The Visit

by Darlene Frank

One necessary ritual on my occasional trips back East was a visit to my birth mother’s parents. On a Sunday afternoon in late October, I sat with my parents—my father and my stepmother—in the Bergeys’ living room, amidst the heavy furniture and hearty plants, their large pots pressing like weights into the floor. African violets laden with blossoms lined the windowsills, and crocheted doilies dressed the chairs and sofa. Aunt Naomi and Uncle Henry had joined us from their farmhouse next door. They always came by when I showed up.

The Bergeys are my “real” family, and I wanted to see them. But I would have preferred to visit on my own. Even though I was an adult, my parents drove me to the Bergeys’ house (and everywhere else on these Pennsylvania visits), and sat with me for the duration. “I would like to visit my grandparents alone” was one sentence I could not say aloud. I thought it, I said it to myself, I imagined us talking together. “I’ve always felt like I belonged more to this side of the family than to the others,” I would have told them.

And of course I might have learned something about my birth mother, the ever-present dark ghost. I still did not know how she died, and by then I felt an urge to clear up the mystery once and for all. I had the right to know this fact about my own mother.

That Sunday, there was the usual talk about church sermons, the crops, and sick relatives—and television’s bad influence on the younger Mennonites.

“Ya, ya,” Grammy said. “I do not know vot this vorld is coming to.”

The afternoon dragged. I sat quietly, as contained as the plants in their pots, like I was on display, so these relatives could see me for two or three hours every few years.

They asked about the weather in California and the building I lived in. Sometimes we sat in silence. What I feared most in those silences was that someone would ask me about my beliefs or what church I was attending. This question hung between us, amorphous, unuttered. Of all my “sins”—marriage outside the church, divorce, living with a man I was not married to—surely leaving the church was the greatest, the one they judged the worst. And the subject I was least prepared to handle.

Alone with Mom in my parents’ kitchen, drying dishes after each meal, my stomach was always tense with the waiting, afraid she would ask it. I was sure my parents and grandparents wanted to know this more than anything else, and that eventually they would ask. I didn’t know how I’d reply. It was best I say little, so as not to trigger their questions.

The tall snake plant and palm, the dieffenbachia and deep green aspidistra, sat breathing with us; the clock ticked loudly atop the piano. I listened as the conversation turned to the Moonies.

“Do they have cults in California?” Naomi asked me.

Cults? Do they think I’m involved with a cult? For a quick second I panicked. “They probably do,” I replied. “I haven’t run into any.”

“I should hope not,” Mom said, wide-eyed, tucking her chin in fearful distaste.

“My neighbor across the road told me she was doing yoga,” Naomi continued. She shuddered. “Yoga is of the Devil.”

I almost shuddered myself, feeling lucky I had never mentioned the yoga I’d practiced by following pictures in a book. The visceral satisfaction I’d felt, learning subtle sensations of muscle and bone. An introduction to the body as temple of pleasure, one pathway to wholeness the church had denied. Yoga a tentacle of the Devil? It had not occurred to me.

The clock ticked. The furniture settled. I did not breathe easily there.

“What kind of work do you do?” my grandfather asked. His aging face was still lean, his green eyes alert.

I explained that I wrote workbooks for a management consulting company.

“That requires a lot of thinking,” he said.

I felt pleased that he recognized the demands of the work. I knew he valued intelligence and was proud that three of his daughters, my mother included, had been valedictorian or salutatorian of their classes, as had he and his wife. He was proud I was smart like my mother; his tone and eyes said it.

He continued to look at me. I felt examined, but not intrusively so, and not without cause. My grandparents have always looked at me a lot; in one sense it was the only way we could speak. Maybe it was a sign that we were related: I too have a love of looking, and let my eyes linger on what fascinates me—to the discomfort, perhaps, of my subjects.

My grandmother seemed deep in sorrowful thought most of the time, and she had much to be sorrowful about. Her favorite daughter, my mother, had died thirty years earlier and left me, the grandchild whose life they had mostly been excluded from. Her oldest daughter, my Aunt Beula, broke my grandmother’s heart when she left the church, and again when she divorced her husband and abandoned her child. Then my Uncle Franklin joined the army in the Korean War, breaking with the Mennonites’ pacifist tradition. Though he came home intact, “Mom was never the same afterward,” my aunts told me. In the past year she had also lost two grandchildren: Franklin’s son died in a car crash on the way to college; Naomi’s middle son in an icy trucking accident, leaving a wife and young daughter.

