FOUR GENERATIONS

Joyce Maynard

My mother called to tell me that my grandmother was dying. She had refused an operation that
would postpone, but not prevent, her death from pancreatic cancer. She could no longer eat, she had
been hemorrhaging, and she had severe jaundice. "I always prided myself on being different," she told my
mother. "Now I am different. I'm yellow."
My mother, telling me this news, began to cry. So I became the mother for a moment, reminding her,
reasonably, that my grandmother was eighty six, she'd had a full life, she had all her faculties, and no one
who knew her could wish that she live long enough to lose them. In the last year or so my mother had
begun finding notes in my grandmother's drawers at the nursing home, reminding her, "Joyce's husband's
name is Steve. Their daughter is named Audrey." She rarely saw her children anymore, had no strength
to cook or garden. Just the other week she had said of her longtime passion, Harry Belafonte, "I gave him
up." She told my mother that she'd had enough of living.
My grandmother's name was Rona Bruser. She was born in Russia, in 1892, the eldest daughter of a
large and prosperous Jewish family. But the comfort didn't last. She used to tell stories of the pogroms
and the Cossacks who raped her when she was twelve. Soon after that her family emigrated to Canada.
Her youngest sister was so sickly her mother was going to leave her behind, but Rona, at thirteen,
promised to hold and care for the baby for the entire duration of the ocean crossing, and against all
predictions, the baby survived.
My mother has shown me photographs of my grandmother in the old days. Today a woman like her would
be constantly dieting (as my mother does), but back then her stout, corseted figure was the ideal. She
had a long black braid and the sort of strong-jawed beauty that would never be described as fragile. She
was pursued by many men, but most ardently by Boris Bruser, also an immigrant from Russia, who came
from a much poorer country family, and courted her through the mail, in letters filled with his watercolor
illustrations and rich, romantic prose. "Precious Rona," his letters begin. "If only my arms were around
you." "Your loving friend," they end, (as little as one week before the wedding), "B. Bruser."

My grandfather, like the classic characters in Isaac Bashevis Singer stories, concerned himself more with
dreams than with life on earth. He ran one failing store after another, moving his family from town to town
across the Canadian prairies, trusting the least trustworthy of customers, investing in doomed businesses,
painting gentle watercolors and arranging canned goods in artful pyramids in whatever store hadn't gone
bankrupt yet, while his wife tried to balance the books and baked the knishes.
Their children, my mother in particular, were the center of their life. The story I loved best as a child was
of my grandfather opening every box of Cracker Jacks in his store in search of the particular toy my
mother coveted. Though they never had much money, my grandmother saw to it that her daughter had
elocution lessons and piano lessons, and the assurance that she would go to college.
But while she was at college my mother met my father, who was not only twenty years older than she
was, and divorced, but blue-eyed and blonde-haired and not Jewish. When my father sent love letters to
my mother (filled, as my grandfather's had been, years before, with poems and the most wonderful
drawings), my grandmother would open and hide them, and when my mother told her parents she was
going to marry this man, my grandmother said if that happened, it would kill her.

Not likely, of course. My grandmother was a woman who used to crack Brazil nuts open with her teeth, a
woman who once lifted a car off the ground when there was an accident and it had to be moved. She had
been representing her death as imminent ever since I could remember, and had discussed, at length, the
distribution of her possessions and her lamb coat. Every time we said goodbye, after our annual visit to
Winnipeg, she'd weep and say she might never see us again. But in the meantime, while nearly every
other relative of her generation, and a good many younger ones, had died (nursed in their final illness,
usually, by her) she kept making borscht, shopping for bargains, tending the most flourishing plants I've
ever seen, and most particularly, spreading the word of her daughters' and granddaughters'
accomplishments.
On the first real vacation my grandparents ever took, to Florida -- to celebrate their retirement, the sale of
their last store, and the first true solvency of their marriage -- my grandfather was hit by a car. After that
he began to forget his children's names and could walk only with two canes. After he died my
grandmother's life was lived, more than ever, through her children, and her pride, her possessiveness,
seemed suffocating. When she came to visit, I would have to hide my diary. She couldn't understand any
desire for privacy. She couldn't bear it if my mother left the house without her. Years later, in the nursing
home, she would tell people that I was the editor of the New York Times and my cousin was the foremost
artist in Canada. My mother was simply the most perfect daughter who ever lived.

