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O BUDDHA

When I was a boy, I used to often be taken on visits to various family relatives, of which I had a bewilderingly large number; their exact kinship to me, and to each other, was a matter about which I was often uncertain.  My father, for instance, was an only child, but both his parents had married and remarried several times.  My grandfather had first been married to my father's mother, then to another woman who, along with his first wife, I referred to as "Grandma"; she, in her turn, had been married once before, and had had several children who, if not considered "relatives" in the strict sense of the word, were nevertheless treated as members of our extended family.  My father's mother, after divorcing my grandfather, married twice again, and each of these subsequent husbands had also been married previously and had had children by these previous marriages.  Some of those children lived in other parts of the country, and these I never met; but others still lived in the area and sometimes took part in family gatherings.  On my mother's side of the family, there was a less complex assemblage of immediate ancestors; her parents, at least, never divorced.  She did, however, have a great number of brothers, all of whom were married and some of whom later divorced and then married again, thus producing large, complicated, intermixed families of their own.  The family tree had more branches than I could keep track of, and which of the branches were original outgrowths and which had been merely grafted on I did not always know.  I had cousins by the dozen, some of whom were blood kin, some of whom were only "cousins-by-marriage"; a multiplicity of aunts and uncles; and a somewhat larger-than-usual number of "grandma's" and "grandpa's," several of whom were part of the family gatherings for only a few years, and then – rather mysteriously from a young boy's perspective – simply dropped out of sight.

My great-grandmother on my father's side was the oldest living member of the family and operated, in nominal fashion, as our matriarch.  That is to say, she was not a person one sought out in particular for any such wisdom as her advanced years might be thought to have given her; rather, her mere existence was taken as reason enough to command respect.  She was our "living link" to the past:  age, not sagacity, was her explicit virtue.  She gave flesh-and-blood embodiment to the one principle we were all expected to hold most dear:  perseverance.  She was a large-boned old woman, already in her eighties when I was boy, but hale and hearty except for her hearing loss, which was admittedly severe.  She wore a hearing aid, the microphone for which consisted of a small, flat, plastic box she kept clipped to the top of her slip.  In order to make yourself heard you had to lean over and bawl rather loudly into her chest.  Not too loudly though; if you did that her hearing-aid would give out a high-pitched whistle and cause my great-grandmother to pull back sharply, breath hissing from between clattering false teeth.  However, if you pitched your voice at just the right level, she seemed able to make out enough of what you said to respond appropriately; though in truth, she wasn't really able to contribute much to a conversation.  Mostly people would just shout things at her chest and she'd nod and smile, give a dry, throaty chuckle and cry, "Yaw!  I know!  I know!" even though she clearly had no notion of what exactly it was you were talking about.

In looking back on it, it appears that her fame within the family circle rested on rather thin evidence.  The glossy whiteness of her hair, for instance, was frequently accounted remarkable:  it was considered a marvel that it had not yellowed with age.  Her house, kept in a state of disarray that bordered on slovenliness, was called a pack rat's delight:  old bread wrappers, tin cans, rubber bands, newspapers, etc, were to be found in profusion, sticking out of drawers, stacked up on tables and jumbled into corners until such time as they were relegated to the back porch, where great mounds of various combinations of junk stood heaped in haphazard piles.  She was also known (this bit of information always being imparted with a sly wink) to like a drop of whiskey now and then, and kept a bottle of the stuff in her bedroom; it was replenished all of once a year.  Above all else she was famed for her black bread and baked beans; when she served up the latter at the yearly dinner she held, it was always to the accompaniment of the following humorous old rhyme:  "Beans, beans, the musical fruit!  The more you eat, the more you toot!"  She repeated this joke so many times it actually fostered a nickname for her:  Toots.  No one seemed to be embarrassed by the fact that the family matriarch was referred to by a euphemism for farting; rather, it was taken to be a kind of homage to that earthy quality which had allowed her to live to such a grand old age, despite the many difficulties of her life.

