It’s been a moment since I last came here (or anywhere, for that matter) just to sit down and write. Partly, that’s because I’m at the point in my program where I have to prepare for candidacy–which involves so, so much writing. And partly because when I’ve sat down to work on my candidacy materials, I feel anxious and then I wind up feeling so guilty about my lack of progress that even trying to digest the possibility of writing for pleasure or writing editorials and personal essays has had the effect of plunging me deeper into guilt. I’m not quite finished with feeling all of those feelings, but I think I’m finding that I’m someone who *needs* to write. Not only in the sense of producing tangible materials to move forward in my program, but also in the sense of all the things I need to do to keep from unraveling.

That said, here is an essay I’ve been tinkering with on and off for about a month:

Almost everything was pink—the shag carpeting; the walls with their hand-painted accents of fig branches and peacocks; the scalloped pillows; and yes, even the velvety sofa in the conversation pit where we sat. The room had high ceilings and was built such that we could make out the shadows of my grandmother’s guests upstairs. Had any of them wanted to, they could have looked over the upstairs railing and directly down at us in the pit. In the center of the ceiling, a crystal chandelier sparkled and swayed, casting little rainbows here and there.

This was Colby’s first time meeting my grandmother and the sight of her marvelously decadent mansion left him with questions he was too polite to ask. But I could sense that having never mentioned my grandmother’s Waco, Texas estate wasn’t sitting right with him. I placed my hand on his arm and drew myself closer to him, “I guess I have some explaining to do.” Just then, a group of people joined us in the pit, one of my grandmother’s staff trailed behind with a silver dish of champagne flutes. “This isn’t a great place to talk,” I said. Colby and I stood and I paid my niceties to the crowd now in the pit, giggling and consumed in their own stories. As we passed my grandmother’s domestic staff, he took the empty glass we each held and replaced it with a fresh, full, bubbling glass.

I led Colby across the parlor’s lush, pink shag carpeting, through a set of heavy and opaque glass double doors, and into a room with alternating black and white floor tiles and ivy plants crowding the large windows. We sat down on a wicker bench and just as I was about to tell him all about how my maternal grandmother built this place off of her earnings running a brothel and selling drugs in Waco, Texas between the 1940’s and 1980’s, another group of happy party-goers entered the room, filling it with the sounds of their clinging glasses and booming laughter. We were just about to leave the room when another of my grandma’s guests stopped me, “You’re Maria’s youngest, right? I just met your brother in the other room! Say, all this champagne is great but it’s not really my style–any beer around?”

I looped my arm through Colby’s and began guiding him away from the crowd, “If you’ll just follow the hall, you’ll either come to a set of black French doors that lead to the kitchen, or you’ll bump into one of my grandmother’s staff who can assist you. Nice meeting you, sir!”

Colby and I opened another set of glass doors onto a sprawling patio. We walked down the patio stairs and toward the pool where I slipped off my shoes and rolled my pants up to the knee. I dipped my feet into the pool’s cool water. In the distance, twinkling strings of light signaled that the party had spread out to the garden. Colby took my champagne glass over to a long table offering a buffet of elevated party snacks. He was setting our glasses down when my grandmother came onto the patio and patted Colby’s shoulder. She reminded us to save our appetites for dinner, which would be served shortly.

All night, her guests had called her Maria, but we (her family) knew her by the moniker her twin brother, Goto, gave her in their infancy: Kine. Save for photos from the height of her youth and success–polaroids of her playfully running towards waves, showing off a new fur coat, or laughing at a man’s joke over dinner–I’ve never seen Kine looking so good. Her hair was dark and luscious and her makeup immaculate. She was wearing a fitted, white button down blouse with big lapels that was tucked into olive trousers. Around her neck, a vintage silk Hermes scarf rested elegantly. Her nails and lips were cherry red and she wore gold jewelry. Kine continued on toward the garden festivities, walking barefoot in her plush grass, she kissed the top of my head as she passed me and I smiled at the scent of her Dior perfume. An older man, though not quite my grandmother’s (or even my mother’s) age came running behind her, “Maria, I’ve been looking for you all night! I was hoping to have a chance to talk with you” he paused, suddenly aware of Colby and I watching him, “…alone.” Nervously, he ran a hand through his salt and pepper hair.

Kine stopped walking and turned to look at the man, her eyes twinkling flirtatiously, “well, my solitude fetches a pretty penny these days, but I’m sure we can work something out.” She grinned and waited for him to catch up to her. When he did, he put his hand on the small of her back. The two continued on toward the garden. I watched as he pushed her hair back to whisper into her ear and as she threw her head back in laughter. She gave him a playful push, “you little devil.”

Colby sat beside me at the pool and began taking his shoes off and rolling up his pants. I could tell we were shelving the conversation about how my grandmother built this place. “Your grandmother’s place is great,” he said, leaning in to kiss me on the cheek.

“We could stay through the weekend,” I told him, running my fingers along the reflections of stars and strings of lights that danced along the water’s surface, “she won’t mind. But there isn’t much to do in Waco once we leave the property. That’s the only drawback.” We heard a commotion inside and looked toward the home, through the kitchen windows where my mom was laughing, like genuinely smiling and laughing, as she and her cousins tried to light the 90 single candles on Kine’s birthday cake. I’ve never seen her like that.

Next, I woke up.

Kine passed away quietly and nearly penniless in 2016. My mother, who maintained no small amount of shame about Kine and her past, invited next to no one to Kine’s funeral: my two brothers and I were the only invited guests. For my grandmother, we might as well have been no one: we were not the people who loved her. 

