I Dwell in Possibility. Toni McNaron

nothing that day except the Hershey bar and Coca-Cola. Next day, when things were back to acceptable, the earlier plan resumed. To this day, Betty has retained what can only be called a girlish figure, feeding others sumptuous meals while nibbling at Lilliputian helpings herself. Recently her doctor warned her that her blood sugar level was dangerously high, that sweets were off her diet. Realizing the genuine crisis this constituted, I quickly searched my co-op shelves for substitute snacks. But sesame sticks and trail mix hardly replace Lundt’s latest delight, a giant Hershey, or bulk chocolate triangles by the pound.

      Her looks and charm made her quite popular with boys, who somehow did not hold it against her that she was also extremely smart. Since I was a flop at “boys” because they resented my success at my studies, I held my sister in some degree of awe. Betty was unwilling to sit home and pine, however, so she hid her all-A report cards, telling chums that she “did all right” at the end of each grading period. When I was preschool age, she had endless beaux wishing to marry her, all of whom she carefully kept at bay. Several of them paid court to Mamie, sensing that the way to Betty’s heart was through her mother. Others chose to focus on me in their struggle for supremacy: I was carried off to bed many nights on the shoulders of a sweet hulk of a man named “Box” Willingham, who threw me into the air to my delight and let me blow his army sergeant’s whistle. These World War II veterans played with me the way other children’s dads did, and I loved them fiercely.

      Every now and then, Betty would prefer me out of the living room so she and her current visitor could be “alone.” In addition to the proverbial nickel for an ice cream cone, I was bought off in clever ways. The most original was the time Betty finagled me into turning the crank of her old blue Victrola while she and Tookie Teague waltzed. I was intrigued by the magical machine that made sounds if you cranked and by the graceful swirls my sister made. She negotiated the furniture and ornaments so much better than I.

      During the war when men were off fighting Germans, Betty worked as a public school teacher. I picture her, frantic in our living room, watching a high school senior doing calisthenics that she herself would have to lead her class in the next day; or helping Mamie cut out endless patterns of leaves for borders in her third-grade room; or standing in tears in the middle of the floor having vainly tried to locate middle C on a pitch pipe, readying herself to teach music class. Finally, she got to be the librarian for a year until the regular guardian returned from her stint in the navy.

      Books suited my sister better than basketballs or chalk pointers, so after being replaced in the schools, she found her way to the Birmingham Public Library. Beginning in the circulation department, checking out books, she quickly rose to be head of the popular literature wing. In those days, libraries tried to maintain quiet. Betty loved jewelry, especially gold charm bracelets. I can still hear her clinking delicately around shelves, urging three more novels on one patron, four more books on camping on another. Circulation doubled during her first year in the job, since her customers, especially the men, simply could not refuse her recommendations. Who knows whether they read every word, but they certainly exposed themselves to much more culture and information than they had intended. Though she complained about the hours, my sister probably liked her job—not exactly a salon, her section of the library was definitely her domain.

      Betty left the library in the early sixties, returning to teaching, this time in a private school across town from where we lived. But in 1963, in December, our mother died suddenly, and Betty was permanently changed. One sign was her decision never to return to work. She asked a friend to bring any personal belongings from her desk when he came to pay his respects. Her last check was mailed to her at home.

      We had what is now thought of as a closed nuclear family. When I was born in 1937, three of my grandparents were dead and the fourth died when I was three. My parents were old enough to be my grandparents, and my sister could have been a youngish mother. Though one of my mother’s brothers and one of my father’s sisters lived in Birmingham, I spent very little time in their homes or getting to know them. They visited us at Christmas, and occasionally we went to their houses for some special event. They called on my parents when they needed help, or when one of their sons (they all had only boys) got into some kind of trouble. I resented their arriving on our doorstep with their newest crisis, expecting Mamie or Daddy to solve it. I resented even more Mamie’s and Daddy’s persistent willingness to do just that, even when it meant hardship or strain for them.

      My family’s insularity meant I was shut out of my history as well as on-going holiday clan gatherings. Neither parent liked to talk about the past: my mother said it was too painful; my father simply never mentioned his. I have been told that the annual July 4th celebrations in Selma took place on my mother’s parents’ lawn and that Mamie’s father worked for the railroad. Mostly, he dressed himself in starched white shirts and immaculate suits, summer or winter. Daddy was born and reared on Sand Mountain, at the tail of the Appalachians. His family was supposedly dirt poor and uncultured. My father’s father walked out on him, his mother, and two sisters when Daddy was in his teens, forcing him to end his youth and go to work to help support the family.

      I know these shadowy ancestors from faded pictures, shown me under duress and at my insistence. I held back questions and responses so as not to upset whoever was showing them. Daddy’s father looks like a slightly ill kempt, overgrown kid, usually with some old hound dog at his feet, holding a bottle or glass in one hand, a string of dead fish in the other. His eyes are not quite focused, and he looks as if he could run at any moment. The first time I saw a snapshot of him after I had gone through treatment for years of alcoholic drinking, I felt I was meeting a kinsman. My father’s refusal to touch liquor at home suddenly made more sense.

      Daddy’s mother came to live with him and my mother and sister when Betty was a child. Mamie told a story about sterilizing dishes and glasses in order to protect her child, only to have Mrs. McNaron, who suffered from tuberculosis, go into fits of hurt or affronted self-pity over the special treatment. Whenever my mother and father were in deep wrangles, Mamie would drag out her recital of these scenes, guaranteeing a yelled out, “I don’t want to hear that story one more time, Old Lady” (my father’s affectionate name for his wife). In the single snapshot of her that I have seen, my paternal grandmother stares out of eyes filled with betrayal, holds herself like a ramrod, seems afraid to smile. She is as thin and sparse and held in as her husband is fat, messy, and without boundaries. I would describe her as handsome rather than beautiful, him as childish and irresponsible.

      I have many more photographs of Mamie’s side of the family, especially of her father. He is dressed to the hilt: rounded high collars centered by tasteful ties always adorned with a stick pin, never lacking a suit coat, framed in oval, arty tintypes taken by a professional photographer in downtown Selma. “Doc,” as Mamie’s father was called, smiles from his neat borders and reminds me of the Mona Lisa—reputedly enigmatic if not downright profound but vapid to me. In the full-standing photos, this saintly creature always has a pocket watch, visible from the gold chain and jeweled fob that show just below the center of his buttoned vest. Betty remembers him as “the sweetest man that ever lived.” All I remember about him is a walk down Holly Court hill when I was a baby of about two and a half. I needed to hold his hand to steady myself. Because it would have been less than gentlemanly to walk any way other than upright, I had to strain my short arm because he was too tall to walk upright and still reach down to my level.

      Mamie’s mother looks like a matriarch from the United Daughters of the Confederacy, though we never belonged to that group: buxom and tightly corseted; tall and big boned; eyes looking straight ahead, unflinching and steely; hair pulled back from her face severely, only to roll into a soft circle around her head. When Betty showed me this picture a few years ago, my unvoiced but immediate response was, “I wouldn’t want to have her mad at me ’cause she could hold on to it forever.”

      My mother’s mother died quite suddenly one summer in Foley, Alabama, in a movie house. Every year, my family vacationed there, staying in the cabin owned by Mamie’s parents. Foley boasted a picture show among its more modern attractions and Mamie’s mother took Betty and a boy cousin to afternoon matinees as often as the feature changed. There, in the darkened theater, my grandmother had a heart attack, and while my sister held her head her cousin ran for a doctor. My grandmother died, and my mother fell