by
Aletha Irby

for Nora Anderson Foster
and Grover Cleveland "Snap" Foster
of Asheville, North Carolina
and San Antonio, Texas.
and for Hal.

I received another phone call for Diamond Jackson the other day. It is always a different male voice, in a business-like tone which I recognize as a prelude to a discussion concerning money, who asks for Diamond Jackson. I never ask the callers exactly what they want and they never volunteer information, so finally realizing after many such phone calls that these men had been swindled, I began volunteering that I regularly receive calls for someone named Diamond Jackson, but that I've had the same phone number and residence for seven years and know of no such person. What I don't say to them is why did you entrust your money to someone with the name of a Mississippi riverboat gambler, or the confidence man in any novel, or movie, or comic strip?

It seems that some victim, though, has finally caught on that he has been conned, for the message on my answering machine the other day was from an attorney in Houston who requested that Diamond Jackson or his attorney return the call.

And oddly, those phone calls, and the new Texas Lottery with its little gleaming rub-off game cards and corny, catchy titles-Lone Star Millionaire, Texas Treasure, Cactus Cash, Texas Two-Step, Tex Tac Dough (friends and I have spent entire weekend evenings discussing the practical measures and defenses we'd implement, and the impractical purchases on which we'd splurge, if we won the big Lotto) and my mathematical-genius, computer-expert, probability-calculating, games-of-skill-and-chance-whiz friend Hal's astonishment at how rapidly I, computer-illiterate unnumbered soul that I am, can run through a game of Las Vegas solitaire on his computer-all of it reminds me, now that it is October, of the first time my heart was broken. Not by any man, or any man's leaving, but by my grandmother's dying.

My grandmother was, in fact, the one who taught me, at age six, to play solitaire, showing me how to count out seven piles of cards, each increasing in number, every faded baroque-backed card with its dog-ears and the worn red diamonds or hearts on its face as large, creased, gentle, soft and strong as my grandmother's palms, the plain gold of a well-loved wedding band gleaming on her right ring finger. She explained to me that the object of the game was to beat Old Sol by turning all the cards face up and laying them in order on top of their aces, which were placed above the seven piles of cards. It was a good game for a six-year-old to learn, Old Sol losing often enough so that I never became frustrated or bored-though at some point, soon after I'd been taught, I fear I became impatient with watching how slowly (it seemed to me) my grandmother and grandfather laid out the cards and turned them over on the checkered tablecloth of their breakfast nook, and I itched to grab their cards and play the game for them. Just as I now grow restless watching Hal click the cards a bit too slowly during his computer's Las Vegas solitaire. I shake up and down in my chair and stomp my feet in anticipation and he says, (to my great surprise, for despite his patient instruction I've never been able as an adult to learn chess) "Aletha, you're just too quick for me." He says the same thing when we play time-limit Scrabble.

At any rate, it was also when I was six my great good fortune to be my grandmother's only right-handed descendant (my mother and sister were both left-handed), and thus the one she taught lacemaking, the albino dolphin of the ivory tatting shuttle gradually intuiting its way despite my unskilled fingers, leaping and cavorting through the triangle of thread to leave behind a slow wake of lavish, delicate lace. And I remember just as clearly the first piece of linen I embroidered under her guidance, holding it between its hoops on my lap after I'd put on my "nightie" (my grandparents' word) and accidentally cross-stitching, satin-stitching, and french-knotting myself to the golden butterflies of the linen so that my grandmother had to cut me loose.

Of course the familiar treasure-trove that was my grandmother's and thus every grandmother's home does not need repeating-yet bears repeating: the crystal doorknobs, the kitchen a spacious, genuine room which harbored three rocking chairs, a stove, an icebox (my grandparents' word for refrigerator), and was the scene of much family socializing. The fragrant hallway closet, too seldom opened when I was visiting her, with its embroidered linens, crocheted doilies and antimacassars, patchwork quilts and pillowcases, tablecloths and counterpanes. And the heaters set into the wooden floor of the hallway, their grates warm on my slippered feet above their brilliant indigo flames. Also, the sepia photograph of my mother sitting on a piano bench in nineteen-twenties San Antonio, a little girl with long corkscrew curls, a white recital dress and photographer-enhanced pink cheeks.

And my grandmother herself, in pecan-harvesting season, in her blue jeans, flowered shirt, and straw hat, shinnying up the trunks and branches of huge pecan trees with a bamboo pole to knock down the pecans that remained at the furthest reaches-and the musty smell of the hulls that stained our fingers black as we pulled them from their shells. The names of the pecan varieties did not impress me as strange then-Mahan, Schley, and Choctaw; and Success, and Easy Money. And, far from those pecan trees, how we went fishing up in Seguin, where she'd bait the hook of my small bamboo pole and spit on the worm "for good luck."

In the October of my thirteenth year she died suddenly-of stomach cancer, they said-after being hospitalized for a few days. But it wasn't until November, several weeks after her funeral-the funeral of a woman dressed in a pink impossibly-chiffon gown she would never have worn or chosen, a woman with a strangely square jaw and expressionless face who didn't even look like my grandmother-only several weeks afterward that I discovered that she was dead.

The house where I had spent every weekend and entire summers remained as she had left it, but when I noticed the delicate galaxies of dust beginning to lightly shroud the furniture (something my grandmother would never have allowed-not because she was slavishly or domineeringly tidy, but because she was simply too energetic) I began to look for her. Walking down the long gravel driveway, I expected her to drive up at any moment with the groceries in her friendly black 1967 Mercury. Then I ran out in the backyard expecting to see her hanging the well-worn opalescent linens out to dry, clothespins in her mouth, or up in the trees again, knocking down pecans. It was when I returned to the house and had turned every corner that it struck me, as if I'd been travelling as rapidly, recklessly, and rapaciously precise as the Indianapolis 500 driver on whom everyone has placed their bets. And now my superb reflexes, no equal for the speed, had failed, so that the heart that was my face smashed into a wall far stronger and more inexorable than any steel-the nose and lips, the cheeks and chin, the jawbone of the countenance that my heart had become crushed irremediably, its features collapsed permanently back into itself so that it became as smoothly chilled and expressionless as the face I'd seen in my grandmother's coffin. It was then that I ceased waiting for her to return and truly became one of the bereaved.

But October, the month that my grandmother happened to die, had always been my favorite month, and many years after her death I began to notice and to recall that I had to be very careful in October, because whatever goals or projects I pursued, whatever games I attempted, whomsoever I chose to give their comeuppances-everything I did proved lucky-everything I attempted in the month of October succeeded almost too famously. When I mention this to my friends, they say I should play every lottery this October, that I'm bound to win.

Perhaps I will purchase lottery tickets, for now that outside my window another tragic-romantic October abounds inconsolably with plangencies of ebony and orange and aubergine, I can wager that my grandmother with her defiant entourage of splendid fortune will issue forth again-improbable and predictable as Perseid or Leonid, as beating Old Sol, as being bilked by Diamond Jackson-my grandmother venturing forth unvanquished and autumnal as if from amber, from among other loves embedded amid the savage, gambling lambents of my heart.

Aletha Irby is very grateful to have been granted this time, on this planet, to spend time with the English language.

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