I started calling my grandmother by her first name when I was thirteen. It was the summer before Grandpa died, and Dad and I were spending the month of July with them in Woodacre, California. They owned a cedar-shingled cottage there where they’d go for weekends and vacations, and after Grandpa retired from Berkeley, they moved into it permanently.
My grandmother was an artist who was known primarily for her paintings and photographs. She was always mentoring a few art students, and one of them had a show opening in San Francisco during our visit. My grandmother took me with her.
The show was in SoMa at a garage that specialized in hybrid and electric vehicles, and doubled as an art gallery. A red plug-in Prius was elevated on a lift at the back of the garage, which had the cleanest polished concrete floors I’d ever seen. I had expected to see paintings hanging on the walls, but this artist made wire sculptures. They hung from cables that stretched across the space, twirling slowly in the air like graceful dancers made of silver mesh. Other sculptures were installed on stands scattered across the floor. Most were abstract in form, but some resembled female bodies or animal-like shapes: arms and tails extended, or elongated heads that seemed to look at you, even without eyes.
I was the youngest person there. As soon as we arrived, my grandmother was pulled away by a stranger, and then another one, and after a few minutes of awkwardly hovering a few feet away, I retreated to the rear of the garage by the Prius. Nearby, two couches were arranged around a sky-blue shag rug, and I sat down by myself while more people came through the garage’s huge open doors.
I could see the traffic whooshing by on Mission Street in the dusk. As Saturday evening settled into Saturday night, growing shadows blurred the city’s hard edges and turned them into soft-focus suggestions. I had been to plenty of art galleries before but not a Saturday night opening, and I’d dressed up for it in a teal-and-white sundress along with a carefully applied coating of lip gloss. Sitting on that sofa, I felt grown-up, almost.
I lost track of my grandmother in the gathering crowd. It was mostly women, mostly casually dressed in jeans and tees or tank tops, sneakers or boots, along with a smattering of all-black ensembles. Many of them had bare arms covered with tattoos: flowers or pinup girls or intricate abstract designs. A couple of women, one with pink hair, sat across from me on the other couch and set down small paper plates of cheese and grapes, while they toasted each other with clear plastic cups of white wine. I thought about making a plate of cheese for myself, but before I could get up, a Black woman with very short hair sat down beside me.
“This seat’s not taken, is it?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Thanks.” She held a plate of cheese and grapes, too, but instead of wine she had a small bottle of Pellegrino. She twisted it open and took a sip.
I could see the brown skin of her scalp where her hair was faded in on the sides. I didn’t want to stare, so I lowered my gaze. She was wearing black jeans and black motorcycle boots.
“Joan West is supposed to be here tonight,” the woman said. “Have you heard of her?”
I looked up. “Yeah, she’s . . .” Her right eyebrow was pierced, and her eyes were sapphire blue. The edges crinkled as she smiled at me, and suddenly I didn’t want to admit that Joan West was my grandmother. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be connected with her, but this woman was speaking to me as if I were an adult, like her. To be Joan West’s granddaughter made me a child, which I didn’t want to be. “She’s great,” I said. “I like her work.”
“Yeah? What’s your favorite?”
My grandmother’s most recent paintings were quite different from her previous work, but I liked them. Long, golden sweeps of light across doorways and honeyed wooden floors. When I looked at them, I thought of her and Grandpa on their deck in Woodacre in the late afternoon, the smell of wild grasses in the sun.
“I like her Time series,” I said.
She nodded. “Very meditative. I really appreciate her photography. The shots of her children especially.”
I knew the ones she was talking about. The pictures of my dad and Aunt Tammy when they were kids in Colorado. “Yeah, I’ve seen those,” I said. “People say they’re not about her children, but about the way we think about childhood.”
The woman’s smile broadened. “You know a lot about Joan West’s work. Are you a fan?”
I realized I had put myself on a path toward directly lying about who I was, rather than simply skirting the truth with careful omissions. It was a little exciting.
The woman’s smile softened as she looked at me, as if she knew I wasn’t telling the whole truth, but she wouldn’t push me. It was as if we were co-conspirators, and the thought of conspiring with her sent a nervous thrill through me. I wondered who she was.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m a fan.”
She nodded as if she had expected me to say that. “Joan’s been a big influence on a lot of artists here in the Bay Area. She should be way more famous than she is.”
I felt shy as I asked, “Are you an artist?”
“I am,” she said, as if it surprised her.
