The Greatest Generation

Or, a bedspread fit for a queen

She had been dreaming that Cary Grant was mowing her lawn. But then the chop of the mower and Cary’s winking smile fades into utter silence and total dark.

Well this certainly isn’t where she started out, that’s for sure. When, at 9pm, she zipped up her gown and slowly lowered her old rear-end onto the mattress, she had done so with the expectation—and not an unreasonable one—that she’d wake up in near about the same place.

What in tarnation hell, she says out loud. It’s the cold that woke her up in the first place, snatched her from the green grass. The cold is rising from beneath her. Wooden planks chill her shoulder blades and backside and the backs of her bare calves. Oh god. Did she die in her sleep? Like her sister, Billie?

But if she died and this was a coffin, someone’s gone and left the lid off. For when she pushes her hands heavenwards, stretches her arms up with their swinging wings of skin, there is—thank God above—nothing stopping her.

She finds that she can turn her head to the left and right, and on doing so she discovers her head has been pillowed this whole time. Hence the cold not reaching the ol’ noggin. What is that, fur? Faux fur? The imitation rabbit slippers she bought last year in Slidell and thought had been stolen by her son’s wife?

OK, she thinks, this is actually alright. I am not dead and buried, nor is this the floor of some vagabond’s van. This ribbed wall I am stroking with my right hand is the chenille bedspread. And here by my leg? Yes, that is in fact the collection of Look magazines stored under the bed to save for my niece. OK. I have some grasp on my relative geography, she thinks. 

The window unit kicks in just then and that only confirms things, albeit it’s coming from somewhere above her. It’s a miracle that in her going overboard she didn’t hit it.

This is the chenille bedspread she says to herself, and pats it again. It’s pooling on the floor. It was made for a queen but now dresses a single. And this—knock—yep. This is the wall for sure. Here is the baseboard with its layer of dust like fur. Here’s the outlet where the alarm is plugged in. Remarkably still plugged in and not ripped out of the wall from her abrupt descent.

But it is still dark. And though she has slept in this same room thirty years, she has never observed it from the floor between the wall and the bed. Daylight to maneuver out of this pickle would be required. The faux rabbit slippers that she thought she’d lost are surprisingly not uncomfortable as a substitute pillow. She reaches her right hand up and grasps the chenille, pulling it hand over hand, glad that she didn’t leave her book out on the bed to come crashing down on her face. She pulls enough down to shroud herself, tucking the blanket as best she can between herself and the cold floor. And she closes her eyes. Tries to go back to that excellent dream.

---

That’s a story based on my grandmother, and the incident of her rolling off the bed and deciding to sleep there all night was a story my dad enjoyed telling me when I was a kid. That was the crux of the story for Dad. Not that she, as an elderly widow, tumbled out of bed and had no one to help her, but that in her practicality she decided, “I’ll worry about this in the morning,” and went back to sleep. I think he got a kick out of just how practical she was, a remnant of the Greatest Generation wedged between the wall and the bed. Dad is now not much younger than she was when that happened, and thinking of him sleeping on the floor all night as the result of being alone does not strike me as funny. A friend recently told me about an elderly member of his church tumbling into a bush (unhurt but probably not comfortable) and sleeping there all night.

That particular story of my grandmother was the segue into another story that Dad loved to tell: from that point on, she slept in a rocking chair. And not long after that, when her neighborhood started getting a little “shady,” she started sleeping with a pistol on her lap. I picture her as a gunslinger in a serape, wrapped in all that excess of mustard yellow chenille with her right hand peeking out and lying loose on a revolver.

She died when I was seven, but I remember her so vividly. Not because she was particularly present or affectionate (there's a hilarious photo of me sleeping on the sofa curled up next to an old woman whose arms are crossed over her chest and who has scooted as far to one end of the sofa as possible, like I was a dead rat.) I think the few minutes of home movies we have of her at Christmas helped keep the memory alive. I can hear her Plantation Southern accent, but also I can smell her. The footage of her in a pant suit and her feet squeezed into tan loafers somehow conjures up the scent of old powder puffs.

My parents have the complete set now: the rocking chair, the chenille bedspread, and the gun. Like props from an Alfred Hitchcock movie. At one time the bedspread covered my own childhood bed, and the rocking chair sat in my room, and once when I was nine I took my grandmother’s suitcase to a sleepover and also, unknowingly, the loaded .38 revolver.

This year, were she alive by some miracle or act of science, my grandmother would be 120. To have known someone who could conceivably be that old now makes me redo my math over and over and then question my own age. 

Who have you met whose life began so long ago that the span of years seems almost impossible? I asked that question to an older friend of mine, someone I have adopted as my substitute grandmother. She tells me stories, mostly about Mississippi, such as the KKK taking up donations at an intersection where I now buy Starbucks. Also like a good grandmother she gives me food and invites me to sit in her front parlor, puts old crystal in my Neanderthal hands and enunciates clearly, “this is a celery vase.”

I asked her the question about age spans, figuring she probably recalled someone whose life began even further back than my grandmother’s. I was thrilled to hear about her great-grandmother, ancient from birth, a widow who wore only black dresses and to my friend’s childhood recollection, “never left her armchair.” She was born in 1870.

“That’s insane,” I said. “To think that you knew someone born five years after the Civil War, and now here we are in the 2020s.”

My friend is from the Silent Generation, and it shows.

“Yep,” she says.

“That’s 154 years!” I say.

“Yep.”

“And you’ve talked to her.”

“I have.”

“And I’m talking to you.”

“It looks that way.”

I’m glad I knew my grandmother at least a little. Had I the appreciation for old stories that I do now, I would’ve cornered her at the end of the sofa and made her tell me the minutiae of her life. I would’ve grilled her about raising my dad and the cost of milk and her favorite radio program.

I remind my dad of the story of her rolling out of bed and he chuckles with the reawakening of that memory. Then, deciding that thirty years is probably enough time, I tell him about my packing heat to a slumber party courtesy of his mother. Dad finds that story equally amusing. He shakes his head as if to say, “She would do a thing like that,” though I don’t know which of us he means.

Nine-year-old Sara just off to get her pjs from the ol’ suitcase.