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On remembrance
A short and nostalgic vignette, which requires no introduction, from the marvellous maja roglić. If you’d like a physical copy of the magazine, you can purchase individual copies or a discounted yearly subscription from our website. Thank you so much for your support.
I remember eating sweet cherries out of a bowl in my grandmother’s purple upholstered bed. I was in a white nightgown inspecting the dark flesh of each fruit carefully, tossing the wormed ones back into the bowl with disgust. It was late August and hot. We opened all the windows in her sixth floor apartment and lowered the shades. It was a miserable summer: my grandmother, my mother and I all taking turns crying. My grandmother gave up her big purple bed to my parents and took the twin that had been my mother’s as a child. I was relegated to the blue pull-out couch in the living room. Most nights my mother joined me, unable to sleep from my father’s snoring. Finally, there was stillness.
But in the morning it was chaos all over again: my grandmother yelling at my mother, my mother yelling at me, me storming into the bathroom and crying angry, spiteful tears into my hands. Thinking of the great injustice of it all. No car, no air conditioning, wormed fruit. Three generations crammed into the top floor of a socialist-gray housing block while my friends from elementary school were in spacious, white-shingled houses on Cape Cod or Martha’s Vineyard. Where rich, normal people went. The next day, the cycle reversed: I yelled at my mother, who yelled at my grandmother, whose turn it was to cry in her little room. I was ten that summer and sure I was Depressed. I thought it would never end: the heat, the misery, the cramped, ugly rooms.
But it did. In the last week of August my mother and father and I boarded a plane to return to the United States, where there would be air conditioning and my own bedroom. My grandmother accompanied us to the airport, watched us climb the escalator to departures. Her eyes scrunched with tears once more. That’s how I remember her now: seeing us off with a little handkerchief in her hands at the end of the escalator. Her eyes magnified by her big glasses, crying. I didn’t like to look at her like that, I wished she would stop. I told my mother: Why does she have to be so dramatic? We’ll be back next summer.
And I was so excited, that first night back in America: riding in the comfortable car home from the airport, passing by the bright highway signage and the well-lit stores. A whole world of possibility and smiling faces. Green lawns and SUVs and seedless watermelon. I could be anyone I wanted to be. I woke early the next morning, before the sun, excited for what the day would bring in the land of opportunity.
Inevitably it brought a trip to the mall, where I was eager to spend the money my grandmother had spent all year saving for my birthday. I walked around the bright, well-lit hallways and delighted in the cold, clean spaces. I bobbed in and out of welcoming storefronts, leafing through clothes and colorful toys. Neatly packed promises of joy everywhere, all at my fingertips.
And what did I do, with all of that stuff and all of that freedom?
The shirts looked cheap in the light of a new season, and the syrupy food court flavors soon faded from my tongue.
And as for all of the space and all of that possibility? I don’t remember.
But I remember stepping on my grandmother’s back while she laid on the floor, laughing into the green carpet. I remember sleeping with wet towels pressed to my feet, my mother scratching my back in the blue glow of the small TV screen. I remember eating sweet cherries in my grandmother’s bed, at midday in my white nightgown. I remember the sweetness, and the warmth.
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