Back to the Old House
Hannah Tran
I don’t remember exactly when it started, just that it did. When it happened, my time at grandma’s house was forever changed.
“Do you have any siblings?”
“Who are your parents again?”
“What’s your name, con?”
Everyone gets old, but it doesn’t always play out like this. It was hard for me to understand at first. The body and mind change so strangely and inevitably with just the tide of old age, never mind dementia—how could I ever understand it? I figured you don’t get it until it happens to you.
It’s the middle of August now, several years out from the first few symptoms’ onset. I’m starting high school soon, but until then I’m more than happy to revel in the last few weeks of summer. Outside is the kind of heat that sticks to your skin and summons unholy hosts of insects from the trees, but Bà Nội’s house is always refreshingly cool. I followed Dad to the house today for the nurse consultation. He’s the eldest son and I’m his eldest daughter, so I always know what’s happening.
This is how it’s always been, but these days I’m uncertain. The shadows at Grandma’s house seem a little deeper, and my family whispers things I don’t quite understand.
When Dad started coming around the house to handle paperwork and do chores, I felt some obligation to tag along. Deep inside, it felt like I was making up for lost time. New friends and schoolwork take up most of my attention, so visits to grandma’s house are few these days, reserved for special holidays and the occasional Sunday lunch. It’s hard to admit, but the conversation during these visits is also dwindling now. Between the two of us, Bà Nội doesn’t have much to say, and I hardly remember the words to say anything at all.
While Dad, my aunt, and the nurse talk over Bà Nội’s bed, I’ve been banished to eavesdrop from the living room, too fidgety to stay in the cramped, curtain-darkened space. I don’t mind though, the rest of the house is interesting enough. Like Bà Nội, the house is familiar and strange all at once. Looking around from my sprawl on the vintage floral couch, the living room is the bright and airy playspace from all those years ago, except more child-proofed than ever. Layers of foam and cellophane tape pad away the sharp corners on the heavy rattan cabinet, and the TV on top is shifted slightly to the side to better survive any bumps. On the shelves above the TV, Bà Nội’s pretty porcelain dolls in hand-sewn clothes flank framed family photos. She loved those dolls and they showed it, donning perfectly powdered hairdos under crocheted hats. I coveted one beautiful doll in particular with its tall nose and gingery-blonde hair. Whenever I pleaded for it, Bà Nội would just laugh and pinch the gentle bridge of my nose as if she could massage it higher.
The room’s decor itself is familiar like a snapshot of my earliest memories, but I can pick out a few changes. Most striking are the memos plastered on every wall and important item, like the literacy cards that teach young children their world in words.
TV Remote, ON/OFF. Door lock, slide right. Cholesterol, take twice a day.
Everything is carefully penned in Vietnamese to reorient Bà Nội in her home of forty-some years. It’s disconcerting to think about. After the war, Bà Nội and Ông Nội raised my aunts and uncles into adults here, pushing all six of their children through college. Six bronze graduation plaques hang above the mantel to show for it. My aunts and uncles moved out to start their own lives, and our growing, rowdy family spilled into this house for every holiday year after year. In all of our family photos, my grandparents are center stage—holding a newly baptized baby, flanking a pair of newlyweds, handing out New Year’s gifts to a line of silk-clad grandchildren. There’s a photo from my first birthday where I am reaching for the shiny teal earrings hidden under Bà Nội’s carefully coiffed hair. Steadfast, my Bà Nội saw our family through it all. I think back to an episode from several weeks back.
It was late in the evening, and my aunt was squaring away the house for bedtime when Bà Nội called out from her bed.
“Where am I? I want to go home, home!” Bà Nội couldn’t sleep, full of restless energy that seemed to vanish during the day.
My aunt gingerly placed her grasping arms back into the bed and pulled up the covers.
“Please, Mẹ. Go to sleep. We can’t go to Vietnam now, we live here.”
“No, not Vietnam! Home, you remember home? You should take me there now!” Bà Nội’s voice pitched higher and higher as she desperately repeated her wish.
