#Aanya Reeves | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

alarawriting · 1 year

Text

52 Project #50: Grandma's House

Just in time for Thanksgiving weekend!

The O Street Museum, unlike the grandmother's house in this story, is a real place, and is really as I have described. Possibly even more over the top than the grandmother's house.

***

Grandma’s house was cold. It wasn’t a metaphor; someone must have turned the heat down to some ridiculous level, 65 degrees or something. Grandma used to keep it around 75 degrees; I’d wear summer pajamas when we came here for Thanksgiving, despite how cold it was outside. For some reason I’d thought it would be just as warm as when she was alive. I shivered, and wondered if I’d find sweaters upstairs in the Sweater Room, or if someone had gotten to them first.

No time like the present to check. I stuffed the key into the pocket of my blazer and headed up the first set of stairs. I’d gone in on 27, so I headed up to the third floor and went through the secret door to 29, then up another flight of stairs and through the regular door to the fourth floor on 31, because you can’t get to the third floor of 31 through any other of the doors. The Sweater Room was on the third floor of 31. I went inside.

The walls were hung with sweaters. Cable knit sweaters, cashmere sweaters, sweaters with sparkly sequins all over them, ugly Christmas sweaters, cardigans, short-sleeved sweaters (never been able to understand why those even exist), thick wool sweaters… The sweaters hanging from the hooks on the wall partially covered the dressers, which were covered to the inch with knick-knacks of Grandma’s that had no real theme or connection to them, like she’d just dumped stuff she couldn’t figure out where to put it. But inside the drawers: more sweaters. Men’s sweaters, women’s sweaters, sweaters for every size child and baby.

Most of Grandma’s themed rooms seemed to have some artistic point to them – the rooms themed around specific historical figures, like Elvis or Teddy Roosevelt; the rooms themed around features of nature, like the Ocean Room or the Cherry Blossom Room; the rooms themed around seasons like the Winter Room, or colors like the Purple Room; or the ones themed around activities, like the Billiards Room or the Music Room. And then there were rooms like the Sweater Room, that had a theme, but the theme was ridiculous.

I asked Grandma once why she had a room dedicated to sweaters, and only sweaters. She glared at me. Grandma used to glare a lot. “No one will ever say I let any of my family members be cold, ever!”

My favorite was still hanging up on the wall. It was a gradient of blue, light at the top and dark at the bottom. I pulled it off the hanger.

It smelled like Grandma’s laundry detergent.

The tears welled up out of nowhere and I found myself sobbing, out of nowhere. I pressed the sweater to my face and breathed through it until I had myself under control again.

“What are you crying for?” Grandma would have said. “People die! If they led a long, full life, then stop crying about it! That’s the best any of us ever get!”

I didn’t know how long Grandma had lived. No one did. When you asked her, she’d say “As old as Ann,” and when you asked how old Ann was, she’d say “That’s for me to know and you to find out.” I took this as permission to try to find out, when I was thirteen; I went rummaging through her purse to find her identification documents. Her driver’s license said her name was Gloria Reyes and she was born in 1929. Her passport said her name was Long Xin-quan and she was born in 1918. Her other driver’s license, which was buried at the bottom of the purse, said her name was Aanya Desai and she was born in 1907. Grandma used to claim to be Chinese, which would have made sense given that the name on her passport was Chinese, but she could easily pass for any number of other ethnicities – she had long, straight black hair, she tanned very dark in the summer and turned very light in the winter, and her eyes were like Keanu Reeves’ – if you had assumed she was white, they looked white. If you assumed she was Asian, they looked Asian. She had, to my knowledge, been assumed to be Indian, Native American, Hispanic, Polynesian, Thai, practically every East Asian nation, Polynesian, and white, on various occasions.

I thought she was a spy. None of those ages could be right; Grandma couldn’t be that old. Although, my biological grandmother, my Nan-nan, also called her Grandma, so maybe she really was that old.

It didn’t seem weird to me until I was nearly a teenager. No one knew exactly how Grandma was related to us, and no one really cared. There were, the last time I counted, 25 separate families of cousins, all of whom counted as Grandma’s family. Some people might have been adopted; Grandma had taken in at least two abused kids on separate occasions and just declared them to be hers now, according to my mother. Though I happened to know that the Haskins, the African-American family that ran into trouble occasionally when people couldn’t believe they were related to Grandma, were in fact actually directly connected to me; my Nan-nan’s sister had married a black man. According to my Nan-nan, this utterly shocked and horrified her parents, but Grandma had just glared at them and said, “You had better come to this house for Thanksgiving, you hear me? I don’t care where you go for Christmas or anything else, but Thanksgiving is for my family, and you better come.”

With my sweater on awkwardly under my blazer, I returned the way I came, back to the front room of 27. I’d always intended it to be my starting point. And then from there, I went through the hallways to 23.

***

If you’ve ever been to the O Street Museum in DC, you might get a sense of what Grandma’s home was like. Grandma claimed that the founder of the O Street Museum got the idea from her, and I don’t know enough to dispute it. O Street Museum is five interconnected town houses; Grandma’s house is seven, and they all have four floors and finished basements. Oh, and a gabled roof, where most townhouses, including the others on the street, have flat ones. It actually looks from the outside like just one very long roof, the only visual indication from the street that the townhomes are connected in any way. There’s supposedly an attic under the roof, but I’d never been there and neither had any relatives I’d talked to.

We used to call the houses by their street numbers, but not the whole thing. We were on the 1200 block, so the houses were 1223, 1225, 1227 and so on up through 1235. 27 was the main entrance to the whole thing. You could also get in on 23 and 33. All the rest of the doors were blocked.

There are over 70 rooms, not counting the private bathrooms that most of the bedrooms come with. And every square inch of the walls and furniture in most of the rooms is covered with Grandma’s stuff. Art, knickknacks, jewelry, books, clothes, you name it. One of the rooms is filled with nothing but hats. Unlike the O Street Museum, which has a similar aesthetic but with more selective artistic grounding behind it, you couldn’t buy any of the stuff and you couldn’t rent a room. Grandma wasn’t running a hotel; this was actually her house, and she didn’t take in boarders. Not for money, anyway.

So when Grandma demanded that the whole family gather for Thanksgiving… she meant the whole family. 25 separate families, as in family trees with kids and grandkids, and around 30 singles and couples who had no kids and weren’t considered part of one of the other families. Everyone was your cousin, and the exact degree didn’t matter. Us kids indiscriminately called everyone in our parents’ generation Aunt or Uncle (or Avun in a couple of cases where someone considered themselves non-binary, but that comes up more in my generation than it did when we were the kids), and everyone in any generation above that was either Aunt/Uncle or Great-Aunt/Great-Uncle depending on how elderly we thought they were.

Grandma also owned a parking lot, about two blocks away from the house. That, she rented out, but around Thanksgiving the parking lot would close and you had to have the code, which Grandma would give out, to get in. Even then, there wasn’t enough room for all the cars. The disabled and elderly parked in the row of on-street disability parking spots Grandma had acquired in front of all of her houses, and everyone else parked further away and walked or took mass transit. The 7-Eleven across the street on the block corner actually had signage specifically forbidding that anyone from Grandma’s house, which was generally referred to as “Long Mansion” due to being long enough to take up most of the block, park there.

All of that would be gone soon. Grandma had entrusted me to sell off her stuff and give the proceeds out to the entire family, and that meant the houses too. I figured I would probably have the doors between the houses sealed, covered up with wall, and sell them as separate townhomes. Grandma’s will said I could do that if I wanted. I didn’t want to – I wanted everything to be exactly like it was. I wanted all of Grandma’s stuff to remain in her house and for the family to meet every Thanksgiving and Grandma would be there. But that wasn’t happening, and I had a mission, given to me in Grandma’s will. And a seven-house four-story mansion wouldn’t sell to anyone unless they planned to cut it up for apartments, which no. I wasn’t doing that. I was going to sell these houses to families, people who wanted to raise kids in them. Or run a nonprofit to give housing to runaway teens, or something. Something better than being a landlord renting out apartments.

