At our fifth winery, my arm extends across an empty seat. The raised nose of my terrier Lola sniffs the plate of Cheetos cheese puffs I offer my eighty-seven-year-old former mother-in-law, Judith. She chooses one. Munching, we bob our heads to Mrs. Robinson. Florescent orange dusts her lips. Daughter Lyda, Judith’s granddaughter and only descendant, the chair’s absent tenant, eyes me as she leans against the bar counter. I smile, Judith and I peachy-keen without Lyda sitting in between. Lyda turns her back to us and negotiates another pour into goblets. The glasses are plastic and covered with sayings in pastel cursive: Good Times with My Sis, Best Friends, BFF! The winery, known for The Fluffer, Rise Up, and O reds pared with Cheetos and chips, is packed. Other revelers, mostly women, ooh and aah over our glasses, ask where they are from (discount store), say how cute, with a nod to one another, motions I interpret as why can’t they be like us, a three-generational family and begging dog, bonding in the midst of rolling southern Arizona grasslands speckled with scruffy cattle and senescent vineyards? We are saccharine sweet. Maybe it’s because we nibbled our way through a picnic basket brimming with goat cheese, rice crackers, gherkins, chili-jam, and chocolate-covered mangos, and sipped twenty-five two-ounce pours. Maybe, like the ranchers looking skyward to low-hanging pewter clouds, seeking deliverance for a drought-parched range, we thirst for what might have been. Two days ago, as Judith walked through our front door for Christmas Eve dinner, she said the dog was fat. Lyda defended the dog and my honor, since I feed Lola. The two proffered the terrier’s girth, proportion of body to spindly legs, and waddle, each spinning their version of truth. That’s a trait we share: the need to be right. With PhDs after each of our names, we hammer home ideals. Though the fat-shaming was tame, I cut Lola’s rations. Twenty-six years ago, when Lyda was two, Judith sought court-mandated visitation every other month, never mind that she wasn’t a parent and lived three thousand miles away. Perhaps in her mind she was a stand-in, as Peter—my husband, her son—had died a few months earlier. Diagnosis to death had been swift, six weeks, hardly enough time to learn to pronounce metastasized adenocarcinoma. At age thirty-three, he left a gap wider than the winery’s metal chair between two women who had difficulty speaking to one another. *** August 24, 1994 Dear Judith: I'm saddened that you are seeking mediation. Peter hasn’t been dead one year, and we are just settling into our new relationship. I believe that your initiation for court-ordered mediation is a drastic step to take before we have spoken directly. It doesn't seem logical to begin a formal process before we have discussed the matter. As I expressed last month when we met, and in an earlier letter, this period is very difficult, as both my wedding anniversary and the anniversary of Peter's diagnosis coincide next week. I don't believe that your initiation of this process is being undertaken in "the spirit of love" as you state. Instead, I feel that you are trying to cause me mental anguish and making an already difficult situation harder. This action does not help me in the "healing process", as you propose, on the contrary, it compounds the situation. I wish you would give things a chance to work out between us. Lisa *** “This is Lisa.” Judith introduced me to Aunt Helen, Peter’s great-aunt. I was nineteen, between my sophomore and junior years at college, where Peter and I had met. The family matriarch stood in the screened porch of the communal dining room. We had traveled all day, from Long Island’s tip to New Hampshire’s wilds to reach this socialist summer camp, Peter at the wheel, Judith in the passenger seat, and me stuffed in the back of an Accord hatchback, the two of them eager to escape The City. It was my first time to the East Coast, to a socialist camp, and to The City. Peter’s foot had been heavy on the Accord’s accelerator; he couldn’t wait for them to fall in love with me as much as he had. We arrived as the dinner triangle clanged. “She’s not Jewish.” Helen gave Peter a once-over and settled her gaze onto Judith, perhaps expecting further explanation. “You’re late. Said you’d be here an hour ago.” “Let me help you to a chair, Helen,” Judith said. “Traffic. Peetie, get Aunt Helen a Scotch.” As if a stiff drink would ease the pain of my ethnicity. So passed four days. Judith at Aunt Helen’s beck and call, with “Peetie” as back-up. We escaped ‘get this, get that’ by canoeing the lake. I reveled in the calls of magical loons and the Aurora Borealis. From