Hurricane Season
BY NICHOLL PARATORE
In September of 2017, while the rest of the Eastern Seaboard prepared for Hurricane Irma’s descent by purchasing candles, canned food, and bottled water, my grandmother Kristina reached for a box of Clairol.
I immediately touched up my roots, she wrote to my family and I over email. I definitely don’t want to be caught on live national TV being airlifted off my roof with mousey roots!
We received this dispatch as an addendum to her Friday Tweets: a weekly email she deployed with the thoughtful curation of a newsletter, including her own personal happenings, current events, and a song recommendation—often of the ’90s hip-hop persuasion. As Hurricane Irma churned toward the coastline of South Florida, where she lived just a few miles from shore, her Friday Tweets became both briefer and more frequent, earning an inventive new title of their own: Hot Flash. Urgent, like a newsflash, but with an age-appropriate spin. In the latest flash, she referred to her city’s mandatory evacuation as a kind of mixed message, but she assured us that she took all precautions necessary—prepping her locks, of course, being the most necessary of all.
Scattered across separate states, my mother, uncle, aunt, and I watched on as Irma paved a trail of destruction through the Caribbean, anxiously awaiting its landfall over my grandmother’s county. A rare Category 5 storm—the highest rating on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale—Irma’s winds gusted over 180 miles per hour and didn’t show any signs of slowing down. My family offered to fly my grandmother to a safer state or pay for accommodations further inland, but she denied our suggestions and continued to speak of the storm as nothing more than a nuisance. One she didn’t need us to rescue her from.
In between writing sessions, I pored over Irma’s projections on my laptop, watching each five-second loop spill the storm’s hazy spiral into Florida’s edge. Pixelated clusters of red and orange animated above the areas in gravest danger, and there, in the exact location Irma would land, was the name of my grandmother’s city in crisp white font. Still several days away from reaching the coast, Irma’s potential trajectory—also known as the cone of uncertainty—remained particularly ambiguous, stretching across Florida like an open fan. But I knew that anytime your city’s name appeared on the map of these forecasts, things aren’t looking good. As I continued to track the storm’s movement from a few states north, all I could think about were the real-life consequences on the other side of these conjectures; my grandmother and her newly dyed ’do, under all that uncertainty.
The aftermath could be worrisome if there is no power for weeks, which is what occurred after Hurricane Andrew literally smashed things to bits back in the ’90s. I am good to go for ~10 days or more food-wise, however with no power I shall be bored sh–less. I’ll keep ya posted til the power goes out, then I’ll send a daily text to a designated text-ee so you know I’m alive. ☺ Latah Gatahs
Hurricane Andrew, the last Category 5 storm to hit Florida, was mythic. Tearing through the southern region of the state in 1992, it made landfall over Homestead and resulted in sixty-five deaths and twenty-seven billion dollars’ worth of damage. More than forty-thousand homes and businesses were irreparable; Florida’s infrastructure, massively impaired. And three years later, when my mother, grandmother, and I moved to Florida from Maine—after my mother and stepfather, who carried on a long-distance relationship, were married—restoration was still ongoing. We were spared the experience of surviving Andrew, but the mark it left behind was unmissable. Neighborhoods looked as if they’d been ravaged by war. Storefronts remained shuttered. Empty stretches existed where trees once stood. It was as if something was broken, stolen, plucked from the landscape, everywhere you turned. As the years passed, that disrepair started to seem as natural to our surroundings as the sand collected on the beach, warranted, perhaps, by the inevitability of another hurricane season, the arrival of another storm, and the human limitations which prevented the community from keeping up with every blow.
Over time, Andrew became something of a local ghost, haunting residents throughout the area—including my new elementary school classmates. I had four hundred dollars in the bank, a girl in my third-grade class told me. And the bank just blew away.
To live in Florida was to accept this devastation as an inescapable part of life. It meant becoming versed in weather patterns and sea levels, the difference between a tornado watch and warning. It meant learning how best to prepare for an incoming storm, and how to pick up the pieces and rebuild your world after. Resilience was essential to survival in the state, but it was a skill that was cultivated through experience alone.