She had borne seven children in her time, five boys and two girls.  One son had died in infancy, the victim of rheumatic fever.  Her husband, a common laborer, had also died young, leaving his widow to act as sole provider for the remaining children.  With no other resources available, my great-grandmother was forced to take any job she could:  she rode a bicycle about town at dawn, delivering newspapers; the rest of the day she worked as a telephone operator.  She also canned her own fruits and vegetables and made a variety of jellies and jams as well; some of these, along with the eggs she gathered from a small brood of scrawny chickens she kept in the backyard, were sold on Saturday mornings at the local Farmer's Market.  By these means, she managed to keep her family together; they stayed together until the arrival of the Second World War.  Two sons went off to fight in that war; only one came back.  In memory of the boy she had lost, she kept forever after on her bedside table a small figurine of a soldier molded out of white plastic.  (I remember I loved playing with this when I was a child:  it glowed in the dark.)  By the time the war ended the younger sons were getting old enough to marry, and one by one began to do so.  Of the daughters, one moved down South during this period to live with her husband and his family.  The other daughter, Jane, remained at home.

My great-aunt Jane was the youngest of my great-grandmother's children and, in private conversation, other members of the family said that it showed.  They claimed that she had been spoiled as a child, and had in consequence been spoiled for life.  The household she had grown up in had been very poor, yet by the time Jane reached girlhood the years of truly desperate poverty were over; whatever luxuries were to be had were given to the youngest, whose individual personality all usurped in order to make of her a poor-man's princess and family pet.  The combination of being so particularly cosseted in the midst of such general impoverishment caused Jane to grow up willful and rather sassy.  She had a pert sort of prettiness about her, what with her doll-like, heart-shaped faced, her mop of reddish-brown curls, and her habit of smiling with her lips closed, as if in prim sureity that her every heart's desire would, could, and should eventually be fulfilled.

She determined to make her own way in life.  She went to business school and learned the skills necessary to become a secretary, then got a job in an office at one of the local factories and moved out on her own.  She loved people and she loved parties, and apparently enjoyed herself quite a good deal in her younger days.  A string of men passed into and out of her life.  She climbed steadily at her job, eventually becoming the factory manager's personal assistant.  Some said that she got the job because she was sleeping with the manager, who was a married man.  This may have been so, though it always seemed to me equally possible that skill and efficiency at her work might just as well have caused her advancement:  she had, after all, been at the factory some fifteen years by that time.  Yet family gossip held otherwise.  Jane was always said to have been proud – too proud for her own good:  the implication being that she could be unscrupulous with regard to getting what she wanted; hence the rumor of an affair.  I must admit that no one in my family really liked Aunt Jane; no one regarded her with genuine affection.  And it's true that, when I was a boy, I could see for myself that she had a difficult personality:  she was selfish, bitter and vain.  There was in her, by the time she reached old age, no sign of softness left – only the scars that too much softness had left behind.

When she was forty years old, she surprised everyone by marrying a man she had known for only three months.  A year and a half later, her husband died of liver failure, this having been brought on by excessive drinking.  I used to often look at the small framed photograph Jane kept of him on her dresser.  He was a handsome man with a roundish, rather florid face, a neat, trim moustache, and an easy, almost flippant smile.  He looked gay and carefree, a man who knew how to enjoy himself; no premonition of early death marred that smooth brow.  I asked Jane about him once; she said only that he had been a lot of fun to be with, that she had liked him, and so had married him.  "But he turned out to be weak," she said.  "That man was one weak sister."  Even all those years later, her voice was still sharp with disdain.

She had reason enough for bitterness.  When her husband died, Jane was forty-two years old.  She had quit her job when she married and could not, by that time, get it back; moreover, she had been left with many debts.  Her youth was behind her; she was no longer the pert young woman who had brought life to every party.  Neither had she any children to take comfort in.  She had in fact nothing, nothing left to call her own.

My great-grandmother, still living in the family homestead on the outskirts of town, was growing old; the house was becoming too much for her to take care of.  There seemed no other choice but for mother and daughter to move in together and share expenses.  They found an acceptable, if rather humble, apartment in town and installed themselves there.  They would live in this apartment together for the next thirty-five years.

Jane soon found another job as a secretary, though this one was not nearly as prestigious and well-salaried as the previous position she had held.  Still, it paid the bills.  At the company where she now worked she gathered about her a little clique, the members of which, it was said, made life rather difficult for the other employees.  They were, apparently, a sharp-tongued group; I imagine my aunt to have been one of those rather nasty gossips who, their own lives having been spoilt, take their revenge by needling at whatever flaws they find in others.  Pride in her skill on the job hardened into rigidity:  she became the office watchdog, insisting that everyone always follow the rules; no bending was allowed.  Photographs show that she became, in those years, rather dumpy in appearance:  her belly turned flabby and her hips widened; her hair, once soft with curls, became a smoke-colored mass of dried-out frizz.  She wore thick glasses.  Fuzz grew on her chin.

