“Are you wearing a panty with a bow?” was always the first question she asked when she phoned her bouncy granddaughter, who would take a peek before giving her an affirmative answer. I suspect the woman who birthed the woman who birthed me, also birthed my penchant for frilly things. Ouma Hetta always and exclusively bought me panties with tiny satin bows on the front because the ones without them were too boring. I’ve heard that American children don’t use that word, they just call them underwear. In South Africa, a panty is a panty, regardless of age. My grandma lived a few hours away, near Cape Town, and we were planning her next visit. I knew she would bring along a new pack of three and I would adore them.
Upon arrival, she also presented me with the latest issue of People magazine. It had Britney’s wedding on the cover, which was inevitably going to be our main topic of discussion (because hello?? Britney could do so much better than K-Fed).
Ouma Hetta kicked dust in the other girlies’ grandmas’ eyes. I beamed every time I introduced my sole grandparent to my friends. I like to indulge in speculation about how she’d experience the world past her allotted time. I just know that woman would have lost it for Britney’s Blackout album; she would have adored a peach-flavored vape. She’d rejoice in my living in New York, with its accompanying portal to a vast world of celebrity sightings. She’d be so pissed at what those fuckers did to Britney.
My grandmother was a pesky gal. This I mostly know from family lore. She still is, which I know from experience.
She was born with the sun in Aries, and her dark hair had a Martian tint. She liked it pinned back, with sleek strands caressing the sides of her face. She knew all of the pop stars’ songs on the radio and even had a soft spot for our queen Britney’s main competition, Christina. Before she became sick, she had a rich boyfriend with a fairy-tale house in the Cape Winelands that I loved to visit. She could dress, this is the first thing my mother will tell you about her: she had a predictive prowess, a sense of where the fashion world was heading. She made all of my mom’s dresses for dances and functions herself; their styles would appear in South African stores months later. In my eleventh-grade design class, I studied a Dutch trend forecaster. I wondered if Ouma would have liked a job like that if she’d been asked what she wanted.
I once came across my mom’s diligently organized folder collection. I sifted the ones marked with my grandparents’ names and looked for something/whatever—clues to the forever-nonexistent version of myself who could have known life with grandparents, or at least a grandparent, past the age of seven. My experience of being a grandchild remains wholly contained in a few years with Ouma. I flipped pages until I stopped at my maternal grandparents’ wedding certificate. Ouma left no signature; it read too young to sign.
My mom loves sourly sharing the story of the day she ran into an old acquaintance of her parents at the grocery store in my hometown. He approached her and asked whether she was her parents’ daughter. After she confirmed and entertained some small talk, he intensified his gaze and hit her with a line my mom has never let us forget.
“Well, you must be your dad’s child then. That mother of yours was a gorgeous woman.”
It quickly became an unprovoked dinner-party favorite in our home.
“This bloody old man,” my mom would say, “called me ugly to my face,” before she let out a genuine cackle. She has always been more comfortable with self-deprecating jokes than the idea that she might be beautiful.
Mom’s aversion to Ouma’s visits baffled me as a child. I knew Ouma stressed my mother out but I didn’t understand why. To age is to keep adding footnotes to long-known familial truths, and they’re usually not pretty. What is childhood if not the gatekeeper of all that will eventually corrupt our innocence? (If you’re lucky—some never have the luxury of this oblivion.) I’ve shaded my initial, simple outline of Ouma with words like alcoholism, bipolarity, and teenage motherhood. The gravity of what it would mean to have a child at seventeen only suddenly impales you once you turn seventeen yourself; before that, it’s all just numbers. My grandfather was a policeman in his twenties when my uncle was born, and he married Ouma shortly after.
I sometimes wish to get her back, the woman I had known with naïveté-colored glasses. A person unfucked with by life: just a naturally kooky lady.