Just south of me in Miami-Dade County, they have started to experience power outages. So, I shall run and make my very last, last-minute preps…I’ll re-watch Kong: Skull Island whilst eating my six ice cream sandwiches, which would melt for sure if I did not. Robin Crusoe, over and out…
I don’t know if my grandmother realized that our move south would mean swapping blizzards for hurricanes, or how much more frequently they would occur, but she was no stranger to a life framed by rigor or repair. I was in kindergarten when she first taught me the phrase pumping iron, and by that point, she had been featured in more national bodybuilding magazines than I could count. My grandmother is pint-sized and platinum blonde, but she’s neither elderly nor frail. She’s The Uncanny Granny—a moniker she adopted when she started publishing articles in her fifties about her weightlifting practice and its impressive results. Her frame is muscular, svelte, tan; her biceps and calves like taught tennis balls, waistline nonexistent. When I picture her in her element, I see her at the gym in biker shorts and a tank top, bopping along to the hip hop in her headphones as she bench presses her bodyweight with ease—the younger men around her both jealous and stunned.
Few people look at bodybuilders, with muscles bulged far beyond their natural composition, and think: I could do that. Even fewer might want to—to subject themselves to the physical torture bodybuilding requires. And yet, my grandmother has long been one of them. She practiced karate into her late thirties—ultimately advancing to a brown belt—until she dislocated her femur mid-kick during a match. That injury set her on a path of rehabilitation that lasted longer than she anticipated, but she remained determined to return to the mat. One evening, after finishing her regular physical therapy in the pool at her local Y, she spotted a large piece of equipment beyond a wall of glass doors. That beacon was a universal gym. She vowed to give it a try on her next visit and instantly became hooked. It was then, she says, that she was bit by the bodybuilding bug.
In weightlifting, the body is pushed past its own known limits. Muscles are strained and overexerted until they approach the edge of injury. That brink—a threshold reached through a kind of self-induced harm—is the aim. It elicits microscopic tears in muscles just intense enough to incite the body’s own restorative responses. In turn, muscles develop more fiber and increase in size; the body becomes stronger, capable of enduring the pain it was just dealt, and over time, sustaining even more. I imagine this is where the phrase bodybuilding comes from, not only as it relates to the body’s own production, its ability to build and re-build muscle, but the athlete’s agency in that construction too. The power they wield in manufacturing a new physique; in being the one who pushes themselves to that brink. And then beyond it.
With weights and machinery incorporated into to her routine, my grandmother was able to bring her body back to life faster and more completely than she could facilitate on her own. Soon, she began to see that weightlifting offered her something else she secretly longed for: control. I was able to control the weights and that made me feel like I had more control of my life, she shared in an interview with Natural Bodybuilding magazine. After enduring the dissolve of her marriage, years of piecing together low-paying jobs as a single parent of three, and narrowly escaping evictions, weightlifting provided a kind of gratification she struggled to find elsewhere. The rush of adrenaline, like an instant dose of resilience; her changing body, an armor of her own design.
Until the police, fire and rescue, and/or one of the one thousand National Guardsmen they have on-call come around here with a bullhorn telling me to get out, I’m staying put. I’m all set for Irma…I hope she’s all set for me. ☺
Reading my grandmother’s Hot Flashes from hundreds of miles away only stoked my fear. It was hard not to find her narration charming, but I worried it was mostly a front, another performance of her bulletproof persona; no pain, no gain. I imagined her shaking her fist in the air at the gathering clouds as they threatened to break. The storm’s imminent arrival, like a plot twist in her favorite action flick. As I watched Irma creep closer to Florida, the projections sharpening, landfall growing near, I couldn’t stop my mind from envisioning the worst. What if her windows shatter from the winds? What if her roof is ripped right off?
