Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

respectability, moderate prosperity, mollified wife in a black silk dress, the well-turned-out tall daughters.
    Though as a matter of fact their dresses look frightful; flouncy and countrified. All except Aunt Madge’s; a tight, simple, high-necked affair, black with some sparkle about it, perhaps of jet. She wears it with a sense of style, tilts her head a little to the side, smiles without embarrassment at the camera. She was a notable seamstress, and would have made her own dress, understanding what suited her. But it is likely she made her sisters’ dresses also, and what are we to make of that? My grandmother is done up in something with floppy sleeves and a wide velvet collar, and a sort of vest with crisscrossed velvet trim; something seems askew at the waist. She wears this outfit with no authority and indeed with a shamefaced, flushed, half-grinning and half-desperate apology. She looks a great tomboy, her mop of hair rolled up but sliding forward, in danger of falling down. But she wears a wedding ring; my father had been born. She was at that time the only one married; the eldest, also the tallest of the sisters.
    At supper my grandmother said, “How is your mother?” and at once my spirits dropped.
    “All right.”
    She was not all right, she never would be. She had a slowly progressive, incurable disease.
    “The poor thing,” Aunt Madge said.
    “I have a terrible time understanding her on the phone,” my grandmother said. “It just seems the worse her voice gets, the more she wants to talk.”
    My mother’s vocal cords were partly paralyzed. Sometimes I would have to act as her interpreter, a job that made me wild with shame.
    “I wouldn’t wonder she gets lonely out there,” Aunt Madge said. “The poor soul.”
    “It would not make any difference where she was,” my grandmother said, “if people cannot understand her.”
    My grandmother wanted then a report on our household routine. Had we got the washing done, had we got the washing dried, had we got the ironing done? The baking? My father’s socks mended? She wished to be of help. She would make biscuits and muffins, a pie (did we have a pie?); bring the mending and she would do it. The ironing too. She would go out to our place for a day, to help, as soon as the roads were clear. I was embarrassed to think we needed help, and I especially tried to ward off the visits. Before my grandmother came I would be obliged to try to clean the house, reorganize the cupboards as much as possible, shove certain disgraces—a roasting-pan I had never got around to scrubbing, a basket of torn clothes I had told her were already mended—under the sink or the beds. But I never cleaned thoroughly enough, my reorganization proved to be haphazard, the disgraces came unfailingly to light, and it was clear how we failed, how disastrously we fell short of that ideal of order and cleanliness, household decency, which I as much as anybody else believed in. Believing in it was not enough. And it was not just for myself but for my mother that I had to feel shame.
    “Your mother isn’t well, she cannot get around to things,” said my grandmother, in a voice that indicated doubt as to how much would have been gotten around to, in any case.
    I tried to present good reports. In the old days, when such things were sometimes true, I would say that my mother had made some pickled beets, or that she was busy ripping worn-out sheets down the middle and sewing the outer edges together, to make them last longer. My grandmother perceived the effort, and registered the transparent falsity of this picture (false even if its details were true); she said, well, is she really?
    “She’s painting the kitchen cupboards,” I said. It was not a lie. My mother was painting our cupboards yellow and on each of the drawers and doors she was painting some decoration: flowers or fish or a sailboat or even a flag. Although her hands and arms trembled she could control the brush sufficiently for a short time. So these designs were not so badly done. Just the same there was something crude and glaring about them, something that seemed to reflect the stiffness and intensity of the stage of the disease my mother had now got into. I did not mention them at all to my grandmother, knowing that she was going to find them extremely bizarre and upsetting. My grandmother and Aunt Madge believed, as most people do, that houses should be made to look as much as possible like other people’s