the porch one afternoon I overheard Judith tell Peter, “She’s Midwestern. Ignorant. There’s no substance there.” *** Which is why he married me. I was a foreigner: on a first-name basis with a manicurist, lived in a two-story house at the end of wooded cul-da-sac with a lapdog and a Cadillac Coupe de Ville in the garage. The youngest child (my siblings would use ‘spoiled’ here) of Nixon-supporting parents. Peter, the only child of a Birkenstock-wearing single mother. He didn’t know his dad’s name, grew up in Brooklyn, marched in civil-rights and anti-Vietnam protests, and attended an alternative high school where he played chess all day. After we married, Judith was the poster child for meddling mothers-in-law. “This lasagna is inedible,” with a spit into a napkin. “Why did you buy this house?” “I can’t believe you don’t know that.” “Why did you buy me (fill in the blank), I’ll never use it.” “I’m not sitting in the backseat, you sit there.” I tried to let her jabs roll off, like water from a duck’s back. “Quack-quack,” Peter mouthed when she visited. I pictured myself a Teal or Ruddy, ducks with attitude, to cloak my heart in blue-, green- and rufous-colored feathers. But feathers weren’t Teflon. Leading up to her frequent visits, I asked my married friends for advice, yelled at Peter for not standing up, saw a counselor. I also pictured her gone—to the Peace Corps or worse. Imagining how she would go, via slow boat or aneurism or rare cancer, fueled restoring our old house: refinishing termite infested wood floors, grinding paint off wrought-iron, digging irrigation ditches in July when night-time temperatures hung around the century mark. I stopped daydreaming when Peter found a lump. When I asked Judith, a registered nurse at the time, what caused his cancer, she answered, “Your fighting,” meaning if I’d cooked to her liking, wore Birkenstocks, and understood my place in the backseat of our lives, he would not be on a fast train to oblivion. *** “Do you think she’ll turn him into a saint afterwards?” I asked Jeannie, Judith’s younger cousin, Aunt Helen’s daughter. We sat on my patio in full October sun; taking a breather from witnessing Peter dissolve. Jeannie had flown in from New York to say goodbye. She clutched my arm. “He’s her super hero now, imagine after he dies. Everything he did will have been better than everyone else. She will be unbearable. Peter this…Peter that…” “How do you put up with her?” Jeanie shrugged, “She’s family.” *** My family did not put-up with. We shunned. Dad and his sister didn’t speak. Mom lost track of her brothers. Sometimes there were reasons. Mom’s older brother a drunk and womanizer, the younger one mad she used money he had given her to safeguard on flying lessons. Dad said he never liked his sister. Other exorcisms were over ideals. My older sister moved to Berkley and morphed into a suede-fringe-wearing, poetry-writing liberal. This metamorphosis was enough for my parents to say they had one daughter, me, when new acquaintances asked about children. *** The summer after Peter died, when Lyda wasn’t quite two, I hired a witch doctor to make contact, not to cleanse the house of Peter’s presence, as I constantly looked for signs from him, but to make sure he was alright, wherever he may be. A month prior I had woken to lights in my bedroom doorway and felt a presence. I wanted to believe it was Peter, but maybe it was the soul of two owners back, an elderly lady who had died there. Was our two-bedroom, one-bath house big enough for two celestial beings or were they wrestling with one another? The witch doctor waved the smoking sage bundle over the coconut. Once. Twice. Three times. Two devotional candles with the Virgin Mary painted on their sides burned. The witch doctor, me, and the midwife who delivered Lyda, sat on the living room’s sofa and stared at the offerings on the coffee table. The witch doctor, a friend of a friend of the midwife, was from the Andes, a woman in her forties, small in stature, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Not the wizened older soul with feathers braided into gray hair I had expected. The shaman smudged the coconut again. It really didn’t look like Peter. Prior to the ceremony, she had sent a supply list. Lyda and I visited a store in the Barrio to buy candles typical of Catholic mass and a coconut that resembled Peter. I held up each, positioned it so the eyes faced Lyda sitting in the shopping cart and asked, “Does this look like Daddy?” She shook her head. After a dozen failures, I pawed through the bin and found the most oblong one with the most fibrous growth, albeit it was reddish-brown. Peter had a narrow face