Портрет матери: как женщина с фотографической памятью и любовью к сладостям заботится о внуках

Pete McMartin: The things she does Opinion: She corrals the spiders that make themselves at home in the corners in our hallway, ushering them onto pieces of paper so she can release them into the garden unharmed, where, she said, they can do good. She isn't a woman afraid of spiders. She curates the refrigerator doors, shingling them with her grandchildren’s artwork, her mother’s obituary, cartoons, photographs of us when we were young and beautiful, and photos of her best friend who has been dead now for over 30 years. She corrals the spiders that make themselves at home in the corners in our hallway, ushering them onto pieces of paper so she can release them into the garden unharmed, where, she said, they can do good. She isn’t a woman afraid of spiders. She dons rubber gloves and scrubs the bedroom’s berber carpeting where, once again, the dog has pooped. Poop has been a staple in the fabric of her life, from her children’s diapers, to her grandchildren’s diapers, to her dogs, including a succession of brainless terriers too excitable for house-training to our present giant Scottish deerhound, whose poops are awe-inspiring. Jesus Christ merely washed the feet of his disciples, but she, on her hands and knees, with her bad hip, and hard at it with a scrub brush and disinfectant, washes away the vastly more odorous sins of her disciples. No wonder they all love her as fiercely as they do. She smiles easily and often, which, as I always tell her, was the first thing that drew me to her. Her smile is an embrace. Her smile is an open door to a better life. She sings badly, and often while making breakfast, can be heard in the kitchen from the bedroom where I still lie. Her voice is the start of my day, as bright as the morning sunlight slanting through the bedroom blinds. She stuffs the front hall closet with a cache of candy — lollipops, sour keys, gummy bears, chocolate-covered raisins, licorice allsorts, malted milk balls, strawberry-flavoured wafers, Reese’s Pieces, Kit Kat bars — all put there by her at a height low enough so her grandchildren can believe they are stealing them on the sly, to their delight and their parents’ dismay. When she picks her grandchildren up in our car, she stashes bags of candy in the car’s cupholders for them, and stocks bags of potato chips and taco chips and cheese twists in a kitchen drawer — addictive snacks dusted with lethal amounts of salt — which, though I suffer from high blood pressure, I eat anyway, choosing to believe she is probably not trying to kill me. She carries a Rolodex in her brain, and knows by heart the birthdays of her children and grandchildren, their birth weights, their first steps and their grades in school, fixed in her head by a photographic memory fuelled by love. She remembers everything, it seems, from an entire dinner we ate 10 years ago in a seaside cafe in Corsica, to where and when I apparently bought a sweater for her birthday, to every asinine thing I have ever done or said, which fills volumes. She cooks as her mother did, as a communion devoted to family. She bakes fat chocolate chip cookies that give her grandchildren sugar highs. She spends every Sunday — often at the request of her adult children — making a meal that brings them home to convene at our dining room table. Spaghetti, pot roast, breakfast for dinner, mashed potatoes, chicken wings, baked beans — always comfort food, because they come home to be comforted by her. She acts as her children’s psychiatrist and emergency daycare worker, and once took in two of our grandchildren every weekday for two years, saving their parents tens of thousands of dollars. Her kitchen table is the summer camp where she organizes crafts for them, with the colouring books and glue and crayons she buys with them on regular trips to the dollar store. When they stay overnight, it is she who reads them stories until they fall asleep. She buys children’s books compulsively, and when I once tried counting them all, I stopped after reaching 500. In bed before sleep, she reads on her Kindle — the Kindle bathing her face in a pocket of light — and always reads the kind of novels that would give fans of Dostoevsky apoplexy, which is to say she reads to be entertained and not to be enlightened, a preference for which she isn’t in the least bit ashamed. She snores. Before she falls asleep, she says the thing to me that she always says, and I say back the thing to her that I always say, and sometimes during the night she reaches across the bed and touches me on the arm, as if to see if I am still there. I am.