I.
The Social Security Death Index only says "Dec 1971."
I remember it so vividly that the abbreviated date seems vaguely insulting.
There was no snow on the ground, and I was walking home from school on Starr Street, which stretched from our apartment complex, past the Acme, all the way to the steel factory like a spool of satin ribbon fallen from a table.
The walk seemed endless.
I often took it with my friend Everett Ashenfelter. At 12, he was already fat. But he was kind; meaning, that he spoke to me rather than taunted me.
On this particular day I was alone. Quite likely, I was wearing the black, sherpa-lined boots my mother bought for me that slipped on and off so easily, and perhaps even the ridiculous faux fur coat that made me look like a pre-pubescent Tallulah Bankhead.
My mother was also fond of dickies, the tightly collared sheaths that fit under V-neck sweaters—functionless and abbreviated, not unlike "Dec 1971."
That day, I might have been carrying my plastic Bundy clarinet in its black velour-lined case, double latched, indestructible as a Kelly green tank. My reeds—I had two—slipped into a tangerine paper folder with the name of the music store on Bridge Street rather carelessly rubber stamped onto each side.
Perhaps my mother had called the school. I might have been dismissed early and told, without explanation, to return straight home. Today, I can look at a map online and determine, with the accuracy of nostalgia, that it must have been at about house number 759 that my mother's white Ford Mustang passed me, then turned into the Acme parking lot and stopped.
I got into the car.
Brian was in the front passenger seat looking frightened and sullen.
I imagine I must have interpreted the situation loquaciously, gabbing from behind my geeky glasses frames held together with Scotch tape. It was an early and lifelong habit always to experience life verbally, summoning adjectives and drawing conclusions as a sports announcer might call plays—anxiety and joy running ahead together like two unleashed dogs toward a field of syntax.
The car idled in one of the double lanes leading into and out of the treeless shopping center, and the song on the radio at that moment was Three Dog Night:
Just an old-fashioned love songComing down in three part harmonyJust an old-fashioned love songOne I'm sure they wrote for you and me.
That piece of music is capable of evoking the day as no snapshot could. It became, in my little boy's heart that understood no rock and roll—only Glenn Miller and the Lutheran hymnal—an unlikely anthem of Nannie, dead at 62.
II.
My mother's mother spent her childhood an easy walk from where I live today, yet no records of her can be found. It's taken me decades to learn that she was born in Sweden, her last name had been Andersen, she was adopted in Maine, divorced my grandfather and moved to Boston, then moved to the southwest, married Poppy, and settled in Betzwood. She may have studied with James Beard but more likely made it up.
She was a compulsive, highly creative liar.
Eighteen years ago, during a singular, rare gathering of two of my sisters-in-law, so temperamentally opposite, the only shared memory was of their first meeting with Nannie. It elicited a giggle from them both.
She was known for her from-scratch cooking, her perfectionistic housekeeping, and her legendary binge drinking.
My mind often wanders the hall and tiny rooms of her trailer, with their sliding doors and the philodendron-latticed room divider between the kitchen and the living room. Nannie's chair was just on the other side, where she sat watching Mannix. The click of a Zippo cigarette lighter evokes her now, her packs of Salem rendered more ladylike by a translucent plastic case the color of sea foam. A lava lamp was the only other light in the room.
I have the hammered aluminum dish she used for nuts at Christmastime; I'm missing the nutcracker always laid across it, and those thin metal pics that looked like dentist's tools.
This woman was my mother's reluctant choice of babysitter for me when I was 10, and I remember sitting on the foot of her bed with her as she muttered in a thick voice about losing the top to her pajamas. I had never seen breasts before, and I recalled them for my mother as Nannie's "shopping bags." The phrase became stock in our family for years to come, laughed at even by Nannie herself.
It was said she went from trailer to trailer one night, inebriated and topless. I wonder what it was she wanted from her neighbors. In speech she had a strong Maine accent.
A vivid memory is watching Brian walk her down the long hall of the trailer to the bathroom. She couldn't stand or walk alone, so he walked backwards holding her hands as she stumbled forward, urinating on the avocado green carpeting with each step.
That was a long night of horror.
It was one of several.
I remember her sobbing, as the alcohol took hold, so wildly and pathetically—then, later, cursing everyone she had known. Even as a child, I understood that something about the display was disingenuous, like the first read-through of a play, the unpolished speech of a macabre dress rehearsal. The Nannie of homemade dinner rolls had exited the stage, which now smelled of Canadian Club and vomit.
So it was on that December afternoon that our solemn party returned to Nannie's trailer. I was left to wander as my mother knelt, sobbing hysterically, on the floor scrubbing a large stain out of the living room carpet. In the bathtub I saw a small pink bucket. One side of it was coated in tar-colored vomit—Nannie had missed.
I will never forget that sight. I kept the twin of that pink bucket until it was lost in our move five years ago—the only other object of Nannie's I ever had.
The memory of her perfectionism and blind but uncanny certainty—her talent—became a model for me as I matured. I think of her not with disgust but sorrow that someone of such capability was so unlucky.
The call was coming from inside the house, so to speak. Nannie carried her demise within her.
III.
I came downstairs this morning and performed what has become a familiar accounting: one leftover Bogle cab, one Pinot Noir that was on sale at Shaw's, and the 90+ Cellars cab—all gone. When Gary told me he'd had three glasses, I was only temporarily relieved: he said two of them were white, so, only one of his three glasses was red. I had effectively drank all three bottles of red wine myself.
Of course, I have no memory of the evening. I once baked a blueberry pie in a blackout. I always felt that was a testimony to my pastry skills, no doubt inherited from Nannie.
In the hours before dawn this morning, I was scrolling TikTok and landed on a video by a man whose wife died in her thirties from the rupture of esophageal varices precipitated by alcoholism—precisely Nannie's death. He said she had had no symptoms of cirrhosis.
No symptoms.
Today, I am the same age Nannie was on that snowless December morning, 50 years ago, the exact date left unrecorded by the state.
That Christmas, my mother put a framed 8 x 10 studio photo of Nannie on the top of her maple cabinet stereo. The ancient casket of knobs and tubes was her most treasured possession, with its creaky, 10-pound lid, the heavy metal arm that dropped down onto the records, a fabric-covered façade like a stage curtain, and that smell as the tubes heated up. My mother was 42—the age I was when I lost her.
A certain bullying by the universe seems to be the thumbprint of my family—a lucklessness despite worthwhile charm. I remember them, with some exceptions, as having a fine sense of humor, a love of fun (certainly), and good taste in clothes and material things. How much of this genetic tackle box I wish to take with me on the rest of my journey is always a subject of speculation for me. But I have been—for years, now—convinced some traits are best abandoned.
I am still very much that boy with the taped glasses and the clarinet, and it has been sweet to conjure him again on this cold December morning.
I wish the best for him.
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