But overnight, Irma unexpectedly changed course. The entire storm system veered away from the east coast of Florida and turned toward the Gulf of Mexico, where it will make landfall over Marco Island and weaken to a Category 3 storm. Though it will devastate much of Florida’s west coast and still cause tremendous damage where my grandmother lives, she will experience inconveniences at most. My family and I were able to breathe again, at least for the time being.
Just got the internet up and running this AM. It only took about 4 hours.☺ The streets were littered with wrecked cars…it was like a Smash-Up-Derby out there. I had my picture taken by a Sun Sentinel reporter when I went to buy some ice at the only place that had it in a 15–20-mile radius…We were certainly spared this time around.
Thanks for all your concern and TLC.
Love Yas
***
A little over a year later, I too am in a cone of uncertainty as Hurricane Florence makes its way through the Atlantic Ocean toward the coast of North Carolina, where I’m in graduate school studying creative writing. After a frenzied day of gathering groceries, flameless candles, and every kind of charging device I can find, I begin securing all the valuables in my apartment ahead of my departure the following morning. It’s Monday evening and Florence isn’t expected to arrive until the weekend, but it’s barreling through the ocean as an alarming Category 4 storm with winds of 120 miles per hour, and it’s projected to make landfall on the tiny beach town where I live a few minutes from shore.
I drape plastic tarps over furniture I still haven’t paid for in full, stash the books I’m not taking with me in the bathroom—the most tornado-proof room, according to storm lore—until the tub overflows with paperbacks. I remove oil paintings by my great aunt and grandfather from the walls, wrap them in layers of plastic and plush blankets, and store them high up on shelves in my closet, out of reach from any flooding. I line every window and doorframe with bands of thick brown tape, as if it might—in the face of extreme winds—do something. There is no Clairol in my preparation, no levity or jest. But as I keep working through the night, I wish there was.
I moved from New York City to Wilmington, North Carolina for graduate school two years earlier, and like clockwork, each fall semester kicked off with a massive storm. We’d reconvene just long enough to meet the incoming class, and soon after, the warnings would start to roll in. I left town each year at the first sign of anything stronger than a tropical depression; a plane ticket purchased, a car fully packed. I had no hubris about surrendering and no interest in experiencing the destruction first-hand. But Florence even spooked the toughest locals who typically stuck around. For the last few days, Wilmington felt like an echo of closing trunks and shuttering windows. Gas stations were overwhelmed with lines; grocery stores emptied of the essentials. It was all anyone could talk about—in text messages, phone calls, Facebook posts. Our faces remained buried in our phones, frantically refreshing the weather alerts. Everyone searching for the safest way out. The fastest.
I’m fortunate to be joining my former classmate Morgan further inland in South Carolina, at one of her family’s homes, along with our classmate Jeff. This escape route will take us hours away from Wilmington, but it won’t put us entirely out of Florence’s path. I pause my packing to read the most recent updates, hoping to find Florence turning sharply and unexpectedly, just as Irma had. But there are so many projections illustrated on the map—overlapping, intersecting—it looks more like a work of abstract art than a clear answer. And somehow, each forecast still predicts that the storm will land in my town.
I hoard up one-of-a-kind garments from the years I spent working in the fashion industry, and enough shoes to start a new wardrobe, if need be. I gather all my notebooks and post-its scattered around the apartment; the puzzle pieces of my memoir-in-essays, its momentum sputtering and stalling in recent months. I move swiftly and automatically, loading a handful of canvas totes with dogeared essay drafts and a few favorite texts, until I come across a folder of magazine clippings featuring The Uncanny Granny, and a copy of her pitch letter to The Oprah Winfrey Show, affectionately signed: The President of the Blue-Haired Gang, A Master of the Universal, and a close personal friend of Father Time. It’s already early the following morning, but I stop what I’m doing to scan the articles, losing myself in the character they depict.
