GRANDMA SCHNEIDER’S TWO HUSBANDS     (1,813 words)                    

   “Mrs Aldwell’s  an old witch,” I told my baby sister Sarah one afternoon. We were sitting at the kitchen table, cutting out paper dolls from old Sears Roebuck catalogues.  I crumpled up one of the paper dolls into a tiny ball and showed her. “See that? She could do that to you. Turn you into a spit-ball in two seconds flat. She tried it on me today but I got away.” 

   This wasn’t true of course, but I felt justified: I’d cut through Mrs Aldwell’s backyard on my way back from school and she’d come out and shrilled at me, her old-lady face all crabbed up and furious. She must’ve been lurking at the window, just waiting for someone to trespass over that one little corner of her backyard. Cutting through her backyard took about ten minutes off my walk to school and meant I didn’t have to walk past Johnny Blakewell’s house. Johnny Blakewell hated my guts.

    “You shouldn’t call someone a witch just because she’s a cross old lady,” Mama said to me later. She’d had her back to us and I thought she wasn’t listening.

   “She is a witch, though,” I said. “She’s mean and nasty.” I was putting a moustache on one of my lady paper dolls and I pressed down so hard with my pencil the lead broke off.    

“Age and youth,” my mother said softly. ‘I was just like you with my Grandma Schneider. Lord, we kids were hateful to her.”

   I drew a beard on a girl paper doll. “Why were you mean to your grandma?” I asked.

Mama sighed. “She was a lot like Mrs Aldwell. Kind of bitter, I guess. You see old people sometimes – when you’re a kid, how’re you supposed to know they haven’t always been that way?” She was talking to herself, not to me.

   “So what about her?” I said again, forgetting to be nonchalant. “What was wrong with your Grandma Schneider?”

   “My Grandma Schneider,” Mama sighed, “had the sourest expression you’ve ever seen on a human face. You know how I’m always telling you kids ‘Don’t frown like that or your face’ll freeze that way?’ Well, when I was a child, I used to reckon Grandma Schneider’s parents had forgotten to tell her that. I don’t recall ever seeing her smile.

   “Now my Grandma O’Canny, she was different. She was the sort of grandma you see in Christmas cards and story books:  beautiful face, all creased and wrinkled in the right sort of way with happy lines all around her eyes, smile-furrows stretching from her mouth to her nose. Always laughing, always full of fun.

    “She and Grandma Schneider were close. You wouldn’t think that they’d get along, let alone actually like each other, as different as they were. But they would sit together and do their sewing, chat. We kids would come into the room and they’d always stop talking. Whatever they talked about, it was a secret from us.

   “We lived in a big house back then, and Grandma Schneider practically lived with us, in her own little cottage out back. She had a little kitchenette my dad’d rigged up for her, her own little bathroom and sitting room. Grandma O’Canny lived a distance away, in the next town. She didn’t drive, so we didn’t get to see as much of her as we did of Grandma Schneider, and we kids thought that was a pity. We’d have rather had it the other way around. 

   “She didn’t have any sense of fun at all, that was the problem. She worked hard: after dinner, you had to beg her not to get up and start on the dishes right away; she was always knitting or sewing something, and she went out into the garden every morning first thing and raked up all the leaves, dead-headed the roses and such. But she didn’t laugh. She didn’t smile. We kids were cold to her, kind of stand-offish. And we were mean to her behind her back, too:  we called her names. ‘Old Sour Puss,’ I remember, or Mrs Moustache. I feel awful just thinking about it now, but back then she was just a pain in the neck to us kids, always frowning and tidying and sweeping. And she had no use at all for silliness. There were three of us girls in the family and most girls do giggle, after all, and that seemed to make her especially cross. So for us she was just a killjoy. A wet blanket, just born to ruin our fun – well, we just didn’t know, did we?”  Mama sighed again.

    Mama used to do this all the time. She’d stop a story just at a crucial moment and ruminate while you hung there, desperate for her to go on. She did it now, too. She sat there shaking her head until I couldn’t stand it any longer. “What, mama? What was it you didn’t know?”

   “What made her the way she was. We had no idea – she never talked to us about it at all. Not to us kids at any rate. Things are different now. Seems like people talk about everything nowadays. Get right out there on television and tell the world about their problems, their personal business. But that wasn’t how they did it back then. She’d grown up believing that if you had some sorrow in your life – well, it was your own personal affair. You didn’t go around telling everyone.”

