Grandma Ward
by Jon Woolley
One evening, after a dinner of whatever fast food chain was offering two sandwiches for three dollars, I retreated to my jail cell sized room for a time of forced self-reflection. I opened my Bible to the book of James, and read a verse that said religion is visiting orphans or widows. I didn’t know any widows. There was a dearth of orphans since the inventions of vaccines and organized agriculture. Seems if you give little kids shots and food, they tend to stay alive.
The next day my roommate said he was going to visit Grandma Ward.
“I didn’t know you had a grandma nearby?”
“Oh, everyone calls her that. She is an old widow I visit.”
Prayers answered. Time for some real religion. I shall minister to a widow.
We drove to where our town was called “old” and was once a separate village before being swallowed up by suburban sprawl. We pulled into the driveway of a ranch house with a huge picture window. It was across the from the library and a strip mall. The house predated all of them, as did its owner.
As we advanced up the walk, I could hear panting like a marathon runner nearing the end of the race, or his life. My roommate opened the front door to reveal an obese yellow lab. It was as though Winnie the Pooh were a dog.
We stepped into a living room with wall to wall faded light blue carpet. The fat yellow lab was trying to jump up on me, but unable to get her front paws more than an inch off the floor.
“Oh, am I happy to see you,” said an old woman sitting on a dark blue sofa. Lot of blue. Her hair was black and perfectly permed. She was wearing a dark brown skirt and a turquoise blouse. A sitting garage sale. At what point do people decide they are done updating their wardrobe? For my parents, it was forty-six. Hers was also forty-six. 1946.
“This is Jon,” Dan yelled, “He’s a teacher.”
Grandma Ward had perfect hearing. Much like a two-year-old being told to go to bed, if she didn’t like what you said, she just pretended not to hear it. This caused pretty much everyone to raise their voice around her. Like one does with a little kid.
Grandma Ward threw her head back and laughed. The exact laugh I had been missing in my life.
“I was a teacher for thirty years! You know, I had a fella that was sweet on me, back a hundred years ago. He asked me to marry him, but I knew he’d never let me teach, so I had to let him go.”
She patted the sofa next to her. And I went over and sat down on a blue sofa with a sheen of yellow lab hair. She leaned forward.
“Now, what grade do you teach?”
“Seventh.”
One eyebrow raised. There was a spark in her eyes. She reached to the coffee table to her left to snatch a glass bowl.
“You need a piece of chocolate,” she whispered.
And she was right, I did need a piece of chocolate.
She proceeded to ask me all about my job and boring life, hanging on every word.
A few days later, I was back at the corner of Main Street and Water Street, at the ranch of dark brown brick with the picture window. I grabbed her mail protruding out of the black metal box next to the door. It was addressed to Aida Ward. I didn’t need to knock, the dog having a seizure gave my presence away.
“Hello Mrs. Aida Ward,” I said while reading the name on her the mail.
“Oh, Aida is my given name, but I’ve always gone by Vareena.”
“You traded one civil war widow name for another?”
She laughed long and hard while extending her candy bowl toward me.
“So, Jon, are you sweet on some young lady?” she asked while I sat down next to her.
“I’m sweet on a lot of young ladies.”
She started laughing so hard she almost tumbled off the sofa. Her dog, Honey, got all excited and started panting, sending golden hair into the sunlight pouring through the picture window. I saw a leash hanging by the door.
“How about I take this dog for a walk?”
Grandma Ward clapped at the idea and Honey nearly went into an asthmatic fit with excitement while I grabbed the leash and clipped it to her collar. I stepped into her Brady Bunch kitchen. I pulled open drawers until I found a plastic bag to stuff into my back pocket. Honey and I took off down the sidewalk. Well, I took off. Honey waddled after me.
The neighborhood consisted of tiny ranch houses built on a cement block with single car garages. They were built in a totally different era. Just like grandma Ward. I knew this type of neighborhood. I grew up in one. In the 50’s and 60’s, these houses were the dream. Now they were homes for the permanently poor. Everyone owned three vehicles, two in the drive and one on the street, with the goal of keeping two cars running. People stood between houses and smoked. Everything had changed in this neighborhood. Everything but Grandma Ward.