This is what 50 looks like! opens her feature in Natural Bodybuilding, riffing on Gloria Steinem’s famous quote about her forties, and doing her one better. In the accompanying full body image, she appears ageless, statuesque. Posing in high-cut black bikini bottoms and a white sports bra, her right foot is raised and pointed to accentuate her sculpted silhouette. One curled arm hangs in the air like a trophy; her grinning face peeks over the arch of her bicep, blue eyes beaming, lips lined in pink. She looks buoyant, despite her pumped-up state. Or perhaps buoyed by it. She looks just as I’ve known her all my life.
As I near the end of the articles, I find a photo of us: I’m three or four at most, my open palm wrapped around her flexed muscle as she kneels beside me. My tiny hand, barely big enough to get a good grip. Perhaps it’s hindsight, but I feel like I can spot it in that image—the beginnings of the underbite that would bloom in the coming years, distorting my facial features and making smiling or biting into food properly an impossible task. I didn’t know it then, at the time of that photo, but I would spend much of my young life waiting for my own form of bodybuilding: the surgery I would receive in early adulthood to correct my bite. Bone would be cut from bone, my jaw broken and reset. The operation would only take a few hours, and after, close to two months of healing at my mother’s apartment, where I would survive on liquids as the severed muscles around my mouth relearned how they once worked. But I would wait two decades for that surgery to arrive, and in between I would learn what it feels like to live in a body that’s seen as a problem to be solved. I would learn this in the teasing I received growing up, the handwritten notes and name-calling. I would learn this in the insecurity I inherited coming of age in a culture that lives to tell women how to be. You will look like you were in a terrible car accident, my surgeon warned of the swelling and bruising that would follow the procedure. But I didn’t care. I thought only of the end result, my ability to determine how I looked and felt in my body; how I was perceived.
It is not lost on me now how similar this surgery was to my grandmother’s own transformation. Breaking our bodies down to rebuild them; embracing physical pain for an aesthetic result. Our methods were self-inflicted, but enmeshed with social ideals, echoes of capitalist productivity. Her, working out; me, getting work done. The two of us working our hardest to become another self. These bodily modifications would offer us both a shortcut to a different story. We believed in the promise of it, the deliverance of before and after. We imagined healing could be all that awaits on the other side of pain.
I hit the road without any sleep; my Prius bursting with my most prized belongings and enough provisions for at least a week. The sky goes soft pink then breaks into a piercing blue and doesn’t rain a drop in the four-plus hours it takes us to get to South Carolina. On the other side of the journey, we settle into a three-story estate with ancient trees and a wrought iron gate, where the bedroom I’ll stay in overlooks a rectangular swimming pool and horse stables; where, if I was without an iPhone and access to the Internet, I might believe I’d woken up in Gone with the Wind. The home is historic, brick-laid, and so large I get lost as I bring my bags inside. It feels like the ideal place to wait out whatever occurs next.
I change clothes and shower, FaceTime with my mother, and sleep until sundown. Morgan and Jeff enjoy the pool. That night, we dine together in a formal room with red brocade wallpaper and French doors overlooking the grounds, then splinter off into our own routines and turn in early.
As I drift off, I think about Hurricane Sandy, the last hurricane I endured in person—not in Florida, but in New York—six years prior. Trees that defied generations of development were ripped from the ground, dropped atop cars, carried through storefronts. Ankle-deep streams submerged the streets. Sandy was only a Category 1 storm, but when its winds knocked the power out overnight, it felt as if the city lost its pulse. Every neighborhood below Midtown was engulfed in total darkness. Many would wait a full week for electricity to be restored—some close to two.
When Sandy’s rains and winds finally stopped the following day, I ventured out alone. Without the illumination of storefronts or streetlights, every block seemed eerily abandoned, save for the aimless residents searching for food or a functioning ATM. I trekked through pools of still water from the East Village through Alphabet City, until the flooded FDR appeared in the distance along the island’s edge, like a barricade holding us in.
In all the years I had lived in New York, I never saw it in such a state. The city seemed so impenetrable before Sandy, both in scale and presence. But the whiplash of that aftermath, how swiftly our world collapsed, made its repair feel even further out of reach. Of course, things did eventually resolve. And though it would take months for much of New York and its surrounding towns to recuperate, we picked up the pieces and kept going. I try to remind myself of that, of the way we moved on. I try not to think about the damage that remains, the memory of it; how acutely I can conjure it now. I try not to think about Florence as it continues to inch closer to Wilmington, a cloudy coil swirling in a sea of blue.
