Heavy Cream

The week after we ransacked my grandmother’s house for bounty, we drove back to Maple Falls to attend as guests my grandmother’s memorial at the Northwest Hills Community Church. One thing my mother never shied from was a long-haul drive. We hurtled up Route 542, shadowed by Mount Baker. The mountain was a dormant volcano that had been a glacier, and I felt my mother becoming more agitated as she moved in the direction of the hot flow of home.

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She turned up the dial for a song we liked, and that I felt was a pep talk for both of us Sloopies. Hang on, Sloopy, Sloopy, hang on!

She was a lawless driver, always, calm as a clam in gridlock, backing through an intersection to avoid circling the block. She would run red lights, not slowing down on a yellow, saying it “felt like a green.” Chances were: no traffic cop, just a consortium of resentful fellow citizens, blaring their horns. These small transgressions added up to a sense of ourselves as special, exempt from the rules—but also disliked, distrusted, untrustworthy, apart.

Arriving at the church, we were directed to the worship hall. We slipped past a few people in navy suits, then faltered, uncertain where to sit. We had worn thrift-shop black, subtly faded over time to slate. An elderly woman in a proper ink-black dress and modest, sensible heels motioned us over and led us down the aisle, inviting us to sit in the pair of waiting chairs just opposite the pulpit.

At the front of the church, the projector hummed. And there, fussing with the remote as it cycled through the same four or five images of my grandmother, smiling and waving, with our same pale eyes, holding a pie, was my aunt Nell. She sniffed as she made her way back to her seat from behind the lectern. I snuck glances but managed to avoid her eyes. I felt that if I met them, I might turn to stone or worse.

“Of course she’s making a show,” my mother whispered. “As if she’s such a sensitive flower.”

My mother and I did not cry. It would have been unseemly to feign sadness. I tried to imagine what grief would feel like, if I could feel it. Perhaps like one’s heart crisply split in two, spilling its squelched juices, like the baobab fruit broken open by the stylish monkey in The Lion King, my favorite vintage cartoon.

My grandmother had been devoutly Christian, if not always practicing in the usual ways. Her sleepy house was dusty and silent, peppered with doves and angels in a gray tinged orange my mother called terra-cotta. They looked to me like they should be outside, activated to a rich color by rain, rather than turning stale gray on her shelf. I hadn’t set eyes on them, or her statuary, since my mother had severed contact after the dispute over our house— the house my mother had believed rightfully ours.

From what I could gather, my mother, having seized upon the idea of home ownership, had scrolled the classifieds for a few weeks and landed on a suitable two bedroom with a down payment she was just short of, the way that with her it was always just. My grandmother had said something like, “I want to help you buy it,” which my mother had interpreted to mean she was buying it for her and proceeded on this assumption. Once the illusion was punctured, she’d called off the moving van—swallowing the late cancellation fee that the customer-service line refused to waive or reduce, no matter how she pleaded about an unforeseeable emergency—and then did not speak to her mother for five years.

The rift between my mother and her sister, Nell, was something more nebulous, harder to trace. I was primed, on the lookout for the inevitable confrontation between my mother and Nell, an artist who lived in New York. The sense I had of her was that she was smart, quirky, quiet. Edgy and cerebral. Otherwise occupied. I’d met her only a handful of times. There had been a period of reconciliation, a fragile truce between the two sisters, in my kindergarten year. Nell had not fared any better with their mother than my own mother had, a fact that alone had been enough to reunite the sisters periodically, bound by a shared experience—and then, confronted by how their experience had differed, finish in a spectacular falling-out. I always felt that my aunt liked the idea of children but wouldn’t have known what to do with me for long.

“It wasn’t entirely Nell’s fault,” my mother acknowledged. She said that their mother set them at odds as children. She was intensely jealous. “She felt we did not love her enough for her to allow us to love each other. We had, for a time, anyway, in spite of her. I was my sister’s protector.”

Once, apparently, my aunt had tried to shove my infant mother off their mother’s lap. Supposedly, my grandmother had hankered for a son, having ingested the belief that boys were naturally devoted to their mothers. She was wearily certain that her daughters were uninterested in her.

“She’d say to us, ‘You girls would cry anytime I held you. You didn’t like me.’”

I wished she had held her tongue. Maybe things would have been different. All this patter, and now she was gray dust.

In my early memories, my grandfather had smelled like carpet cleaner. If I asked, “What about Grandpa?” my mother would shudder. “It’s so weird to hear you call him that, Jellybean. He just sort of dissociated. Grandma was the only one present in the household.”

My mother felt that anyone—namely her best friend from college, Bonnie Vowell, who had landed in Connecticut, and her sister, Nell—who moved to New York had a certain presumption. It was where you went if you fancied yourself too fabulous to live

anyplace else. If you felt you’d be able to make a mark in a markworn place. If you needed not just a Fifth Avenue at your disposal but a Broadway to boot.