with thick to-die-for curly black hair. “No worries,” the witch doctor said. “Your husband isn’t troubled with the soul of the other person who died here.” I leaned back into the sofa pillows, relieved. “I do though, sense hostility. Anger. Unhappiness. Perhaps it was because he was young and those left behind are still processing.” She instructed me to light candles regularly and burn sage in all the rooms’ corners. “How many should I light after someone I don’t like leaves? Someone who upsets me?” The shaman furrowed her eyebrows. Her lashes were almost as full and as dark as Peter’s. “This is your home,” she said. “Only allow in people who care about you.” *** “Here’s a pad of paper. Take notes,” my attorney, who specialized in divorce, with the ironic last name of Everlove, said. Tired of Judith’s demands of mediation, psychological evaluation (mine and Lyda’s), regular therapy for Lyda, and Judith’s anger, especially after she showed up for a visit to find Lyda and I had other plans, I sought a pit-bull. Everlove’s name was top of the list. “Now that your former mother-in-law lives in Tucson, overnights and holidays are real possibilities,” Everlove said. “She could ask for more frequent visits, too.” Prior to re-locating, Judith visited four times a year and saw Lyda during the daytime over the course of a long weekend. “Your remarriage might counter more visitation. Her requested additional time would interfere with creating a new family.” She moved to Tucson six years after Peter died, and two weeks before my second wedding. I had half-expected her to show up at the Episcopalian church, burst through the wooden doors a la The Graduate and shout “How dare you go on with your life.” Everlove told me to call 911 if she showed. Luckily, she did not. “It will be at least a one-day trial, possibly two,” Everlove said. “With a judge. Answer questions succinctly, shut-up, be civil, address the judge, Judith, her lawyer formally. Dress conservatively. No tits, no slits, no ass.” I was envious of Everlove’s pastel pant suits, tailored-made with matching one-inch pumps. “Wear low-heeled closed-toed shoes. Don’t talk unless spoken to. Don’t take your hands out of your lap. No doodling.” She glared at me. Her instructions up to the last bit were a no-brainer. But no doodling? My pent-up energy would have to go somewhere. But where, if not into inky swirls? “Looks like you’re not paying attention,” she said. I had planned to tune out, self-medicate by drawing flowers, rabbits, trees, pages of forest animals. “To stop twitching, drill your heels into the floor. Do not take off your shoes. The judge can see every movement you make. No eye rolling. No frowns. No lip curls. Judges hate it when parties are rude to each other, especially when small kids are concerned. And whatever you do, do not interrupt me, the other attorney, and certainly not the judge. Let the opposing side go off the rails. Don’t let what she says bother you. Do you understand?” I almost mouthed quack-quack. *** I wore a navy-blue with green piping St. John knit suit, a blue-winged teal costume. I looked great and I promised myself I’d buy another of the pricey outfits if I behaved. Judith took the stand, as well as Jeannie, the psychologist, me. I nearly drilled a hole in the carpet with my one-inch blue pumps. I rephrased Judith’s lawyers’ questions and asked for confirmation to compose myself before answering. I stared straight ahead when Judith said something rude or untrue; halted impending eye-rolls when the psychologist or Jeannie walked the line of not saying anything derogatory about either Judith or I, and in the process pissed me off. Judith’s lawyer hadn’t given her the same lecture or she hadn’t listened. By the afternoon, she had broken most of Everlove’s rules, including interrupting her lawyer and the judge. The judge ruled in my favor. Not for the St. John Knit or conservative pumps or tight lips, or because Judith flipped off the rails, but because of Troxel v. Granville, a recent Supreme Court ruling which deemed grandparents’ rights law unconstitutional. Six years of legal papers and psychologists reports, with fees amounting to a year’s full ride at Harvard University, were stuffed into a banker’s box and placed on my shed’s highest shelf so no nasty juju would seep into the house. *** “Though you’d like to slam and bolt the door against her,” Everlove said at our debrief, “Don’t. Laws change. Let her see her grandchild regularly, then if grandparent rights swing in her favor, she won’t have a case.” Lawyers can be such killjoys. “Step away,” Everlove said. “Let the two of them make arrangements. An eight-year-old can answer