Refrain
My grandmother Renee was a time-traveler. She did it just a little bit at a time, over the course of what normal folks would perceive as a decade, until she finally found a tear in that heavy fabric of time that she opened up and slipped through, moving out beyond the boundaries of time, lost to the present forever.
Most of my memories of her are situated in the time before she learned how to do it. Some of my earliest musical memories are of her playing John Williams’ score to Star Wars, and those are formative memories indeed. Renee didn’t seem to care too much for the movie, but she did like the score, and she would sit me down with the double gatefold album to unfold and peruse the huge poster that was included as an album insert while she cooked or while she tanned. I would lose myself in the music and in my imagination, running my fingers across the faces of my favorite characters depicted on the poster and she would follow John Williams score with albums by Bach or Puccini, or Rachmaninoff, so that to me, it all sounded like music from the Star Wars universe.
When there wasn’t music playing on the stereo, Renee would whistle. Her head was swimming with melodies, and you could usually locate her in the house by locating the lilting refrains of the moonlight sonata or an ascending line plucked from a fugue. I can picture her lips puckered into a whistle as clear and distinct as my hands in front of my face. But given that it’s been so long, many of my memories of Renee are faded. She loved to tan, and would strap on a bikini, slather her body with Bain de Soleil tanning grease, tune the stereo in the living room to KVOD and head out to the deck, where she would sizzle for hours, a dog-eared Erma Bombeck book collecting sweat and oil stains on the towel next to her as she napped. In the summer she tanned herself into supple leather, as brown as a saddle and as soft as chamois. She smoked Pall Mall filterless cigarettes when she drove and kept the windows rolled up. She cooked a wicked goulash. She cackled when she laughed and it was unsettling. Her lips tightened and blanched when she got mad. She was quiet and temperamental. She had that pendulous, matronly quality that old ladies have.
Renee started time-traveling around the time that my mother, my three sisters and I moved in with my grandparents, after my mother divorced my stepfather in my thirteenth year. No one noticed it at first, and she wouldn’t talk about her travels. It took quite awhile for anyone to catch on that she was doing it at all. Our lives in the present moved on without impact, stretching out before us in lines that did not deviate from that which the clock prescribes. My mother struggled in her need for help in finding her way out of a lonely marriage. My sisters turned from gangly tomboys into fierce young women. I found drugs and rocknroll. Our lives were segmented into measurable lengths of time predicated on future touchstones: a due bill, the end of summer, thanksgiving, Easter, catechism, swim meets, new episodes of television shows.
But not for Renee. She had found a way to travel backwards in time, some device, perhaps no bigger than something she could cup in the palm of her hand, carry under her tongue, or slip into her curly hair. I think what she had discovered was that she could travel back for a few moments at a time, leaping back whenever she chose, but that it was not without its side effects. Every time she traveled back through time, she would leave something of the present behind when she came back, and the more she did it the more she became confused by an asynchronous reality. It started out as little things, like having a hard time reckoning with the fact that tape dispensers exist, or how to use a lighter. If she traveled to a time before those things had been invented, that would be the piece of the present that she would leave behind, and when she encountered them again in the present, there formed in her mind a crisis of newness. Everything else in her world was familiar, but these small implements, so radical and basic in their design, would seem alien, fake. We didn’t know what to make of her confusion, and because she would not let on that she had been dipping into the past, we laughed off confusing moments and quickly changed the subject whenever she would come into the kitchen at dinnertime clutching a tape dispenser, her lips ringed in little white wrinkles where she had pinched off the blood flow, her eyes fixed on the alien technology she shook, the sand in the base rasping like a muted shaker. Time traveling irritated her, but she couldn’t stop doing it. Can you imagine the allure? How much comfort did she find there, seeing her children young again, falling in love, running through the grass, knee-high to a grasshopper and shrieking with feckless joy?
She may have talked to my mother about it, but she was reserved around my sisters and I. Over the course of a couple of years, she became obsessed with traveling backwards, and the side effects increased. Her sense of the present tense was no longer linear, it folded back on itself. For Renee, the clock revolved in fits and starts, spinning out of control in the wrong direction at times, only to freeze and then start again. More little things were lost to her and she spent most of her time in the present agitated. She would walk through the house, whistling familiar melodies, trying to situate herself in rooms filled with objects she could not name. Her whistle became constant, and then even that started to bend towards the unintelligible. She had been to that epoch that exists before the songs in her heart had been played, and they, too, faded.
My grandfather watched on in horror, frustrated and unable to locate the device that she used to move back and forth through time. But he was tender with her, and stern. They moved into a small trailer that they kept parked outside of the house, and her world became small, austere. She would wake in the morning, dress, and wander through the house, breaking away to that secret place where she visited the time before structures, the time before words. She whistled and she wandered, she laid her hands on alien objects in the rooms of her former life. She stopped smiling and simply set her face in a scowl. Her whistle thinned and became a reedy hum, tufts of breath without the strength to form notes any more. The present no longer suited her.
In 1995 my grandfather had a heart attack and died face down in the dust of a Yuma trailer park, where he had parked the trailer for the winter. My mother and my aunts brought Renee back to Colorado and she moved into a nursing home. Her once curly gray hair began to straighten and grew long. She lost weight under the minimal care of the nursing home staff. Where did she go when she went back in time? I thought about how she must have been pushing back to the very limits of conception every time she went. But I couldn’t understand why she would continue to exist in a time that she didn’t feel at home in. Why wouldn’t she just let go of the present? Did the device force her back?
I held her hand the night before she left for good. Her gray hair had started to turn blonde, and her skin had started to smooth. The leathery old lady I knew was regressing. The crow’s feet that stretched out from her eyes in radiant lines and the deep creases that furrowed into her cheeks from laughing had disappeared. Her hands had become delicate, papery. She was warm all over. She had no more words to offer. They had been lost one by one. She had stopped whistling. She had gone back beyond melody to a time when there was only rhythm and as I sat in her room and held her hand, I listened to her breathing. Slow and steady. I wondered if she had figured out a way to go all the way back, if she had figured out a way to stay wherever she went. She looked amazing that night, radiant, younger than I had ever seen her. She took deep, long breaths, measured out as a lugubrious waltz.
My mother stayed with Renee that night, and I know that at some point during the next morning, my grandmother pushed back beyond her time in the nursing home, back beyond the death of her husband, the death of her son, the birth of her grandchildren and children, back beyond the songs of her youth and the migration of her parents, and further still. Back beyond melody, back beyond rhythm, back beyond the humming drift of the continents, the gaseous swirl, back beyond the very moment, the mere moment, the seeds and their sowing, further still, to where there was no time, nothing for her to forget, nothing but silence and speed, and that is when she stopped.