T has always just been my mother and has never required any caretaking from me. The extent of her asking for help is when she summons me because she accidentally set her Google to Spanish. Mothering is her job and her forte; she is the most capable and natural mother I’ve ever seen. She miraculously knows to check her phone at three a.m. when my cries for crisis management pour in (even when her ringer is off), never has to consult WebMD, and holds babies without a hint of calculation or strain. However traditional in her beliefs, she tells me that an unplanned pregnancy on my part wouldn’t be the worst thing, as she’d love the opportunity to take care of a baby again.
My uncles, T’s two brothers, also know how to captivate a dinner-table audience. Sometimes Ouma comes up. They laugh at these stories now because they can, because in the best-case scenario, most of the remaining anger or resentment dies with the dead and you get to look back with more empathy than scorn. It must be a manifestation of relief. The worry is over.
My mom’s younger brother constantly hid my ouma’s car keys when he was in high school. She’d get drunk and turn bold in her willingness to risk her life for a pack of cigarettes.
T’s older brother has a story of how he flew from Johannesburg to Cape Town with the sole objective of chasing down the shady boyfriend who had convinced Ouma to grant him full access to her finances. This claim is anything but figurative, as this scumbag apparently tried to make a run for it. My father (the getaway driver who wished to stay out of the drama and/or trouble with my mom) hid in the car and watched one grown uncle chase another around the property.
If you ask my mother how she felt confident in marrying my father a year after meeting him, she’ll tell you that Ouma said that with my dad in the picture, she finally seemed at peace.
When my parents divorced, my older brother was away and I had to sort out a lot of nasty things around me, T once wrote to me in an email after the two of us had a huge argument. College had radicalized me and I felt emboldened to point out every single thing that did not sit right with my enlightened spirit; she’d been rattled by the sudden swerve and was pushing back. I don’t know why we were hashing things out over email, not texts or a call, but somehow this was where we felt most comfortable prizing and prioritizing compassion.
My mother fell and hurt her back and therefore needed care. She and my younger brother, who was still in school, stayed with me, and my father was admitted to a hospital for depression. With both parents bedridden, I had to take study leave, T wrote of her experience of being twenty-one. Another number, one I was approaching.
She continued, Then I met your father. Thank God it was your father. It was probably not the easiest thing for him to marry a woman with such a strange personality, and he didn’t always understand me, but he stuck by and supported me and loved me above all else. Our first few years together were hard, because I wanted to do everything myself. I never accepted help or advice, because I promised myself I would never depend on a man or let him order me around.
My mom doesn’t identify as a feminist but served as my prime example of an existence not centered on men. Practically and logistically, she does not need them, and she knows it—that woman can do whatever she needs to have done. One of her favorite words is useless, and she’s not afraid to use it to clock men’s incompetence. Her response to my questioning of her aversion to the label of feminism has simply been that she doesn’t need to burn a bra to prove a point. The milieu she operates within daily doesn’t desperately require much more than that.
My dad was known as a cool guy, functioning as a fan to my mom’s hot temper. T provides this as evidence of the burdensome nature of Ouma’s visits. My dad never lost his shit, except for the time he lost his shit at my grandma—confirmation of her provocative excellence. He had told her to pack her bags and had put her on the next bus back to wherever she was living at the time. This might have been the visit where she disappeared, but I cannot be sure.
On that occasion, the one with the disappearance, she had us frantically scouring the neighborhood as we called her name and phoned everyone we knew; then she showed up hours later.
“I just went to get us takeout at the restaurant on the harbor,” she said. The bartender must have been a great conversationalist because Ouma, visibly wasted, presented us with one Styrofoam container. Inside it: a pathetic portion of fries.
Ouma’s mini-disappearance was the first time I considered death as a thing, meaning something that could happen to me. I felt touchable by the thing for as long as the crisis endured, then forgot about it and carried on with my happy little life until it eventually did touch me.
It was my dad who delivered the news. He lifted me, placed me on his knee, and said that he was sorry, but my ouma was gone. He told me this after I’d asked him why my mom looked so pissed off that day.
