Reading Aloud to My Grandmother Every Sunday
Her eyes failed, so mine took over the serials and the psalms.
For six years, my grandmother's eyes were my job every Sunday between four and six in the evening. Macular degeneration took her reading in her seventy ninth year, and the family decided, without ever holding a meeting, that I would become the replacement.
Nobody asked me. That is how duties work in our family: you find out you have one the way you find out it is raining, by already being wet. I was sixteen, resentful, and certain that no one else on earth spent their Sunday afternoons reading a Malayalam newspaper serial aloud to an old woman in a chair.
The chair matters. It was a heavy wooden armchair with wide flat arms, set at an angle to the window in her room, and she sat in it facing the light even after the light stopped being much use to her. She said the sun on her face told her the time better than the clock did. By four it reached her knees. That was my cue.
The syllabus never changed. First the newspaper serial, a family melodrama that ran for years and in which, as far as I could tell, every character was somebody's secret half brother. Then the psalms, one or two, her choice, though her choice was almost always the same ones. Then the letters, when there were letters: her younger sister wrote monthly from Toronto in a hand like barbed wire, and I would decode it while my grandmother interrupted with corrections about events she had not witnessed. Then her replies, dictated to me, which always opened with the state of the weather and closed with the state of her knees, and smuggled all the actual love into one sentence in the middle where her sister would least expect it.
Here is my confession, since this is the place for it.
I cheated.
More than once. Some Sundays I compressed three pages of the serial into four invented sentences so I could leave early for football. I gave the half brothers shortcuts. I once resolved an inheritance dispute a full month before the newspaper did.
She never said a word at the time... Years later, near the end, she took my hand one Sunday and said, You know, the year you were seventeen, that serial made no sense at all. Then she smiled with every tooth she had left.
She had known the whole time.
She had let me believe I was a successful criminal because my visits mattered more to her than the plot.
The psalms were different. I could not cheat the psalms, because she knew them by heart and had for sixty years. She did not need me to inform her that the Lord was her shepherd. If I dropped a verse, or rushed one, a finger would rise off the arm of the chair like a conductor catching a lazy violin. You skipped the valley, she would say. You cannot skip the valley, child. It is the whole point of the psalm.
It took me an embarrassing number of Sundays to understand what I was actually there for. She was not listening for information. She had all the information. She was listening to her own life being carried in a younger voice, the way you keep a fire going by moving it onto new wood.
She did not need someone to read. She needed to be read to. Those are two different kindnesses, and it took me years to learn the second one.
The tin came out on an ordinary Sunday in my twenty third year. She pointed at the top of the cupboard and asked me to bring down the old biscuit tin, the one with the faded Scottish terriers on the lid. I expected buttons.
Inside, wrapped in a square of muslin, were letters. Thin blue inland letters, soft as cloth at the folds, all in my grandfather's handwriting. He had spent two years working construction in the Gulf in the seventies, sending money home, and he had written to her every ten days for the whole of it. He died when I was four. I remember only a white shirt and the smell of boot polish.
Read them, she said. I have not heard them since my eyes went.
So I read my grandfather's love letters to my grandmother in my own voice, which everyone in the family says is his voice, though I had always assumed they were being sentimental. She sat facing the window with her eyes closed and the sun moving up her knees, and I gave her back, one blue page at a time, a man twenty years dead.
They were not what I expected... They were funny.
He complained about the food with the specificity of a poet: rice that tasted of apology, tea the color of a shy man. He described his roommates like serial characters. And in the letter from March 1975, in the middle, where she would least expect it, because apparently that is where our family has always kept its love, he wrote: I am bringing you nothing from this place except one thing. I have seen a chair here with wide flat arms, and I am having one made when I come home, so you can sit like a queen by the window while your tea gets cold, because you have never once in your life sat down while tea was hot.
I stopped reading.
I looked at the chair. She did not open her eyes... She just patted the wide flat arm twice, the way you pat the hand of someone you have been married to for a very long time.
She died the following January, on a Wednesday, which felt like a clerical error.
She belonged to Sundays.
I did not manage to write about her for almost a year... When I finally did, I found I could not write about her face or her hands or her psalms. I could only write about the chair, empty at four in the afternoon with the sun climbing across the seat, and how grief turns furniture into monuments. That poem went further than anything else I have written. I entered it into a monthly poetry contest mostly so it would stop belonging only to me, and the theme I filed it under was not loss. It was memory, because the chair is not about what I lost. It is about what I was handed, two hours at a time, for six years, against my will, and how close I came to fast forwarding through all of it for football.
If you have an old relative and a spare hour, read to them. Not because they cannot manage, they managed whole lives before you existed, but because a voice in the room is a different medicine from a page, and because you will not understand what those Sunday hours were until they are a chair by a window with nobody in it.
The chair is in my flat now. My mother wanted to give it away; I drove six hours with a rented van to make sure she could not. It sits at an angle to my window. Some Sundays, at four, when the light reaches it, I sit somewhere else in the room and read aloud, a psalm or a bad serial or whatever I am writing, to the sun on the empty seat, and I no longer skip the valley. She was right about that, as she was right about nearly everything. It is the whole point.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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