Perpetually in and out of prison between the 1950’s and the 1990’s, Kine took to the gospel after her final arrest and became a staple within her prison’s ministry group. She was released (after nearly fifteen years) in the early 2000’s on the account of a heart condition that threatened to eclipse any value she had to the state of Texas as an incarcerated person, or even as a cop-killer (which is really saying something).

She left no plans for her funeral. Had it been up to her, I’m not sure Kine would have particularly cared whether any of us were there, and she certainly wouldn’t have wanted the Jewish service my mother planned. (This may seem strange, but my mother began thinking deeply about Judaism when Kine came to live with us, and fully converted after my parents’ divorce. In both cases, I fully believe spite was the primary motivating force). After the rabbi left the gravesite, my mother passed a copy of the Robert Munsch children’s book, Love You Forever, for the four of us to take turns reading out loud to Kine’s coffin. This did strike me as strange: as far as I could tell, my mother did not like Kine, let alone love her (in fact, Kine’s time living with us came to an actual screeching halt as we drove home from a family get together in 2004, when—after confronting Kine about the irony of her newfound Christianity, Kine failed to give my mom the apology she felt she was owed and my mother pulled over the family car at a gas station in rural Texas and told Kine to get out, leaving her there with no money, phone, or discernible way home).

But still, my mom sobbed reading the book’s bare prose and passed the book over to one of my brothers. Kine’s life after incarceration was rich with friends from her continuing work with the prison ministry, family she’d reconnected with, and new friends from her work at a city-wide donation center. Just before her death, one of Kine’s nephews threw her a surprise birthday party for her 80th and so many people came. The party, though modest when compared to the one in my dream, was full of people dancing, grilling, and playing with babies.

Naturally, my mom caused a car accident en route to the party to try to get out of going, but after a quick trip to the ER, we (because she’d coerced one of my brothers and I into going with her) were deemed not injured enough to miss it. 

I was thinking of the happy strangers at Kine’s party when I felt the open children’s book placed onto my lap. It was my turn to read a page out loud. I was looking at the baby pink coffin my mother selected for Kine and the spray of pink carnations on top. It was all wrong—Kine wasn’t a soft woman; she loved Elizabeth Taylor, red nail polish, a red lip, cheetah print, and gold; she would have wanted big, red roses and a sleek casket. We heard footsteps approaching and the four of us turned in unison. As the small group of mourners approached us, my mother began grumbling about invitations and classlessness.

“Rachel, this is wrong. You can’t send her off like this” one of my grandmother’s nieces said to my mother, authoritatively placing a hand on Kine’s pink coffin. The niece’s eyes landed on the children’s book on my lap and she sucked her teeth, “people *loved* her. You’re not just keeping us from saying goodbye, you’re keeping them from really knowing her.” She was pointing at my brothers and I now. The niece sat beside me and put a hand on my left knee. “Your grandma loved to dress! Her whole life she loved clothes. Before she died, we went shopping and when she went to pay, the check out man said her card was maxed out. And do you know what she said to him?” I shook my head. “She said, ‘give me my damn clothes, I’m dying any day now!’ And he did!”

One of my grandmother’s nephews followed, “I came to see her—had to have been 1985—and your grandma loved a good time. So I came in late and she said I should go straight to sleep because we were getting up early. And I thought, ‘oh, wow, we’re going to start partying first thing!’ And in the morning, your grandma had me get dressed and drove me out to the high school nearby. And I said, ‘what’s this now?’ And she said, ‘you’re going to go in there and tell the man at the desk that you’re here to take your GED.’ And I said I wasn’t ready. She said, ‘Yes, you are.’ And I told her I hadn’t signed up or paid or anything but she’d taken care of it all. So I went and took it and passed. I got my GED because of her.” 

There were maybe only six strangers total, but each of them had something to say about the haughty woman I barely knew in that pink coffin. At the end of the service, I went up to her coffin and whispered, “I hope that made you smile, they crashed your funeral to send you off right.” I smelled a pink carnation and patted the coffin’s top. Lifting my head, I heard my grandmother’s best friend chastising my mom for trying to bury her mother with so much secrecy and shame. After the graveside service, my mom, my brothers, and I went to Kine’s modest wooden frame house on James Street. We stood in her empty living room and silently drank big red out of solo cups and ate quartered pimento cheese sandwiches and conchas my mother brought. Standing there, I remembered how once, a long time ago, we’d renovated this house ourselves as Kine went up for parole—just in case. One of her old boyfriends, an old man who went by Roy, was driving by and saw us making repairs. He came by every afternoon after that to help and it was obvious that he was still smitten with Kine fifteen years on. I still remember watching him eat fried chicken on Kine’s patio, his dentures gently wrapped in a napkin he placed beside him.

My mom told me Roy was once a very handsome and wealthy lawyer, but after Kine’s last arrest, he’d been disbarred for his association with her. I knew, even at twelve, how powerful she must have been once to have a ruined old man still calling after her all that time later. 

Kine never did have a mansion. I saw her lavish life and birthday party in a dream one night after seeing Everything, Every Where, All at Once. I’d like to think it means somewhere a different version of our family grew up with Kine as the matriarch, going to garden parties, and knowing her well. Which is to say that somewhere, a version of me takes Kine’s fabulousness as routine. In my wildest imaginings, Kine still lived a life of poverty, but she was able to have a normal and happy life. In that world, at her funeral, I told a story about how she did my makeup for homecoming, or lent me her pearl earrings for graduation.