One day, my mother got a call to say her mother, my grandmother, had just died. She wasn’t confident driving out of town and she asked if I would take her to view the body. I dropped what I was doing, and soon we were speeding down the Southern Motorway to my aunt’s house at Rotokauri, near Hamilton.
In the car, my mother brooded. Her expression was grim and faraway, her mood was dark. Occasionally, she let out an angry, bitter laugh. Gran’s illness from cancer had begun with familial co-operation and goodwill, but had exploded into warfare as Mum and her two sisters fell out.
First, the eldest had arrived from Sydney to stay in Gran’s flat in Tauranga. The arrangement had worked well until the middle sister decided she should take over the care. This seemed unnecessary and perverse to the others, since the Sydney sister was well established in the flat. Her care was exemplary; Gran was happy.
But the middle sister would hear no argument. She arrived in Tauranga, put Gran into her La-Z-Boy chair and loaded her – in the chair, so we were told – into a vehicle (I pictured a flatbed truck or ute) and drove her away, over the Kaimai Range to Rotokauri.
The other sisters were outraged. Gran was in agony, she was fragile. Imagine how it must have been for her, bumping and jolting over the mountains. Wrenched away from her snug apartment, her own bed, and for what reason?
Having stolen Gran, the middle sister issued strident and defensive reports. Gran was happily installed in her La-Z-Boy. She had a nice room. She was receiving foot massages from one of the young male cousins. Foot massages? This provoked a fresh wave of outrage. Gran, a shy, private person, would hate that. It was awful, it was too weird.
The forceful commandeering of Gran was mystifying to me, a glimpse into a dynamic I couldn’t understand. My mother and the middle sister had sometimes been described as “two peas in a pod”. (The eldest was not so close.) It seemed that my aunt simply refused to be sidelined. If death was a drama, she needed to be at the centre of the action.
Now, though, another main character was limbering up in the wings. With me at the wheel (her dim, puzzled chauffeur), my mother was heading along Exelby Rd, ready with harsh words for the sister who’d turned death into a debacle.
The old car, the powerful Cortina, droned up the steep driveway and we emerged into the blinding light of a sunny afternoon. My aunt’s house was set on the ridge; below us was dreamy Lake Rotokauri surrounded by raupō, flax and paddocks. We could hear the high cries of sheep.
The front door opened and my aunt rushed out. She never stopped talking. I tried to describe her verbal onslaught in fragments I wrote over the years, my first youthful attempts at fiction. I realised she was trying to alter reality with words. The situation was wonderful because she said it was; in describing everything as flawless, she would make it so. She talked to fend off her sister’s anger, to justify herself, to stave off uncomfortable details. Even my mother’s fury couldn’t extinguish the blasts and trumpets of wonderfulness as we were ushered into the last room. Gran was so lucky, her death had been perfect, moving, marvellous really. Here she was. Just look!
I’ve held the memory so long, I assume it’s accurate. Beautiful golden afternoon light streamed in, illuminating every detail. Her fine hair was stuck to her forehead, her hands were clutched together and her mouth was open in a sad O.
She was lying in the La-Z-Boy. This bothered me. It might have been a comfortable chair, but you surely wouldn’t want to sleep or die in it. You couldn’t writhe around or turn over or lie flat.
My mother laid her hand on Gran’s forehead and said in a dramatic, heightened tone, “My mother.” She gave my aunt a look of contempt and was about to speak when my cousin walked into the room carrying a baby. Now, in Gran’s last room were six daughters, two grandmothers, four mothers and a baby girl.
In the bright silence, energy washed through like a wave. A moment and then my aunt’s voice rose again, a wall of sound, and I crossed to the window and saw cloud shadows crossing the distant lake and a boat rowing towards the shore, a man plying the oars, the wake spreading on the glassy surface.
I turned from the window. Gran was a skinny old doll in a toy bed. My mother and my aunt stood over her and glared, as if they would each take one of her fragile stick limbs and tear her to pieces.
At the door, I said to my cousin, “Nice baby.” It had been a surprise, her getting pregnant. I respected it as an original move. She gave me a sharp glance, checking if I was mocking her and then said, “Thanks.”
My mother swept out, ignoring everyone, thwarted by my aunt’s extraordinary verbalising. Back in the car, she was even more furious. I never saw her cry over her mother; she wasn’t sentimental about Gran.
Gran had been humble, meek, unassuming. She’d had a weakness for pulp fiction and soap operas. In her timid presence, my mother had often appeared to be holding back derision and scorn. I’d been fond of Gran, a fact my mother indulged with only light scoffing. When I was a child, I loved staying with her. Gran had spent her last years in Tauranga with the doilies and net curtains, the conservative old ladies and the provincial fustiness. She was a terrible cook, mainly of stews. She was neither intellectual nor picturesque, and her conventionality filled my mother with boredom and disdain.
My anxious little grandmother. As she travelled over the Kaimai Range, was she afraid? Did she know she would never see her apartment again?
I was deeply struck by Gran’s death. I wrote many pieces trying to describe the feeling in the room. What was missing? What was the thing I looked for and couldn’t find? I thought of my cousin holding her baby. Had she been searching for it, too?
I didn’t know my verbose aunt as well as I knew my mother, whose every move I had watched from when I began to understand myself and the world by relating to her, until the end. The secret notion I’d always had was that, in some essential way, my mother was younger than I was. This was her charm and the source of difficulties.
I saw her as a free agent, unencumbered. She could look after kids, but probably wasn’t old enough to look after teenagers. She could do a lot of good or she could be rather wicked – it was her choice. She was a main character, widely loved. Men in particular couldn’t work her out; most were too credulous and literal-minded. You couldn’t get them to understand such complexities, any more than you could ask them to believe that the uncanny power of the women in the last room was the very force that had shaped them.
Charlotte Grimshaw is an Auckland author and critic. This is the first of four stories by well-known writers about the maternal influences that helped shape their lives.
