Free Where We Are Now by Carolyn Osborn

Lucy and Uncle Phillip were the only quiet ones. From the first grade on my cousin Fergus sassed his teachers. Uncle George complained about the bank’s service to the president’s face. When Miss Kate told my mother she was simply being willful the day we moved out, my mother had said, “It’s a trait I seem to have inherited.”
    Lucias Atkinson, unlike the Moores, seldom spoke unless he’d considered his words carefully. When he pronounced “guardian,” loss made me shiver. I’d planned to leave, to run from Miss Kate’s unstated yet obvious desire to produce another generation of ladies, to rush away from Aunt Lucy’s fluttering wish to help, Fergus’s wildness, even Uncle Phillip’s kindness. I wanted no part of Uncle George’s domination. The early years of travel and those spent in Virginia had widened my view. I meant to escape my family, the state, the South. I’d thought I might go to California to college, then perhaps to France for a junior year in Paris.
    â€œMarianne, you need to stay around here. We want to be able to see you now and then.” Uncle George was good humored at first. His hair had gone totally white, a contrast to his middle-aged face. Ironically it made him look younger.
    â€œI want … I was thinking about going to California … to Stanford maybe.” It was the only college I could think of at the time.
    â€œYou can wander later, young lady. Plenty of time for that. Your mother thought you should be looked after a while, and I can’t do that any place but Tennessee.”
    â€œI know, Uncle George. You think I don’t know anything?”
    â€œYour grandmother and I think it’s best for you to stay here. Now Lucy, you know Lucy likes California and she doesn’t like telling people what to do. Never did.”
    â€œI wish the rest of you didn’t.”
    â€œYou could go to Vanderbilt.”
    â€œIn Nashville?”
    â€œI don’t think the school has moved, honey.”

    I escaped by going to Vanderbilt, meeting Marshall McNeil from Texas, marrying, and fleeing west as soon as I graduated. Miss Kate sent sporadic family news along with admonitions about church attendance and the necessity of prayer. She told me that George, driving Jean home from a party, wrecked his car and broke both his legs when he ran into his own stone gatepost. “Perhaps he’ll give up drinking,” she wrote, desperately trying for cheer.
    â€œFergus’s marriage to Dorothy has lasted just two years,” she lamented in another letter. “I pray he’ll find someone more suitable soon.”
    We both knew Fergus was as partial to a variety of women as Uncle George had been, but there was no need, in her view, to admit that in writing.
    Aunt Lucy remained the chief worrier in the family. There was little news of Jean or Uncle Phillip. They were the ones who seemed to live their days in a reliable fashion. I could call Jean at her house or Uncle Phillip at his insurance office at nine o’clock any morning, and they would be there. I seldom did. I was having babies. For four or five years I was lost in the welter of that sweet confusion. Fergus drove Miss Kate out for the christening of her first great-granddaughter who was also called Kate. Three years after she returned to Tennessee, Grandmother had a cerebral hemorrhage, and George put her in a nursing home. I had to go back.
    By the time I arrived, Miss Kate had apparently given up everything. George sold her car and rented her house. She was living on the edge of her life, and I thought sheknew it. Though the nursing home was functional, it was a depressing old house with a lot of ramps and dark—sometimes peeling—wall paper. It smelled of urine, some indefinable vegetable boiling, and hopelessness. Was my grandmother who had always been a particular woman—proud of her house and the order she’d created in