I’ve done estate sales for the past six years, but I’d never had to do one for anyone I was related to. There was a pattern we’d always follow. You meet with the bereaved family members who hired you. You express condolences on their loss. You’re gentle, friendly but not over-familiar. I work for a company that does these, so someone else was responsible for setting the percentage we take, doing the marketing, signing the contract; it’s just my job to satisfy the customer by getting the best price possible for their loved one’s stuff, while making sure no one in the family feels slighted because some favorite knickknack got sold instead of given to them like their mom promised.

I always begin by walking around in the house, taking pictures of everything. Often, the person who owned the house had been sick for some time, and the house smells… not bad, exactly, but it smells like sick old people. Often, cats have peed on a good bit of it. I’ve been in the homes of hoarders, where rooms are stacked to the top with old magazines and newspapers the deceased couldn’t bear to throw out. It’s a little weird, walking through someone else’s life, but I’m professional about it and I try not to speculate on the life I’m observing, even in my own head. Then I catalogue all the photos in a spreadsheet and make sure that the family members all get a chance to see it and point out what they want to take, even before I price anything. Once they’ve done that, I work on getting pricing. Often someone will come back after I’ve priced things and tell me they wanted a specific item, they forgot about it or they didn’t see it in the sheet. They come back during pricing often enough that I know this isn’t always motivated by money… but sometimes, they just coincidentally remember that their grandfather left them this particular piece of fine art that’s worth a few thousand, or whatever. I always check that against the will, first, and then against whichever family members are closest, who hired me. The children, usually. The siblings, sometimes. In some heartbreaking cases, it’s the parents, who outlived their own child.

Grandma picked me to do her house because I’m the only family member with experience doing estate sales, and I’m generally very professional. But walking around in Grandma’s house, every little stupid object with a history I remember, and the afterimage of Grandma everywhere… I broke down a few times. I didn’t know if I could do this.

I was so glad there wasn’t anyone here to see me crying.

I’d made the mistake of going to the Kids’ House first, number 23. When I was little, my parents lived in the same city as Grandma, as many of the family did, and sent me over here for babysitting, so I spent a lot of time in the Kids’ House. Later after we moved, we still came here four or five times a year. The basement was a playroom for kids to run around in. There were some huge dollhouses, large enough for a Barbie doll, and some smaller ones that were more works of art, that only the older children and adults were allowed to touch. First floor had the game room, where there were board games and three different televisions hooked up to every video game console that had ever existed. Grandma actually had a Colecovision. I was going to have to test if it even worked.

On the same floor we had the huge dining room with the enormous child-height table, the high chairs and booster chairs and children’s seats still ranged around it like Grandma was expecting guests with children. 23 also had a working kitchen; most of the family’s food was prepared in 25, but 23 had a fridge full of healthy snacks and bottled water, a pantry and a breadbox full of not-so-healthy snacks, canned food on shelves, and a stove with every childproofing technology known to man. Kids were encouraged to learn to cook for themselves. There were children’s cookbooks on a shelf, and a TV hooked to a computer that had nothing on it but cooking videos, and links to cooking videos online.

I wondered if it had usually looked like this when we weren’t here. For obvious reasons, I’d never seen what the house looked like when Grandma hadn’t prepared for child guests. There used to be milk, chocolate milk, apple juice, and sometimes for a rare treat even soda in the fridge. None of that now, just water. There were no handmade brownies or cookies on the platter with the glass lid, no fruit in the fruit bowl with the bug net over it. Carrots and celery in the fridge, and jars of jam and jelly, but no peaches, no pre-made salads with plastic wrap over the bowls. The breadbox had a loaf in it, but it was wheat bread, which most of us had always refused to eat. Grandma didn’t do pure white bread, but she usually had multi-grain and potato bread and honey wheat, as well as the wheat bread and the weird options like pumpernickel and sourdough. None of that was in there. And the wheat bread had gone stale.

On the second floor, we had the TV room, separate from the game room; that was on the second floor and had probably been a master bedroom, once. We also had the Baby Room, with cribs, and the Toddler Room, with the baby gate to lock them in there so they couldn’t get down the stairs. I held it together until I got to the Toddler Room, and then I started bawling. The kids who had last visited Grandma who’d stayed in this room wouldn’t even remember her.

I got a piece of tissue paper from the Toddler Room bathroom, and a bottle of water from downstairs, and got myself under control. Then I went back up, to the bedrooms. They were practically Spartan compared to the rest of the house; I thought that would be a good way to ease myself into it.

“Compared to the rest of the house”, however, turned out to be the operative word. Each room had bunk beds – sometimes two sets – with nice sheets, nothing ever branded with commercial characters, fluffy blankets, and a few dressers, bookcases, and bins for toys. The bookcases were stuffed with children’s books. The dressers were completely covered with kid-friendly decorations, and some that weren’t such a great idea for kids, like ceramic statues as music boxes. Inside the dressers and closets, there were clothes of every size. The rooms tended to be themed, with gender markers in the toys and the colors. Bright rainbow colors on a room with dollhouses. Deep blue ocean colors and murals of monstrous sea creatures on a room full of action figures. Some rooms had no clear gender, devoted to books and art supplies and board games, painted in light blues or neutral yellows.

Why had Grandma supplied us so many clothes? These clothes weren’t for us to take home, they were to stay here for cousins who needed them. Sometimes kids stayed with Grandma for extended periods of time – maybe because a sibling was sick, maybe because there was upheaval in their homes. Sometimes, cousins brought friends to Grandma’s, and the friends stayed for weirdly long periods of time even after the cousins went home. Some of those then kept showing up every Thanksgiving as new cousins.

So many clothes. All of them smelled like Grandma’s laundry detergent.

I was old enough that none of these had been my toys or my clothes. Grandma swapped out the toys and clothes to stay on top of fashion and children’s interests. Even things like board games got replaced with newer editions of the board game in question. There had been videotapes and small TVs with VCRs in these rooms when I was coming here, and I remember heated discussions with my other female cousins as to which of us would room together in which room, based mostly on which videos we wanted to watch, or wouldn’t be caught dead watching. Those were gone now. Instead there were laptops, one on each bed. Most of the kids brought their own, but if you didn’t have one, you’d have one at Grandma’s house.

The thought occurred to me that Grandma must have been fabulously wealthy to be able to afford things like this. New toys and games every few years. Every game console there had ever been, and televisions to go with them. Clothes for any and all possible grandkids. Laptops.

My uncle, the executor of Grandma’s will, had said that once I’d sold everything on behalf of the estate, then all of the money would be divided among all the family members. Including Grandma’s existing liquid money. Everyone was waiting on me to get this done.

It took me three hours to get through house 23, taking pictures of everything, and 23 was the simplest one because it was set up for kids. I had over a thousand pictures of separate items to price, and then sell at estate sale or online auction.

This was gonna take forever.

***

I met my cousin Vanessa while we were staying together at 23, when we were both around 8.

I mean, I’d seen her before; she was my age and she was at every Thanksgiving, just like me. But there were enough kids running around at every Thanksgiving that I didn’t even know all of their names, and I’m not sure if I knew Vanessa’s before the year I was 8. That year, we were put in the same room together, and something clicked.