***
I never knew a version of my grandmother before she was bit by the bodybuilding bug. I didn’t know that her foray into weightlifting was part repair and part reinvention, that she ever felt anything but in complete control, until she started opening up to me about it in recent calls; until her regular emails to our family began to include long anecdotes about her life, cut with a tenor of defeat.
It made me feel like a real throwaway person, she wrote about moving around often over the years, struggling to keep up financially, and shedding her belongings along the way. It was hard to reconcile these reflections with the alter ego we all saw. My grandmother, who faced each day with a fully painted face, lifted weights like the big guys. This sorrow she was starting to unearth seemed so limitless, threaded through one experience to the next. I tried to console her in my replies, to locate a bright spot between her misfortune. But the stories kept coming. The narrative of her life unfolding around themes of hardship, perseverance, and on the surface, a lot of pain. I began to wonder how long she’d been suppressing it. If she’d simply disguised this sadness beneath her superhero façade, hid it from view.
The more I learned about my grandmother’s personal history, the clearer it became that, despite the ways she felt like she failed, she was a fighter long before she ever lifted weights. I think about the sarcasm and steadfastness we imagined stood in the way of her survival as Irma drew near. Perhaps it was, in fact, what made it possible—over the years and now.
***
Florence crawls toward Wilmington at a painfully slow two-to-three miles per hour. The days pass like black holes; restless hours of rumination, one indecipherable from the next. I jog around the property and fill my time with trips to the grocery store for more snacks and supplies. It’s a bizarre limbo to be in, made even more bizarre by the way we’re moving freely through the world, knowing we’ll soon be bracing together. Knowing, in some ways, we already are.
Our classes have been canceled through the following week, but the first draft of my thesis—a book-length project, due the following semester—looms in the distance. Back at the house, I unpack printed copies of my essays, line-edited and ink-stained, folders of notes, and easel-sized pieces of paper. I lay it all out on the second twin-sized bed in my room; the debris of my work at odds with its prim décor. All this empty time feels like an opportunity to be productive, but I’m too worried—about my town, the semester, everything that remains unknown—to think of anything else. Maybe I’m just procrastinating, continuing to avoid writing about the things I’ve struggled to confront this whole time: the volatility of my most significant romantic relationships, the unexpected impact of my jaw surgery. But I don’t know how to navigate it all at once. I think about Sandy and Irma, every other storm I’ve experienced. Was I better equipped for this one having lived through so many before? I worry and wonder, nervously reloading Florence’s projections. I leave my writing untouched for days and wait for the storm to pass.
***
When I was approaching adulthood, I learned from my mother that it wasn’t just sunshine or the chance to live close to the beach that brought my grandmother down to Florida with us: it was her desire to stay close to me. I was the only grandchild at the time, and until that point, we were attached at the hip. In the years that followed, she would become the family member I spent the most time with as she cared for me during the week—taking me to and from school and doing all the cooking and cleaning around the apartment—while my parents worked long hours and sometimes long distance. And yet, our relationship felt anything but close.
The move from Maine to Florida redefined every dynamic in my household. My mother and I were no longer our own family unit, but one blending with my stepfather, and after my mother’s promotions resulted in more work-related travel, my grandmother stepped in as the primary caregiver. Secretly, I was resentful, and perhaps doubly so about the catch-22 of their financial arrangement. My grandmother’s help allowed my mother to work full-time; my mother’s work paid for my grandmother’s life.
