My Grandmother Kept Lists

My grandmother kept lists of everything, and when she died we found them all. There were the normal ones. Groceries, appointments, people to call at Christmas. These were in the kitchen drawer, organized by year, rubber-banded into bundles that went back to 1987. Every Christmas card she sent had a corresponding entry: name, address, whether they'd sent one back, and a one-word assessment of the relationship. "Good." "Fine." "Fading." There was one entry that just said "Unclear," which none of us could explain, about a woman named Dorothy in Chelmsford. Then there were the others. In the hall closet, in a shoebox labeled "Shoes (winter)," which did not contain shoes: a running tally of how many times each grandchild had visited, broken down by month. I was third. My cousin Alice was first by a wide margin, but Alice lived four streets away and also my grandmother kept biscuits that Alice liked, a strategy my grandmother referred to in a separate note as "the custard cream offensive." In the bedroom, in a hardback notebook with a faded cover: a list of every book she'd read since 1972, with ratings out of ten and brief comments. Most books got a seven. Anything by Catherine Cookson got a nine. A John Grisham novel received a four and the comment "Too many lawyers." One Booker Prize winner was marked with a single word: "Nonsense." In the garage, in a tin that had once held toffees: a list of her neighbours, updated yearly, with notes on their behaviour. "Number 12: new car again. Compensating." "Number 8: dog barks at foxes. Dog is correct." "Number 15: hedge encroaching. Will mention at Easter." My mother read this one aloud at the kitchen table after the funeral, and my uncle laughed so hard he had to leave the room. She had a list of meals she'd cooked for my grandfather, spanning forty-one years of marriage, with his reactions noted in shorthand. A tick meant he'd eaten it. A cross meant he hadn't. A question mark meant he'd eaten it but complained. Most entries after 1995 had question marks. My grandfather was not an easy audience. There was a list of films she'd seen at the cinema, going back to the 1960s. She had seen Jaws three times. She'd walked out of A Clockwork Orange after twenty minutes, and her note said simply, "Absolutely not." She gave four stars to a French film none of us had heard of and wrote, "Didn't understand a word. Beautiful." Deepest in the closet, in an envelope with no label, was the strangest list. It was short. Ten items, handwritten on a single sheet of blue notepaper. Things I Have Not Told Anyone We found it. We read it. I will not repeat what was on it, because she was right not to tell anyone, and the list's existence was the telling, and that was enough. She was ninety-one when she died. The last list we found was on the kitchen counter, written the morning she went to hospital. It said: Milk Bread Call Alice Feed the cat The cat had been dead for two years. We think she knew that. We think she wrote it anyway, because the list was the thing, the putting down of words in order, the insistence that the day had a shape and the shape could be written. We kept all of them. Every list, every notebook, every tin and shoebox and rubber-banded bundle. They sit in my mother's attic in three cardboard boxes, and sometimes, when I visit, I go up there and read one. Not for information. Not to learn anything. Just to hear her voice in the handwriting, in the ticks and crosses, in the single-word verdicts on books and neighbours and a life that she recorded completely, in her own way, without telling anyone she was doing it.