We went exploring together. When you’re 8, something the size of Grandma’s house is a mountain, or Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea’s journey to the West Coast. It’s a major league undertaking to explore it. Some rooms connect to other rooms with a door, without going through the hallway, and some have secret passages that go to other rooms. There are closets nearly as deep as a room in themselves. Almost every bedroom has its own bathroom, but you can’t explore the bathrooms if there’s someone asleep in the bedroom, so you have to explore over multiple days to actually get every room.

We spent four nights at Grandma’s, as usual. Wednesday was always the night to travel to Grandma’s, after school. Vanessa’s family lived closer, so she’d been the first one in the room. We’d been given the Boat Room, a two-kid bedroom where the beds were themed as boats, the furniture and decorations were all nautical, and the walls were painted ocean blue, with fish and seaweed and coral painted onto the walls as a mural. When I’d arrived, late, and dropped my bags on the bed that was left, Vanessa said casually, “I’ve been playing Nintendo for two hours and I’m bored. Wanna go explore?”

“I just got here,” I said. “I want to go to the kitchen and get some food. We had McDonalds, like, five hours ago.”

“I’d like a snack.”

Vanessa accompanied me to the Children’s Kitchen, where I got a roast beef sandwich and some handmade chocolate chip cookies, and Vanessa got juice, celery, and a peanut butter dip in a ramekin. While I was eating – you were not supposed to take food back to your room – Vanessa told me that she found a swimming pool. It was November, of course, and I’d somehow managed to never get here during the summer, so I – and presumably Vanessa – had not known about the swimming pool.

If there was a swimming pool we’d never encountered before, what else might there be? After my long drive, I was tired but also restless from having to sit still so long, so I agreed to go exploring with Vanessa.

I don’t think we successfully managed to get the whole place that visit; it might have been another couple of years. Vanessa got her parents to hold her 9th birthday party for her at Grandma’s house, and invite all the cousins close in age; her birthday was in July, so this was her clever plan to get access to the swimming pool. That visit, we spent too much time in the pool to explore much. Exploration resumed that November, and then Grandma had us come back over winter break so she could hand out presents. I got a Sega Genesis and a Sonic game. Vanessa got some Mario game, I don’t remember what. So we didn’t explore much that Christmas either. It took until our 10th Thanksgiving for us to finally finish filling in the notebooks we were using to track our progress, though since we had started that the previous year, it’s entirely possible that places our notebooks said we’d never hit were actually places we’d gotten to that first year, and we’d just forgotten.

Vanessa and I exchanged phone numbers and addresses, and we spent a lot of time writing letters. Less time on the phone, at least until long distance charges stopped being a thing, but we tried to call each other once a week or so, given parental interference in the matter of the phone bill. We were best friends. She crocheted me a doll. I wasn’t crafty enough to make her a present like that, so I scoured toy stores until I finally found a stuffed animal that wasn’t a bear. (Seems odd now, but in that decade it was genuinely hard to find stuffed animals that weren’t bears.) When we were teenagers, we talked about school and classmates and our romantic lives. We met up for Vanessa’s birthday at Grandma’s, every year, and Christmas (an event to which only families containing children under 18 were invited), and one year I managed to get my February birthday at Grandma’s. We made up names together for the hypothetical babies we would have, and talked about buying a house together when we were adults, and our husbands would just have to suck it up because we would insist on living together.

This did not happen.

I don’t know when Vanessa and I drifted apart. Maybe college. Maybe when she got married at 23 to a guy with an annoying laugh. I went to her baby shower a year later, but not the one two years later for the second baby. By then I understood that my life was going to be different. I had no desire to have kids, and I was never going to get married. Gay marriage was on the radar then, as a thing the community was working toward achieving, but I had a good career I was moving ahead in, and friends, and I didn’t think I’d ever want the level of being tied to another person that marriage represented.

Vanessa and I didn’t have any angry, angsty falling out; we still see each other on Facebook and comment on each other’s posts, perfectly civil, like we were nothing but cousins who see each other at Thanksgiving, because that’s all we are now. And as I was remembering it, I realized, I don’t know when that happened, or how. We just got busy, and we didn’t have much in common anymore.

***

25 had the Kitchens. This was the area that fed the majority of the people, at Thanksgiving and other large gatherings. Nearly the entire first floor of 25 of was a kitchen, and there was another kitchen in the basement, plus a pantry. There’s a dumbwaiter in the basement that goes up to the first floor kitchen, and a passage at the back of the house that goes over to the dining hall in 29, bypassing 27 entirely. (It doesn’t actually bypass 27, it still runs through that house. It’s just that you can’t get into it from 27.)

The first floor kitchen was all stainless steel and granite countertops. I remember a time when all the appliances in here were white, and then black, before the stainless steel came in. All of Grandma’s cooking pots and pans were either cast iron or stainless steel. There were knives in blocks, modern kitchen appliances like food processors and blenders, a microwave oven, and a bread maker that was still in its box. I couldn’t help laughing, imagining Grandma’s expression upon realizing someone was suggesting she use a bread maker rather than knead her own dough and bake it herself. The waffle iron had seen a lot of use, though.

I went down into the basement, where the pantry – the size of one of the smaller bedrooms – and the basement kitchen were. The basement kitchen was used when someone had an allergy, so there wouldn’t be cross-contamination. I remember seeing Grandma directing a few adults in scrubbing the basement kitchen so she could cook for the vegans and the people with dairy allergies, after she’d already made food for the nut allergy people.

There were four chest freezers and a tall freezer down here in the basement, and three refrigerators. A lot of meat in the freezers, as if Grandma kept it stocked with entire cows, pigs and sheep on a regular basis. There were three turkeys and a dozen large roaster chickens. A lot of very large whole fish. I’m no fish expert, so I couldn’t tell what kinds they were; I just wrote down “fish” in my notebook and noted how many there were, and approximate sizes.

All the food was making me hungry, but it felt almost sacriligeous to cook in Grandma’s kitchen, without her permission. I used my phone to find a local Asian fusion place and ordered myself delivery food.

Grandma had cooked food from all over the planet. It had been impossible to figure out her ethnicity based on her cooking style or her choice of cuisines; Thanksgiving dinner itself had always been the traditional American turkey and sides. Usually two turkeys, a ham and maybe some other large roast like a goose or a pot roast. But the rest of the holiday’s dinners could have been Mexican, Chinese, Thai, Italian, Indian, Peruvian, Nigerian, anything. Not usually Northern Europe, she said there was no spice in their food, and no taste. Grandma liked her spicy food, though there was always something on her table that family with more mild taste buds could handle. I’d tried a curry she’d made one time when I was little, and had to chug an entire glass of milk after one bite. Everyone had laughed, and I felt ashamed.

“Don’t worry about it,” Grandma had said. Her voice was never gentle. Everything she said was barked or shouted or growled. But we just accepted that that was Grandma. If she was actually mad, she’d let us know. “Mighty dragons start out as little cubs out of the egg, after all. Try something that spicy once a year, maybe once every few months, and it’ll get easier. Or eat a little bit of hot with your food every day, and a little bit more, and a little bit more, and you’ll get there.” I still haven’t. I was here for Grandma’s Easter celebration earlier this year, and she had enchiladas, ranging from mild to super hot. I’d taken a bite of the super hot, but ended up eating the medium. Super hot was still too hot for me.

By the time the food arrived, I’d finished cataloguing the kitchen, so I took a break to eat, and then onward. In 25, the second floor has color themes and then the rest of the floors are themed for old celebrities. So we had the Olive Room, the Lavender Room and the Orange Room – all foods as well as colors, and the lamps had glass shades with colored bits showing off the plant the room was named for – and then rooms like the Elvis Room, Sinatra, Monroe, The Beatles… Grandma’s interests were all over the 20th century as well, because she’d also had Teddy Roosevelt and Ozzy Osbourne themed rooms. That was quite a spread.

