THE ROSES IN YOUR NAME
Everything is about going back home. At the end of the day, all you want is to hug your mom, even though you can cook your own breakfast or there are many graduation photos on the fridge. What do you do when you want to return home when you are already there?
Do you remember the times Grandma cut tomatoes without dropping even one little seed on her pearl white ceramic plates, and do you remember when Grandma remembered how I liked my omelets?
“I need to go home, my husband is waiting for me.”
“Don’t worry we have time. And your painting is not finished yet. Let’s finish that and leave.”
Grandma let out a long breath and scrabbled the pen on the page up and down and up and down.
“Is it done yet?” Grandma turned the kids’ coloring book toward me.
The page was covered with cheap green ink. It had bled to every page underneath. The ink bled around her fingers.
“It looks absolutely beautiful…I should take a picture.” She raised her head to look at me. The pen she put on the table rolled away and fell on the floor. I was too drowsy even to make an attempt to stop it. I looked under the kitchen table, and it needed to be vacuumed again.
Grandma looked at the picture I took as if the woman in it belonged to a distant memory. It was as if the person she saw there was a stranger. She squinted her eyes, made a sour face, and took the phone in her hands. The woman in the picture’s name was at the tip of her tongue, and something with roses was in her name; maybe it was somebody she used to know. She was not sure; after all, time is weird.
“Come on, I want to go home.” It is a loop, and I need to fix it. Grandma gave me her knitting. She was bored because it got all tangled. I took Grandma’s knitting needle and tried to put the string through the loop. It was not working.
All I know is to mess up her box of yarn by taking them out and playing pretend knitting next to her. I did not learn how to knit when she showed me the correct way. I don’t want to learn anytime soon. We still have time.
“My daughter! Why did you rip it?” I was angry, Grandma. I was angry that I did not know how to fix it. I am not like my mother yet. She knows how to do it. The string I ripped with my hand hurt and was bruised red.
“Let’s just coil the string, okay?” Before I could give her the yarn ball, she started coiling it from the end. I held the big ball of yarn in my hand. She coiled and coiled until she reached the actual ball.
“Oh, why did that happen?” I don’t know either. Now, we had two balls of yarn on the same string. Where does it start or end? Now, both the beginning and the end were lost. I held the bigger yarn; it was the beginning. You held the smaller yarn. It was once the beginning of the string, too. Or was it? Time is weird.
“Come on, let’s go home. It is getting dark.” It was dark, but it was not that late. It was the gloomy weather. Time has odd ways of making itself felt.
“We will, after mom comes home.”
“When will she come home?”
“Soon.” Playing with the ambiguity of time gave me power against days like this. Because days like this feel like they will never end. We have consumed all the activities we have. Grandma already did her daily walk around the house because of the cold weather. She colored pages with the same pen until it ran out, looked at a magazine, watched her three-hour-long soap opera, and knitted—a lot.
Now, we were going to have dinner and sleep. It is a simple routine, and it can sometimes be really fun. But that day, it wasn’t. Nobody was home except for us. I knew I could not make her happy. She kept looking out the window, perhaps for some change, but it didn’t even rain. It was just cloudy and dark.
The weather is so cruel sometimes. The sun will always set at night; why would it leave so early? Isn’t the sky supposed to be like the ocean? It was just gray like old photos. On days like this, Grandma’s memories torment us from behind an obscuring veil.
The spaghetti in the bowl got dry, hard, and tasteless. The yogurt lost its structure and started to almost melt into the spaghetti. Grandma did not touch her food even a little bit. I could not help but get hurt.
“Let’s go home.”
I looked out the window, and the sky faded into black and white. Now, there was no escape but to listen to the voices from the past. I tried to gather strength and kindness in my voice.
“We will, after you eat,” I grabbed her fork. I tried to feed her.
“No, no, no.” She turned her sour face away from me.
I put the fork down. I was angry that Grandma was not eating her food. But mostly, I was angry that Grandma did not remember she had to eat.
She called me back from my thoughts using my mother’s name. I did not correct her. I got her. Time is odd. I carry pieces of my mum, and my mum carries pieces of her.
“Let’s go home,” she cupped her face in her hands.
I know that she will eat only one thing on days like this. Vanilla ice cream. She pushed her plate filled with food away with the back of her hand.
“The doctor will be very angry at you.” I felt a pinch of guilt in my heart, hearing my own threatening voice.
“Let him be.” She put one hand on top of the other in front of her on the table after her instant feedback.
The anger in me disappeared instantly at the sight of her beautiful hands. She fixed her rings. She looked at them tenderly, then looked out the window again.
Her hands are the same as my mother’s hands and mine. Time is weird. Sometimes, you see all of it at the same moment.
I wanted to break the silence, so I decided to play the “Remember When” game.
“Do you remember when you got this ring?”
She did not remember at first, but then she did. She talked about her first husband to me. He did not buy the ring. Grandma was married twice. The time was being weird again to her. But I had never heard about this person before. So, I asked his name. I let her run her mind a bit. She remembered his name, too. This person created a new wave in our greyscale ocean in the sky. I asked about his job, what he did, where he went. Her answers come in short sentences.
“He was a candy shop owner. He sold ice cream. He died in the war. He got sick. He was a very beautiful man.”
“You must have eaten a lot of ice cream and candy.”
We laughed. Her laughter gave me a sense of accomplishment, but the edges of my smile ached to be pulled down. I felt my eyes were getting heavy with tears. Memories are crueler than boring days. How do we choose which memories to keep and which to let fade?
She missed something, and maybe she does not really remember. Maybe we don’t remember what we are after; we just miss how it felt. We just want to go home.
I took the vanilla ice cream out of the freezer. I made ugly scoops. She grabbed the cone happily. I took a cone for myself. I tasted it. It tasted delicious. Grandma devoured the ice cream in seconds. Maybe it was never about him, and it was because ice cream tastes good.
She quickly ate the cone away and asked when we would go home. Time is weird again.
“Very soon,” I lied. What does soon mean to her? We are already home.