Two blocks away, Honey drags me into a perfectly manicured yard. Her girth equal to that of a compact car. No sniffing around or pacing. She lets lose a steamy turd. I want to turn away, but I can’t. This must be what it’s like when a sumo wrestler drops a constitutional. I wrap the plastic bag around my hand, hoping against hope that this thin piece of plastic holds as I pick up a turd the size of adjoined softballs.
We walk a block back towards the house. The bag of steaming dog poop keeping time, swinging like a pendulum in my right hand. Honey lurches toward another yard.
“No! No! I don’t have another bag!” I yell as an epic tug of war begins. Honey strains forward like a plow horse. I dig in my heels, to no avail.
Honey arches her back and plops out another. Bigger than the first. She turns to me and smiles.
I look down at her business, glance right and left, not a soul in sight. I decide to use up any spiritual goodwill gained from walking Grandma Ward’s dog.
“We gotta run.”
Occasionally, in professional football, an overweight defensive lineman, a player who in the course of a season should never touch the football, ends up with the ball and has an opportunity to progress the ball with other large people chasing him. He will huff and puff and flail about in a comical manner. This player will finally collapse after running about ten yards and strain to stand again. This is Honey running back to Grandma Ward’s house.
Her exuberance over her once in a lifetime exertion extinguished, she lay in the center of the sidewalk half a block from home.
“Come on!” I chant while pulling. She responds with a raised eyebrow that says “Just choke me out with the leash.”
I drag the cement bag back home. As soon as I pull her over the threshold, she jumps up and starts panting all over the place. Grandma Ward gets up and disappears into her Brady Bunch kitchen. She emerges with a 1970 orange Tupperware full of leftover pot roast. She dumps it in the dog bowl and Honey goes to town like Winnie to Pooh on the honey pot. Then Honey pauses, lifts her head, looks at me, and winks.
“She worked up an appetite,” says Grandma Ward, not realizing I’m the work horse.
We both turn toward the picture window as a late model Honda Accord pulls up. A couple I have seen at church comes walking up the driveway. I hug Grandma Ward and prepare to excuse myself.
“Dale and Charlotte are taking me out to dinner. And you are coming,” she states, as though choosing dinner over the first drive though I see is a tough choice. Honey looks at me and smiles.
“We’re nothing alike,” I whisper to Honey.
Soon I am sitting at a local restaurant. Grandma Ward chooses where she eats based on the special for that day of the week. Tonight’s choice was based on potato soup. Grandma Ward made me sit close to her so she could whisper to me and wink. Charlotte was quite a bit older than Dale, which caused quite a stir in the church circles when they married. Charlotte was pretty, college educated, and smart, and I’m sure she had plenty of suiters in her day, but had turned them all away. Now she was forced to double back and scoop up Dale, a day laborer with square hands and an “aw shucks” grin.
Grandma Ward pats me on the back as I order saying I worked up quite an appetite walking Honey.
“I’ll have the pot roast,” I say to the waitress.
“Why don’t you have any kids yet?” asks Grandma Ward while staring at Charlotte, who is near forty, and near the end of fertility, “Something wrong with your pipes?”
Awkward silence. Grandma Ward turns toward me and whispers in an unusually loud voice that conceals nothing.
“Must be her pipes. My pipes are so old, I’m not even sure I could get a man interested in these pipes anymore.”
I sit perfectly still. Mortified. Charlotte giggles a little. Dale chuckles and soon everyone is laughing as Grandma Ward smiles, like a two-year-old who has a hang nail on her middle finger and goes around flicking everyone off, old ladies get to say whatever they want. I love Grandma Ward.
When the bill comes, Grandma Ward hoists a black leather purse that could easily encapsulate a bowling ball, up on the table. She pulls out a wad of cash that could choke a mule.
She walks out gripping my arm and I gently lower her into the backseat, hop around the car and sit in the backseat next to her. She winks at me and leans forward.
“Dale, I sure could use some ice cream.”