“What medium do you work in?” I’d heard my grandmother pose this question to others before, and I thought it made me sound mature.
The woman blinked, her smile disappearing for half a second before it returned. “Metal and wire. Sculpture mostly.”
“Sarah! There you are.”
We both looked up as my grandmother came toward us. She was wearing a purple-and-gold-patterned blouse that draped around her in some complicated way that created wings when she opened her arms for a hug. The woman sitting next to me rose to her feet and embraced her.
“Thank you so much for coming,” she said.
“Of course I came. I’m so happy for you.” My grandmother saw me watching and said, “I see you’ve met—”
“Hi, Joan,” I said quickly, standing up and smoothing down my dress. I flushed as my grandmother gave me a funny look.
The woman grinned. “Yes, I think I’ve met one of your biggest fans,” she said.
My grandmother seemed a little puzzled. “Aria, this is Sarah Franco. She’s the artist featured here tonight.”
Metal and wire, she had said. I was embarrassed that I hadn’t put that together.
Sarah extended her hand to me. “Hello, Aria. Nice to meet you officially.”
“Likewise,” I said. Her palm was rough, her fingers a little scratchy.
I wondered whether my grandmother was going to explain who I was. We didn’t look related because she was white and I’m half Asian, although there was something similar about the shapes of our faces.
“I’d better go get ready,” Sarah said. “I have to make a speech.”
My grandmother squeezed her shoulder. “I’m looking forward to it. And congratulations.”
“Thanks. Nice talking to you, Aria,” Sarah said, and then she headed off toward the front of the garage.
My grandmother looked at me with an amused smile. “Shall we go up front and get a good spot? I want to be sure to see everything.” She put her arm around my shoulders, and I knew she didn’t mind that I’d called her Joan, and maybe she even thought it was funny.
During Sarah’s speech, she thanked my grandmother for mentoring her over the past five years, for pushing her to go beyond her comfort zone. The audience applauded when Sarah pointed out my grandmother standing beside me, and when she stepped forward to acknowledge their applause with a smile and a wave, she looked beautiful and wise. I felt a keen sense of pride to be related to her—to Joan West. She was my grandmother, yes, but she was more than that, and it seemed inadequate to call her by a name that said nothing about her accomplishments.
From that night on, she was Joan to me. When my dad told me I was disrespecting her, my grandmother laughed and said, “We’re on a first-name basis now.”
—
Barely a couple of weeks after my dad and I returned to Massachusetts, Grandpa was diagnosed with fourth-stage pancreatic cancer. It all went so fast.
In mid-August, we flew back to California. Dad took a leave of absence from Wellesley College, where he taught. Aunt Tammy and her family came up from Pasadena, and we all stayed in a vacation rental near Woodacre. A hospital bed was set up in my grandparents’ bedroom and Grandpa spent more and more time there, while nurses came and went twice a day.
Dad and Aunt Tammy kept scurrying back and forth—from the kitchen to the bedroom to the grocery store and back—as if they were trying their hardest to hold the world together with their bare hands. Joan sat at Grandpa’s bedside and read to him, everything from the latest astronomy papers to his battered old Robert Heinlein science fiction novels. Sometimes I sat with them, and Joan’s voice would lull me into a half-waking dream of rocket ships and the boys who flew them.
Grandpa died in September. It was one of those perfect, golden days in Northern California, the air warm and weightless, the light like slowly melting butterscotch. Dad had made plans to grill steak for dinner because Grandpa said he wanted some, even though he wasn’t eating much anymore. He never ate it.
The memorial took place at the Unitarian church in Berkeley that my grandparents had gone to in the two decades they lived there. It was full of Grandpa’s former colleagues from Berkeley’s astronomy department, where he’d been a professor, but plenty of Joan’s friends came, too. Afterward, when I was waiting in the church vestibule for my parents, I saw Sarah Franco, the artist from the garage show. She was dressed all in black, with a black button-down shirt and polished black oxfords. She came over to me and told me she was sorry for my loss, and I realized then that she’d always known I was Joan’s granddaughter.
Dad and I took a 6:00 a.m. flight from Boston to San Francisco. Our seats weren’t together because he’d bought the tickets last minute, but I was relieved to be alone. I got a window way in the back, only a few rows up from the toilets.