Behind closed doors, I began to see a different side of my grandmother—one that was undetectable in the time we spent together in smaller increments, which seemed diametrically opposed to everything The Uncanny Granny signified. She had a penchant for self-deprecation, a kind of gravitational pull toward pessimism. She seemed fragile, and at times, even afraid. As a child, I had yet to learn her full backstory, but I was also unaware of so much. I didn’t understand the impact a lifetime of experiences—both big and small—can have on someone’s personality or the way they view themselves. I didn’t know the insecurity I sensed was a symptom of a greater internal struggle, lingering aftermath of plans gone awry. Perhaps I didn’t want to know this at the time. Maybe it felt too absolute to suggest that there are some things you simply can’t shake, no matter how much of yourself you try to recover. To accept that the body can only handle so much.
When I look back on my adolescence, I see the two of us moving around the apartment like separate storms in the same body of water, drifting further away from each other over time, deeper out to sea. The truth is, I was fragile too. And beneath the surface of a star-student persona and my own comedic efforts, I was insecure in other ways, deeply uncomfortable with my appearance and anxious about the future. As I grew older, I found myself navigating intensifying change at each stage of life: a move across the country in elementary school after my mother and stepfather were married, and later, their divorce when I was a teen. I felt adrift in those transitions, untethered, and all the while wishing for some semblance of self I imagined awaiting on the other side of my jaw surgery. For a version of my life where things would simply fall into place; where it would all remain, unmoving and mine.
For a short time after my jaw surgery, the changes to my appearance felt bigger than a balm for the insecurity I experienced and more like a kind of rebirth. I felt confident in front of cameras, among my peers on my college campus. My friend group quickly ballooned, as if that outward transformation was imbued with a kind of social currency in and of itself. But soon after I graduated, a familiar burning arrived beneath my cheek. A searing. And overnight, the swelling bloomed so wildly I could barely open my eye.
An infection had emerged—or re-emerged—beneath the cheek implant on the right side of my face, which I received as a part of my jaw surgery, at the suggestion of my surgeon, to add depth to my profile. I had experienced an infection around the same implant while recovering from the surgery less than two years prior, but after an emergency procedure was performed to expunge it internally, my healing continued on course. We attempted to stop this iteration of the infection with antibiotics, but it remained unruly. Days later, I underwent another operation, but this time nothing more could be done. Both cheek implants were extracted from my face. A fact I learned only once I woke up.
Instantly, I felt overcome with loss, marred by the lack that existed in my new appearance, grieving the parts of myself that felt stolen along with it. But as my body metabolized any signs of the infection in the days and weeks that followed, I pushed my pain inward too. Soon after, I received a response about a job I applied for in New York—a role in social media within the fashion industry. When the hiring manager reached out to arrange an interview later that week, I did not disclose that I was temporarily living with my mother in another state, or that days before that moment, I deleted every photo of myself from my social media profiles to erase any evidence of what fell apart. Instead, I accepted her offer, purchased a one-way ticket, and left.
In New York, I stayed with a friend as one interview stretched into another, and then several more, dressing the part in tailored skirts and button-downs borrowed from my mother that made me seem similarly put together. In reality, I was still reeling from all that occurred, my face still softly swollen—a subtle reminder that my healing wasn’t done. In between the interviews, I caught up with friends I hadn’t seen since graduation, dining in narrow downtown restaurants where we sat close enough to touch. I watched their eyes move around the table, lingering on the slopes of my face as I spoke, wondering if the hesitation I spotted in their glances was their recognition of everything that had changed; wondering if I had done a good enough job hiding it, this bottomless hurt. If I simply kept going, kept pushing on, if it would, eventually, disappear.
***
On the fifth day of our evacuation, Hurricane Florence drowns Wilmington in feet of rain. Its winds rush through Wrightsville Beach at 90 miles per hour. An 11-foot surge spills the Cape Fear River into the cobble-stone streets of downtown. We see aerial footage of the flooding from the safety of our brick-laid fortress; entire neighborhoods and cars submerged. The rain bands that pass over South Carolina give us nothing more than a few flickering lights and hours spent inside. In between the worst of it, I try to return to my writing. I review my notes spread out across the bedroom, searching for links between my pages, connective threads and upward momentum; some kind of compelling arc. But mostly, I keep stalling. I know that the book will require me to disarm myself completely. And that night, as Florence continues to ravage my town, I’m not yet ready to face the wreck.