“Our home is here, where else is there? Go to sleep, Mẹ!”
Anyone familiar with dementia knows you don’t correct your loved ones. You don’t fight against what they know. I was frustrated with my aunt, but I tried my best to understand her exhaustion. After Ông Nội passed away a few years ago, she moved back into her parents’ house at sixty years old to be Bà Nội’s full-time caretaker. It’s a heavy burden to bear but there aren’t many alternatives.
Any care home in the area would have been impossible for Bà Nội since she’d be alone without a familiar face or voice for support. Dad hired a caregiver to come during the day to help with physical therapy and hygiene, but lately she’s only around two or three times a week. My aunt doesn’t want her intruding in the house, much to Dad’s exasperation.
All of this is to afford Bà Nội the comforts of her home, but those comforts can’t seem to be found anymore.
How could she forget the place she made into a home?
I don’t think too hard about this question because I’m not sure I want the answer. If this house full of my family’s memories isn’t home, then where is it?
There’s papers passing between hands down the hall. Hushed voices shuffle back and forth too, until Bà Nội’s brittle voice cuts through the whispers.
“Please go! I must dress up, my grandbabies are coming for dinner and I’m so busy!”
The conversation in the bedroom lulled, unnerving me. I have so many questions but no one will answer them. Shouldn’t I be in that room? Bà Nội is expecting my company after all. But then again, what can I say to her? I don’t know that I have any words, even English ones, to begin to explain to Bà Nội what I’m feeling. There’s shame too, when I see her face slacken as I fumble for the right words only for them to slip clumsily off my wooden tongue.
I don’t think I want to be in that room after all.
A sunlit breeze comes in through the window to brush my face, and I reluctantly turn around towards the backyard. Rising from the couch, I go to run my fingers through the gauzy, sheer curtains blowing across the back door before wrenching it open.
Outside, the afternoon heat immediately engulfs me. I stand on a weird concrete block covered in plasticky turf that looks out into a modest fenced yard. It still smells like freshly cut grass from when Dad mowed the lawn earlier.
I felt guilty watching him toil away in the summer sun, pausing only to wipe the sweat from his bushy brow or grasp at his aching back with calloused hands. I heard that Ông Nội left behind a decent inheritance, so it’s not like we don’t have the money to hire some help. We just don’t. Dad never lets me use the mower, no matter how many times I ask. He says I’m too skinny. The last time I brought it up with Mom, she just got mad. Her mouth set in a thin line and her eyes sharpened, forcing my gaze to flee from hers.
“Is that what you want to do? Cut the grass for your auntie and grandma? For how long, how many years?”
I knew this wasn’t a question she wanted me to answer.
“When will you have done enough? I ask your daddy this question all the time, don’t make me ask you too.”
I felt very stupid for asking. There was a deeper problem beyond the overgrown grass, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I still don’t get it, but any answers are reserved for adults so I keep to myself.
The view of the cloudless sky is obstructed by Bà Nội’s clothesline—a length of insulated wire stretched between two metal rods at opposite ends of the turf block. The house has an old dryer in the basement but Bà Nội never used it, instead hanging the laundry in the sun with a number of faded plastic clips. Today, there is no laundry to block the sun from my eyes so I head to the eastern face of the house where Bà Nội’s camellias grow.
It’s already several degrees cooler when I turn the corner and stand between the lush bushes. The camellia flowers are hefty, filling the spread of my palm, and remain a bright lipstick pink away from the direct sun. Bà Nội’s sickness cost the camellias of their most faithful attendant, but they are still hardy and beautiful in their untamed state.
Inevitably, the summer heat makes even the shade feel hot, so I slip through the side door to admire the view from inside the kitchen. In my memory, the vibrant blooms are pleasantly framed by three glass panes like a spring triptych. Whenever Ông Nội wasn’t sitting in his orange chair in front of the door, a younger me would stand on it to peer through the window. Today, the middle pane aligns perfectly with my face.