When I was in my twenties, I’d brought my first real girlfriend to Thanksgiving one time. Most of the younger folks did; Grandma fed the plus-ones same as the rest of us. We had the Ozzy Osbourne room, which my girlfriend thought was hilarious. Posters on the wall, photographs, a Funko Pop of Ozzy, album covers. Also a train-on-tracks decoration on the dresser and a Marvel action figure of Iron Man. I didn’t want to tell Grandma that that wasn’t the Iron Man the song was about, because she’d have asked then who was it about, and I wouldn’t have known.

We’d been making out, our tops off, her skirt racked up, my pants unbuttoned, when there was a loud knocking at the door, which repeated when we tried to ignore it in hopes that it would go away. And then there was my mother’s voice, calling my name.

After frantically getting dressed as quickly as possible, I opened the door a crack, expecting some kind of emergency. No. The house was full of dogs, because several of my relatives had brought their dogs, and my mom wanted me to go to the Lounges and cover all of the sofas with chairs so the dogs wouldn’t climb on them overnight.

That girlfriend wasn’t back the next Thanksgiving, but I tell the story at family gatherings now with teens and twenty-somethings, to great horrified hilarity.

The Ozzy room was nearly the same as I remembered it from that night. There were a lot of actual vinyl albums hanging on the walls now, and some newer reprints of photos, and the inserts to the DVDs of “The Osbournes”, but the Funko Pop figure and the train were still there. Iron Man had been replaced with a small iron sculpture of a man. I took it. There are advantages to being the one your grandmother picked to catalog all her stuff and run her estate sale.

I’d been at this for eight hours and only gotten two houses done. It was a good thing the estate was paying me; if I was doing this as a volunteer, I probably would miss so much work I wouldn’t make my rent.

***

I turned up the heat the next day. I know why the thermostat was set so low, but it was just wrong for Grandma’s house to be cold.

Today was 27’s turn. This house was our main entrance. There was a large, open foyer – I think this was the kind they call a lawyer foyer, extremely fancy and open, with a wide spiral staircase going up to the second floor. We called the first floor and the basement “The Lounges”, because that’s what all the rooms were dedicated to. The basement was a man-cave sort of room, finished, dark paneling, no windows, a pool table and a cribbage board, and fat vinyl armchairs and sofas strewn about, surrounding coffee tables. At least one of the coffee tables was one of those chessboard tables with the chess and checkers pieces hiding in a drawer underneath. There was no television, though. This was a game room, not a TV room.

Upstairs we had the piano room (which also had a couple of guitars and a trombone) and the art deco lounge. Then most of the back of the house was taken up by the TV room. I’d never seen it showing anything other than sports. Even when we kids had begged to be able to use the big TV to watch Disney movies on videotape, none of the grownup men had been willing to relent and give up any of their precious sports. The day after that, Grandma had gone out and bought us a big TV; before that the TV in the children’s room had been a normal CRT. She replaced it with a projection TV – flat screen televisions didn’t exist yet – that was bigger than the one in the TV room. At one point one of the uncles came over to the kids’ TV room and complained that our TV was bigger. Grandma apparently heard of the complaint, even though she wasn’t there in the room, and came to chew him out. “You think you’re better than them? You think because you lived more years, you have a job, you think you’re entitled to have things that are better than theirs, all the time?”

“It’s wasted on them,” my uncle – I forget which one, there are a whole grouping of them of similar age who all look pretty similar, and I always confuse their names – said. “They were fine with a regular TV. They all have good vision!” He wasn’t old enough to have old-age related vision problems. “Kids don’t need fancy things, they like the regular things just fine.”

“You men wouldn’t let them have the main television to watch a movie, because you wanted to watch sports commentary. The game was over. So they get a bigger TV than you to teach you a lesson. You don’t treat my grandchildren like crap.”

I was going to point out that he was wrong about the vision thing; I’d learned by then that older people tend to get farsighted as they got older, which meant they couldn’t see things that were close up anymore without glasses, but children who are nearsighted often don’t get diagnosed until late elementary school, because they don’t know that the blurs they’re seeing aren’t what everyone else sees. And nearsighted people need big TVs a lot more than farsighted people do. I didn’t have a chance, because Grandma shooed him away. She always used to tell me not to complicate my arguments anyway. “If they say something that’s not true while they’re in the middle of making a stupid argument, you don’t need to tell them that the thing they said wasn’t true. That makes it sound like their stupid argument would make sense if the thing was true. Just tell them their argument is stupid. And why. Or don’t. Sometimes they don’t deserve to know why.”

The TV room took up almost all of the back of the house, but there was a narrow extension of the hallway that went all the way to the back, up a ramp, to a door. That led to the Decks. Plural; on the first floor the deck stretched over to 33, but it had two additional decks above it on the second and third floors, and the third floor deck was technically multiple. It ran from 27 to 29, skipped 31, and was back on 33. The second floor deck actually only went to 31; if you wanted to get to the deck on 33 you took the spiral staircase on the first floor 33 deck. There used to be a rope ladder from the second floor deck at 31 to the third floor at 33, but I think Grandma was convinced to get rid of it in the late 00’s, in case one of her grandkids fell off it and broke something.

Not much on the Decks, though. Patio furniture with covers over it. I had to take off the covers to take pictures. A fancy grill, probably only about 5 years old, on the first floor of 29. It was out at the edge furthest from the houses, and the second and third floor decks weren't quite as wide, so the smoke would miss them… usually. Some plants in pots. None of the games or lawn toys appeared to be out here; they might be in storage under the deck.

Someone had removed the volleyball net from the lawn. I'd have to go down there to assess the lawn features, but later. I could see the pond filters were still running, but from here I couldn't see if there were any fish. The parts I could see of the pool were covered in tarp.

A long time ago there was a really elaborate treehouse. That was long gone. The swingset of my childhood had been replaced with one of those kid playsets of wood and plastic, with foam cushion underneath, sometime in the 00’s. I'd have to check Grandma's records and hope she noted down the purchase, or kept the receipt. The age would be important in determining the resale value.

I remembered so much about these decks, that lawn. The trees, most of which were still here. The fish pond. The swimming pool partly under the decks. Me and my cousins running around here screaming, because kids always scream when they play outside.

All gone now. All going away forever.

I don’t have kids, don't plan to, so why was this hitting me so hard? The nieces and nephews (technically, cousins, but our standard practice was, everyone a generation younger than you or more was a niece or nephew) who were children now… I hardly know them. Some of my favorite cousins, their children, I know pretty well, but this emotional reaction seemed extreme.

I went back inside. Time to do the rest of 27.

***

Upstairs we had Music, Movies and Dancing for themes, then colors, then Famous Writers, Sculpture and Animation. There was a whole fine arts theme going on the second and fourth floors, which begged the question why the third floor was Purple, Green and Yellow.

When I was in my late 20s, I was hanging out with a 14 year old nephew, technically cousin. It wasn’t just me and him, but I was the one rooming in Animation Room that visit, and he was the one who said he wanted to see it. So I went over there with him, and we ran into Grandma on the way. Grandma, being a very nosy person, asked what we were doing, I told her, and she came with us.

Then she spent the next hour telling us all about the different styles of animation that the pictures and objects in the room came from or represented. Steamboat Willie. Rubber-hose style. Looney Tunes. Claymation. Ralph Bakshi. At the time I didn’t pay a lot of attention, because animation isn’t really a thing I care about much, then or now. Evan – that was my cousin – was blown away. He wouldn’t stop talking about it all weekend long. Now he’s in his 20’s, making animated shorts on Youtube, and he and some friends are apparently trying to make a pilot episode for an animated series.