***
That interview in New York would turn into the start of my career; that job offer, a chance to begin again. And for the next decade, I would try to learn how.
By day, I worked in social media for a fashion brand, curating the image it presented to the world, and in my spare time, I started writing again, for no one’s eyes but my own. I wrote about my family and my fears, about everything except the parts of my history that felt most haunting: the lingering wounds of my last romantic relationships, all the heartache I’d yet to process around my altered appearance. How abruptly it occurred.
When I decided to apply to graduate school to devote more of my time to writing, my grandmother started pursuing her own narrative impulses too. Somehow, after so much, as we tried to find a way back to ourselves, examining our pasts through the aid of a page, we found a way back to each other. But this time, our dynamic felt less like a rekindling of our former bond and more like something unique to this particular moment. Something founded on common ground.
Hey City-Slicker—I often wonder if your little footprint has ever stepped on the same exact spot on the cement sidewalk of New York as my little foot did 50-plus years ago. Has your little palm landed in the same spot on Macy’s brass and glass revolving doors? Has your butt sat down on the same seat at Café Wha? Way to keep up the family traditions.
Soon, she began spending hours throughout the week crafting emails to my immediate family and I, each missive like a chapter from her memoir, complete with a narrative arc, with characters rich in flaws and compassion. She opened each note with her signature sense of humor—Hey homies, Hey doods and doodles, Hey groanups—but what followed was nothing short of a heartening, and at times, hard to read, excavation of her personal history. Everything from her conservative Finnish upbringing in an immigrant nucleus in Brooklyn, to the births of her three children—which she distilled in a lengthy trilogy—and the irreparable pain of her divorce. After the presidential election of 2016, she started to share more about who she was at my age too: a political activist with no tolerance for hate. She wrote with clarity and conviction about the corruption in our government and recalled stories of her own rebellious past:
I remember running alongside Spiro Agnew’s motorcade with Secret Service agents running interference alongside us protesters. All parties were shouting obscenities at each other, and all hell broke loose when someone from the protesters’ side started bashing Agnew’s limo with a baseball bat.
Her life seemed as surprising to read about as it must have been for her to have lived, filled with unpredictability and misfortune, but in between, sudden bursts of serendipity. She wrote about moving from Brooklyn to Maine with my grandfather when my mother was a toddler, my uncle just an infant. How she convinced my grandfather—a guitarist at the time—to turn down a tour with Mitch Ryder, which would have left her raising the children alone. (The other guitarist in my grandfather’s band would go on to play for Frank Zappa.) And years later, how her job as an illustrator led to modeling work that landed her in both Esquire and Seventeen Magazine. But despite the occasional stroke of luck, or how closely it remained in her orbit, her sagas ended most often on a downbeat note. One of deep regret.
Looking back, I compare my life to the surface of the moon, pockmarked with craters which I liken to my many missed opportunities. Little did I know there lay a lot more of them ahead for me in the future.
Though The Uncanny Granny garnered a good deal of visibility, my grandmother was never able to turn that persona into a profitable career, through workout guides and personal training, as she had hoped. When I spoke to her recently about these almosts, the line went silent for a few beats too long. Hearing a slight crack in her voice as she began to talk, I sensed that I had overstepped. But amid my panic, she asked if I could clarify my question. I realized, then, that it wasn’t my inquiry that gave her pause, but the belief that these opportunities were reserved exclusively for her younger self. The idea that the tour was over didn’t sit well with her because in her mind it wasn’t. She wasn’t done trying—even now.
By the time I entered graduate school, our calls became more frequent. We would talk on the phone until we could hardly keep our eyes open. I told her about my own false starts, about the hesitation I was facing with my writing. How it formerly felt like a refuge for me, a place of protection. And how I had found myself, in recent months, unable to write about anything but the stories from my life I most wanted to hide.
You have to let it all out, she said. There is someone out there who needs to hear it.
