She went to Kenosha every weekend after that, claimed she was visiting friends. By the time she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, her butt, thighs, back, and stomach were covered. She wore sweatpants and sweatshirts. Her mother praised her for her modesty. Her father bragged to his friends that his daughter was a virgin. No one suspected that words were crawling underneath her clothes, not just Stendhal's declaration of atheism, but Karl Marx, Groucho Marx, physicists, philosophers, and other marginalia- everyone was speaking on her body.
Then, something strange happened. She was tattooed with words being spoken at that very moment. They weren't particularly monumental words: "Jimmy, get the coat." Soon, she was being tattooed with words that would not exist for days, weeks, months- even years. Where before a few lines had been added every week, now she had pages and pages of ordinary text curling up her arms and legs: "The butter is rancid; why can't you remember to put it away?" "Math sucks," "Italy's tramway system is very efficient."
Having run out of space on the hidden parts of her body, she had words tattooed in tendrils across her palms and forehead. Three weeks later, the canvas of her skin even more complete, she returned home for Thanksgiving. Her father spilled cranberry sauce down his shirt, her mother dropped the turkey, and the dog was too stunned to lick the floor. In this moment of literal collapse, my grandmother felt a rising up. Her secret was not a secret anymore. There was no longer a reason for baggy clothes. She decided to live nakedly; her tattoos, she reasoned, were clothing enough.
She was so pale, the words so vivid, that she disappeared. The first time this happened, she was helping a friend move furniture to a new apartment. My grandmother stood in front of a blank refrigerator- no magnets, no pictures- and her friend could not find her. All that was visible was the shifting of words, phrases, quotes, passages, movie scripts, jingles, lyrics, grocery lists, insults, adages, and poetry. She could not be seen against white walls, picket fences, or clean sheets. Several lovers momentarily feared that she had sloughed the ink off her body and walked away; really, she was spread-eagled in bed.
By now, my grandmother was no longer a human being. She was a collection of language, a body of literature- words appeared and disappeared, swirled across her stomach, dripped in straight lines down her shoulder blades, began on her fingernails and ended on her toenails, streamed out of her bellybutton, and pricked at her nipples. The whites of her eyes were like a teleprompter. Sentences sprouted from her head instead of hair.
Upon sitting down to read this diminutive collection, you may have perceived a strange skittering of shadows on the wall. As a rational being, you likely attributed this to the way sunlight filters through tree branches and window blinds. Perhaps, for an instant, you thought these shadows looked like words. Sometimes, we read things in spider webs, spilled salt, flower arrangements, and fallen leaves that cannot possibly be there. We know this. Our brains correct.
I am not bone-white or violet-eyed. I do not carry the albino gene. Instead, I am the liaison between a body of literature and a pigmented world. My grandmother has snuck inside, pressed herself against the wall, walked forward. You are reading her forearm at this moment, held steady above a sheet of paper. I attach my name to her shifting body- the rest has been written, is being written, will be written spoken sung listed screamed recited- perhaps by me, perhaps by someone worlds apart, language unified on her ghostly flesh.