Carrie Fisher - Postcards from the Edge

“Oh, I sure do,” he said. “I remember. I heard that. Don’t talk behind my back. You women, I tell you…”

“Honey, don’t get all worked up now,” said Suzanne’s grandmother. “Do you want some—”

“I just want some coffee and one of my doughnuts,” he said. “I just heard you so loud in here. I’m all right.” He wandered back to his room.

“He gets worse every day,” her grandmother said. “It reminds me of you, when you used to get all bleary from those painkillers.”

Suzanne sighed. “All I want is to feel like I’ve got a regular life. Do you think I could make it if I moved here and wrote the insides of cards, and—”

“I don’t think you could do it, quite frankly,” said her grandmother. “But I think it’s your way of having a nice dream. Most people dream big, you dream small. It’s just whatever you haven’t got is what you want. It isn’t the life, it’s what you do with it. So, do something regular with your irregular life, rather than trying to get a regular one, ’cause you’d just do something irregular with that.”

“But do you think I could hold down a job? A regular job?”

“I’m one of those people who believe you can do whatever you set your mind to,” her grandmother said. “But, that being said, I think some people have an easier time setting their minds down than others do, and your mind seems to hover. Your brother seems to have his head out of the clouds, but yours is right up there in them. You always read too much, always had your nose in a book. A bookworm. You just don’t seem to have a level look on things, and I don’t know if you can get that or not. Maybe you could just live with it. I don’t think it’s such a bad thing. Certainly there’s worse.”

“Was Mommy like this?”

“You’re a little like your mother. She never was booky like you, but she had that big kind of personality. When you were a little girl you were very quiet. Your mother was more of a tomboy, but you… One time when we were driving somewhere I had you in the car seat, and we were taking these bumps really hard, and you took this big bump—you were less than two years old, way less—and you looked over at me and you said, ‘Damn it!’ And I don’t know where you got that word.”

Suzanne smiled. “What else do you remember?”

“You were very serious,” her grandmother continued. “You had these big brown eyes and you were always going, ‘What’s that? What’s that?’ You wondered what everything was. You would frown and point a lot, like a conductor looking for your orchestra. You always seemed very busy, like you were between appointments all the time, but you were just a little child.”

“You know what I remember, Gran? I don’t know where I was, but I was little enough to be under doorknobs, and I wanted to say a word so bad, and the word was ‘interesting.’ And I tried to say it, but it always came out ‘insterting.’ And that was my first big, big frustration.”

“You take things pretty hard,” her grandmother said. “I always tried to get you not to, but I don’t know, you can’t get children to be other than they are, and your nature is you take things rough. You work them over too much. Let things be, I always figure, but you always mull around and check everything out. Oh, you were a nosy little thing.”

“I like to hear stories about me,” Suzanne said. “It’s like I expect to hear some clue one day, like ‘Rosebud,’ where I’ll think, ‘ That was the moment.’ See, I don’t really remember feeling like a child, or like I imagine children are supposed to feel—that kind of Yippee! thing like running down a green pasture or something. That’s why I love hearing stories about myself as a child, so it seems like maybe I didn’t just land here.”

“No, you didn’t land here,” her grandmother said. “You were a child. There’s plenty of children in the world that are serious children. You had to grow up fast because of the divorce. That was hard, but it happens to lots of people nowadays. Of course, it’s easier on children when it doesn’t, but there’s no use going over that. I don’t know, you did things children do. You wore big hats and put on your mother’s makeup and wore her big high heels. You directed little shows in the closet. You were a child, and you can still be a child if you want. If you want we can go down to the market and I can get you some baby food. You’re not missing that much.”

“I always feel like I’m missing something.”

“Well, you always did feel that way. You never could even nap. Never.”

“I’ve always had this sense of foreboding,” Suzanne explained, “that something could go wrong and…”

“And what? You think that if you could be there you could prevent it? A little person like yourself? If it’s gonna go wrong, it’ll do it all by itself.”

“I know, but I feel like if I were there, I might be able to make it go right.”

“Well, that feeling is wrong,” her grandmother said. “So maybe the foreboding one is, too. You can’t stop things from doing what they’re going to do, unless you’re doing the things. And if you really want to get married and have children and cook, well, you better get a move on, little sister. You’re not doing any of that stuff now. You should shit or get off the pot, pardon my French.”

“Beautiful French,” said Suzanne. “Is that some Berlitz thing I’m not aware of?”

“Don’t you be fresh.”

“Is there a cutoff age for fresh?” asked Suzanne. “Or does it just go on indefinitely as long as you have older relatives?”

“Don’t make fun of me,” said her grandmother. “You know what I’m saying is right. Just pick someone and make it work, rather than using all the make-it-work energy saying, ‘He’s too short, he’s too tall, he’s no good…’ Just pick somebody. I’ve stayed with your grandfather now for fifty-odd years. I don’t like him, but I picked him. I’m proud of the fact that we’ve had this long marriage. I can’t say it’s all happy, it’s not always a good life, but we have a life together, and it’s as God intended. You’re there with your partner, and you don’t always like them but you don’t leave just ’cause you don’t like it. You’re spoiled. Your generation thinks that if you don’t like something, you can do this or do that, take a drug or whatever, but that’s not my generation. We make a choice and we stick with it, and I think you could learn something from that.”

“Yeah,” said Suzanne, “but you and Granpaw hate each other.”

“Where did you get that idea? We don’t hate each other. He just mostly stays in the back of the house and I stay in the front, but we see each other. We have our history together. We are each other’s lives, and I don’t hate my life.”

“So I should just… pick somebody?” asked Suzanne.

“I’m not saying I just went out and picked him, but I stuck by him,” she went on. “I can’t say we’ve had the happiest marriage, but we don’t just get up and walk out when we have a fight. We’ve been faithful to each other, and that counts for something. I love your grandfather. I don’t like him all the time, I think he’s an ornery old grunt, but he’s my husband and I will stay with him.”

“So, what qualities should I look for in a guy?”

“Well, you can’t afford to be so choosy. You know, you’ve got twenty-year-olds also looking around, with their tits way up high and the best years of their lives to throw away on somebody. You’ve already thrown yours away, so you can’t be all that choosy. If you find somebody who likes you and respects you, and if you like each other, then, you know, you can work on the rest of it.”