They were in my mother’s garage, packed into a cardboard box and left to the nuclear heat of Florida, the bugs, storms, and humidity. How long have they been in here? I asked my mother, and she said, Must be about two years since he kicked the bucket. The tone, the imprecision—I didn’t know anyone else less enamored of a dead parent than she to her father.
She had forgotten about the slides and spotted them while digging up toys to amuse my daughter at the pool. I tried to calm my distress at their conditions with the simple joy of their discovery. What I wanted to tell my mother was, As a professional archivist, I think this treatment counts, at least, as a criminal misdemeanor.
But as a daughter, I said, Let’s get these slides inside.
#
My mother was the one to clean out his house after my grandfather died. I’m sure she did it with aplomb. She is a terrific cleaner of things. Thorough. Fastidious. Merciless, even. In our household, a fingerprint would not remain long on a windowpane. Countertops sparkled. Cleanliness was a moral victory. Mess was chaos and chaos was a lack of control and a lack of control was an invitation for catastrophe, and these anxieties had replicated for generations through the genetic coil of my maternal line. The prospect of failure loomed high, always. Failure to please, failure to succeed. I rarely felt relaxed. I don’t remember many lazy days. I do remember lists of chores. I remember vacuuming, mowing the lawn, triggering the Windex to rain across the sunlit rooms of our big suburban house. In my thirties I finally started taking medication for anxiety and now I don’t worry if there are clothes on the floor. They are simply clothes on the floor. Anxiety was not just a feeling but a diagnosis. You could open a book and find it there. For the first time I was thrilled to know that something was wrong with me. I hadn’t understood that I had an illness and therefore hadn’t known I could be cured.
#
My grandfather had died the day after Christmas. Cardiac arrest. He got out of bed in the middle of night, probably for a glass of water. Suffice it to say he never got it. (His father had died of the same cause at the same age, 76.) I happened to be at my mother’s house in Florida for the holidays. The morning he died, my mother emerged from her room, clutching her phone as if it were a stone tablet fallen miraculously from the sky. You’re not going to believe it, she said to me. My father’s dead. Nobody cried. I was an atheist but nevertheless imagined God welcoming him into heaven with that glass of water.
#
But would my grandfather go to heaven? When I was growing up, I was taught that he was bad. This was impressed upon me as routine truth, the way we are taught to brush our teeth or comb our hair, as if I should accept these parcels of information without question because why would there be any question? He had been a bad husband. He had been abusive to my grandmother. They split when my mother was in high school and my grandmother was left to fend for herself economically, which never did quite work out. She would go on to have another husband, and then another. Imagine Blanche Dubois in Buffalo, if Blanche had married in Las Vegas and then slowly run the guy into the ground. My grandmother was an alcoholic. She called her glass of straight vodka a martini. This, too, was in the genetic rope, which I remember every night when I am drinking my wine.
#
My mother would describe her departure from Buffalo, at age 18, as an escape. She fled to Florida, got a job as a waitress at a sports bar. She dated a mechanic who was locally famous for his radio show. She met my dad, a construction worker. They married. He built her a tiny house. My mother told me that my grandfather showed up at her door a few weeks after I was born. Knock, knock. Surprise, he said. I moved to Florida.
#
I was taught that my grandfather was spoiled rotten by his mother. He was an only child. My mother theorized that his parents wed shotgun style, that their union was devoid of passion. My great-grandfather was handsome and my great-grandmother was called plain Jane. She funneled all her love and attention to her only son, and this ruined him. In my family’s calculation, overwhelming love weakened a person. You needed to know you only mattered so much. But my grandfather would grow up unable to cope with a world indifferent to his exalted stature.
#
I was taught that he was racist and sexist; both were facts I could determine myself, empirically, even by third grade. Neither quality is surprising to find in a white male raised in the 1940s; it’s more a matter of how vocal they are. His highest compliment to me was always that I looked like a million bucks. Because of him I knew what was wrong—I had his clear example. In that way his effrontery was a gift. I never needed convincing about the darkness of our society. In this sense, we amount to who our ancestors were not just as much as we amount to who they were.
#
I was taught he had been a bad father. I was told stories. One story is that, after the divorce, he drove my teenage mother out to a desolate parking lot and screamed at her that his life’s collapse was all her fault. This story especially terrified me as a kid, because once a month my parents dropped my brother and me off at his house to have some time to themselves. Would this be the weekend he snapped? But he never did snap. We ate candy and watched old Westerns on television. He took us to the neighborhood pool, which had a corkscrew slide. We went to Disney World and he bought us ice cream shaped like a mouse.
#
I am a film archivist. I source old footage and images for documentaries, usually aired on public television. I can talk to you at length about Library of Congress collections. I get a kick out of census records. I am known to pop into cemeteries just to have a look around at the details on the graves. Since I specialize in dusty old things, I would’ve wanted to clean out his house myself. I was there the day after he died, after the ambulance had taken away his body, which I declined to see when given the option. I marveled at the casual ease with which I was offered this choice, like a waiter asking if I want bread with my meal. Since he had few friends around, and he hadn’t spoken with his family in years, there would be no funeral, just a cremation. People talk about cremation as a convenient alternative to burial but the thought of it troubles me. I have lived an entire life, the least I deserve is a headstone to say, I am here, a little space for my body to decompose at its own pace.