As soon as the plane took off, I reclined my seat and stuffed the tiny airplane pillow against the edge of the window, trying to make myself comfortable enough to sleep. The plane smelled like bathroom cleaner and somebody’s egg-and-cheese bagel. The constant hum of recycled air seemed to press against me, pushing me deeper into the hard plastic window shade. I began to imagine my body passing through it, envisioning my skin and bones as individual cells and then singular atoms and then only photons—energy itself. And each photon, each tiny particle of light, could be instantly inside the wall of the airplane and simultaneously beyond it. My whole body could be suddenly outside, thirty thousand feet above the earth’s surface. I imagined the whirling air around me, nitrogen and oxygen and water vapor in the clouds and in me, the dawning sunlight scattered by microscopic particles of water and the atoms of my body.
I slept in that unsettled way I often do on planes, half dreaming, half awake. I still remember one of those dreams. It has stayed with me my entire life. I’m in the woods; the trees seem too tall to be real. I look up and up and can’t see their tops, only their feathery, dark green needles draping down and down. My grandmother is there, wearing a smock splashed in gold and blue and green. She holds a brush loaded with fuchsia paint and begins to sweep it across her torso, as if she is her own canvas. She notices that I’m standing nearby and raises her eyes to look at me.
She says: Don’t worry, something will happen.
And then I’m on a beach, and someone is handing me a shell. Pink and white, coiled tight.
I say: Is this something?
The airplane shuddered and I jolted awake, and the captain came over the speaker and said, “We’ve reached some expected turbulence over the Rockies, so I’ve turned on the fasten seat belt sign. Please return to your seats.”
The pillow slid down from the window. A bright white line shone from the bottom of the shade, and I inched it up, wincing against the sunlight. When my eyes adjusted, I looked out and down, and far below me the Rocky Mountains looked the way they do on topographical maps: wrinkled blue and brown, unreal.
If only, I thought. If only this wasn’t real.
—
Morning traffic was heavy as we left the San Francisco Airport rental car center, and Dad was silent as Google Maps navigated us onto the freeway. I stared out the window as we passed Colma and Daly City, continued up the stop-and-start length of 19th Avenue, then through Golden Gate Park and the Presidio. Finally, we reached the Golden Gate Bridge, glowing red in the sun. To the right, the glittering bay and Alcatraz; to the left, the blue of the Pacific beyond the suspension lines, and then we were swallowed by the rainbow entry of the Waldo Tunnel through the Marin Hills.
I wasn’t supposed to be here. I was supposed to spend the summer on Martha’s Vineyard with my friends, not in the remote woods of Marin County with my grandmother. The interior of the car suddenly felt airless, and I fumbled for the button to unroll the window. Traffic noise and warm dry air blasted inside. It smelled like Northern California: brown grass and sunshine and something else, some kind of tree or plant that grew here, and I remembered Grandpa taking me out on his precarious rooftop deck on late-summer nights to look at the stars. An ache inside me. He died five years ago, and I still missed him.
“Smells like California,” Dad said loudly over the rushing wind. They were the first words he’d spoken since we got in the car.
I glanced at him, and maybe because I had been thinking about Grandpa, I noticed how Dad looked like him. His eyebrows were bushy in the same way. “Yeah,” I replied.
Dad gave me an eager smile. “You always loved visiting here.”
I knew he was trying to get me to feel better about this summer, but I didn’t feel better and I didn’t want to pretend like I did.
“It’s too bad we never visited here with your mother,” he said. “She has family here, too.”
I felt like I must have known this before, but even so, it surprised me. “Who?” I asked.
“Some cousins. They’re out in the East Bay, but I think they used to live in Chinatown.” He looked at me encouragingly. “You should ask your mom.”
Now I knew what he was trying to do: get me to call her. But she had a phone, too. She could call me if she wanted.
—
We exited 101 North at Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, which we took all the way to Woodacre. The road passed through well-manicured suburbs with relatively tasteful strip malls at first, but bit by bit the strip malls became more worn-out, and the trees and hedges became wilder and less trimmed. We drove past Safeway, the last supermarket before Woodacre, and Sir Francis Drake High School, and then we went through the little hippie town of Fairfax, and at last the road broke out into open space. Brown hills dotted with green oak trees rose up on either side as the road wound between them, and all was laid bare beneath the wide blue sky. It felt like an entirely different world from the New England we’d just come from, where one town merges right into the next, and the sky always seems to be held at bay by trees and buildings.
Just past Spirit Rock Meditation Center, Dad turned left onto Railroad Avenue, which led into Woodacre. It was barely a town—a post office and a market and that was about it. The road narrowed and lost its center stripes, curling up and around the hills. The air smelled of sunbaked wood and grass, and the wind had hushed so that we could hear the birds singing. At last we rounded the final bend, and Dad pulled up behind my grandmother’s car, an old Honda Civic, in a gravel-covered pullout at the side of the road. Just ahead of the pullout was the green-painted gate that led up to the cottage.