Dale and Charlotte turned to see the eyes of a little girl asking her daddy for a frozen treat. They’d have better luck kicking a kitten. Grandma Ward turned to me and smiled, her eyes sparkling. And I loved her even more.
The ice cream place was the type of establishment open only for the summer. A shack with a sliding window and four teenage girls in matching T-shirts, all sprinting around for minimum wage. I try to decide which of the 50 flavors to choose for my single scoop sugar cone. I order blackberry chip and step aside. Grandma Ward, black purse swinging, dressed like she just stepped out of a USO dance, fog of rose perfume, saunters up to the window.
At the bottom of the sign listing all the flavors, is the Atomic Bomb. A fifteen-dollar concoction of the ten most popular flavors, dumped into a waffle cone the size of a mixing bowl. Like the $100 bottle of wine at a pizza place, no one orders this.
“I’ll have that A-bomb,” states Grandma Ward.
The shocked teeny bopper starts stretching out the ligaments in her forearm. Grandma Ward pulls on my arm so I am forced to lean down to hear her whisper.
“Life is short. Always get the big cone.”
When the A-Bomb comes out, they have to turn it sideways to get it out of the window. Grandma Ward takes it with a grin. I grab a handful of napkins and she takes my arm as we walk to the car. She’s getting ice cream on everything. A glob lands in her hair, dribbles down her USO dress and onto my arm. She’s oblivious. She smiles and takes a big lick.
Back home, I help her into the house. She’s eaten a tenth of this monstrosity. She walks into her Brady Bunch kitchen, stands over Honey’s dog bowl, and drops it in.
“Done,” she deadpans.
Honey trots past me. Smiling. I have a feeling this is not the first Atomic Bomb for Honey.
It was getting late. I hug Grandma Ward, breathing in the rose perfume that has become comforting. It’s been a month since I’ve hugged anyone.
I’m back in the driveway. I can see Grandma Ward’s excitement through the picture window, I can almost hear Honey wheezing, and have rose perfume assault my nostrils. She is wearing a navy-blue pleated skirt with a matching top.
We decide, or rather she decides, to head to an Amish restaurant famous for fried chicken and peanut butter pie. She digs her keys out of the black leather purse that could easily fit a bowling ball, pinching the ignition key between her thumb and pointer finger.
“We’re taking my car,” she says.
“Fine, but I’m driving,” I answer.
“Don’t try to run away with me,” she says, teasing.
“With what? A 1989 Chrysler with eight hundred miles on it, and an untold fortune in your giant purse?”
“You’re lucky I’m not sixty years younger, or you’d think about it,” she answers, with one raised eyebrow.
At the restaurant, she struggles to get out of the car. I lift her and get her steady between the open door and frame of the car. Grandma Ward is slightly plump but weighs almost nothing. Whenever I help her up, she always takes that as an opportunity to hug me or give my arms a little squeeze. I turn and lean in to the car to get her purse.
It is autumn and the maple trees are a beautiful shade of orange. The seeds are aptly nicknamed helicopters. I turn around with her Brinks truck of a purse and she has a handful of helicopter seeds. The Cadillac next to us left their driver’s side window down a bit. She is dropping them in like letters in a mail slot.
“What are you doing? Where did you even get those?”
“This man will be glad in fifty years when he has a maple tree in his yard. He’ll thank me. You need to plant more seeds,” she says with a slight indignant tone.
“I’m sure he will thank you on your 130th birthday. Bring you firewood or something.”
She uncurls her fingers like a kid who has been caught with a hand in the cookie jar. She has two left. I glance around.
“Put ‘em in,” I sigh.
“You’re going to be a good dad one day,” she whispers as we walk across the restaurant parking lot.
The lobby is a sea of people. I have to breast stroke to get to the seating station. A taller Danny DeVito with a Secret Service earpiece is barking orders at a pair of teenage girls. He glances up at me.
“Wait is going to be over an hour,” he snaps.
Grandma Ward peeks around my arm.
“Tommy?”
He grins and barks “Table four” at one of the girls. She leads us to a circular table set for six people. Six people who are not us.
“You going to get married? Have some fun? Have some kids?” she asks without looking up from the menu, knowing we were both getting fried chicken and peanut butter pie.