#
I went to his empty house the day he died and started rifling through drawers, files. Difficult as he was alive, in his death I appreciated my grandfather’s impulse to keep everything and keep it orderly. This was a first-time feeling, vis-à-vis him. Gratitude. I was never taught that one. In his house I found my great-grandfather’s US Army documents from World War II. Stacks of his black-and-white snapshots from Japan. Certificates, supposedly, for shares of uranium ore purchased in the 1950s. A stamp collection. A thimble collection. A spoon collection. A stamp collection. A gun collection. I imagined scanning everything and editing it into a narrative, a slow pan across the studio portrait of my grandfather dressed as a five-year-old cowboy with holster at his hip and bandana tied around his neck. I could hear the voiceover. As a child he was taught a John Wayne style of masculinity. He was taught. He was taught. I was taught, I was taught. At what point, among the sweeping power of our influences, does accountability begin? I don’t believe anyone has the answer to this question. The older I get, the more I believe it might be that question which underlies everything, all human thought and emotion, all our art, politics, religion, commerce. Anyway, I could’ve spent days in that house, but I had to get back to work in New York, so it was my mother who cleared everything away and sold it. The house was sold to a contractor who gutted it, stripped the walls of the wood paneling, tore away the glorious 1970s gold-flecked wallpaper and painted everything white. He bulldozed the garden, dismantled the flagpole where my grandfather raised and lowered, every day, an American flag. Afterwards I got a check. This was my inheritance.
#
I carried the boxes of slides into the living room, then the projector. The projector had also been stored in the garage. Its condition was dubious. Perhaps it would electrocute me when I plugged it into the wall, and that would enter the family’s great oral tradition of denigrating my grandfather, because that, too, would be his fault. The slide boxes looked up at me like grimacing mouths, the slides cocked like crooked teeth. I had spent years working with the artifacts of other people’s families. This time I was handling my own. We plugged the projector into the wall, flipped the switch, and it rattled to life. My mother reached for a box of slides. Alright, she said. Let’s go.
#
What was I expecting to find in those slides? I suppose, as always, they would reveal some great insight into the subject’s identity. This is the splendor of archives: people obfuscate but, in the compendium of physical records we can attempt to piece together something like the truth, which is itself always a negotiation. To recognize truth you have to recognize the lies.
#
My shrink had to convince me for over a year before I’d touch medication. You don’t know what you don’t know, she told me. I argued that humanity had managed long enough without a pharmaceutical boost. All that DNA—miles and miles and miles of chains that lowered me to earth. I told her that cavemen didn’t have Prozac. She told me that if I had high cholesterol, I’d take medication. Why would treating my brain be any different? I talked myself back and forth from the edge of life until I realized a day could come where I might not be able to talk to myself anymore, that eventually I’d run out of words. Perhaps I wasn’t jumping off the precipice, but I was on a downward slope. I had two children. I wanted to watch them grow. I wanted to take them to Disney and buy them rodent-shaped ice cream. I wanted to know what I didn’t know. I started an SSRI and within a few weeks everything changed. Why hadn’t I consented years earlier? Why hadn’t my mother? My grandmother? We could’ve hurt ourselves and our families so much less. In my broken brain SSRI stands for so sorry.
#
One after another, the slides soared through the white light and onto my mother’s wall. Years and years of photos, most of which he had taken himself. My mother narrated. That was our house on Kelly Street, she said. We built that house. That yellow color, though. Look at the decorations. I remember that carpet, and the wainscotting. We used to roller skate on that patch of cement. Look at Grandma. She was always serving him. I remember the day we brought that couch home from the store. I broke that ash tray. Those were the neighbor kids. That was our dog, Victoria, wasn’t she cute? My mother made me that dress, I picked out the fabric. I remember that vacation. That restaurant is still open. Oh, I remember that boy, he got hit by a truck. What were we all wearing? It was the Seventies. These slides are too damaged to see anything. Guess we’ll never know what that one was.
#
So, what do you think, my mother asked me as she yanked the electric cord. I thought about it for a few seconds. You always had to be careful with the words you gave my mother. It was impossible me for me to square the man I had been taught with the man who took these pictures. He seemed to me like a guy who had loved his family. Nobody ever told me that he’d loved them. That’s not everything but it’s certainly not nothing. I didn’t tell my mother that I wished she would’ve taken her thumb off the scale, even just a bit, when it came to my grandfather. Even if he was an asshole. Even if he was bad or wrong. I remembered the last time I saw him, years earlier, when I knocked on his front door and he didn’t recognize me. He had looked at me like I was trying to sell something. I never introduced him to my children. Suddenly the conditions I had accepted as status quo appeared tragic. I have a friend whose mother died. My friend told me that our relationship with someone who has died doesn’t end. The person may end but the relationship continues. I could never get back what I lost with my grandfather but I could keep trying to understand him, and this effort would fold itself into my life, the life that I pass on to my own children, who are getting old enough to think about their lineage. My daughter keeps asking, Where am I from? I want to tell her, you are the culmination of everything that had ever happened until the moment you were conceived.
#
I thought of the man behind the camera, snapping these pictures and having no idea that fifty years later he’d be a pile of ashes while his estranged offspring dragged his finest memories out of a hot garage. I had compassion for this man. In his slides I saw Christmas mornings, family camping trips, beach trips. Backyards. Bicycles. Blue skies turned brown, degraded by time. I could smell the sunscreen and the cigarette smoke. There were dozens of photos of my grandfather’s cars. His Harley. His road trips with his biker buddies. Pictures of my grandmother at my age, her helmet hair bleached blond and long legs dangling over her chair. Parties. So many parties. Parties in basement bars, snow piled high outside the windows. My grandmother’s siblings and aunts and uncles and cousins, cups full of beer and liquor. They all drank so much. They were all trying to forget something at the same time they were trying—with a camera—to remember. This, too, is my inheritance.
~
Megan Peck Shub is a producer who has won Emmy and Peabody awards for her work at Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on HBO. Her work has appeared in the Missouri Review, Salamander, Electric Literature, STORY, New York Magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among other publications. She is a fiction editor at STORY magazine.