On late nights, Johnny Carson, beer-soaked napkins, and the most honest person I ever knew.
I was, without question, a grandma’s girl. While other kids my age were asserting their independence and pretending not to need their families, I was perfectly content sharing a bed with Estella Pearl Bradley until I was twelve years old. No shame. Zero regrets. The woman had Nick-at-Nite and she rubbed my knees when my growing pains got bad. You don’t walk away from that.
But let me be clear about something: she was not like other grandmas. Not even a little. It was completely normal to come home from school and find her taking a break from yard work, cold beer in one hand, pickled pig’s foot in the other, very short shorts, high-heeled sandals. She was not a cookie grandma. She was Pearl. And Pearl had a vocabulary that would make a sailor pause. “Harder than a preacher’s dick.” “Wouldn’t that just frost your balls.” “Your ass is grass.” These were just things she said. Casually. In the living room.
She also drove me to swimming lessons every single week. My teacher was Carmelita Hughes, a woman who conducted lessons in the pools of old oil baron mansions across Tulsa and who did not entertain the concept of opting out. One afternoon we were supposed to jump off the diving board. I decided that was not going to happen, walked out to grandma’s car, and explained my very reasonable position.
She did not see it that way. She told me my ass was, in fact, jumping off that diving board today. And if she had to go get Miss Carmelita to push me, she would do exactly that. I knew when to admit defeat. Grandma was not going to be my ally here.
I jumped. I was proud of myself. So was she. On the way back to school she handed me a snack and a thermos of Kool-Aid, and when we pulled into the parking lot she reached into the glove box, pulled out a napkin, soaked it with her Busch beer, and wiped my face before sending me back inside. I probably smelled like a panhandler at an off-ramp. I was five years old. It remains one of my favorite memories.
The evenings had a rhythm. Dinner dishes done, grandma would pick up her glass of ice water, very innocent, very hydrated, and slip into her bedroom closet. This is where she kept the half gallon of LTD whiskey. She’d emerge with a generously poured glass that now resembled sweet tea, settle into her chair, and click on the evening news. Two people in the entire family would stick around past that point: my Uncle Johnny, and me.
“By the time Johnny Carson came on, grandma was generally hammered — and absolutely wonderful.”
What I loved most was when the TV became background noise and she started talking. Drinking grandma was honest grandma. No filters, no careful edits. Just truth. I watched a tear roll down her cheek as she described going hungry in the 1930s, and how flour companies started printing pretty patterns on their sacks so mothers could sew them into dresses for their children. I was a kid. I knew I was hearing something real.
At some point I’d eye her glass and ask for a sip. She always said the same thing: “Yeah, but you won’t like it.” I thought she was being modest, I loved iced tea, and this looked exactly like iced tea. The burn that hit the back of my throat corrected that assumption immediately. Grandma let out a little chuckle. Didn’t try to hide it. Fair enough.
One thing you did not say around grandma: “I’m bored.” That was not a safe thing to say. Before you knew it you’d be armed with a butter knife, a rag, and Murphy’s Oil Soap, standing in front of louvered doors. To this day, if I bought a house with louvered doors, I would use them as firewood.
My grandma also had your back in the ways that mattered most. When my cousin Susan came out, after leaving her husband, an army base in North Carolina, and a life that didn’t fit, she came home and told the truth about herself. My Uncle Johnny called grandma to raise hell. Grandma went off.
“John D!” — his middle name was Darcy, so that’s what she called him when she meant business, “if you didn’t know that girl was gay when she was three years old, you haven’t been paying attention. It took everything she had to leave and come home and tell you the truth. Now you will do nothing but support her. Got it?”
For context: Susan had always been the husband when we played house. She was a ninja, Freddy Krueger, or a vampire every Halloween. Dressed up for Easter, she looked like she was in drag. Grandma had been paying attention her whole life. She loved her the whole time and was ready when it counted.
One of her best friends was a gay man named Fritz, a former gourmet chef and, as she eventually told me, a very successful drag queen who made, in her words, a beautiful woman. I didn’t see it. I thought he looked like a toad. But he came to stay during the holidays, helped in the kitchen, and I resented him deeply, not for any of that, but because he slept in grandma’s bed and I did not appreciate the competition or what he could be doing to her in there unsupervised! When I admitted this to her, she laughed, explained that Fritz was gay, and assured me that if he were to touch her silky drawers, it would only be to find out where he could buy some. That settled it. I grew to love Fritz.
My grandma put a full face of makeup on every single day. So do I, even when I don’t leave the house. She wore a ring on every finger. So do I. I didn’t inherit these things consciously. I just became her, in the ways that count.
What I didn’t understand until much later was what she had survived to become who she was. Her husband’s suicide. Her boyfriend’s suicide. Losing everything, and then picking up the broken pieces and making something beautiful she could be proud of. I never understood her contentment with being single, her self-sufficiency, her refusal to be defeated by the world. I do now. The same things that happened to her happened to me. And I found myself on the other side of it the same way she did, choosing beauty over bitterness. Loving hard. Rebuilding.
She prepared me for life. She gave me skills, practical, emotional, spiritual, many of my closest friends simply don’t have, because I was raised by her hands. She didn’t want me soft. She wanted me skilled, independent, and strong. That is exactly what I am.
She died in our pink house in Broken Arrow, surrounded by the people she loved, one week after my son was born. My ex-husband Steven raced us to the house so we could say goodbye. My son had come a month early, like he knew. The day before I went into labor, my mom was crying in the kitchen telling me grandma was holding on to meet him. I told her she couldn’t put that on me. I had no control over that. I went into labor that night.
I named him Bradley. After her. Estella Pearl Bradley. There are things I want to stop with me, patterns, inherited pain, generational nonsense. But his name is not one of them. His name stands for a woman who gave me stability in crazy times, taught me how to take care of myself and my family, and loved me with everything she had.
I still feel it, universes away.
This past weekend I stayed with my mom’s best friend Rhonda, they had been friends since they were eight. She talked about my grandma and said she was the only person who ever made her feel truly welcome. Like she belonged there from day one. My best friend Jessica, who I’ve known for thirty years, says the same thing. Grandma loved her too, folded her in, bought her favorite snacks, made room. That was just who she was.
When I was little I wanted a cookie grandma. Not the kind who cleans your face with beer. But now? I wouldn’t trade her for anything in this world. She was exactly what I needed, even when I didn’t know it yet.
Five minutes before she took her last breath, I leaned close and told her:
“I am so proud of you. And so proud to be from you.”
Estella Pearl Bradley
Cold beer. High heels. Rings on every finger. A heart with room enough for everyone.
Happy Mother’s Day, Grandma. I love you wherever you are.
Rock Bottom Was Only The Lobby 