Элизабет Чандлер: Legacy of Lies

There I found Grandmother in a kitchen with a huge open hearth. An old stove sat halfway inside the blackened fireplace. She stood next to it, stirring something in a pot.

“So you found your way back,” she said.

“Yes. I saw the river. It’s awesome.”

“Then you must not have kept the house in sight,” Grandmother observed shrewdly. “You cannot see it from any place along the riverbank, not this time of year.

“I, uh, guess I did lose sight of the chimneys. But I have a pretty good sense of direction.”

She didn’t reply.

“Shall I set the table?” I offered.

“It’s set.”

So we were eating in the dining room with all those appetizing paintings of dying deer and fox.

“You may carry out the meat and biscuits. The rest will get cold if Matt- Well, it’s about time,” she told him as he came through the door.

“It’s three minutes to six,” he replied mildly, then joined her at the stove and began dishing out the greens. I may as well have been a kitchen stool he walked past.

I carried out the platter of meat, then biscuits. He and Grandmother brought the soup and green beans.

Grandmother sat at the head of the table with Matt at her right, which left me the seat across from him. As luck would have it, I was also across from the goriest deer of the hunting series.

“We always pray first,” Grandmother said as I pulled up my chair.

She folded her hands, resting them on the edge of the table, so I did the same. Matt stared down at his plate.

“Dear Lord,” Grandmother began, “forgive us our trespasses this day. Though we lie with our lips and our hearts, call us back to your truth, and grant us mercy rather than the justice we deserve. Amen.”

It was the gloomiest dinner prayer I’d ever heard. “Maybe we should give thanks, too,” I suggested, “as long as we’re praying before a meal.”

Matt glanced up.

“You may pray however you like on your own,” Grandmother replied, then handed me the ham. “I am relieved to see your parents didn’t bring you up to be a complete heathen, though, no doubt, they’ve passed on some kooky ideas.”

“No doubt,” I said cheerfully. She wasn’t going to drag me and them down. I took a little of the meat, more of the green beans, and one very hard biscuit. A bowl of thick soup was dished out for me.

What appeared to be ham was so salty I could hardly swallow it. It was as if someone had glued fake bacon bits together, then sliced them ultra thin. “What do you call this kind of meat?” I asked.

“Smithfield ham,” said Grandmother. “It’s a tradition.”

I took a long drink of water, ate another mouthful, then bit into a rock-hard biscuit.

“Those are beaten biscuits,” Grandmother told me.

“Another tradition.”

Some of that traditional airplane food I’d turned down was looking pretty good now. I sampled the green beans, then gobbled them up.

“Try your stew,” Grandmother ordered.

I pulled the bowl closer and spooned lumps of grayishwhite stuff.

“They’re not raw,” Matt said, “not when they’re in the stew.”

“What’s not raw?” I asked, setting down my spoon.

“The oysters.”

I ate one mouthful. It was the slimiest seafood I’d ever tasted, swimming in heavy cream. “May I have the green beans, please?”

“You’re not a vegetarian, are you?” Grandmother asked. “I refuse to feed you if you are.”

“I’m trying a little of everything, Grandmother,” I replied patiently, “but I have always liked green beans.” I used to like biscuits, I thought, taking another bite of the hard, flat thing.

“It would be just like her parents to raise her as an animal rights extremist,” Grandmother said to Matt. “The two of them have always had strange ideas.”

It annoyed me to be referred to in the third person, and it hurt to hear my parents put down, but I kept my cool.

“Dad doesn’t like hunting,” I admitted, “which isn’t real surprising since he’s a vet. But as you know, Grandmother, his father was an Eastern Shore farmer. Dad was raised on meat and still eats it.”

“It’s unnatural to avoid meat,” she went on.

“Look,” I exclaimed, frustrated, “1 am not a vegetarian!

Though the paintings in this room are pushing me in that direction.”

Matt’s eyes flicked around the room, then came back to me. His dark gaze was unreadable, but at least he’d given up the pretension of not seeing me.

“So what is your mother up in arms about these days?”

Grandmother asked. “Migrant workers, I bet.”

She knew Mom better than I thought. Two letters on migrant living conditions had been sent to senators last week.

To Matt, Grandmother said, “Carolyn marched for integration, raising taxes for education, luxury condos for chickens-for everything but common sense.”

“That’s an exaggeration,” I countered. “For the chickens she supported two-bedroom apartments.”

Matt’s mouth twitched, but he remained silent.

Grandmother grimly ate her ham and biscuits. Obviously, she had no sense of humor, which meant I wasn’t going to be able to joke my way out of an argument.

“College ruined her,” Grandmother went on. “It made her a sloppy thinker.”

“Mom says that when she arrived at college she found out how narrow-minded she was.”

Grandmother laid down her fork. “There was nothing narrow about Carolyn’s mind. When she left my house she saw the world clearly and knew right from wrong. After four years away she became hopelessly muddled.”

“It is easy to see clearly, when all you see are black and white,” I argued, “when you believe that everything has to be one or the other. But it doesn’t.”

“What is clear to me is that you weren’t raised with manners,” Grandmother countered, her eyes glittering. She didn’t like me, but she liked conflict. “You weren’t taught respect for your elders.”

“I was. But I don’t fake well, and despite what Mom and Dad say, I don’t respect people who don’t respect others.”

A long silence followed. I chewed and listened to the clink of silverware.

At last Matt pushed back his chair. “I’m going to a movie tonight. Alex is picking me up.”

“What movie?” Grandmother asked.

“Sheer Blue. It just opened at the theater on High Street.”

“That film got a great review in the Tucson paper,” I said.

“I’ve been wanting to see it.” Maybe he’d take the hint and ask me along. I was eager to be with kids my own age. “The chase sequence is supposed to be fantastic,” I added.

“That’s what everyone says,” he replied. “I’ll be home by one o’clock,” he told Grandmother, then rose and picked up his dishes.

I wasn’t going to be invited.

“You mean twelve-thirty,” Grandmother told him. “Who’s going besides Alex?”

“Kristy, Amanda, and Kate.”

“Oh, the girls you were studying with today,” I ventured casually.

He turned around, surprised.

“It’s just Alex that he studies with,” Grandmother informed me.

“Really?”

Matt gave me a look, which translated into something like drop dead, then left.

I sat sipping water, waiting for Grandmother to finish her meal. When she pushed back her chair, I did the same. “Do you have any special instructions for washing dishes?” I asked.

“We each do our own.”

“I’ll do yours,” I offered. “You did the cooking.”

“Nancy does the cooking,” she corrected me.

“Well, I’m still glad to do them for you.”

But, as she said, we each did our own. Grandmother could not bend in any of her ways.

When the kitchen was cleaned up, she told me it was her custom to read in the evening. I could sit in the library with her, as long as I did not talk or listen to music. Her invitation didn’t give me warm and cozy feelings. And I doubted she’d approve of the book I’d picked up at the airport: The cover showed a woman with a torn dress and half-bared breasts running from a big house on a stormy night.