    And she was back to shaking her head again and looking sad. “So tell me what happened!” I practically shouted.

   “She died, Grandma Schneider. Very suddenly, in her sleep. It had been really windy the night before, all the leaves had blown down from the big copper beech we had in the backyard. Normally she would’ve been out there first thing, raking. My father went out to see why she wasn’t up and he found her. Gone, just like that. None of us had even had the chance to say goodbye. She’d been all by herself.”

   “So what about her life?” I urged.  “What happened to make her that way?”

   My mother came and sat down with me. “All we knew about her was that she’d come from Germany way back when, as a bride. At her funeral, it came out that the man she’d married before she left Germany wasn’t Grandpa Schneider; it was his younger brother.”

    “What happened to him?”

    “He died on the ship just before they got to America. He got something they called ship fever. Once you had it you were certain to die, and they’d just chuck your body overboard. They couldn’t afford to keep a body infected like that on the ship. So one minute he was her husband, warm and breathing, and the next – well, he was dead, sinking in the ocean. Just like that.”

   “So what about Grandpa Schneider? When did she meet him?”

   “Grandpa Schneider was on the ship with them, coming to America too. It was an adventure for all three of them; they’d never been out of their village in Bavaria before. Grandma Schneider and her new husband were only nineteen, and the older brother – Grandpa Schneider, as it turned out – was twenty-five. They were all off to America to have great adventures and make their fortunes.” Mama sighed again.

    “Later on we went over to her little cottage to clean out her things. Not that she had much, and everything she did have was kept just so tidy!  It was pitiful, all those nice things she’d never used, packed away in her drawers. Every gift she’d ever been given – cheap brooches, soap, box after box of brand-new handkerchiefs – which is what we always got her for Christmas, you see, because we couldn’t think of anything else – all carefully packed away and labelled in her spidery handwriting. ‘Christmas gift from Edna,’ one said. ‘Birthday present from Jacob.’ And in the very bottom drawer there was a photograph.

    “We didn’t recognize her at first. She was in the middle, with a smiling young man on either side. One of the men we didn’t know, but the other fellow was obviously a younger version of Grandpa Schneider. But her – oh my! She looked completely different. Not just a younger version of herself, but a different person altogether. Grinning all over her face, she was. Like she had the world by the tail. A real beauty too, and her smile just like sunlight. We were all sitting there marvelling over that picture, when Grandma O’Canny came into the room.

     “She looked at the picture we were exclaiming over. ‘Can you believe it’s her?’ we were saying.  Oh yes, she said, she could believe it. Hilda – that was my Grandma Schneider’s name – sure, she had told her how she’d been a happy, gay girl before. ‘Before what?’ we asked, and she told us what Grandma Schneider had told her.

    “They were in a state of high excitement, the day they got on the ship bound for America. Hilda was a young, giddy thing, back then, really frivolous and carefree and with a habit of saying silly things just to make people laugh. And she had put her arms around both brothers and planted a kiss on her husband’s cheek, then her brother-in-law’s. ‘Look at me!’ she cried to the people seeing them off. ‘Here I am off to America with my two husbands!’

   “People back then were superstitious. Grandma Schneider never forgave herself for making that one remark. She just knew she’d brought about the death of her husband by saying that one silly thing. As soon as they got to New York, she married Heinz, the older brother, and they had my father and my aunts and uncles. They raised a big family and she lived a long happy life after that – well, long at any rate – but it changed her forever. Maybe it was wrong for her to take it so to heart, but she did.

   “I went outside a few days after she’d died. I wanted to do something to make her happy, wherever she was. I knew she was gone, knew I’d never have the chance again – but I wanted to make amends and do something for her. In all the fuss after the funeral, no one had swept up those leaves. So I did. I raked them onto the beds just like she always had and I said, like she always said, ‘Now is nice and neat.’ It was all I could do, but it made me feel a little better.”

   I sat at the table drawing for a long time after that, thinking about Mama’s Grandma Schneider.  It was hard to imagine nasty old Mrs Aldwell as a young bride pining for her lost love. Almost impossible.  But I tried anyway.