My grandmother had poured her heart into her plants. Infused with her love, they had grown large and lush. They sat in deep ceramic pots, gleaming and cared for. Surely tending them brought her some peace and the gift of forgetting. From the size and state of my own collection, I knew I had inherited her love of plants.

The conversation slowed; the space between sentences grew longer. Then my grandfather asked me, “Do you to go to church?”

This was it. Fear suffused my body, swift and hot. I could lie; I had lied about this to my parents in the past. When I was first married and they came to visit, I pretended my husband and I belonged to a church down the block. I took them there on a Sunday morning. Certain that all the women at non-Mennonite churches wore hats, I had cut the netting off my bridal veil to create a makeshift hat from the bow that remained. I felt ridiculous and must have looked it, and I wondered if Mom suspected the truth.

All faces in the room were turned toward me now, waiting. Someone had finally asked what they’d all wanted to know. I decided to answer truthfully. “No, I don’t,” I said.

I felt compelled to say more. I was afraid of what I might say next, just to fill the silence. There was a silence. A long one.

But someone else filled it, with another subject. I could breathe again.

For the remainder of the visit, I worried about my answer. My confession must have been high in the minds of everyone in the room, because now they knew what they had wondered about for years: I was among the unchurched. They may have been silently praying.

My grandparents, too, must have lamented the lack of privacy on these visits, chafing at the constant presence of Mom, who wanted to be there to control what was said, as though if they held their tongues in her presence they would do so in her absence as well. Surely there was much besides church they would have liked to discuss with me.

My grandmother sat quiet and brooding, her head bent slightly forward and to one side, her watery blue eyes magnified behind glasses on her broad, pale face. She looked at me with wondering and sadness. She had looked at me in this way since I was a child—long and deep, wordlessly and sad, into and beyond me. I think she saw my dead mother, and saw me as lost, unattached, needing rescue. Like a door left unlatched and swung open, a tragedy she was helpless to fix and could only watch from a distance.

In the kitchen we gathered our coats and got ready to leave. The day had turned dark and the light from the low ceiling fixture cast shadows on the counters and cabinets. As we moved toward the door, my grandfather addressed me with a simple statement. He looked straight at me, the way he always had, as though nothing shielded us from each other, as though everything between us was clear glass. “I wish you would go to church,” he said.

I said nothing. When he was a young father and forbade Beula to see the friends he thought were a bad influence, she had moved out of the house, but at least she continued to attend their church for a while. She even ended up a missionary later in life.

I could almost feel his pain then, as it traveled the family circle like a current: I had lost a mother, they had lost me, and now it appeared my soul might be lost as well. Each one of them, I imagined, was hoping I could somehow be saved from the fires of hell. That’s what it came down to: Their ultimate concern, I believed at that moment, was not for my present life, but for my afterlife.

Now that my parents knew the truth, too, I was not eager for the drive home. I settled into the back seat of the car, feeling much like a child, yet strangely more adult than on the ride over. Speaking the truth to my family was a new experience for me.

A mile or so into the dark evening, Mom turned around to look at me. Her face and voice were pinched. “Old Harry Bergey tried to tell you what to do back there, didn’t he?” she asked.

I didn’t answer.

She turned forward and grabbed the steering wheel from my father, twisted it so the car swerved sharply. “Didn’t you see that in the road? You almost ran over it!” Her voice was almost a squeal. She turned back to me. “I have to give your father driving lessons.”

My body raced with anger, but it was pointless to respond. How many times we had ridden in that car to and from my grandparents, always with tension, tight as a rubber band, over my birth mother’s shadow. Nothing stirred my anger more than Mom’s pointed digs at my mother’s family, the jabs directed at Dad, the jealousy that refused to die. So often I had watched Dad’s stoic shoulders tense and his chin grow meek. He rarely gave more than a “yup” or a “no” to whatever she said. I always felt sorry for him, having to hear his first wife’s memory shredded. I wished he would talk back, just once, sharply, and silence her venom.

Mixed with my congested frustration was relief that I no longer lived with Mom and her anger, and I resolved right then to make this the last of our joint visits to my grandparents. In the future I’ll rent a car and go on my own, if they’re even alive next time. I turned my face to the window and watched the black fields in the night.

The space between Mom and me came into clearer view that day. It became like a great shallow lake, drained of water, the other side too far to see. Its empty lakebed would require a long crossing, and I could not imagine how it would fill.

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© 2012 Darlene Frank. All rights reserved. A slightly different version of this story was published in Fault Zone: Over the Edge (2013). Please ask permission of the author if you would like to reproduce or use this work in any form.