“I’m already having fun,”
But I wasn’t. I was all alone in life. And so was she.
After dinner, we drive back to the ranch on the corner of Water and Main with the blue carpet, massive red brick fireplace, and fat yellow lab. We chat, count cars out the picture window, and eat all the chocolate out her crystal candy bowl.
“We’re a good team,” she says as I stand to leave.
“You get one of those handicapped parking passes and we’ll be unstoppable.”
“It was in the glove compartment.”
“You’re lucky you’re not sixty years younger.”
I drove home thinking about old Vereena, who goes by Aida, and why I liked being with her so much. Overpowering rose perfume? June Cleaver fashion sense? The fact that she probably slept in a formal dress? The ability to get a seat in a crowded restaurant? The ability to say whatever she wanted? Definite selling points.
I had mostly avoided the elderly. My own grandparents lived far away and I never saw them much. One grandma was cranky, the other was a hoarder. I didn’t think I was missing much on the old lady front. Mostly old people scared me. I was scared that I would end up just like them. Unable to stand without pulling a table over. Smelly. Wearing sweatpants and white New Balance shoes. I shuddered at the thought.
Grandma Ward was mostly the opposite of these things. She was witty, dressed nice, and literally smelled like roses. But that wasn’t why I loved her.
A few months later, I brought my new girlfriend, Julie, to the corner of Water and Main. I’m not sure if our relationship would have continued had Grandma Ward not extended her candy dish with her left hand and glanced at me and winked.
Soon we visited and Julie extended her left hand to Grandma Ward, palm down. We were engaged. Grandma Ward was so happy for me.
Julie had a wedding shower at the house we bought together. Neither of us lived in the house yet. We were going to do things “old fashioned” like Grandma Ward would want. I entered the living room with steel folding chairs and Julie’s college friends and ladies from church were sitting in a circle. Julie was wearing a black cocktail dress and she looked really beautiful. Grandma Ward gave me the most evil grin, like a four-year-old just waiting for dad to figure out she ate all the cake. My future wife pulls me out to the kitchen and cups her hand to tell me a secret. I lean down, looking at Grandma Ward.
“Everything was good. Everyone got me really nice gifts. But one person got me the skimpiest lingerie. It’s barely there.”
Grandma Ward just smiles and nods.
At our wedding, Julie had her grandma on her side, and I had Grandma Ward on mine. We got her this big flower to wear. We hugged on the way out of the church and some more at the reception. She was so happy for me.
Turns out, when you marry a corporate lawyer, they are responsible for this thing called “billable hours”. I’m still not sure what it is, but it meant I rarely saw the new wife. March came and I was staring down a wife working sixty hours and my own teacher spring break. Back to sad and lonely. That Sunday, at church, another old lady asked me if I knew that Grandma Ward had fallen at her home and was in a nearby nursing home. I did not know. And now I knew what I was going to do with my spring break.
I park in the side lot of Arlington Court Nursing and Rehabilitation Center next to the only other car. I haven’t seen her in six months. I walk into a lobby of overstuffed couches, brass lamps, and coffee tables. It looks like an abandoned furniture store.
There is an old lady staring out at the courtyard. She has perfectly permed hair, a green dress, and I can smell the rose perfume. I sneak up behind her and perch next to her on the couch. It takes a second, but she recognizes me. I get the biggest smile.
“I am so happy to see you! I was hoping you would come. But I would understand if you didn’t. You’re married now,” she says.
“Yeah, to a lawyer. it means I see her about as much as I see you. I am off all week. She is not,”
“What are you going to do with yourself?”
“Hang out with you. We make a good team. I like this place. I think I’ll move her too.”
“You can have my spot.”
We both laugh and then sit quiet for a good long while. I have missed her. Missed her a great deal.
“Did you drive here?” she asks as though I walked, “Sneak me out. Take me back home. They make me wake up too early. I miss my house. I miss Honey.
We talked for a long time. Neither of us had anywhere else to be. We both had empty houses waiting for us somewhere else. Mostly, she made sly innuendos about sex and me being newly married. She always threw in a smirk and a wink. I laughed until my side hurt.
