remembering Betty Jane

My maternal grandmother, Betty Jane Greer, died Tuesday morning in her sleep in hospice care in St. Augustine, Florida. She was 86 years old.

She stood about 4 feet 10 inches tall and shrinking. She wore her hair, still naturally black except for one silver streak I pray to inherit, in a careless bun prickling with bobby pins, and her blue eyes were always magnified by enormous thick glasses. Decades of chain-smoking slim cigarettes had left her everyday attire of sweatpants and men's undershirts uniformly full of burn-holes. Although toward the end the cigarettes were, more than anything, a prop to be left burning in an ashtray or waved around at the end of her hand for effect. She'd leave a trail of ash on the things and then gesture with them while she spoke in a guttural, unexpectedly forceful voice that seemed to emanate from beyond her, and we'd wince, recoiling from that dangerous cherry threatening to fall with every emphatic thrust of her little fist.

Her face looked like a withered apple and she'd lost most of her teeth before I was born. She hated wearing her dentures but despised being seen in public without them, and as a consequence left the house as seldom as possible. When she did go out, accompanied by one of my uncles or my mother, she had a tendency to discomfit others with impertinent questions and "inappropriate" observations. She carried a variety of tupperware containers in her purse in case her outing resulted in leftovers.

Politically my grandmother fell somewhere to the right of Scary Fascist. As far as she was concerned even the most conservative elements in the U.S. government were wrapped up in a socialist conspiracy to undermine white people everywhere. She spent most of her time in one small back bedroom of her house, furnished simply with a sofa, a television, a coffee table, and ninety bazillion cassette tapes she used to record everything that happened on C-SPAN. She used cassette rather than video tapes because they afforded her the chance to superimpose her own analysis over that of the commentators. Tapes were piled up past the window frames and an arm's-depth into the corners of the room. To my knowledge she never listened to what she had recorded, and despite the fact she never catalogued or dated her tapes, she believed that they would one day constitute a valuable historical archive. Tragically, my grandfather, who died in '93, started the family tradition of recycling her tapes and if she ever noticed she didn't say so.

My oldest uncle and my mother remember a time when Betty Jane was coherent, gentle, lovely. Their younger brothers for the most part do not. Now she's the maelstrom they have to navigate in every conversation. Our family reunions are few and far between, but when they happen they tend to result in late nights around the kitchen table sipping coffee and trying to figure out where and when Betty wandered off. We cousins, I think, have a heightened sense of our parents' afflictedness, and have no illusions about the fact that we are to some extent afterthoughts, epilogues to a family drama that hasn't played itself out yet. Remarkable that such a small, eccentric and otherwise ineffectual person exerts such power over us in my family.

When I was little I used to be afraid of my grandmother: her loud voice, her cackling laugh and rough touch, the live end of her cigarette and her opaque rhetorical questions. As I got older she became an unpredictable source of amusement -- the few of my friends who met her found her fascinating, and I laughed with them, always with a trace of resentment, a trace of guilt.

Here's my favorite story about my grandmother: she went to a busy doctor's office after she had her hip replaced. The waiting room was full of grumpy, defeated-seeming people. After a couple of minutes, she turned to the young girl across from her, perforated with piercings, and said, and what made us decide to do that? The girl paused, obviously taken aback, and then answered. Soon they were in a conversation about which piercings had hurt the most, how much they cost and why she would choose to pierce this or that part of her body. Next she engaged a woman whose husband had just left her in telling her life story. So your husband left did he? Yes, so did mine, she said, and then another lady turned out to be that lady's neighbor, and this sparked off further conversation, and pretty soon the whole waiting room was laughing at this little old lady cursing and being honest, and she looked around her and said, well, I guess we aren't as sick and miserable as we thought.

Here's to Betty Jane; may she rest in peace, or in theories of chaos and conspiracy, whichever she prefers.