I envy him a little, although I’m making a lot more money than he probably ever will without exceedingly good luck. I didn’t get into estate sales because it called to me or I was obsessed with it. I applied for a million different jobs, like most of late Gen X/early Millennials, because there were online job application systems and it was so much easier than going around in person or even calling various offices. A few interviewed me, and the one that sounded most interesting was the estate sale business. You have to be fairly good with people – compassionate and patient, because they’re grieving, and because the matter of a dead family member’s estate is something that raises a lot of emotions in a lot of people – and you have to be detail oriented, and good at math, and willing to do what I was doing right now, systematically going through a house and recording everything. When I got started, we wrote descriptions down in notebooks. Now that I use a phone to take pictures, I can barely remember how we managed that.

It's important work. The things that families owned, the things that the dead pass down to their loved ones, those carry memories. They’re representations of the times spent with the one who’s now gone. Or they’re representations of one’s own past, now gone forever, the way the past always is. Things are never just things. They always represent emotions. Sometimes the emotion is ennui, or the mild aching emptiness of the absence of emotion – when people buy things they don’t really want to assuage some lack in their lives, all those things carry are memories of the lack. Sometimes the emotion is bewilderment or even betrayal, like when the dead’s estate turns out to contain things that throw into question the living’s understanding of their loved one, such as evidence of a long lost child or an affair in the past or papers that indicate employment as a spy. But they are always emotions, and it’s important to tune into what the survivors are feeling about the stuff I catalogue, price and sell… or don’t sell, because sometimes a survivor says “oh, that old thing, yeah, sell it,” but you can tell that either they don’t mean it, or some other family member has emotions attached to that thing, and they want to keep it.

So I care about my work, and I’m good at it, but it’s not my passion. I’ve never been sure what my passion actually is. I’ve loved my girlfriends, but never enough to make them the center focus of my life, which is probably why I don’t have one right now. I was into alternative fashion for a while, until I found my look, the pantsuit lesbian, and now I just buy clothes that fit that and I don’t really go outside that zone. There were times in my past when I collected things, when I was deeply emotionally invested in them, but nothing I acquire nowadays has much of any emotion attached to it, so I’m something of a minimalist in my personal life now. Two storage units full of memorabilia from my childhood that I can never let go of, things my girlfriends left behind when they left me, stuff I owned in college… but my apartment looks barely lived in, like a model from a magazine about Less Is More Living. Evan loves his animation. What do I love?

***

After I’d catalogued all the bedrooms, it was time to do 29. I did it upside down this time. There was a door between 27 and 29 on the fourth floor. When we broke this up into multiple units, we would be going to have to bar all those doors. It wouldn’t be enough to put locks on them; total strangers will be living in them. We would have to wall them up.

That made me very sad, but honestly all of this did. I was grateful no one was here to see me. The constant on-the-verge-of-tears look would play holy hell with my rep as the one who was always strong, always cool, helpful and friendly and compassionate but never with weaknesses of her own. That wasn’t just my professional rep; it was what I showed my friends and girlfriends as well, the way I wanted to be, and it was bad enough how my feelings about Grandma’s house were wrecking that image to myself. I couldn’t bear letting anyone else see that image being destroyed.

Maybe Grandma herself. She was the only one I could ever imagine deliberately letting myself be weak with. Even my parents – ever since I went to college, I’ve tried my best to never upset them or make them unhappy by letting them know I’m suffering. Grandma was the only one who loved me enough to care if I was hurting, while being strong enough to take it. But Grandma was gone.

The top floor here had some of the weirdest rooms – Jewelry was fairly normal, but then there was Figurines, and The Majesty of the Law (we weren’t allowed to shorten it to either Law or Majesty), which was dedicated to politicians and judges. When I was something like eight or nine, my cousins and I used to sneak into the Figurines room to play with the figurines, which were mostly collectable toys and models with occasional ceramic statues. One time Grandma caught us and yelled at us; we were supposed to be in the Kids’ House, playing with the toys that were there for us. These, she said, were for looking at, not playing with.

I asked, “Aren’t they sad, with no one ever playing with them?”

In retrospect, this was a little bit of a strange sentiment, given that the movie Toy Story hadn’t come out yet. I don’t remember why I thought that toys wanted to be played with. Grandma took it perfectly seriously, though. “I play with them sometimes. They’re too fragile for kids, but when you’re as old as I am, you learn how to take care of things.”

Then she put on a little play for us, doing voices with different figurines. I actually don’t remember what it was about, I just remember we thought it was hilarious, watching our ancient, intimidating Grandma playing with toys the way we did, using them to tell stories.

The other floors’ rooms were more normal. The third floor had Stars, Moon, and Autumn, which sounds weird until you know that the second floor was Winter, Summer, Spring. Summer had a door that opened onto the second floor deck, above the swimming pool. Most of the pool was sheltered by the deck; it ran horizontally along 29 and 31, with a third of its width sticking out into the sunlight. You could get into the pool area from the basement level, or the first floor, or you could go down the stairs from this deck. I wanted to test the stairs, so I took them. They were still in good condition.

The pool was tarped, not drained. Grandma used to drain the pool in early November so the frost wouldn’t crack it. She hadn’t made it that far this year. Without the pool drained, I couldn’t inspect the condition, but I didn’t need to right away. I noted that we should have the pool drained so I could check it over, and I catalogued the pool toys and lawn furniture. Unlikely that they’d have any real value; I half expected they’d get thrown out, honestly.

A swimming pool with a tarp on it, in cool weather, looks so empty. It’s almost a liminal object, something that looks wrong, like it shouldn’t exist. Swimming pools exist in the late spring and summer. They should just vanish on the fall equinox, not to return until spring. Grandma had a pool heater, so we would generally start swimming in late April on nice days. By the end of June, the pool heater would go off, and then run most of September. We never went near the pool on Thanksgiving, obviously, but there were plenty of times we’d come up here in the summer. Sometimes the families would come up and then the kids would stay for two weeks while their parents went back home, back to work.

I remembered this area in summer, so many summers, crowded with all the kids in the water, most of the adults out on the pool deck or up above us on the regular decks, a handful – usually dads – in the water with us. I never understood why the moms didn’t want to come in the water. I still don’t really; when I grew up, I was one of the adults who’d play with the kids in the pool. One time, my parents and I came up in May, before school was out, and I remember being alone in the pool, floating on my back, looking at the sky. My parents and Grandma were on the pool deck, so I wasn’t truly alone, but when the water’s in your ears, all you can hear is your own heartbeat, and when you’re looking straight up, you don’t see the people to your sides.

It was peaceful. I’ve tried to get there again in public pools, but even though I can’t see or hear the other strangers in the pool, I know they’re there, and it’s not the same.

From the pool deck, I unlocked the gate from the pool area, and went out onto the lawn. Someone had set up the croquet hoops and never taken them down. I noted that; it was a potential hazard, but I wasn’t going to walk around pulling them up. The estate could pay for someone to do that. I inspected the children’s play structure and the fish pond. The fish were in there, but hiding until I showed up. Then they figured it was dinnertime and they all swam over to me. I felt bad for them, and decided to try to find the fish food. Turned out all of the pond stuff was down in the basement of 29, along with the changing rooms, the swimming pool accessories like the chlorine and the skimmers, and the showers. I went down the concrete stairs from the side of the swimming pool, catalogued the basement quickly, and brought the fish food up.

Big koi can sell for a lot. I photographed the fish as they ate. There were five, and they were large and looked healthy. Then I went back inside and up to the first floor.

