What Happened at the Reunion

It was the hottest day of the year. August air shimmered above the dirt like hot oil. A line of cars crawled up the road towards the house. The cats lounged in trees, tails wilting and curling like fern fronds. Silos in the distance stood silently, reflecting sun like upturned mirrors. No one noticed the grandmothers, sent to the backyard to shuck corn in a circle of thirteen chairs.

There were more of us than wheat stalks in the surrounding fields. We went on like multiplication tables, a self-generating hive of great-aunts and grandfathers and nieces swarming all the way to the shores of Lake Erie. Names buckled and disappeared under the weight of tradition for decades at a time, only to resurface with distant cousins struck by the thought they’d invented something impossibly classic and novel. Our mailboxes grew swollen with handwritten notes for baby showers, school plays, anniversaries, an endless parade of greeting card milestones until they became our currency and in person gatherings became less frequent. We could never attend all the funerals. Only the reunions remained.

The mothers wanted gin. The fathers retreated to the cool darkness of the wood-paneled basement. The babies slept on the mustard shag carpet under the clinking fan. We danced around aunt Ruth and her flat gaze, snapped the screen door shut on the back porch. We avoided cousin Peter. His laugh, loud and desperate; his shoulders, eagerly curved towards ears; the way he trailed underfoot, sticking onto our trouser legs like burdock. Our dislike percolated through the younger cousins like bags of tea in the sun, darkening the pitcher until it clouded black. The adults fanned out under the dogwood trees, eating butter corn and grilled snapper. Fat white kernels like milk teeth littered the tablecloth, drying into husks under the sun. 

Dark sky steeped down the horizon while the adults spoke of the harvest, the wolves, Beau—the boy with blue eyes in all of the photographs. The cousins from the West watched fireflies spark over the lawn with O mouths. Our mothers ignored the dishes, dipped their brown feet in the creek. They snuck back into the kitchen, raided the ice box, melted salty cubes between their breasts. In the late orange sun, the windows of the house looked like they were on fire. We stole the whiskey from behind the colony of rabbit hutches, waited for something to happen. For someone to ride the belt, climb the ladder, kiss. The wheat rustled like a long skirt. We went to the barn where Peter told us he hid the gun. We marched the perimeter between field and forest, falling over with shouts. Bang! went the barn door behind us.

It was late, late in the evening when we realized the grandmothers were missing. The grandfathers napping in recliners dreamed of rabbit screams and paper mills. The adults grabbed flashlights. Roused from the hayloft, we saw beams of light crisscrossing through the pink flesh of our eyelids. Heard the straw crunching under their feet. Tried to remember where they had last been seen. Had we ever really looked them in the eye? Where did they spend the hours of their long, unhurried days? We could remember the texture of their hands like thin-stretched dough smuggling cellophane candies into our pockets, gripping the backs of chairs they passed, fingers fluttering like moths around their collarbones. The mothers retraced their steps, frantic, searching for different women than the ones we were. While we remembered only hands and fingers, in the mothers’ minds the grandmothers’ skin smoothed, hair darkened growing thick around the crown, spines straightened as if pulled by a string from the top of their head, eyes cleared, minds unforgetting their grandchildren’s birthdays and the streets they grew up on—until the mothers’ gaze was blinded by their memories. 

Now we ran, slower than the children but faster than the adults, through the fields, along the rows, throughout the house, but it was Peter who found the grandmothers. We found him in the backyard, standing in silence, staring at a circle of thirteen birch trees, the pale green underbellies of their leaves winking at us in the cold light of our flashlight beams. ▩