Post 5: The Enigma of Anita
I have known her all my life, and yet I have never understood her–‒ I have never truly known her. She has a curious personality, and a past so distant her own child does not know about it. I know tons about her but never has she told me the truth about herself. She’s the closest yet most faraway person I have ever had in my life. There’s no one I understand less in the world.
My granny was born in 1949 in beautiful Alexandria, Louisiana. She had six brothers and was the only daughter her mother ever delivered alive. They moved to California when she was nine. Maybe that was when what she remembers of life became a blend of truths and untruths. Nevertheless, she grew to be a lovely young woman. In her youth, my grandma was statuesque with hair the color of butterscotch and ivory, satin-like skin. She was the epitome of beauty, and her beauty attracted boys and men alike.
My mother was born in 1969, a consequence of my grandmother’s allure. The joy my grandma experienced quickly became overshadowed by responsibility as she became a single, teen mother. She was fine for a while, finding comfort in a tape-bound journal and sunsets from the back porch. She was happy. At some point, however, while my mother was in middle school, all traces of happiness faded into obscurity, replaced with depression. The strangest thing, however, is that she and my mother remember this period differently. My mother remembers my granny as being distant and melancholy. She tells me that there was a time when her mother disappeared for months and no one ever told her why. My granny, on the other hand, simply calls my mother a liar and insists that she was consistently in my mother’s life, always loving and always caring. But the most telling thing, the only evidence I need, is something my grandmother once said, “My life has been going downhill since 1970.”
As my grandmother aged and life wore on, her beauty dimmed. Her candy-colored hair faded into a dull brunette color and finally to its current silver-streaked state. Her previously slim waistline grew rounder and her physical health began to mirror her mental health. The one constant through the years is the hollowness I imagine has been behind her slate eyes all this time. Rather than the coldness, I envision she had in the past, her eyes are filled with warmth. But all the while I can tell there’s still emptiness, a missing part of her.
No one knows what it is, and I’m sure she refuses to acknowledge it. I have a theory, though. It’s rather morbid, but it’s more realistic than an alien abduction story. Her depression could have come completely out of the blue or it could have been the result of an event, nevertheless, she had it. I imagine that when she disappeared, she was in a mental hospital, forced to seek help for her depression. It’s likely she had Electroconvulsive Therapy to treat her depression and it had some long-term effects on her memory. My mother has her own theory — my grandmother subconsciously chose to block out her memories in an effort to deal with the abuse she suffered. It would make sense being that she speaks so lovingly of the man who mistreated her. Whatever it was, left her with a void. She’s filled with a desperation to fill it with anything she can whether it’s true or not. She can’t deal with the vacancy. She grasps at snippets of memories, some real, some not. She holds onto anything she can grab, from plausible to totally outlandish, from a farm in Louisiana to a close relationship with Martin Luther King Jr. I don’t think she knows what’s real in her life and what isn’t.
She’s a pathological liar, but I don’t think she knows it. She misplaced something as important as her memories and now she’s lost. She fills this hole with whatever she can find, not knowing that she is clogging her body up with poisonous fiction. The poison causes her to adopt lies in place of truth. The toxin eats away at the things she knows are true, leaving her with a bigger hole than she had before. It’s an endless cycle. People who know her missing memories try to pull her from the cycle but she’s convinced she knows the way. Her stubbornness will leave her with more than emptiness behind the eyes.