It was nearing lunch time. I stood and helped her stand. I walked her back to her room, which was no easy process. I walked backwards with my arms extended. She had hold of my hands and I was talking her through every step of the way.
“Five more steps. You got this,” I said as she ambled down the hallway, “Don’t run home on us tonight, Mrs. Jackrabbit.”
“When does that wife of your get home? So you can have some fun,” she fired back.
“With your bridal shower gift?”
I have more faults than can be listed. One of my biggest is that generally don’t like other people. There’s seven billion people on the planet and if I met them all, I would like seven of them. This wears on a person.
On the couch, sneaking up beside her, Grandma Ward’s eyes focused and her smile was magical. She had recognized me as her person. She was my type. I thought I’d never see a smile as pure as that again in my life. Never.
“Do you think you could come back tomorrow?” she asked as I walked toward the door of her nursing home room.
“Let me check my calendar,” I said pretending to flip an invisible day planner. She thought this uproariously funny.
I went to that nursing home every day that week. When you find someone who really sees you, who smiles from deep in their soul at you, you return. Best spring break I ever had.
Soon enough, Grandma Ward’s shower gift returned dividends. Julie was pregnant with a little girl. I was excited. Nervous. All the feelings at once. Grandma Ward was thrilled for me.
“You will be the best daddy ever,” she would say. When I would ask her how she knew she would smile at me. As though it were one of our shared jokes.
Twenty weeks into the pregnancy, we starting having problems. They were serious enough that Julie had to go on bedrest at home, and then in the hospital. We had to have a baby shower in the hospital, and Grandma Ward came, despite her distaste for hospitals. Another sentiment we shared.
Weeks inched by. Then a month. Tough time. I went to work, and then straight to the hospital, every single day. It was depressing. One day, my wife was entertaining one of her many visitors while I sulked in the corner. I overheard them say “Grandma Ward fainted at home. She’s here now too.”
I walked out. Took the elevator to the welcome desk in the lobby. Some sixteen-year-old candy striper boy was manning the desk. He smiled at me with this “I’m going to be an Eagle scout someday” grin.
“I need to see Grandma Ward.”
Blank stare.
“Aida Ward.”
He pecks the name into his keyboard while I spell it. Blank stare again. Dang civil war widow names mixing me all up.
“Vareena Ward,” I say like we are trying to guess an email password.
“Bingo. Room 512,” he says while taking out an over photocopied hospital map and a highlighter.
Old Vareena would listen to him patiently. Smile at him and wink at me. Maybe in another fifty years I’ll be as saintly as her.
“I don’t need a map. I live here,” I snapped.
The hospital had two gleaming towers. My wife was in one, trying to keep a life from entering this world. Grandma Ward was in the other one, maybe leaving this world. I took the elevator to the fifth floor. The door to her room was ajar, and I could hear her and her daughter talking. I lightly rapped, slowly pushed the door open, and had to hold back tears.
Her hair was permed on one side, but mashed down on the other. No make-up. No rose perfume. Just the disgusting hospital disinfectant that permeated my life. This was the first time I had ever seen her not wearing a dress. They stuffed her in one of those white off green hospital gowns. It had blue polka dots, like the designer was thinking, “what this needs is some dots, that way when you’re dying with your naked rear end falling out, you’ll have that fashion going for you”.
She turned and her eyes focused. Her whole face brightened and she got a big smile.
“My boy! My boy is here!”
I saw the same smile as I did on the couch at the nursing home, as every time she saw me walking up the sidewalk through her big picture widow, and as she handed me a chocolate out of the glass candy dish while asking all about my hopeless life.
Her daughter graciously stood so I could have a seat next to her. She reached over to take my hand and the inside of her arm was all purple and green.
“What happened?”
“Young girl was trying to draw my blood. She was trying hard,” she said with a wink. I knew exactly what she meant. Learn on someone else.
“Your wife still here?”
“Yeah, I don’t think they’ll let us go home,” I said.
“I don’t think they’ll let me go home either.”
We talked. Laughed. Smiled. She reminded me of what a great dad I would be. I missed being with someone who really got me. One of my people.