The kitchen on the other side of the window is not quite as picturesque. My aunt is overwhelmed by all of the other things heaped on her plate, so the kitchen isn’t the tidiest. Still, it’s not like Bà Nội kept a pretty kitchen either. The kitchen is a small, linear space with the coil range, dishwasher, sink, and fridge lined up against one wall. Above the sink, the window is covered in halved water bottles containing scallion and basil sprouts. The other wall backs a waist-high table holding the microwave, and all other available surface area is used for ingredient shelving. A line of glass vessels hosting fish sauce, Maggi, vinegar, and countless dried spices fill one ledge, and the one above it holds baskets full of various dried noodles. Underneath the table, there is a bulk bag of jasmine rice emblazoned with a gold elephant, a wall of tinned foods, and a metal rack holding mesh sacks of onions, garlic, and shallots. Both levels of the fridge are sealed shut with packing tape, but I know there are at least three bags of clementines in the refrigerator and even more plastic-wrapped meat in the freezer.
There’s so much of everything everywhere, yet none of it is wasted. I am not a picky eater by any standards and Bà Nội loved me all the more for it. She’d watch me pick her fish bones clean and sip on boiled cabbage water with a smile before pushing more onto my plate. Bà Nội loved fresh black pepper and kept the freshly ground peppercorns in a little sauce dish next to every main course. Her daily cooking was simple, usually meat and greens in a sauce over white rice paired with a vegetable soup for digestion. For dessert, she’d wash and cut the season’s fruits or cajole me into eating dried prunes.
I never complained about Bà Nội’s cooking, not that there was anything to complain about, but I didn’t know how much I’d miss it now. If I knew, maybe I would ask for another portion and taste it slowly. Today, only the warm weight of nostalgia settles in my stomach as if it were another meal from this kitchen.
“Let’s let Mẹ sleep, we can talk out here.”
The door at the end of the hallway creaks open, and Dad’s heavy footsteps enter the shaded corridor.
I’m still in the kitchen when the adults reconvene around the dining room table. The sun is starting to set so Dad flicks on the dusty chandelier light and puts on his reading glasses. He and my aunt pore over the heap of paperwork and pamphlets the nurse sets on the table, tracing their fingers under the printed lines. Cast under the dim dining room lights, my father’s face looks craggier than usual, as if his own gravity was pulling the folds of his skin deeper into himself.
At some earlier point in my life, I started associating being Vietnamese to being old and being American with being young. My cousins and I weren’t Vietnamese, at least not in the same way as the adults in the family. I figured Vietnam was a country full of thrifty, old people like Bà Nội who wasted nothing and wanted nothing for it. This house is Vietnamese too, in a way that I can’t find anywhere else. The food, the pictures, the conversation, the company—they are all like relatives that I’m sure I love but don’t fully know.
Maybe this is my own pathology, one of loving but not knowing.
I really want to see my Bà Nội now.
The adults don’t pay me any mind when I pad down the darkened hall to Bà Nội’s room. These days, Bà Nội sleeps alone in the smaller side room separated by a wall from the old master bedroom. The hazy corner lamp is still on and casts the room in warm light when I slip through the door.
Bà Nội’s medical bed elevates her head slightly, and the plasticky sheet under her body rustles when she turns her pillowed face to meet mine. Her hooded eyes are lucid and a crooked grin rounds her cheeks at the sight of me. Today was a good day then. Despite everything, she looks well enough and I am relieved. Bà Nội’s sweater-clad arm reaches in my direction, trembling slightly with excited urgency. When I lean over the bed rail to brush wispy hair away from her face, she clasps my warm hand in her cooler ones.
“Hello, con. I missed you so much. Tell Bà Nội who you are again.” Her smile gentles.
I have ideas of an answer, but the words are beyond my reach. In this moment, I want to tell Bà Nội things I don’t fully remember myself. Instead, I return her smile and touch my other hand to her temple.
She leans into it, because I know her and she knows me.