The Dining Room, where all the adults ate at the holiday events, took up most of the first floor. There was also the Guitar Room, which I’d always thought was odd – why so many guitars? There were already some in the Piano Room, why another bunch of them here? – and the Salon, where smaller groups of adults would get together and talk. I never quite felt adult enough to join them, even when cousins my own age joined in.

It was late. I’d been at this all day. I should have stopped here, saved 31 for tomorrow… but I had 31, 33 and 35 yet to do. If I stopped now, I’d have three left.

I pushed onward, up the stairs to the fourth floor and through the door to 31. It was hard to get there any other way from where I was; I could have gone via the first floor or second floor deck, or go over to 27, go outside, in through 33’s door, and then go through the first floor door. But in 29 proper, there was only one door to 31, and it was on the fourth floor.

Up here, we had the Comedians Room, the Rock and Roll Room, and the Actors Room. My cousins and I would go in those room, look at the various pictures on the walls, and try to guess who was who; this was before the Internet was a significant thing. On the third floor, we had the Sweaters Room, the Shoes Room and the Hats Room. We used to try on the hats and show them off to our parents. There were dresses in the closet in most of those rooms; we’d try them on and put on makeup, badly, and high heeled shoes that didn’t remotely fit us, and show off to our parents. I did it to fit in, but sometimes I’d dig out a fedora or a snazzy suit, and put that on, and everyone would laugh. Grandma never laughed; she clapped for us.

I couldn’t do this.

The family had been there long before I was born. It couldn’t end in my lifetime.

All of this… I was going to sell all of this? To strangers? People who couldn’t care about the history, because they wouldn’t know? People who never played with these things, never danced in this ballroom, never ate at the table, never laughed here, never swam in the pool… I was going to divide this estate into separate houses, and no one who lived here would ever use the secret doors, and none of the family would ever come here again?

The Ballroom, down on the first floor of this house, where the family parties were held? I’d attended so many weddings and graduation parties there, and one or two funerals, and a celebration for a family member who’d been elected to some minor political office, and Grandma’s birthdays…

The library in 33, the books I’d always promised I would read once I was tall enough to reach, and then I never did, because there would always be time later…

The Princess Room in 33, and showing it to my new adopted cousin Jessie, joining the family at the age of 6, and how frightened and unsure she was, and how much I wanted to make her feel like she was part of something that would never abandon her, something that would protect her and shelter her and give her joy for the rest of her life…

Being a just-turned-teenager in the Boat Room and inviting a whole pile of younger cousins in to play sailors exploring, because I was a big teenager now and I didn’t need to play, but of course, it was only kind to play with the younger ones because they would like it. And never mind how much I secretly resented growing up and wanting to be a kid who could just play and not having to pretend I was above all that now, no, I was just doing it for them…

Listening to the beat of the music from the Ballroom from the Mountains room in 33, which was catty corner to it…

The Board Games room in 35, and the D&D set I’d put there myself, and running a game for the teenagers when I was in my 20s. The Billiards room, learning how to play pool because women playing pool were sexy in a competent, badass way and I wanted to be that.

All of this, I was supposed to sell it off? Me? The person with the two storage units of memories because nothing in my life right now compelled me as much as my own past? The person who did estate sales because the past was so important to people, because the things of the past were such a vital part of any family’s history, and family members deserved to have that treated with respect and care, and I was supposed to do that to my own past? The past for all the young cousins I played with and mentored and treated like brothers and sisters? The future for all the young kids now who would never have this?

For a moment, I thought, No. I’ll take it all for myself. Grandma’s will gave me the right to do whatever I thought was right with her property. So I’ll keep it. I’ll be the new family matriarch and I’ll share it with the family the same way Grandma did.

And then reality sank in. I was not a mysterious elderly figure of unknown age and origin who had always been there. I was 36, and half the family had known me as a child. I didn’t even have kids; I certainly hadn’t earned the right to be a family matriarch, either through raising children or through a lifetime of service to the family. They’d see it as a selfish property grab, not an attempt to keep the family together.

And did any of it really matter, since Grandma was gone anyway? No one could step into her role. All the older men and women of the family had their own lives, their own subset of the family where they were the elders. If anyone had ever been Grandma’s direct child, they were dead now; my grandmother had called Grandma “Grandma” the same as everyone else did, and so had my great-aunts and great-uncles, many of whom had technically been my Nan-nan’s cousins rather than siblings.

It could never be the same because the woman who had made it that way was gone, and owning her property couldn’t possibly make me into her.

I finished going through 31, dully, going through the motions. It was very, very late and my eyes were burning by the time I was done. Part of me wanted to keep going, right now when I was so tired that my emotions were numb, but I recognized that I was too exhausted to do a good job. The temptation to cut corners in the bedrooms, to maybe not photo every sweater, every piece of memorabilia in the Rock and Roll room or the Actors room, had been very strong, and I wasn’t going to be able to resist it if I kept going, and the family deserved better. Grandma deserved better.

***

I didn’t go back to the house the next day. I spent the day entering stuff into the database, looking up current price assessments and adding them to the records. I didn’t normally do the pricing at this stage, but I didn’t normally work with houses this incredibly big. Also staring into space thinking about Grandma and the rest of the family. I’d lost touch with most of them, so why did I feel so strongly about protecting all of this for them? Was I just being selfish, wanting to hold onto it for myself?

By the time I was done for the day, I was already at an assessment of slightly over a million, based on the resale value of everything I’d entered, and I’d only finished 23, barely starting on 25. And there was a lot more stuff in the rest of the houses that might actually be valuable. Kids’ toys don’t have a lot of resale value unless they’re collector’s items or there’s a lot of intense nostalgia for them. I wasn’t even counting the house itself, which in this neighborhood could probably go for half a million all by itself.

This whole thing was probably going to end up being something like 20 million dollars. Which is a lot, until you consider that it had to be divided amongst somewhere between 125-250 people. Individuals were all likely to end up with less than $100k. Not chump change by any means, but in today’s economy, not exactly fabulous wealth either.

Was all this work even worth it? To give all the family members an amount that wouldn’t cover a full four years of college, or buy a nice house in most places in the country without having to have a mortgage?

I was being hypocritical. Most of the estate sales I did resulted in similar or lesser sums if there were a good number of family members; only when there were few children or few grandchildren did anyone walk away with half a million. Also, I wasn’t considering Grandma’s wealth in banks and investments, which had to be substantial for her to have afforded all this. Yes, it was worth it. If the family couldn’t keep the properties and the possessions, at least they would probably all get a substantial amount of money. I doubted Grandma was a billionaire, but she had to have a few millions stashed away to have afforded all this, unless she had literally spent it all on the property and possessions, and somehow I doubted that.

That part wasn’t my concern. I wasn’t the executor of Grandma’s will or the accountant tracking down how much she had had in liquid assets and investments when she died. She had specifically named me as the one to assess her properties and possessions, and dispose of them in whatever way I thought was best for the family. Since my job was estate sales, we’d all assumed that meant she wanted me to run the estate sale and manage the sales of the properties.

Thoughts occurred to me as I worked, plans that would allow me to avoid breaking the properties up. The O Street Museum has a very similar deal going on, and they’re a museum and hotel, taking ticket fees to see the place and significantly larger fees to stay overnight. But they were also in DC, in an area of town where there were other attractions as well. Our home was in a city where most of the things tourists came to see were nowhere near us. Plus, I didn’t want to risk them suing us.

What if we made it some kind of shelter? Homeless teenagers, maybe? Mentally ill people who needed to get back on their feet after leaving a hospital?... no. I didn’t expect that people who generally hadn’t been treated with basic human respect would respect the property, and all of Grandma’s charity had been for her family members.

