The Last Time I Was Me. Cathy Lamb

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      I slept my drunkenness off for most of the next day and when I awoke, Rosvita made me breakfast. Breakfast at 4:00 in the afternoon can be particularly tasty. I also downed about a keg of coffee, then went to town to buy a gift for Rosvita.

      Knowing what her taste in art was like, I stopped by three galleries. Each of the shop owners looked so hopeful, I bought three different paintings-one from each. I brought one downstairs to Rosvita that evening. It was a painting of a pristinely clean country kitchen, a gust of wind blowing the red-checked curtains, a little girl eating a chocolate ice cream cone on a stool, the floor gleaming, the counters cleared.

      She loved it so much she danced around the room with it, declaring that the artist clearly knew the importance of a clean and sterile kitchen. She hugged me. Danced again with a wriggle and a wiggle.

      I went up to my room and out to my deck to examine the stars.

      A dull ache still filled my head and I felt like congealed oatmeal, but I was still breathing, at least.

      I knew I had to get a hold of my drinking, before it killed me.

      Dying still held vast appeal for me, but last night was not good, not good at all. One should not hug toilets for long periods.

      I thought of the trigger to my drinking binge: That putrid migrant camp.

      When the woman at the shed raised her hand to wave at me, I saw my late grandma in the doorway. My funny, laughing, loving grandma.

      Rosa Sanchez had been born in Mexico. She and her parents lived and worked as migrant workers on various farms in the United States. They stayed for the growing season, then moved on. She had told me about working ten hours a day in a field as a young child, her head getting so hot she thought her hair would burn off. She told me about staying in barns and sleeping next to farm animals on some rich landowner’s property. She told me about being cold and hungry and scared and tired. She told me about the white farmer who attacked her mother. When her father fought back in her defense, he lost the job. They almost starved that summer. She told me about never learning to read or write until she married my grandpa and he taught her.

      It was a hideous way to live.

      And there she was, in my mind’s eye, in the doorway of that pathetic shed.

      My grandpa, a white American, with pure Norwegian roots, met my grandmother when her family worked on his family’s farm.

      “She was my soul mate, Jeanne,” Grandpa told me. “I knew it when I saw her because my heart damn near jumped out of my chest. I told her she almost killed me that day.”

      My grandpa was nineteen when they met. She was eighteen. They married two years later.

      He shook his big head, his white hair cropped close to his head. “The only way I could get her to stop talking some days was to kiss that woman. We always ended up in bed after that. Couldn’t help ourselves. Passion and love crosses cultures and language barriers, dear girl, don’t forget that, and your grandma and me were soul mates whose souls talked to each other even though our languages didn’t. But, dear God, she was a talker. Constantly talking, talking, talking.”

      My grandparents’ black-haired daughter, my mother, married my father, a white American with British roots and blond hair. I grew up speaking Spanish to my grandma and to my mother, although my grandma spoke English, too. She said she loved this country, she was an American woman now, and she wanted to be able to talk to her neighbors, but she talked Spanish to me so I would never forget where my family was from, what they came from.

      And even though my grandpa said Grandma talked all the time, my grandpa decided he couldn’t live without all that talk. One week after my grandma died, after he’d given her a beautiful funeral, he laid down under the giant cherry tree on their land, right where he said they’d made every one of their four children, closed his eyes and died.

      After sixty years of marriage, he was done without his wife. He had been in perfect health until that point, too. The doctors said he’d had a heart attack.

      How silly. He died of a broken and lonely heart and he willed it upon himself.

      As I thought of my grandpa’s love of my grandma and I thought of my grandma bent over double picking strawberries for hours on end as a child and of her poor mother being attacked by some sick landowner who thought her mother was his property, I made a vow to myself: I would get those people out of those sheds.

      I swore it.

      CHAPTER 5

      Anger management class is located in Portland, so I had to drive about fifty minutes west to get there. I go from towering fir trees, homes scattered along a river, and a main street that moves about as fast as melted taffy, to a city filled СКАЧАТЬ