speak, girl

When I was small, I spent days at my grandmother’s house. I used to make breakfast for her, a three year-old’s breakfast with a sliced banana and chocolate syrup. We watched a lot of television. She pored over the Bible and so did I, unquestioning, parroting. She knew everything in the whole world and I loved her with all my heart.

During my adolescence I learned “no” and “why.” I started reading instead of watching television. I became an agnostic, then a deist, then an atheist. I wore flannel shirts and stopped shaving my legs. Worse, I wore skimpy dresses and started shaving my pussy. I realized that by no fault of hers, I was smarter than my grandmother.

This is why our phone conversations are so painful. I have become alien to her, something she doesn’t understand but remembers cherishing. She says my voice is like bird song. These compliments turn my stomach. I do not want to make her day by calling her. I want her to make her own day. I do not want to be the most important thing in her life, because I am not in her life. I have moved away to a foreign place and my customs have changed so that we can no longer communicate. Hers, like my mother’s, is a language of guilt.