I have some memories that feel real enough to claim as mine. I must have been around the age of five when Ouma made the mistake of jokingly uttering the phrase “Ag man, gaan loop skuit” to me. This roughly translates to an interesting suggestion in English (“Man, go take a shit”), but “fuck off” is the gist of it.
Imitating her has and will always come naturally to me. In high school, I continually considered dyeing my hair red. In college, I started embracing her affinity for leopard print (T thinks this is tacky). When I lit a cigarette for the first time, I wondered if I did it like her. She coerced my mother into buying her the showiest gold shoulder-padded designer top for my uncle’s wedding, and I had to convince T to let me wear this same sacred plethora of sequins to my twenty-second birthday party (because it’s a sacred heirloom now). To my mom, the garments remain tacky, but they are precious.
I got my name from Ouma: a construction of syllables from her two middle names. Perhaps my mom didn’t think that one through, as the repercussions of preestablishing me as an heiress to Ouma’s chaos rest solely on herself, a formidable Afrikaans woman who knows how taxes work, is always on time, and is naturally inclined to do things by the book. I’d argue that I am at least more justified in my position as someone who grieves her. These privileges come with the territory, even when I, as a grown-ass woman, hysterically call T because I accidentally flooded my apartment (again).
At this moment, I’m a preschooler who just told my friend to get lost in the colorfully profane wordsmithery of my grandmother. I did not yet know what the phrase meant but it sounded cool because she said it and she was obviously the coolest. I get exiled to the naughty corner for the rest of the day and they put black pepper in my mouth. (A real punishment at this place—the early 2000s were crazy.) T gets informed, and unsurprisingly, my girl is on the warpath. I have to tell her where I heard the bad words, thus betraying my cherished comrade to save my own ass.
I’m in the living room when I hear the shrill cries, so I follow Ouma’s voice to the indoor garden where my mom holds her by her bony wrists.
“What is wrong with you? Why do you speak like that in front of my kid? She’s just a kid!” she begs, her voice trembling with the threat of unleashing suppressed tears.
Ouma tilts her head toward me with pitiable pusillanimity—almost comical oozing from a woman in her fifties—and snivels, “Help me, Mommy wants to hurt me.”
I feel unsettled, knowing something is off with this psychologically manipulative image, this Freaky Friday shit, but things also just are the way they are. It is unclear whether Ouma’s pleas are just her being silly, leaning into the irony of it all, or if she truly feels victimized. I’m not sure, so I don’t laugh. Instead, I go to my room and get my Barbies out.
I have two Polaroid photos, one of T and one of Ouma, that look almost identical. Their dark hair contrasts with off-white curtains and they’re both leaning forward with slightly opened mouths, mahogany eyes stretched, about to take a bite of whatever was caught by the chopsticks they were holding. I don’t know who was imitating whom, but I know that I don’t look like them. My father’s blue eyes and the light hair of his youth won the genetic duel. Their beautiful jawlines are contoured in soft focus. Ouma is on brand, wearing a leopard-print tank top. When my mom showed me these photos for the first time, her eyes glittered as she pointed out how similar she and Ouma looked, and I trusted she knew that it was true, despite what some loser uncle at the grocery store said.
T and I don’t speak about Ouma a lot, not in a serious way at least, mostly in the that-bitch-and-her-crazy-outfits kind of way. The last time we did was after we’d visited a relative of my grandfather who insinuated that my grandmother lacked intellect and couldn’t keep up with my grandpa—a man in the business world—and that was why he’d left her. My mom was fuming, teasing tears, but she remained composed until we drove away.
“He wanted her in there. You can’t force someone to stay in a house and then punish them for their ignorance. My mother was many things, but she was not stupid.” She went quiet for a while. “I can’t believe she said that. I’m so disappointed.”
One way to stay in control is to sneer at your problems as if you didn’t create them.