“Nell always felt superior because she had this thing she did”— my mother meant art—“like she was God’s gift to creation, like she had a direct channel to something more meaningful than my own daily existence, like she was plugged into something real, while I was just walking around, dumb and unenlightened.”

I felt burned, angry on my young mother’s behalf. “Saint Nell,” I said, mockingly making the sign of the cross.

“Believe me,” my mother said. “It was really stifling to grow up around that.”

“I bet.”

She said their mother had bought Nell’s posturing. “That’s something you should know about people, Jelly. They believe what they’re told. If you tell people what you do is important, they believe it.”

Though my mother meant it pejoratively, I logged this idea—that others’ perception of a person could be established so simply. And I used it, too. At school, I told the other kids that we were from a fine old family out east. I made hazy reference to my esteemed aunt Nell. I hinted that we’d been shipping heirs, that my mother had refused her inheritance out of moral objection. And they swallowed it whole.

Spinning my yarns, fleecing my classmates, gave me no pause. I was the Lady Eve, a character of reinvention from another of my grandmother’s VHSes. I was Miley Cyrus peeling off her Hannah Montana wig and straddling a wrecking ball. It was fraudulent, but it was fun.

“Nell clung to art,” my mother said, “because it helped her avoid seeing what was right in front of her. Me, I preferred to keep my eyes open. There’re repercussions for that. But at least I knew what was real.”

I thought I could see what had happened between them. Life opened like a zipper, separating them painfully at first, notch by notch, then faster, wider, until the garment lay split in two. Nell chose Art. What had my mother chosen? Freedom? Motherhood? Or had she just drifted along?

“Anyway, don’t talk to her.”

I could tell my mother was uneasy about having left the funeral arrangements to her sister by the way she vented over Nell’s decisions, errors of judgment she wanted it known she herself would never have made. “Those corpse-green ranunculus wouldn’t have been my doing, but then Nell has always had a distinctive sensibility.” She cut her eyes toward me. “Might have been the quaaludes in the eighties.”

I watched Nell closely, looking for any trace of those quaaludes at work. With my mother, sometimes there was a seed of truth. Nell was wearing black Converse sneakers.

“They look like clown shoes,” my mother whispered. “With those rubber tips. Clown shoes to her mother’s memorial.”

I was eleven but I looked, say, nine. Which is to say I looked like someone people felt they needed to take care of. We found this useful. I was small and I could get under things, gathering coins from beneath a chewing-gum rack. I could order off the kids’ menu. I had a hand in this. My mother liked it when I was babyish, soft and dependent, infantile.

On most topics and especially that of my aunt, my mother instituted our opinions. I wouldn’t have known how to begin to form one of my own. Still, I’d worried. What if Nell, after all these years, was alluring? Someone with the same disregard for convention as my mother, but one who’d channeled that subversiveness into something successful? As with my mother, I had no sense whatsoever what I might expect of her.

Afterward, there was coffee out of paper cups in the meeting hall. It was customary, we were told, for the family to stand at the back of the church and greet the attendees, what number there were. The projector blinked off.

My aunt greeted me politely, from a distance. The thing about the kind of hair we all had was that even with your hair pulled back you could always see it. You couldn’t forget yourself. I gave my aunt a small smile to indicate I did not carry my mother’s old grievances. But I wasn’t certain she noticed. Nell didn’t seem to give much thought to people, not even to herself, out of devotion to her creative pursuit. She never used my name. Sometimes, I wondered if she knew it.

My mother had no choice but to acknowledge her sister. They inched toward each other, landing at each other’s side. They had both tried to pin back their frizzy hair, neither successfully. “Nice flowers,” she said.

“You think I would order those cabbagey ranunculus?” Nell said. Her lips were thin, where mine and my mother’s were full. As if she’d tasted something she didn’t like. “They smell like feet.”

My mother nodded; so she’d been wrong. After both sisters had abdicated planning the memorial, logistical matters—the casket and its transport, the readings, and, yes, the flowers—had fallen to the front desk volunteer of a church my grandmother no longer attended. I felt slighted by my delinquent grandmother. I had the impression that she had done something negligent. Rather than be accountable and considerate, here she was, dead, without a plan.

We were interrupted, introduced to the young pastor who’d led the service. He patted my head. Seeming to grasp something about us, he shared that the church held secular community events: local author readings and a pancake breakfast. If we were around for a few days, we might be interested. My mother said she hated pancakes.

Taking this as his cue, he excused himself, leaving my mother and me no choice but to join the dwindled remaining group, what I understood to be a patchy few friends and a small number of our distant relatives, which included her sister. There was a table of instant coffee in Styrofoam cups, individual creamers, and boxes of Entenmann’s mini muffins, but neither woman took a plate. Nell listened with polite interest as they traded in fond, if fading, memories. There were words of gentle affection about my grandmother’s habit of fishing candies out of her purse, and soft laughter about how she never quite got the pastor’s name right. It was Rodney, but she was set on Richard. “In time, we all just called him Pastor Richard, too, so she wouldn’t feel embarrassed. I think even he began to get a little confused!”