Things went along like that for some years.  I imagine some fractiousness to have existed between mother and daughter, as may happen when people live together not through choice but necessity; still, neither seemed inclined, or at any rate felt able, to change their living arrangements.  Then, one day, calamity fell.  When she was fifty-four years old, Jane suffered a massive stroke.  It was a stroke so severe that her doctor said it was nothing short of a miracle that she had survived:  the implication being that it may have been better for everyone concerned if she hadn't.  The stroke left her paralyzed on one side.  Her right arm was useless ever after; it hung at her side like a broken wing, slightly bent at the elbow, muscles and tendons atrophied, the hand permanently curled into a half-fist and powerless as a dead claw.  Her leg was supported by a metal brace, attached at the foot to a specially made shoe and strapped together at the top just under the knee.  She was able, eventually, to walk about the apartment with the use of a cane, putting first her good foot forward, then dragging her bad foot behind.  Half her body existed as nothing more than dead weight, a living corpse she had to carry about with her everywhere she went.  She hated it.

Her speech she largely recovered.  She spoke slowly, haltingly, and often couldn't seem to find the words she wanted; but if she concentrated and took her time she could make herself understood well enough.  It was only when she lost her temper that the faculty for language deserted her completely; then she would simply grit her teeth and growl.  She lost her temper with my great-grandmother quite often.  She would holler out something she wanted to say, speaking slowly and distinctly in an attempt to make herself understood; but the obstacles of her own faltering tongue and my great-grandmother's growing deafness defeated all efforts at communication.  Louder and louder she'd shout, and my great-grandmother, her hearing-aid whistling, would bob her head and burble, "Yaw!  Yaw!  I know!" even though it was obvious she hadn't a clue as to what had been said.  Aunt Jane would gnash her teeth together and emit a deep growl of frustration.  Then the swear words would come.  "Fuck you! . . .  Fuck you! . . .  Fuck, fuck, fuck you!" she'd shout.  "You old shitass!  You shitass, shitass, shitass!"  Swear words were the only ones that never failed her.

Her frustration and her loneliness were, I imagine, acute.  Ironically though, Jane refused all her life to drop the facade of hope she'd adopted with regard to her eventual recovery from debilitation.  Whenever friends and colleagues from the old days would come by to visit, she would assure them always that she was getting better, her body growing stronger.  She would proclaim that her ability to walk was steadily improving; lifting her dead arm up, she would insist that its mobility was ever on the rise.  For years – decades, in fact – she kept up this pretense, even when it had long since become clear to everyone else that no further improvement was to be expected.  Time wore on.  Her friends grew older; their visits became less and less frequent, then ceased altogether.

I used to go visit my great-grandmother and aunt quite often when I was boy.  I was not taken to see them; I went on my own.  I'm not entirely sure now just why I did this.  Most likely they had asked me to stop by once or twice to help them with some chore:  to wash their windows, put in or take out the screens, hang curtains.  I would change the paper lining on the bottom of their parakeet's cage, help defrost the freezer, run to the drugstore, accompany my great-grandmother as she trekked down the street for groceries.  Eventually going over to their apartment became a kind of habit.  In the fall, after school had begun, I would go once a week to the red-brick building where they lived and find them waiting for me out on their front porch.  The porch was enclosed, and it made quite a comfortable room; there were long windows all along the front and down one side that let the sun in.  Below the side windows was a window-seat covered with cushions.  The parakeet's cage stood near the front, shaded by ivy plants hanging from hooks in the ceiling.  My great-grandmother would be sitting in a rocker tucked into one corner of the porch; beside her was a little table with a drawer in it for pencils and paper and rubber bands and any other little oddments she'd happened to find.  On the other side of the table, near the window closest to the front door, sat my aunt in a sturdy old wicker chair.  Her cane would be propped against the wall, her good left hand restlessly clasping and unclasping the dead one lying prone in her lap.  Her face blurred by age, her dim eyes searching the street outside, she sat week after week in a kind of fury of forced patience, waiting and watching for the appearance of the last friend who would ever come to pay her a call.