When I’m Dead and Gone

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The bowl. Items that looked just like my grandmother's treasures were on sale for a song. I found many variations of that bowl for a hundred dollars or so. That bowl was not unique. It was common. China from China? The real McCoy? I started to wonder about my bowl, about its story and Nancy Cooper Slagle. For a moment the truth of my grandmother's house disintegrated. I questioned the stories that were her legacy. Her immortality? The key to who I am?

Back during the summers when I was a child, my grandmother and I lay in bed at night while she told me elaborate stories born of half-truths, stories that are firmly part of my understanding of who she was--a little girl whose mother recklessly took her west. This much is true. But while I used to imagine the people she talked about, now I imagine a child lying on a mattress, a blizzard blowing outside, inventing from small truths an entire history for her sister and herself, to transport them far from the realities of being neglected in Montana by a mother who did not care.

Examining the bowls in the flea markets, I noticed subtle differences in the designs. Leaves painted more thickly, a lighter blue, a chip. Each one was individual. Mine was a deeper cobalt. A faint crack webbed the base. A chip scarred the scalloped edge. Like birthmarks, they identified the bowl. But it was larger than the details. My bowl, and mine alone, held Nancy and thus my grandmother. It was the stories that I wanted when she was dead and gone, and she'd done a good job of pasting them to the objects—objects that, like books, could be read. My bowl had life. My bowl had history. It did not matter that its story was not factually verifiable. My grandmother mythologized her past, and in these myths she lives.

In my bowl, I see my grandmother in the upstairs hall of Last Morrow, telling me about Nancy. I see Nancy with her seven children, the Cantonese bowl in her hands, hiking over the Alleghenies. I see a line of ancestors marching over time, whispering to each other stories that, like stories told in the children's game of telephone—like history itself—are utterly transformed along the way. Like great fiction, and no less real.

From Women Outside (Sept. 1999), issues available only on newsstands.

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