Mammaw’s Girl by Alexandra Ogle

I am six years old. My tiny fingers reach to touch her face. Her skin, worn with age, is softer than anyone else’s. She smiles at me, soft and gentle, like her skin at my fingertips and the curl of her short hair, and she says, “You’re Mammaw’s girl.”

“Yes, I am,” I respond, returning her smile and pushing my glasses back up my nose. She has on glasses too, oval ones with a thin, gold frame, and as I lean in to hug her, I’m careful not to move them out of place.

“Come back soon,” she says, and my mom promises we will.

From the time I was born, I was Mammaw’s girl, the favorite of the grandchildren. It was never explicitly stated, except maybe by my mother, but my mammaw didn’t try to hide it. She always said we had a special connection, but I don’t think I felt that at the time. I felt that I loved her, and she loved me. Her love was shown in her actions and the way she bragged on me to her friends, and how she always cooked my favorite foods. It was shown in the control I had over the entertainment, watching my favorite movies again and again, and how she’d lay with me until I fell asleep.

I am seven. I lay in “my bedroom,” the spare bedroom at her house in Tazewell, Tennessee. Dusk settles down in the holler, and the only light shining through my window is from the moon. Earlier, I had stayed up late eating popcorn and watching Balto, fantasizing about seeing the northern lights as they do in the movie. Mammaw had completed a crossword as I sat on the floor to be closer to the screen, my eyes glued to the wolfdog’s journey.

Outside my door, I listen to the clatter of pans and running water as she cleans the night’s food away.

“Want Mammaw to come lay with you?” she asks from the living room and I respond that I do.

She joins me five minutes later. Her presence is the comfort I crave, as I sling my arm around her middle and drift off to slumber.

Whether watching Balto, or Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, or Lilo & Stitch, I spent much of my life and my time with her in front of a screen engrossed in a world outside reality. Luckily for me, she seemed to enjoy it too, never complaining or pushing that we do something else. But it’s because of this that I didn’t think we were that close. It’s inherently different from a relationship you have with a friend, where you know their past, their secrets, and regrets. I knew my mammaw in the here and now, her little everyday struggles. But there are stories and emotions that you just don’t know or talk about with each other, like the irrational fear I once felt when spending the night at her house.

In third and fourth grade, I had an obsession with the TV show Monk. I’d talk about it all the time, not that anyone around me cared, but I loved the show and its characters. Sure, Adrian Monk solved a murder every week, but it was still a family show. The content didn’t bother me. But my mammaw misjudged the lightheartedness of the show and suggested that I might like the dark and paranoia-inducing Criminal Minds.

“It’s like Monk,” she said of Criminal Minds.

On the TV, the camera pans across a room, spattered in blood from the walls to the sheets, then to a little girl who enters to wake her parents. But in the night, her parents had been butchered to death by a chainsaw and the little girl had just walked into the crime scene. This is the episode of Criminal Minds my mammaw thinks I can watch.

“This is nothing like Monk!” I cry, my hands sweating and heart beating fast.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. We’ll change it. I didn’t mean to upset you.” She turns the TV off, but I stay where I am, terrified. I want to go home and be with my parents, but I know that would hurt her.

As night approaches, it brings its own fears, heightened by a dark sky. I feel frozen in place with anxiety. I had never been the type to go home from a sleepover, getting scared and wanting my parents. I did now. But instead of having her call my parents, I lie awake, staring at the way the moonlight hits the ruffled plum curtains behind my headboard. It illuminates a crack of light that halts at the edges of an afghan blanket in the corner of my room. With every howl of wind or creak of the floorboard, I hold my breath, imagining an intruder around the outskirts of my mammaw’s home.

“Don’t be a wimp. You’re being ridiculous,” I mutter to myself, considering what Mom might say if I were to call her to make the 45-minute drive so late.

The clock reads 3:30 a.m. before I fall asleep.

When I was seventeen, my mammaw moved five minutes away from me. Yet when I think of her, my memories go back to that house in Tazewell, me sitting on the floor watching movies, cuddling with her in bed, and the one time I wanted to go home but chose not to. There are years of memories elsewhere. The things that awaken these memories and longings are peculiar to me: a stuffed animal that reminds me of Balto causes fresh tears to reopen two years of grief; the afghan blanket tucked in the corner of “my bedroom” that I had forgotten existed until seeing a similar one. They have no significance to her or what she enjoyed or who she was as a person. But they tether me to her even when she’s no longer here.

Alexandra is an East Tennessee native and has been writing on and off for fourteen years. She spends most of her free time reading and listening to music. You can usually find her curled up with a blanket at her local bookstore and coffee shop, recommending her favorite books to anyone who will listen. 

**Featured image by Ekaterina Shakharova, Unsplash