China

Visiting my mother’s side of the family, we played with BB guns and used rocks to blow up rolls of gunpowder cartridges meant for our cap guns. But my father’s relatives were somehow more respectable. He had one living pair of grandparents, who owned a white one-story house in Belpre just across the Ohio River.

They made an odd couple. My great-grandmother stood not much taller than a child. Next to her, my great-grandfather seemed to exist on a separate plane, like a streetlight or a telephone pole. He had served in the First World War, about which I knew nothing definite at the time but which seemed to me to have involved Roman gladiators. After having a leg amputated as an old man, he had to learn how to walk all over again, only to die a few years later.

In those days, I had no patience, always wanting to go faster and do more. My great-grandfather’s loss of a leg unsettled me deeply, for selfish reasons. It was terrible to think a skill I’d already mastered, like walking, might disappear without warning. Could it happen to anyone at any time? Did I somehow have to guard against it? I wondered but was afraid to ask.

The only name I ever called my great-grandmother was Mawmaw, a name that was spoken but rarely written down. Spelled out in letters, the word seems ridiculous, as if it has nothing to do with her.

When I was young, she bought my brother a subscription to National Geographic. To me, she gave a nursery doll in an elaborate dress, the kind any little girl might treasure. I took off through the yard with my new charge, running, yelling, and swinging it by the leg, with no more thought or care for it than God had for my great-grandfather's missing limb. I was no one’s idea of a little girl.

Mawmaw had an endless parade of sisters, some of whom came to visit, not all of whom seemed as respectable as she did. The notorious one was Aunt Janey. After years spent on Hawaii, my Aunt once showed up with a hula outfit for me.

Janey was single, and for much of my childhood, I heard stories about her adventurous life. She didn’t always get along with her relations, but she had a freedom that seemed enviable. It was strange to see an old woman who wasn’t a widow, one who came and went as she pleased, with a changing entourage.

My father’s family had been itinerant, moving to where the work was, taking jobs in bakeries or on farms. They all cheered for the Cincinnati Reds, which became my baseball team, too. In their youth, Aunt Janey and Mawmaw had worked at a laundromat in the city. After finishing their day shift across the street, they could sometimes get into Crosley Field for free to watch the last innings of games.

I knew the 1974 Reds lineup from the age of five, though not the order: Bench, Pérez, Morgan, Rose, Concepción, Griffey, and so on, like a procession of saints. When I summon their faces, it’s baseball cards I see. At the time, I imagined Aunt Janey knew them all and socialized with them regularly.

Unlike Janey, Mawmaw no longer traveled. She was likewise past the burden of raising a child or cooking on holidays, and I don’t remember her ever preparing anything in her kitchen, even a sandwich. By the time I met her, she seemed, in her cat’s-eye glasses and prim outfits, to have narrowed down to a life that was entirely decorative.

When we visited, she usually sat in the living room talking to the grownups. Meanwhile, with her blessing, my brother and I ran off to the basement, a single long room laid with linoleum and filled with building blocks and toy trucks for no one but us.

If the weather was good, we might play in her backyard, which had a fairway of grass cut in a diamond pattern that ended at a witch’s ball, a reflecting globe of green glass set on a white pedestal. The entire world appeared in it, but stretched, as if the contents of the universe were bulging under the pressure of containment. I examined my own warped face on its surface and knew enchantment when I saw it.

Taking up a small garden trowel, I speared a divot of grass from the lawn next to the globe. Underneath lay burnt-orange earth. Pleased with my discovery, I widened the small hole by cutting away another clump of grass.

I looked up to see my great-grandmother, tiny with age and distance, watching from the edge of the porch. I wondered if she disapproved of having her lawn butchered.

“Keep going,” she said, “maybe you’ll get to China.”

The farthest I remembered traveling at the time was my aunt’s and uncle’s apartment in Cincinnati, but a series of revelations flared in my mind. The Earth was round. We had a globe at Montessori. Cincinnati seemed like the other side of the earth. But of course, it wasn’t Cincinnati but China that sat opposite us.

Digging through the center of the planet hadn’t occurred to me before. It might just be possible.

I imagined arriving in China brushing off clumps of orange dirt from my great-grandmother's yard, the foreignness of people speaking another language, of not knowing where anything was. How surprised they would be to see a stranger emerging from the other side of the world.

I wondered if someone on television there might interview me. I imagined speaking another language would, like flying in dreams, be something I was already capable of but hadn’t yet found the key to unlock in my waking hours. Surely, under the pressure of going on television to represent my country, I would be able to speak Chinese. I kept digging.

***

In her bedroom at the end of the long hallway running down the center of the house, Mawmaw had medical equipment—a tank and a rolling hospital bed with a plastic zippered tent. I’d heard about children who had polio being put in iron lungs, and for years, I thought that’s what she had in her house. But it was only an oxygen chamber for her emphysema.

Medical equipment inside an everyday house felt ominous, part home and part hospital, some halfway realm between living and dying. We had lost pets, but I’d never attended a funeral. Digging in the yard, it occurred to me that gravediggers might have been at work there ahead of me—that bodies might already be underground between me and China. But I thought of the dead as ornaments in stories told by the living, and the idea did not trouble me.

Seeing I was making little headway on the hole, I went for a wider look, taking off more grass to feel a sense of visible progress. But then the trench was so shallow it didn’t seem like a tunnel at all. I moved to one end of my flayed patch of dirt and tried to go deeper.

After my brother drifted back in, I stayed outside. But even when lifting only soft clay, shoveling was hard. I went more and more slowly, finally recognizing that China couldn’t be reached in one day.

By the time I went back into the house, my knees and hands were stained with grass, my shoes smeared with dirt. I had a vague sense that I was a mess, that I was still not a child to whom one could safely give a doll.

During the time spent digging in the yard, I’d been determined to break through. I’d never been more serious about anything. When I left to go inside, I believed I would return soon afterward. But I grew distracted by a book or by baseball on television, and the rest of the afternoon passed. We got back in the car, and I was home before dinner.

I forgot about tunneling through the center of the Earth to China; I forgot about wondering if I could lose the ability to walk. As year followed year, not once did I ask myself where these ideas, which had possessed me so fully, had gone.

I left my failures to litter the landscape. It was of no interest to me who put the dirt back, who relaid the divots of grass I stripped from the earth, or who cleaned the trowel and put it away. I stood on my two good feet, not yet needing to think about how to make anything whole. No one records who buries the ghost of a dream.

[You can read another story in this series about my West Virginia childhood here, or find out more about me and this newsletter in my About page.]