the phone and keep a calendar. Remember, your former mother-in-law is hurting and Lyda is all she has.” I had planned to shun the woman, like my father to his sister, like my mother to her brothers. But I was into signs from Peter, and while I tried not to believe, I believed Everlove’s words were him talking. So mad was I that he died, that he left me, left me to Judith’s thrashings, left me to fend for myself as a single mom, left me to remarry, this time to an alcoholic, mad still after all these years, I barely mentioned Peter’s name. Talking through the lawyer was his way of saying, “Remember me.” I followed Everlove’s advice. Lyda, who had been telling me how to drive since she was three-years old, would have an opinion about Judith’s visits. If they weren’t working out, she would say ‘not now,’ or as I hoped, ‘not ever.’ But Lyda liked her grandmother. Liked to hear stories about her dad as a kid, see photos of him her age, looking like her with his long hair, casting for fish, stories I couldn’t tell. She returned from afternoons with Judith of tales that made him real to her. Later, she and Judith graduated to art openings, theater, new restaurants. Sometimes I wondered if Lyda saw her grandmother to spite me. Teenagers are like that. After visits, I interrogated Lyda, asked who said what, to uncover unhappiness, searching for termite-infested floor joists beneath polished parquet flooring. Riddled planks abounded—Lyda wasn’t reading up to grade, afterschool activities lacked, disheveled hair—but Lyda looked past Judith’s gnawing and grew to resent my asking. Friends would report if they spotted the twosome. “What a nice daughter you raised,” they said, after seeing her with Judith and an arthritic Chihuahua at the farmer’s market. “She carried her grandmother’s bags, held her coffee, cleaned up after the dog. So sweet.” When I grunted and told our history, they didn’t believe me. But I had boxes in my shed, rotten I-beams, so I learned not to talk of the boxes’ content to others or to my daughter. *** Lyda burst through the back door, home early from diner with Judith, and tossed car keys onto the counter. She was crying. “What did she do this time?” I was ready for: Judith had dissed her hair, avant-garde clothing, choice of school electives. Again. I was ready to diss Judith, tell Lyda the woman was a piece of work. Again. “She has pancreatic cancer.” A cancer Judith’s father, Lyda’s great-grandfather had died of, a cancer with a very low survival rate, one percent post five years. This was the moment I’d wished for all those years ago as I sanded wood floors, dug irrigation canals, when I imagined her gone. But from Lyda’s tears, slope of shoulders, and tussled hair, gone would be upsetting. Gone would be difficult for Lyda, gone would be difficult for me to watch Lyda suffer. Lyda expected me to help. “Tell her we’ll take care of Charlie if he needs taking care of.” What was one cantankerous Chihuahua when we had two others, especially when he was closing in on his expiration date. Lyda pulled her shoulders upright, finger-combed hair. An olive branch had been offered. *** Judith handed me a platter. We stood awkwardly in my kitchen. “Goat cheese and crackers.” It was Boxing Day, and I’d invited her for dinner. A week earlier, Lyda had said, ‘I’m going to graduate from college in the spring. I need you two to stand in the same room together. I don’t want any weirdness like at high school graduation.” Meaning, I stood on the opposite side of the auditorium and did not invite Judith to the celebratory BBQ afterwards. Lyda had suggested Boxing Day, still a holiday but unsacred so a family spat wouldn’t forever ruin the day, suggested we each invite a friend. To relieve my anxiety, I’d spent the hours preceding a six o’clock doorbell ring cooking vegetarian pozole, kale and pomegranate salad, a Meyer-lemon tart. I accepted the cheese peace offering. “How’s Charlie?” I asked. The dog had to be close to seventeen. “Surprising everyone with his vigor.” Afterwards, Lyda said, “See, that wasn’t so bad. No need to smudge the room.” *** “Judith called,” Lyda said on the phone from her apartment in Seattle, where she attended graduate school. “She has kidney cancer.” Lyda’s voice wavered. “She expects me to come to Scottsdale for the operation next week. I’m not up for this. I’ve got class to teach, I’m behind in my research.” Judith had a network of friends to support her, Lyda said, but her grandmother insisted she fly south. “Will you come, too?” No. “It’s on a Friday. I’ve got work. The dog. You know how I hate Scottsdale.” But when my feisty grown-up daughter said, “I can’t do this without you,” and