This made my mother furious (and then guilt-ridden that she felt that way, when of course she owed so
much to her mother). So I harbored the resentment that my mother, the dutiful daughter, would not allow
herself. I, who had always performed specially well for my grandmother -- danced and sung for her,
offered up my smiles and kisses and good report cards and prizes, the way my mother always had -stopped writing to her, ceased to visit.
But when I heard she was dying I realized I wanted to go to Winnipeg to see her one more time. Mostly to
make my mother happy, I told myself (certain patterns being hard to break). But also, I was offering up
one more particularly successful accomplishment: my own dark-eyed, dark skinned, dark-haired daughter,
whom my grandmother had never met.
I put Audrey's best dress on her for our visit to Winnipeg, the way the best dresses were always put on
me for visits twenty years before. I made sure Audrey's stomach was full so she'd be in good spirits, and I
filled my pockets with animal crackers in case she started to cry. I scrubbed her face mercilessly (never
having been quite clean enough myself to please my grandmother). In the elevator going up to her room, I
realized how much I was sweating.
For the first time in her life, Grandma looked small. She was lying flat with an IV tube in her arm and her
eyes shut, but she opened them when I leaned over to kiss her. "It's Fredelle's daughter, Joyce," I yelled,
because she didn't hear well any more, but I could see that no explanation was necessary. "You came,"
she said. "You brought the baby."
Audrey was just one year old, but she had already seen enough of the world to know that people in beds
are not meant to be still and yellow, and she looked frightened. "Does she make strange?" my
grandmother asked.
Then Grandma waved at her -- the same kind of slow, finger-flexing wave a baby makes -- and Audrey
waved back. I spread her toys out on my grandmother's bed and sat her down. There she stayed most of
the afternoon, playing and humming and sipping on her bottle, taking a nap at one point, leaning against
my grandmother's leg. When I cranked her Snoopy guitar, Audrey stood up on the bed and danced.
Grandma couldn't talk much any more, though every once in a while she would say how sorry she was
that she wasn't having a better day. "I'm not always like this," she said.

Mostly she just watched Audrey. Over and over she told me how beautiful my daughter is, how lucky I am
to have her. Sometimes Audrey would want to get off the bed, inspect the get-well cards, totter down the
hall. "Where is she?" Grandma kept asking. "Who's looking after her?" I had the feeling, even then, that if
I'd said "Audrey's lighting matches," Grandma would have shot up to rescue her.
We were flying home that night, and I had dreaded telling her, remembering all those other tearful
partings. But in the end, when I said we had to go, it was me, not Grandma, who cried. She said she was
ready to die. But as I leaned over to stroke her forehead, what she said was, "I wish I had your hair," and,
"I wish I was well."
On the plane flying home, with Audrey in my arms, I thought about mothers and daughters, and the four
generations of the family that I know most intimately. Every one of those mothers loves and needs her
daughter more than her daughter will love or need her someday, and we are, each of us, the only person
on earth who is quite so consumingly interested in our child. Sometimes, now, I kiss and hug Audrey so
much she starts crying, which is in effect what my grandmother was doing to my mother all her life. And
what makes my mother grieve, I know, is not only that her mother will die in a day or two, but that once
her mother is dead, there will never again be someone to love her in quite such an unreserved and
unquestioning way. No one to believe that fifty years ago she could have put Shirley Temple out of a job,
no one else who remembers the moment of her birth. She will only be a mother, then, not a daughter
anymore.

As for Audrey and me, we stopped over for a night in Toronto, where my mother lives. In the morning, we
headed to a safe deposit box at the bank to take out the receipt for my grandmother's burial plot. Then my
mother flew back to Winnipeg herself, where, for the first time in anybody's memory, there was waist-high
snow on April Fool's Day. But that night, she fed me a huge dinner, as she always did when I came for a
visit, and I ate more than I do anywhere else. I admired the Fiesta-ware china (once my grandmother's)
that my mother set on the table. She said (the way Grandma used to say to her of the lamb coat),
"Someday it will be yours."