My mother did not crack a smile. I watched as she made a decision. She turned to Nell. “Remember when she threw away your journals and told you I’d done it?”

The small assembled group shifted in their chairs. I could smell the sour ranunculus, carried in from the worship hall.

Nell was quiet. “I don’t want to think about that right now.”

My mother snorted. “I’m sure you don’t.”

Nell slumped lower in her chair. “Don’t start.”

I stayed very quiet. I, too, hoped my mother wouldn’t start. I was invested in her staying steady—steadyish, at least. We were a package deal. If she was sometimes a witch, what did it matter when our shared broomstick was the only splinter of wood keeping me from plunging solo through the atmosphere?

“She treated us like dirt,” my mother continued.

Nell made a gesture that implied she was ceding the floor. “Here we go.”

I thought of my grandmother, on the projector, holding out her pie.

“She was not a mother, really.”

“Folks,” Nell addressed my grandmother’s next-door neighbors, “the wine hasn’t even started flowing.”

Yet my mother was not a drinker. She was simply a person committed to, and proud of, blurting out whatever came into her head, unfiltered like a gutter so clogged it overflowed, no matter how inconvenient the timing. It was a quality I often admired. I was humiliated now, but I was also my mother’s daughter. It catered to what, even then, I could identify as my budding pre-teenage sensibility. How she spoke her mind, how she did not behave like everyone else. So long, of course, as she kept it within suitable bounds.

My mother turned an ice-cold eye on Nell. We all felt the chill.

“Oh, because you’ve made peace, right? No, you haven’t. You’ve revised history, and that’s a trap. One that will come and bite you in the ass.”

Elderly couples surrounded us in somber ceremony, each of them in seats clustered close to one another, some holding hands, their fingers dusted in crumb cake. People who did not find tact and courtesy a challenge, who kept things simple. My grandmother had been one of the flock. She had died, and she deserved remembrance.

“Let’s rein it in a little,” Nell said with a quick smile. It seemed impossible that the two women, Nell ready with her reins, my mother unbridled, shared the same gene pool. That they’d grown up in the same house. “Let’s do this score-settling later.”

The truth was, my fancy New York artist aunt was a disappointment to me. She should have been fabulous. It was a near miss. She didn’t look like she was having fun. She was passive aggressive, and it felt like she had a millstone around her neck.

“There’s a reason it’s called a memorial,” my mother said. “I have a right to remember her as she was, in all her damaging complexity.”

Nell, in one last attempt to curtail her, said, “I think you’ve made your point.”

An old lady engaged me, probably thinking that a child shouldn’t hear this about her grandmother, thinking it was the first time my unsullied ears were hearing the adult version of events. “Do you like crumb cake?”

I nodded. I was good at this. If she only knew what I’d heard.

As we entered Corvallis, the Diamante was held up for a passing display. It was a marching band. The drum majors leading the procession were wearing polyester shirts emblazoned Tumwater Middle School. I was overcome by a flare of hostility toward the parade for the delay. My mother resented jazz, it was pretentious. But she bopped along with the pep-rally beat. It took three or so minutes for them to pass. Enough time for me to register that the stab I’d felt was something other than simple irritation with the unsolicited display. This idling and sweaty ill-assorted lot belonged to something, I thought, as the last of the trundling tubas cleared the intersection, joined together in practice and ritual, filing off in lockstep. They had something I didn’t.

“See how she behaves toward me . . .” my mother began to ask at home, grief turning to grudge, her ultimate takeaway from the afternoon. She had her pen in hand, her tongue between her teeth in concentration. She was drafting an interpersonal map, a tool she returned to now and then, summarizing her relationships on a single page. “. . . sanctimonious, as if she’s a realized person and I’m not.”

I knew what she was doing. She was trying to make sense of things. A circle with “me/Helene” was fixed directly at the center, the axis around which the web of conflicts radiated. One offshooting arrow led to Nell, another to their mother. A few others to the usual suspects, the village of our lives, revolving around her. I noticed that I wasn’t listed. I was that much a part of her that I didn’t warrant consideration.

*

Nighttime was the bad time. I distrusted her fun. Once, after a seizure of merrymaking, she woke me up. She swore that she felt bugs crawling on her scalp, but neither of us could find anything. Who knew, she might even have seen them. Former landlords lurked in bushes or on roofs or waited in cars outside our home. She made people so vengeful that sometimes I wondered if these apparitions weren’t in fact real. I thought of the neighbor who had leaned out of his window and called down as I was leaving for school: “Hey, little girl, your mom is a bitch!”

I’d seen that with my own eyes. Hadn’t I?

By the time I’d turned ten, joining her in those fateful double digits, I saw her through a veil of sanity that had grown between us.

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From Heavy Cream by Sarah Blakley-Cartwright. Used with permission of the publisher, Simon & Schuster. Copyright © 2026 by Sarah Blakley-Cartwright.