cried, I said sure. The two-and-a-half-hour drive with Ellie, the family’s Chinese crested powder puff lap dog with her own medical issues, in the passenger seat, bolstered by Bruce Springsteen’s hard life lyrics blasting from my iPhone, gave me time to strategize. Lyda worried her grandmother would die, if not this weekend, then soon. The visit meant I could show Lyda that the two important women in her life could, god-forbid, be cordial. Turning Bruce down a bit, I practiced saying, “You know, Judith, it’s great for Lyda that we’ve put the past behind us and forgiven each other.” Even Ellie perked up her ears at the quintessential deathbed atonement. As we checked into our hotel, stowed the dog, took a right when we should have taken a left from the parking lot, bought coffee, retraced our path, and otherwise put off what we came to do, I wondered how scary can an eighty-something-year-old woman, one day after cancerous kidney removal, be? “What took you so long?” she said. “I heard you two were out gallivanting.” Lyda stuck out a to-go cup. “We brought you coffee.” Judith sipped our peace offering. “It’s cold.” So much for being weak and debilitated. “I’ll find someplace to heat it up for you,” Lyda said. “Cafeteria. First floor,” Judith said. “You might find Laura there, I asked her to inquire about my lunch.” On our way in, we’d passed Judith’s friend at the nurse’s station, deep in conversation. Discussing spaghetti sans meatballs, since Judith was a vegetarian. Lyda glanced at me on the way out the door, communicating, ‘You better be here when I return.’ It may well have been the first time I had been alone with Judith since Peter died. I’d have to soldier through, as it would be several hours to call into play my exit strategy, Ellie, most likely still curled into a ball on the hotel bed asleep, where I left her, would need to be walked or fed. “So, how hard was it to find me a cup of real coffee?” I’m nineteen again. Before I explained about the wrong turn, my obsession with supporting independent coffee shops (Scottsdale was a desert in more ways than one), a stop at Goodwill (Lyda), and Whole Foods (me), the nurse bustled in and Judith, former nurse, turned her high-beams on her: check the IV, pour water, raise bed, close curtains. She hurled commands like a Vietnam combat soldier sprayed foliage with bullets as cover for his platoon’s advancements. With each dig at subpar care, she seemed to gain the upper hand and relax a bit. The sourpuss attitude was a mask, blanketing fear. Fear of dying, fear of change, fear Peter lived a life without her influence. Aunt Helen, too, when Judith first introduced me on that rickety wooden porch of the socialist communal hall, fear that a Midwestern shiksa would pollute the gene pool, fear I would take the brilliant descendant away and summertime would never be the same. *** Judith snags another orange puff from the plate perched on the empty chair between us. Lola swivels her keen eyes toward Judith’s hand and Judith tosses her the puff. “Whoa, there!” I say. “The dog’s fat, remember?” a reprimand my nineteen-year-old self could never have barked. Lola scarfs the goodie as Judith shrugs. Her eyes study my face, with the same drill-down as Lola’s when she eyed the snack Judith held mid-air. “Yours is dirty.” She waves her hand dramatically across her own fluorescent mouth. “Yours too.” Lyda approaches, a goblet in each hand, the third on the bar behind her. She shifts her gaze between us, brow furrowed. “Everything okay?” Judith takes a goblet, BFF in pink cursive running around its side, from her granddaughter’s hand. “Why wouldn’t it be? We’re waiting on you.” Studying the two, they seemed at ease, my daughter simply wanting to please, a fiery child turned compassionate. Perhaps I had misinterpreted our scene in Judith’s hospital room. Lyda’s running off to warm Judith’s coffee was just that, not an escape from her grandmother. Through her relationship with Judith, Lyda had learned to navigate orneriness and developed a skill that will serve her for the rest of her life, how to deal with difficult people. Perhaps instead of shunning and putting up with, I should lean in, like Peter’s and my daughter had. With my plastic goblet embellished with cutesiness, I clink to Judith’s, “To good times.”
Lisa Harris (she/her), a Pushcart Prize nominated author, has published in Orion Magazine, Passages North, Highlights for Children, Litro Magazine, (M)othering (Sorbie and Grogan, 2022), among others. Migrating between Seattle and Tucson as an environmental consultant, she has two daughters, six cats, two desert tortoises, and terrier Lola. @Harrislisakim; www.lisakharris.com.