There simply weren’t that many applications in the world for seven townhomes linked together. I could sell it to some incredibly wealthy person, whole, but most incredibly wealthy people were assholes and it still didn’t solve the problem. I didn’t just want to keep the houses together. I wanted the family to continue to have access. I wanted this place to be what it had always been, and I kept running into the same incontrovertible problem. Grandma was dead. This place could never again be what it had always been.

***

My thoughts were dark when I went back to the mansion, and it was hard for me to work. I don’t do a lot of mansions this size, or have to catalogue quite this many knick-knacks and little things, so I was burning out from just the workload. But if this hadn’t been my family, I wouldn’t be pushing myself so hard. And if this hadn’t been my family, it wouldn’t be haunting me this badly.

There was no way I could get through the library on 33. I had to skip it and do it last; cataloguing so many books could take a day or two all by itself, and I feared I might end up losing time to trying to read them. There wasn’t much else on the first floor – the coat check, which was of course empty aside from a desk, a number of cubbies and a portable closet rod with hangers on it, and the room where the outdoor equipment was stored. Badminton sets, frisbees, sleds, a tire swing that I didn’t even remember ever having been up.

I started to head upstairs, and then I sat down on the stairs and cried.

“Grandma, what were you expecting me to do?” I said to the empty house. “What did you want me to do?”

The will hadn’t just said that I should do the estate sale. It said, specifically, that I should be the one to dispose of Grandma’s properties and possessions “in whatever way she thinks would be best for the family.” Uncle Paul, the executor of Grandma’s will, had assumed that meant she expected me to do an estate sale. It was my profession, after all. But then why had she said “whatever way” I thought best? Why make it ambiguous? What had she thought I should do, or what did she think I would do?

What alternative was there to just selling everything to strangers?

I got up, slowly, and continued upstairs to catalog the rooms.

It was tiring. Every room I entered had memories. I hadn’t stayed in all of them, but I’d been in them all at one point or another. Nearly everything I touched reminded me of something, and I wanted to pack it all away in boxes and put it in my storage unit.

What would any of this mean to strangers?

What would it mean to us that we’d never see it again?

Oh, many of the things would probably go to individual family members. Anyone who had a particular sentimental attachment to something would probably get it, unless there was a conflict. But never again would there be one place that had it all. Never again would there be one place the family could all come together…

…why not?

For the first time it occurred to me. What if there was a family trust, set up to manage the estate, with a board drawn from different generations and branches of the family?

If we didn’t sell anything, we wouldn’t make enough money to maintain the place. Grandma had never had hired help. The people who kept the house clean and in good repair were family members, repaying loans she’d given them, usually young people with more time than money. I’d never been in that position but several of my cousins had. It wasn’t something we thought of as bad or demeaning. If Grandma gave you money, to pay off your student loans or put a down payment on a house or help you buy a car, and you didn’t have the money to pay her back, you helped her out in return. We wouldn’t necessarily be able to do that on an ongoing basis. I didn’t know what access Uncle Paul would approve for the family trust to use Grandma’s money.

But AirBnB was a thing. We couldn’t be a hotel, there would be zoning issues, and permit requirements, and possibly renovations required in places… but we could absolutely rent out rooms via AirBnB when the family wasn’t using them. Or other such services, I knew there were some more traditional “rent your house out to vacationers” services in more touristy locations, and there might be something like that in this city. Also, Grandma’s parking lot counted as one of her properties, and we could absolutely continue to rent out parking spaces.

What if the Long Mansion remained family property? Where any of the objects here could be given away to family members who really wanted them, but most of them would remain here as décor? Where any family member who needed a place to stay could come, anytime, and we had scheduled events – like Thanksgiving, Christmas, the summer stay for the kids… And anytime the whole family wasn’t here, the rooms could be let out, via AirBnB or one of the services that did that kind of thing. And the proceeds would go to the upkeep of the house, and if there was any profit, it would be used to give out loans to family members, like Grandma used to.

There was no one matriarch – or patriarch – to step into Grandma’s shoes. But we could have a board. We could have elders who everyone respected, and representatives of all age groups. Including the children. I could see reserving a spot on the board for a teenager, and maybe even a ten year old.

I needed to talk to Uncle Paul.

***

Uncle Paul listened to me go on about my idea for some time, without saying anything. I was beginning to feel distinctly nervous about the whole thing, when he finally spoke. “Grandma thought you might come up with a suggestion like that,” he said.

“Wait. Grandma thought this was what I would do?”

“She mentioned a number of potential things she thought you might do, and she left you letters in case of each of them. I’ll email you the one for this idea.”

“Well, but, what do you think? You’re part of the family!”

“I’d be happy to serve on your board, if that’s what you want,” he said, which didn’t exactly answer my question, but it wasn’t much of a surprise to me. Whether because he was a lawyer or he was just that kind of person, Uncle Paul rarely gave a straightforward answer about what he thought.

“So you think it’s a good idea?” I persisted.

“I think it has some merit.” I knew that was the best I was going to get out of him. And I wanted to know what Grandma had thought. If she’d guessed this was something I might do, had she thought it was a good idea? Had she wanted me to proceed with it?

What if she hadn’t? What if she’d wanted me to go with the other plan, and sell everything, and divide the money amongst the family? Would I still do it?

I realized… yes. Yes, I would. Because if Grandma was dead, what she wanted no longer mattered. She wasn’t here. Whatever I did had to be for the sake of the living. And I felt sure that this was what the living needed. It was certainly what I needed. I couldn’t be the only one.

“Well, thanks,” I said. “I’ll be waiting to see what Grandma said. Are you snail mailing it?” I couldn’t imagine Grandma writing an email.

“It’s a scanned copy of a paper letter. I have the original in my office, here. I’ll email you the scan.”

***

Grandma’s handwriting looked like the kind of fancy cursive people had used in the 19th century. It was hard to read, but I sized up the scan as far as I could on my laptop monitor while still keeping the whole width of the page on screen, because I really hated bottom scrollbars.

“Dear Tara,

“If you are reading this, you’ve told your Uncle Paul that you are planning on keeping everything together for the sake of the family. Perhaps some kind of family trust, or perhaps you are giving it all to Paul or another to hold in my place. I hope you haven’t decided to try to keep it for yourself. I believe you’re more sensible than that.

“I set letters aside for different contingencies, but this is the one I thought you would most likely follow. You are too much like me. The old blood runs strong in you. I thought when I saw your apartment that I might be wrong—” wait, when had Grandma seen my apartment? I’d never seen Grandma leave her house – “but then you mentioned to me that everything you had owned in childhood and your younger adult years was in storage, and I knew what you were.” I remembered that. I’d been trying to feel Grandma out for whether I could store things in her attic or not. She’d told me that there was nothing in the attic but that I couldn’t store things there because there were bats and squirrels and the roof leaked.

For the first time, I wondered if that was actually true.

“My recommendation would be that you set up a family trust, but if you intend to hand it over to some member of the family to hold it for the rest, I do recommend Paul; he is impeccable. I chose him to execute this will for a reason, after all. And the others respect him. He’s old, though, and I don’t know how much of the old blood runs in him or how long he will live. A family trust is a better idea.” I felt bands around my chest untighten, and tears prick my eyes again. Grandma had the same idea I did. She believed my idea was a good one.

“Now, before you do anything else, go up to the attic. The way is sealed in every house but 35. In 35, go to the top floor, to the Fire room.” 35 was laid out slightly differently than the others; there were four rooms on the top floor, Earth, Wind, Water and Fire, all of them slightly smaller than the bedrooms on the other floors and in the other houses. Fire had a wooden stove. I’d stayed there several times, basking in it. “At the back of the closet there is a panel. Pull it aside and you will see a spiral staircase. From that you can reach all the attics. There’s more information waiting for you there.

