Looking for a Story to Tell

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My mother and I spent two days after the funeral going through my grandmother's house, looking into closets and drawers. We found the silver pie plates with leaves and grapes around the handles, the miniature swans, her wicker sewing basket. Then there were boxes of recipes in my grandmother's hand and also some in her mother's. Stuffed in every closet and cupboard were things both important and inconsequential: wrapping paper, old photos, Woman's Day magazines, letters, receipts, travel brochures, recipes for her babies' infant formulas.

As I went through the boxes, I wondered what could have driven her to save all this? Did my grandmother have the vague, preconscious wish that one day, someone would take the pieces of her life and make them into a story?

I thought of this as I stood on top of a chair, peering into the highest kitchen cabinets. Tucked into a corner behind half a dozen old double boilers was a delicate glass bowl. It was covered with dust and grime. I washed it. When it dried, it sparkled in the sun, and I saw it was in fact a luminous venetian glass dessert bowl with lilac handles and a lilac font, and a knob on top in the shape of a rose. It was a sauce dish, with a hole cut for a spoon.

But where was the spoon? It must have broken or become lost. Instead of throwing the dish away--this flawed beautiful object--my grandmother hid it out of sight, the same way she had hidden herself. The dish is the one thing I brought home from her house. It stands next to me on my desk now, holding a piece of her story and, I'm beginning to think, a piece of my own as well.

Cover Story section, September/October 1997.

Reprinted with permission from Southwest Review (Winter 1996).

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