Fake Grandma

I had 18 years to get to know my grandma.  18 years to learn what her homemade chicken casserole tasted like.  18 years for her to spoil me by buying me clothes from Limited Too when my own mother said they were too expensive.  18 years for her to show-off my gymnastics picture to her friends.  18 years for her to squeeze me in a too-tight hug when I came to her door so that my head squished against her sagging breasts, sparking pleas in my mind for eternal youth.
         But I never did get a too-tight hug from her.  I never tasted her cooking, never invited her to a gymnastics meet.  My mother tells me that she used to come to my softball games, before she got sick, but I don't remember.  I guess that's the problem.  My memory started too late, and her memory ended too early.
         It took me a while before I realized that the grandma I remembered was a fraud.  I was talking with my mother, laughing about the way that Grandma used to slam the door in our faces when we arrived on her doorstep, only my mother didn't laugh.  You know that she was sick then, she would say.  When she was healthy, she loved to cook for family.  So I dug deeper.  I kept resurrecting memory after memory that I had: the dog that my grandma so originally named ‘Puppy Dog' that she kept on a strict Coca-Cola diet, the way she used to maliciously accuse my grandfather of having an affair with his daughter, the smell of urine and sweat that enveloped her house.  The more memories that I extracted, the more I realized that these were memories of a fake person, an empty body already consumed by Alzheimer's.  This was not the same college graduate who was hand-picked to be in the first gifted program in Ohio.  This was not the same woman who spent her later years crafting a novel about a child in a hot air balloon.  This was not the same person who loved to travel and gave good advice and helped my mom with her other two sons when I was born.  The only part of her that I ever remember knowing was an imposter.
         My brother used to call her "Fashion Grandma."  I never quite understood it, because I never got a chance to secure the memories of her in trendy clothes and bright colors.  To me, Grandma would be forever preserved in a pale, pink sweat suit spotted with drool and stained with food.  Her feet would forever be in stark, white Velcro tennis-shoes with worn-out soles from her endless shuffling feet that shuffled even when she was secured in a chair.  Her thin wisps of white hair would be forever covered with a bicycle helmet, a precautionary measure that the hospital thought was necessary after she fell out of bed.
         Sometimes I like to believe that I did meet the woman who was supposed to be my grandma.  Every now and then - before she lost the ability of speech - I would smile at her and she would say There's my little one with a smile that was magnified by its infrequency.  For that brief second I would ignore the constant lip-smacking, her fixed, empty stare and for once I was a granddaughter, not a wide-eyed observer and she was a grandma, not a the embodiment of a disease.



**Alternate ending:
Sometimes I try to believe that I did meet the woman who was supposed to be my grandma.  Every now and then, before she lost the ability of speech, I would smile at her and she would say There's my little one with a smile that was magnified by its infrequency.  I like to believe that that voice, that smile, was the woman who was supposed to be my grandma.  My pastor told me once that you cannot pick and choose what you believe in.  You cannot go through The Bible and choose to believe the ark story, but denounce the parting of the sea.  In the same way, you cannot leaf through a science book and approve the theory of gravity while ignoring the concept of atoms.  But what about people?  Is it possible to believe that two people can encompass one body?  Could I ignore the constant lip-smacking, the way she would incessantly wring her brittle hands, her inability to look in one direction for a fixed period of time and instead just believe in that smile?