Her words felt wholly validating, offered in the exact moment I needed to hear them most. They made me feel as if the work I was struggling through was somehow necessary. But it felt like she was telling me something she needed to hear too—when she was my age, perhaps, or dozens of times since. As if this was the same advice she heeded when sharing her story with my family and I, laying down her own armor, and really letting us in.
I wondered if writing about her life in such great detail offered her the perspective to stay positive, despite all that came to pass in between. If it reignited her fighting spirit, serving not only as a testament to all that happened to her, but all she survived. Perhaps it is a strength in and of itself—a hard-won strength—to be able to confess the parts of your history that feel most filled with flaw. To point out the ways you’re still broken, devastated, how fragile you feel. To admit that the arc doesn’t always end in your favor. To fight, still, in hopes that it may.
***
Hurricane Florence has come and gone but the rain continues for days. The only highway in or out of Wilmington remains dangerously flooded, keeping everyone trapped where they are. We realize that our stay will need to be extended, but it’s too soon to say for how long.
A strange sense of normalcy sets in at the estate. The precarity of our situation drives us deeper into our own routines, into finding whatever joy or entertainment we can in this in between. We read and work in different quadrants of the house—Morgan on the lawn, Jeff on the second-floor terrace—take turns preparing dishes for dinner, assemble puzzles over wine. When the restaurants and bars reopen, we dress up and take ourselves out.
One night, after everyone else is asleep, I decide to try again. I slip in a pair of headphones and flatten out a fresh piece of easel-sized paper. I start the story over; let it all out. I outline for hours until I’m hovering above the details of my surgery and its aftermath, the relationships I’d rather forget. I see more violence in it all than I would like to admit, but I keep going anyway. I continue working until dawn. And the next day, I start to write.
***
We are two weeks into our evacuation when my mother travels from New Jersey to Florida to care for my grandmother. She accompanies her to and from a series of doctor’s appointments for what seems like one illusive ailment after another. She has been suffering from stomach issues for weeks, she says, ambiguous and unending pain. My mother extends her trip more than once, but my grandmother remains too unwell to work or get by on her own. We don’t yet know that this period will mark the initial decline of her health, that after, her life will never look the same. Within a few months, we will learn of the severe anxiety and depression she’s been struggling with. We will learn that it’s been there this whole time.
***
We were so good at moving on, pushing down the remnants of the last catastrophe, building over the aftermath and calling it healing. The bruise of the blow rising to the surface, purpling the flesh, then vanishing as if it was never there at all. But there is no way to truly outrun our history or the threat of what might occur next. It is a lesson I have been forced to learn despite everything I hoped would happen in my own life. A warning I glimpsed first, all those years ago, in my grandmother’s trepidation, echoed back in every environment I’ve lived. But I am no longer interested in trying to hide it: the story of all I was never prepared to endure, and yet, somehow did. The story that feels, in many ways, like my grandmother’s own adversity, her will to survive. Sometimes our pain is simply felt and inescapable. Sometimes how perfectly we recover is, in fact, beside the point.
***
Nearly a month after evacuating, my classmates and I load our cars back up and travel home to Wilmington. The highways are lined with sandbags, stoplights patrolled by armed guards. We pass houses still submerged in water up to the edges of windowsills, to the top of their roofs. I return to my neighborhood, surprised to find it mostly untouched, and start to settle in. In the coming weeks, my aunt will join my mother in Florida, and together they will fly my grandmother to Massachusetts, where she will stay with my aunt and her family. She doesn’t yet know it, but she won’t go home again. My uncle will pack up everything in the apartment where she braved Irma, throwing away and selling more than he ships. Soon, her emails will stop. She will try medication to abate her depression, to treat her anxiety and help her sleep, and later, several courses of electroshock therapy. You’re breaking me out of here, she’ll say when I arrive at the assisted living facility, where she’ll eventually settle, to take her out for the day. Her lips and hands tremoring from the medication, a smile breaking through the quake.
The storms will keep coming. We will keep holding on.