After Grandpa died, I thought my grandmother might move back to Berkeley, where her friends were, but she had stayed. She had adopted a dog—a black lab that she named Analemma—and told everyone she preferred the remoteness of Woodacre.
Now I climbed out of the car and followed my dad to the trunk, where we pulled out two big suitcases and two backpacks. Dad was only staying for a couple of days before flying north to the Deer Bay Writers’ Colony in Washington, where he was spending the rest of the summer. He was supposed to finish his second novel there, but it was six years late by now, so I had my doubts. As I lugged my suitcase toward the gate, the reality of my summer began to sink in. I was staying here. Here.
I unlatched the gate and clumsily shoved the suitcase through. I heard a dog start barking. Analemma.
“I’ll get that,” Dad said. “Will you take the backpacks?”
He held them out, and I took them without meeting his eyes, but I saw the expression on his face: that sad hesitance he’d worn almost continually since that day a month ago.
I turned away and started up the brick steps to the house. It was built on the side of a hill, so you had to climb up a meandering, mossy brick path to access it. Along the way were several terraced gardens planted with ferns and hostas and flowers that could grow in the shade. A wheelbarrow filled with a tray of flowers was parked beside one of the garden plots, and a water bottle was perched on a nearby bench as if the gardener had stepped away for a moment.
Around the next bend the house came into view. The front door was painted turquoise blue, and it was opening already. Analemma shot outside, a blur of shiny black fur, and I had to drop the backpacks on the brick patio and kneel down to greet her, slobbery tongue and soft floppy ears and wriggly muscle.
“Hey, hey,” I said, laughing.
“Analemma, come,” my grandmother said. Ana’s ears perked up and she glanced back at Joan for an instant as if she were contemplating disobeying her, but Joan snapped her fingers, and Ana went. Then my grandmother smiled at me and held out her arms. “Aria,” she said. She was in her seventies, but you wouldn’t have known it by the way she looked. She was wearing faded jeans rolled up at the ankles, Birkenstocks, and a loose red-and-orange peasant blouse. Her gray hair was trimmed in a short, stylish cut that revealed dangling bronze earrings.
I got to my feet and let her enfold me in a hug. “Hi, Joan.” She smelled like coffee and lemon-scented soap, and as my arms went around her I felt a loosening within me, and for a horrifying second, I was afraid I would start to cry. I suppressed the urge, but when I pulled back, my grandmother gave me a sympathetic look and kissed me on the forehead as if I were a little girl.
“We’re going to have a good summer,” she said.
I didn’t have time to respond, because behind me Dad was arriving with my big suitcase, and then Analemma bolted forward, and Dad had to squat down to greet her. Joan told me I would be staying in the guest room. Dad would have to take the sofa bed for the couple of nights he’d be here.
Because the house was built on a hillside, the interior was on three levels, with most of the living space on the second floor. I carried my suitcase upstairs and rolled it through the living room, with its vaulted pine ceiling, Joan’s painting Southern Cross on one wall, and into the guest room. The double bed was covered in a patchwork quilt that looked like it was about a hundred years old; I recognized it from every previous visit. Over the bed were three black-and-white family photos, though they didn’t look like anyone else’s family photos.
There was one of Dad and Aunt Tammy as kids, double exposed so that their faces appeared to be echoed inside each other’s. One shot of Grandpa and Dad, when Dad was a teen, both looking directly at the camera with exactly the same curious expression on their faces. And a self-portrait of my grandmother, taken when she was much younger, her reflection floating in a window.
I heard Dad and Joan and Analemma coming upstairs, and Joan called, “Come and have lunch.”
Analemma dashed into the guest room and bumped my hand with her wet nose. “You want me to come?” I said, rubbing her ears with my fingers. She gave a soft woof, so I followed her out into the living room.
Dad had left his suitcase by the cold woodstove across from the purple velvet sofa. In the kitchen, lunch had been laid out on the round wooden table: a big bowl of salad with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, a take-out rotisserie chicken, a loaf of sourdough bread, and a pitcher of iced tea.
“Help yourself to food and let’s go sit on the deck,” Joan said, taking out plates and silverware.
I had only eaten a stale bagel on the plane, and as I watched Dad cut into the chicken, I realized I was starving. ...
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