Love, Grandma.”

So there was something hidden in the attic that she hadn’t wanted anyone to see. She must have told me about the bats and the squirrels so I wouldn’t think the attic was a safe place to put anything, and therefore wouldn’t ask how to get to it, or what was in it.

***

I did what she told me. It was a very clever trick. Making the rooms smaller and distorting the shape of the Fire room with the wood stove had hidden the fact that there was a narrow vertical passage, large enough for a human who was of medium or smaller size, unaccounted for in the floor plan. I suspected if I’d actually looked at the floor plan, the space would have been labeled as part of the chimney, or insulation, or something.

The spiral staircase went up to a trap door that rose. I pushed it open and went up and through.

The attic had no walls between the houses. There was a wall at the side of 35, which was actually the end of the block and the last house on the street, so of course there was a wall, and there was a wall I could barely make out in the dimness, all the way at the end of 23, but between the seven houses there was nothing but open space. At its highest it was only about five feet tall, so I had to bend over slightly to stand.

It was crammed full.

I don’t know how the floors didn’t cave in. She had literal chests full of gold and jewels up here. Big cedar hope chests stacked on top of each other. Instead of fiberglass insulation, there were piles and piles of blankets, and roughspun sacks that looked like they might have clothes or other cloth, pushed up against the eaves. There were china cabinets full of fragile things, packed in behind plastic milk crates full of books to the point where I could barely make out the china cabinet or what was behind its glass doors. There were narrow, very narrow, winding passageways between the stacks of things, so a slender person could get to everything, with difficulty and maybe some scraping against their arms.

At a wild guess, this would easily add several million to the total. So many of these things were old. Grandma didn’t have a lot of very old antiques downstairs; most of everything she had down there dated from 1920 or later. Some of this stuff might be over 200 years old. Plus, I couldn’t even begin to assess the chests of jewelry just from seeing the tops of them, and I didn’t know how many other enclosed chests there might be with gold and jewels in them.

There was a manila envelope hanging in a transparent plastic pouch, which was attached to a nail in the nearest support beam by a chain and a grommet, directly in front of a full-length antique mirror that wouldn’t have been out of place in an evil queen’s boudoir, telling her to kill Snow White. I went over there and removed the manila envelope, and opened it.

“Dearest Tara, the grandchild who carries the old blood more strongly than any I have seen so far, what is here in the attic is for you. Your legacy. I have taken all that I can carry already. It breaks my heart to part with it; I can yield it up only because I know you will care for it as I have.

“I am not dead. You may see me again, depending, but none of the rest of the family will, and that too breaks my heart. But a person in the United States cannot hold an identity over a century, and it is too hard to establish the new ones. I have spent twenty-seven years growing my new identity, because when I saw how you behaved toward your possessions, and toward your family, I hoped you would be what I believe you are, and everything I have seen of you since reinforces that belief. Except for that apartment. I don’t know how you bear to live in it. I know that you have had to move several times, and that you are often inviting girlfriends to live with you who then leave you, so I believe you are storing your possessions where you think they will be safer than your apartment, and perhaps also following the modern fashion because you believe that being what you truly want to be will frighten women away. Perhaps it will. It was more acceptable when I was young.

“I have spoken of the old blood more than once, and I am sure you don’t yet know what I’m talking about. Our kind surround ourselves with what we own. We are greedy, and yield nothing unless we must, for everything is precious to us. We live a very, very long time… and with the coming of electronic measures to verify identity, it becomes harder and harder to hide among humans. Perhaps by the time you need to do that, we won’t need to hide anymore, or perhaps we will have a better solution.

“Your father is descended from the old blood as well, so I thought you might be the one. We are rare. Most of my grandchildren have only my own blood, and your parents had only you, so you were my best hope. I am pleased to see you have shown all the signs. Even if you are just human, you have the correct attitude, and I am sure that if you age and end like a human, you will carefully arrange for the things I own and the things you own to be returned to the family.

“Things are not as important as family. You know this. Things are precious because they remind us of the things that are most precious. Family, and memories of family. The people you love, and the memories of those you love. There are humans who treat family as disposable, who can be cruel and write family out of their heart for not being what the humans want them to be. There are other humans who treat family as nothing but possessions, and those humans will lose those family, because people are never merely possessions. I lost family that way, in the past, by treating my family like things to own, not like people. In this era, and with the example I have tried to make from the lessons I have learned, I believe you will never have that problem.

“I know you do not intend to continue the bloodline. I know that someday, in the far future, you may change your mind, but if you do not, the family I created will be all the more precious to you. I know you have always treated the cousins of your own age as brothers and sisters, the cousins of the younger age as nieces and nephews, perhaps even your own children. They are the most precious thing you have. You may add a person you love, in the future, perhaps several. That only adds to the precious things you have. No person you love should ever try to separate you from what you already hold precious.

“I have been alive a very long time. I have held to precious things, as memories of who has not passed the years along with me. I cannot take any of them with me now, so care for them for me. You may sell any coins, precious stones, stamps, or pure gold or silver; those things no longer matter to me. They carry no memories, they only allow me to care for my things and my family. They are yours to use if you need money. Everything else, I beg you to hold to. Someday, I hope, I will be able to talk to you and tell you of the memories everything here holds.”

I put down the letter and looked around. Everything here had memories? This looked as if possibly twice, maybe even three times as many things were in here as were downstairs. How old was Grandma?

The letter went on. “You will find it hard to believe when I tell you of the old blood. Humans call us dragons. You imagine a monstrous beast with scales. We can be that, though in most of us, the blood has thinned enough that such a transformation is nearly impossible. We can breed with humans, and we look human, but we live far, far longer. I am five hundred years old and I am not old, though my human form seems so. It’s because I surrounded myself with grandchildren, and they saw me as old. Where I am now, in my new life, I appear young. You would barely recognize me, Tara.

“The same may happen to you someday. I think there is enough of the old blood in you that you will live a long, long time.

“I will try to come to you, sometime in the future, when your blood has proven itself, or not. Until then, I hope you understand. I am rebuilding a new life. Before long I will have a new family. I grieve the loss of the one I must leave behind, and hope that someday we will no longer need to hide what we are, and I will be able to rejoin you.

“Love forever, Grandma.”

I stared at the letter in disbelief. Dragons? Was this some kind of a joke? I actually didn’t find it hard to believe Grandma was immortal, or incredibly long-lived, when I was surrounded by so many antiquities, and with the evidence of three different legal identities I’d found in her purse as a child. But seriously, dragons?

I looked into the mirror. Grandma saw something in me I’d never seen in myself. Was it seriously evidence of dragon blood?

She’d said the transformation was “nearly impossible” for most of the ones she claimed had the “old blood.” Without any serious belief that anything would happen, I thought, as I stared into the mirror, What if I looked like a dragon?

And then stared, and stared harder.

My eyes were gold, without irises, and slitted. Like a cat. Or a reptile. Or a dragon.

Eventually they turned back to my normal brown, within an eyeblink.

I laboriously climbed back down the stairs. Setting up the family trust would take time, and persuasion, and probably arguments. I was going to let Uncle Paul know that the letter said Grandma agreed with me – I wasn’t going to say anything about the dragon thing, though. She hadn’t mentioned that in the letter she’d given him to scan and mail to me, only the one I found in the attic. I’d tell him I’d found a few antiques in the attic to add to the list.

My hands were itching to get back up there, to start going through everything there, cataloguing it, deciding what could be brought downstairs to be shared with the family, what could be sold to support the trust, what I wanted to keep hidden away until I saw Grandma again. But first things first. The family was the most important thing.

#52 project #slice of life #takes a fantasy turn toward the end

15 notes · View notes