Family Resemblance


I.
The year after his wife died, my grandfather
sent us a video of silent 8 mm film,
their life in the Canal Zone, Margarita, 1956,
my middle-aged grandmother staring
sadly at him through the camera,
hand on her hip in front of the new Chevy.
I can see myself in my grandmother's resigned eyes,
and then in my mother's nine year-old face,
exasperated and antsy, as she tries
to slip away through the screen door.
I feel my strange inheritance
not of their faces, but of their
impatience at being the women in his life.
Last month he called me Bunny on the phone,
his nickname for her, dead now twelve years.
I'm trying to figure out the way he
must have loved her, lingering on her
with the camera, all the time keeping her
away from her life, a ship captain's wife,
Panama nothing like the world she'd imagined.
She made the mistake of saving him from appendicitis
on a passage from San Francisco to New York.
I imagine him finding this reel,
cleaning out the house after she died.

II.
Later there is a dinner party,
my grandparents and two other couples. 
Their wild silent laughter and the unsteadiness
of the camera hint they've had too much to drink.
For a second my grandmother poses,
mouthing a song and swinging her hips in a way
that looks too young for her, like a teenager,
as though she was almost happy.
I never saw her move like that,
not even to teach me the boxstep.
Then someone else is holding the camera
and my grandfather is holding his wife, an arm
wrapped tight around her waist as if to keep her still,
his hair combed into the stiff flawless pompadour
he still wears today.  He is instructing, not smiling,
his hand waving towards us insistently,
like he is waving us through the locks.
She turns her head slowly to look at him,
no longer dancing, as if to say,
"You have killed me."

III.
My mother makes a joke of him today,
her confused tyrant. "Daddy," she says
to him on the phone, "You just called this morning."
I am amazed by her patience with the man
who taught her not to be happy.
In the last frame of the movie
she is in her girl scout uniform,
standing still and straight in the driveway
a quick smile quivering on her lips,
then disappearing, a forethought of forgiveness.
I recognize that restless urge and it makes me
thankful for these extended glimpses,
for the way he must have loved them
enough to preserve them, for   
the way he has recorded each of us,
recorded the stories we want
to tell each other, over and over.



Nina Riggs