Once we went to pick Ouma up from the airport in the city of George, an hour and a half away from my hometown. We went to a family chain restaurant with gaudy (and culturally insensitive) decor called Spur—an emblem of middle-class South African existence that has evaded public cancellation to this day—as we did whenever we left my small town for the city. Kiddies’ meals came with balloons and Ouma encouraged me to pick one to take home. I wanted the purple one. As we walked to the car, I lost my grip and fell into despair as my balloon ascended into nothingness. A parking lot scene of little-girl heartbreak, an impulse to tantrum I still experience in adulthood. Why is it over, I wasn’t ready for it to be over.
T was relieved that her balloon grandchild skipped the journey because she hates balloons, especially the sound of them popping, and the life expectancy of a Spur balloon in the hands of a seven-year-old was about the same as that of a mayfly. I mourned the whole way home.
It was 2004, months before Ouma would surrender air to bilateral interstitial pneumonia. The white Smirnoff-labeled ashtray we owned just for these visits was neatly placed on the large porch dining table.
That night I sat on my grandma’s lap out on our porch, which overlooks the beach, one meticulously pebbled to form the rock pools that categorize our front yard as a South African national heritage site. Her embrace felt safe, as that home had remained, even after my dad was taken too.
I consider the last time I was home: the final Sunday before I returned to New York. My mom made the Christmas meal I missed: honey-glazed smoked gammon with Grandma’s sweet mustard sauce, her special crispy potatoes, leg of lamb, and roasted vegetables. T doesn’t like Christmas. She says it makes her sad. I never understood the melancholy it instilled in her, and she’s always fueled my misunderstanding by going balls to the wall and orchestrating a festive event—obsessed with doing the right thing despite her own desires, taking it upon herself to try to preserve the essence of what is meant to be joyful. Perhaps I’m starting to get it. With every passing year, it becomes more evident that things aren’t the same. I wonder if it all changed the Christmas we spent in Cape Town because Ouma’s funeral took place a few days prior. Still, a picture shows a seven-year-old self cradling her gifts like a proud parent, sporting an aggressive grin, pink cheeks perked and glazed by December heat to convey the subject’s position: Christmas is awesome.
“Pick a star, the one you think is shining the brightest,” Ouma said as her eyes shot to the mint-green box of menthol slims on the porch table as a promissory whisper that she’d be right with it.
I looked at the sky like it was serious business, then pointed to my choice. “That one’s mine.”
“Now stop being sad. There’s your balloon. It’s up there. You can see it whenever you want to.” It wasn’t a particularly sentimental act, but rather a stern command, a do-or-die attempt to mend my childish gloom and thus earn her last smoke for the day. The following nights, I dutifully stepped out onto the porch before bedtime to check on my balloon.
When my preordered copy of Britney’s memoir finally arrived at eight p.m. on its release day, my impatience had already peaked. After reading the introduction, I granted myself a quick dip into the dissatisfaction and disappointment that that nutty woman wasn’t here to finally get the whole story, Britney’s story, with me. But then, having passed in 2004, she never saw how nasty things got. She stayed long enough to witness the In the Zone era and dipped right after the release of Greatest Hits: My Prerogative and that’s honestly a great last image of Britney to be blessed with.
Some days I’ll rock up to the family function in a signature leopard-print outfit and my mom will dramatically exclaim, “Oh lord, it’s my mother. Someone go pour me a gin.” All differences considered, I certainly am that theatrical woman’s theatrical daughter.
Other times, one star in the sky will tauntingly pull my attention to it, distracting me from the questions that needle me but have lost their opportunity for answers. But I don’t linger, I return to what needs to be done. Life just keeps going and going. 
Aléna Muir is a South African writer whose work can be found or is forthcoming in Pinch, Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, and more. Her obsessions (which include friendship, scandal, pop culture, and memory) manifest as both essays and impassioned monologues in any given social setting. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Illustration: Maria Jesus Contreras.
