Shades of Watercolor
Devoted to the people who matter most
Article by Emma Devlin Art by Isabella Hageman
The promise sucks the air out of the room.
"Promise me you won't tell your children about your dad."
My butter-sweet Gram is pleading yet firm.
A mere moment ago, something of the same sentiment had been uttered as part of a story. My Gram is old and doesn't like to talk about her family. She likes French cooking, and she likes her cat, Julia (named after Julia Child, of course). And she likes me, her granddaughter. If my Gram and I had grown up down the street from one another, we would have been best friends. We both love gossip, food, and reading, and we were both raised by people who hated us.
But this story does not start with my sweet-butter Gram and me. It starts with the story my Gram told me of how my great-grandmother made a promise to her parents that she would never share the identity of her true father.
Maybe it was the tension that always built when they were left alone for too long. The kind of tension that so often takes root in the space between unsaid words. Or perhaps it was the Ohio air.
It was particularly hot tonight, saturated with silence and smells of childhood. Either way, Lisa was beginning to regret coming home.
Three weeks ago, it had seemed like a good idea, but then, of course, that was before her brother and father had gone away for the weekend, casting Lisa and her mother into a three-day-long wordless standoff.
Lisa’s mother, Gertrude, was in the kitchen, methodically pouring herself gin with a tad of tonic and listening to the radio. Lisa let out a slow exasperated breath, letting the vapor settle in the corners of her lips as she glared at the kitchen door. As if willed by the sound of her daughter's frustration, Gertrude stopped pouring.
Lisa heard the bottle hit the counter, and she closed her eyes in dread.
It was like a bang. “Promise me.”
The words had stuck with me harder than any of my father's threats ever had. I sat miles away from my Gram, and yet, I felt as though her hand had suddenly wrapped around my neck.
The silence crackled on the quiet phone line, and I held my breath.
People are shocked when I tell them I am still close with my Gram. They think of my Gram as the woman who raised the man that tortured my childhood. After all, she was the one who urged me not to banish my father from my life and into the shadows of my mind. She was the one that tried to shackle me to the monster under the heading of "we are family."
I call my Gram, and as soon as I hear the phone ring, there is some part of me that hopes she won't pick up. I imagine her running around the house looking for the handset, and I pray she doesn't find it in time. I cower on the other end of the line waiting for the evil grandmother everyone else expects to appear, and I hope and pray she won't find the phone. But she always manages to locate it just in the nick of time, and her thick, butter-soft voice floods through the phone, and I forget.
I forget that she created the monster, and I forget all the cages she had tried to throw me in, and for the rest of the phone call, she is just my sweet, sweet Gram who took me to Central Park and played dress up with me when I was a girl.
I call my Gram because every time I hear her sweet, buttery voice, I get to be proven wrong.
Gertrude gazed blankly at her daughter from the safety of the doorway. The bottle of gin cradled on her hip like a newborn baby.
There was a faint spark of resentment in her stare, so subtle a passerby would have thought she was just drunk. Indeed, the flame in Gertrude’s eyes was always so faint these days, yet still at the center of their slow throbbing fire sat Lisa.
So perfect, so whole, so…okay.
Gertrude would never let herself admit it, but she hated Lisa a little for that okayness— for being so quick to laugh, for standing so straight, for existing without the weight of the past. Lisa withered under the spotlight of her mother's empty eyes, as she always did until she could take it no longer.
"And what's the drink of choice tonight."
Long ago, Lisa had learned that if she squinted, she could pretend her mother's shoulders weren't shaking; if she squinted, she could blur out the bottle of gin that sat next to her mother; if she squinted, she could sometimes pretend her mother wasn't there at all.
"Mom, you know grandpa doesn't like it when you do that."
Gertrude's shoulders stopped shaking for a minute, the tears that caught in her throat froze, and without thinking, it spilled out into the tense Ohio air: "He's not your grandfather, so please stop acting like the dumb blonde you are and hold your tongue."
"Gram…" I start, not knowing how to fill the space. The promise feels like the long-anticipated second shoe dropping somewhere deep inside me. A flashback of my dad tying my soccer cleat and telling me I am worthless, hugging me and telling me he's proud through choked back tears as I hold up my first report card, jabbing his finger into my shoulder and saying “watch out” through bared teeth. The memories flood together, bleeding into my clear mind and building like a swamp over my thoughts. I search desperately for something…anything to say.
Lisa and Gertrude stared at each other. The words that had been tightening like a noose in Gertrude hung in the air between the two women.
"What?" Lisa demanded. Her focus was honed on the shell of her mother's body, and she watched in horror as Gertrude slammed down the bottle of gin and slumped into a patio chair. A tear welled and flooded down her puffy cheek, and Lisa thought for a moment she could be beautiful in a sad sort of way.
"Your grandfather is just your Gramma Jenny's husband…that is it."
Lisa finally uncrossed her eyes and let her mom come back into focus. She really was beautiful; if she didn't always look so tired and bored, maybe she would have been a rare beauty.
"Mom, stop. For the love of God. What do you mean?"
Lisa would wonder for the next ten years why she had pushed, why she hadn't just said ok and let the promise stay intact, why she hadn't just taken the bottle of gin and ran to her own corner of the house.
"Your grandfather is just my mom's husband, okay? Okay!"
She hadn't meant to scream, but the words had burst out so quickly that they had escaped in a yell. They had been choking Gertrude for years… always choking her… always clutching at something deep in her throat. Sometimes the gin washed the words down farther; they would float away with the bite of the alcohol and settle somewhere deeper in her chest.
But now the floodgates had burst.
Gertrude breathed, sucking the air in big gulps as she stared at her stunned daughter.
Lisa knew her mother hated her a little, but neither of them cared to admit it. As they stood looking at each other, both Clark family women were equally shocked that, for the first time in years, something real had passed between the two of them.
Gertrude took a deep breath.
"Your grandfather raised me, but he is not my father…." She struggled, scrambling to think of how to say the words that had lived in her for so long. "Your grandmother, god rest her; she made me promise never to tell anyone."
Gertrude and Lisa never spoke about this ever again. After the weekend was up, Lisa returned to her fiancé and her okay life and Gertrude to her gin. One month later, Gertrude died while Lisa was on a train.
The broken promise that had failed to die with my great-grandmother Gertrude lives on in my sweet Gram Lisa. Gram grew bitter towards the ghost of her mother and vowed to give her children a better mother than she had received. She defended them through everything, determined to always look at them with the blinding love and forgiveness she was never awarded.
She raised my father. The man that used to tell me I was stupid, who would threaten to hit me or choke me or push me down the stairs or even kill me. There is a part of me that admires my Gram’s ability to still love my dad, but there is a larger part that is terrified by it.
"Promise me you won't tell your children bad things about your father."
I feel the weight of what she is asking of me. Of the silence I will choke every time I look into my future children's faces. The hate that will grow in me if it hasn't taken root already. But more than that, I feel the pain of being proven right. My Gram is, first and foremost, a mother. In her words, I hear the pleas of a parent trying to protect their monster of a son. If only someone had done that for me. If only Gertrude had done a better job of doing that for Lisa. If only we stopped making promises that killed us to keep.
"Yes, of course, Gram. I promise."