Time flew. Unlike when I was in the other tower. One tower to bring you in this world and one tower to take you out. A life lived between the two. I heard two nurses whispering in the hallway. I knew they wanted in. I knew this hospital. Time for vitals. Then some water and ice chips. Lights out, until a midnight blood draw, or the janitorial staff strolls in to empty the trash at two in the morning. Time for me to get out or be chased out.
I stood and hugged Grandma Ward. Walked toward the door, but paused.
“Come see me again, come see me.”
“I will,” I promised.
But I didn’t. I never saw Grandma Ward alive again.
Because I was a self-centered jerk. Who learned nothing from her while she was alive.
I returned to my wife, thirty weeks pregnant. I was staring down ten more weeks of going to work all day, spending my evenings sitting in a 1979 pleather recliner in her room, and my nights in a big empty house. But that didn’t happen. We had a premature baby. Well, she had her. I just mostly stood around and freaked out at the whole process. Two and half months early. Due date was April Fools and we had her on MLK Day. Welcome to your tower, baby Hannah. Live a good life before you get to other gleaming glass monstrosity.
I went on paternity leave for six weeks. Which is exactly how long Hannah spent in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, or NICU. Her mother and I were there every day. This was largely because of her mother. Hannah wasn’t really my person. She was just a strange little creature who lived in a plastic aquarium. Then a plastic bin. Then my bed.
I was at church, when some unknown soul came and expressed regret to me that Grandma Ward had just passed. I felt nothing. “Well, can’t live forever. I hope to live as long.” I tried to put it out of my mind.
Julie made me go to the viewing. Funerals are out of the question. No one has to go to my funeral. I won’t be offended. They have no choice but to be a morbid affair. I expect the same gracious offer in return. There she was, laid out in a casket. She looked like a makeup covered mannequin. I leaned over the coffin and squeezed her hand. It was like a piece of wax. At least they doused her with rose perfume.
“Just so you know, I’d have put you in pants,” I whispered, half expecting her to open her eyes, smile, and wink at me.
I fell into a deep sadness. I did not want to be a dad. I was failing at the one thing Grandma Ward was sure I’d be good at. I didn’t care about baby Hannah. I cared about me. I wasn’t sleeping. I was having nightmares about rolling over on Hannah at night. Finally, my wife had mercy on me and took the little hand grenade to the guest bedroom.
I woke up, alone, at six in the morning. Drunk on depression. I wandered in to the guest bedroom to say good bye. Julie rolled over and baby Hannah, who formerly had the facial expressions of a Barbie doll, popped her head up. Then it happened. The thing that changed my life.
Hannah looked at me. Really looked at me. Her eyes registered me as her dad. She got the biggest smile on her face. It was exactly the smile that Grandma Ward made when she would see me through the picture window. The smile Grandma Ward had when I snuck up beside her at the nursing home. The smile I got in her hospital room when I saw her for the last time. My daughter was one of my people.
Everything changed. I would help her walk, encouraging every step. Go get too big ice cream cones. She’d go to school, and I would promise to be there when she was done. A promise I kept. I bought a glass candy dish. Because sometimes you just need a piece of chocolate. We’d feed the dog all kinds of people food. Hannah loved her dog. Mostly we just held hands and talked. Because in a world of seven billion people. I probably like seven. Grandma Ward was one. My daughter was another.
Sometimes I still think about that verse in the book of James. It said religion was simple. Find a widow. It was simple, just not in the way I thought. By keeping company with Grandma Ward, I didn’t help her.
She saved me.
BIO
Jon Woolley has been published in the literary journal Come on Georgia, and his humorous essay “Record Low” was published in The Columbus Dispatch. Jon is a public school teacher. He thought he knew all about children. Then he had two of his own. Jon Woolley lives in Dublin, Ohio with his lawyer wife. He is often the primary caregiver for his two daughters and they are the reason he writes. They are also why he has gotten into collecting bourbon. Jon is a former Division 1 basketball player. Now he is exactly 80 inches tall for no good reason.
Website: jonwoolleyauthor.com
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