 5 was a cross between a pirate and a Venetian gondola captain.
On Saturday nights our family would gather to watch Lawrence Welk. With very little evidence, Mama thought I was pretty enough and talented enough to be one of the many musical guests who appeared on that show. Quartets and trios, accordion players and pianists, all musicians permanently rooted in the 1950’s, serenaded Mama with show tunes, hymns, and folk music.
Their tiny living room was just barely big enough to hold the six of us, Fritz in the recliner, my mother and Mama and me on the sofa, my father in a side chair across from his father, and Rick stretched out on the wall -to-wall carpet. My favorite place to be was to have my head in Mama’s lap. She would twist and braid and untwist and unbraid my blonde hair all night. Her strong, deft fingers fidgeted and smoothed every hair like she was making lace from fine silk. My hair was her art, her craft, her obsession, and nothing before or since was as soothing and relaxing. My comfort and happiness ruled over everything else.
What arose in Mama’s heart came to life in her hands—hands that were big and sturdy and bent with arthritis like the rest of her. She took vitamins every morning, saying, “Keeps your nails strong.” Those nails could open a stubborn butter bean pod or scrape blemishes off a hundred fresh-picked green beans. Mama’s hands made grape-leaf pickles, rolled out Moravian cookie dough paper thin, and fried perfect chicken. Her hands were as comfortable digging in the dirt as they were making coconut cake or applying lipstick. She was an expert seamstress making all her own clothes and many of mine. She taught me the skills to one day sew my wedding dress, although I didn’t have the patience to hand-baste every seam and uphold her standard of intricate and flawless construction.
Mama’s given name was Ruby Fox. (Isn’t that a beautiful image? Or depending on your level of sarcasm, a stripper name.) Ruby Fox had grown up on a farm where planting vegetables, harvesting, canning, and ringing a chicken’s neck to kill it for dinner were everyday requirements for survival. When Rick was maybe three or four, the story goes, my parents had just returned from New York City and were living with Mama and Fritz while they established a job and gathered resources to buy a house. At the time, Mama owned a pig named Bessie. Come winter, Bessie disappeared and after a while when Rick asked where Bessie was, Mama just laughed, saying, “Well, honey, that’s what you had for breakfast this morning.” Horrified and tearful, Rick refused breakfast for weeks.
I knew only a little about my distant grandfather. He worked at the same newspaper where John was art director. Fritz was a pressman, keeping the giant contraption that printed the newspapers running. He had a box full of dusty typewritten papers in his bedroom that one day was supposed be a North Carolina travelogue. I knew he used to drink before I was born and sometimes he acted like he missed it. Fritz and John would tangle over religion and Christianity, Fritz saying the bedrock was love, John saying it was truth and most Christians were hypocrites. Mama just wanted both of them to stop arguing and take Rick and me to church.
One fall, she complained about Fritz while standing under the Scuppernong vines, swatting wasps out of her ample bosom and gathering and sampling the grape harvest.
“Cynthia, don’t ever, EVER think you can change a man after you marry him!” she blurted after sucking out the sweet Scuppernong meat and spitting the seeds to the ground. She grabbed a stinging varmint that had crawled into her fleshy folds with her bare hands and threw it to the ground. Whatever brought on this outburst from Mama, I thought, must surely be my grandfather’s fault because Mama was dependably good natured and jolly.
But Mama’s good nature and magical touch seemed powerless over the arguments and the anger in my household.
One September, when the Scuppernongs from Mama’s backyard arbor had been fermented and bottled, the canning and freezing of her garden’s bounty was overflowing her tiny unairconditioned kitchen, I imagine her rousting Fritz from his nap in the Lazy Boy and asking him to drive her the half-mile to our house to deliver the first shipment of canned tomatoes, grape leaf pickles, and frozen corn and butterbeans. It would not be unusual for him to stay in the car as she heaved her large frame and heavy grocery bag out of the front seat.
She would have heard the shouts coming from inside, even before she approached the kitchen door. Through the glass of the kitchen door, I saw her heavy shoulders and hunched back from too many summers bent over her garden. She shifted her grocery bag to one hip, then suddenly stood up as straight as her arthritic frame would let her as if to brace herself.
Mama entered a scene she had witnessed many times before: her daughter-in-law she called “Helen Belle” sitting silent at the kitchen table, her face dry, eyes reddened and swollen. Her only son pacing, shouting. I would be frozen in the shadows of the hallway beyond the kitchen.
In less volatile family moments, Mama would share without criticism how her only child had always been fiery and temperamental. He could draw and he was smart and that made him stand out from all the other children who lived in their modest, tobacco factory town. She admitted spoiling him, even breast-feeding until he was over 3-years old after she lost the second baby. Knowing her, in the brief seconds before coming in the kitchen, I bet she asked the Lord to send her patience and forgiveness—for her own failing as a mother and her son’s failing as a father.
In those days, a man’s house and family were his to manage, so it was not her place to question him now. But how she approached me was another matter. Wordlessly and without a glance at the adults, Mama set the grocery bag on the kitchen table and reached her gnarled, open hand out to me, saying, “Let’s go Cindy, we have some sewing to do!”
Mama died on Christmas Day when I was a senior in college, and Fritz passed the February before I got married. On both occasions, I was distracted by my own young adult dramas and determination to exert my independence from my parents. I will never know the intricacies of the relationship between Mama and Fritz nor be able to explain the rift between father and son. But what I do know is I was the only granddaughter of Mama’s only child, and as such the little girl Mama had always wanted but could never bear herself. She would tell the story many times about the aborted Fallopian tube pregnancy that nearly killed her, and although I couldn’t name it then, I could feel the pure gratefulness in her heart for my very existence.