T H E
H A M I L T O N S T O N E R E V I E W
Fall 2010 (Issue No. 22)
Fiction
J. Linn Allen
Sharp Objects
“I can’t believe you let me have scissors. Daddy would go crazy.”
Melinda glanced involuntarily at the scars on Jennifer’s right wrist, careless swipes, as if she’d only been trying to see if the knife worked.
Jennifer bought her hand up against her chin, shielding her wrist and flirtatiously half-hiding her grin. “I’m not supposed to have sharp objects,” she said.
“Go ahead. I’ve got my eye on you.”
“That’s okay then,” said Jennifer, giving a semi-twirl with the yellow handled scissors up in the air. She wore a sheath dress of a similar yellow that bore the imprints of her protruding hip and shoulder bones. As usual, her clothes emphasized her unnatural attenuation.
She began cutting marking title and price labels for Melinda’s paintings to go in the art fair that weekend. They were all of women alone, leaning forward or backward in long dresses, walking dogs, poised on chair with legs crossed and holding drinks or cigarettes, some looking like Melinda, with straight chestnut hair falling around a long, high-cheekboned face, though Jennifer had never seen Melinda wearing anything but paint-spattered jeans and sweatshirts.
Jennifer’s favorite showed a woman from behind lying on a green sofa wearing a burgundy slip, bare legs spread lazily, one arm thrown back, another trailing on the floor next to a wine bottle. A pack of cigarettes lay on the floor and a cat peeked around from behind the sofa. She wrote out the title, “Saturday Night” and the price, $650.
“You should charge more,” she said.
“I want to get rid of it,” said Melinda, producing from Jennifer a moue.
“I want to get rid of this one,” said Jennifer, waving at a portrait of herself, her blond hair rippling to her shoulders from an oversize sailor’s cap made of an old newspaper. That was one thing she’d learned to do in the hospital during Melinda’s art therapy class. It was supposed to help keep paint out of her hair, and required no cutting to make, just folding.
“It’s my favorite,” said Melinda. “But I’ll sell it if someone wants it. Then I can paint another one.”
Jennifer mugged and framed her face with her thumbs and forefingers. “Look at me, Mommy,” she said.
“I never stop,” said Melinda.
“Who is she?” said Jennifer, turning back to the woman on the green sofa. “That’s the sofa,” she added, pointing to its original in the studio, “but that’s not you.”
Melinda was in her mid-30s and the woman on the sofa was at least 10 years younger, and had jet black hair and a fuller face. Jennifer couldn’t imagine purposeful Melinda lazing around in a slip anyway.
“Just someone.” Her voice rose to a chirpy tone, rousing Jennifer’s interest.
“Was she from the hospital too? What happened to her?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her for a while.” Melinda hopped off the stool where she had sat sketching and went over to her workbench. She picked up an exacto knife and started paring a paintbrush.
“Did Daddy know about her?”
“I don’t know, and stop calling Dr. Karpatz Daddy. He’s your shrink, not your father.”
“Are you angry? Don’t make me go away.”
Melinda put down the knife, walked over to Jennifer and hugged her, feeling the hipbones press against her and smelling her hair infused with the ambient tang of paint.
“No,” she said. “But if you’re finished with the scissors you’d better put them down now.”
The Noise from Ganymede
We’d heard before about the war between the moons of Jupiter, but didn’t take much notice. Why would Laurie and I care about the enmity between Ganymede and Callisto, or the treachery of Io?
At first I thought it was one of Annie’s computer game addictions. She and her friend Chrysanthemum (some parents are insane) used to spend every afternoon in Chryssie’s basement playing on the computer, and Annie would come home humming game theme music and pick it out on the piano. Then all of a sudden Chryssie was incurably retarded and Annie stopped going there. I never really understood what happened.
Annie began staying in her room after school, apparently napping, but she seemed to be tired all the time, though insisting she wasn’t. Her eyes were red, and she was either quiet or talked too fast.
That’s when we started hearing more about Jupiter’s moon. Ganymede was becoming a serious threat to the solar system, having conquered Callisto, which had bounteous natural resources Ganymede could use to expand its war machine.
Annie is a lovely child, with a long, oval face with somber brown eyes and a curtain of dark brown hair that parts to show a sharpish nose that seemed shaped to poke around with curiosity. But she’s been delicate, prey to a variety of immunological disorders which turned her body against itself. For two years, starting when she was 6, she had racking bouts of vomiting and diarrhea, became spectrally thin, suffered pink-eye and lost hair. After many frustrating doctor visits, a regimen of corticosteroids and diet changes helped some, gave Laurie and me some dim hope. Then one week when Annie was 8 the symptoms magically disappeared. After a month we stopped the medication and actually went to a service at the Unitarian Church a couple blocks away to give thanks, even though we weren’t members.
It was about that time that Annie became friends with Chryssie, which was a big deal because up until then she’d been pretty much isolated. Laurie and I kept telling each other how amazing it was that Annie had become a completely different girl, eager and excited and above all befriended. We felt like a plane crash that hadn’t taken place.
So we were concerned about the breakup with Chryssie but so relieved her worst symptoms hadn’t come back that we didn’t fret unduly. If her eyes were red, well, she was probably sad about being alone again. We didn’t want to pry. She was a certifiably healthy girl going through a phase. She and Chryssie would get back together, or there would be someone else. She – and we – had been through much worse. As for Ganymede and the other moons – who could get through life without fantasy, particularly a child?
One night I woke up about 3 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep. I was heading down to the kitchen to warm up some milk when I decided on impulse to look in on Annie, hoping the sight of her beauty relaxed in sleep would soothe me. But she wasn’t asleep. I apologized automatically for not knocking, but she didn’t seem to notice.
She was sitting in her blue plaid pajamas cross-legged on the bed, back against the wall. Even in the dark I could see her eyes were wide open.
“Hey, Annie,” I whispered. “Is something wrong? Why are you up?”
“I have to save you,” she said in an unnaturally low voice.
I sat down next to her. “Save me from what?”
“Ganymede is going to attack Earth,” she said. “I have to be on guard to sound the alarm.”
“How do you know about this?”
“I get messages from rebel forces on Callisto. They’re trying to warn us.”
“How do you get messages?”
“Dad, they’re on the air constantly. Can’t you hear them?”
“No, actually.”
“I guess you’re not listening.”
I stifled a laugh, then stared at her narrow face intently. She stared back unflinching. I fought a wave of panic. Then I lifted my head and pretended to be listening hard, another sentinel on the battlement. “I think you’re wrong about Ganymede,” I said finally.
“Why? Did you hear something?”
“Not exactly. But I think the noise from Ganymede may not be war preparations. I think they’re celebrating.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what they do on Ganymede. Banquets, festivities, they party a lot.”
“Dad, you’re trying to trick me.”
“No, I swear. They’ve been known forever for partying on Ganymede.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
In the silence a cat wailed, startling us both. Annie giggled.
“Okay. Cool,” she said. She threw her arms around me in an awkward, swoopy hug, and then fell back against her pillow. “I’m going to sleep now,” she said.
“Me too,” I said. I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek, catching the scent of fresh bloom underneath the acrid sweat of a body up too late.
Laurie was still asleep when I got back in bed. I thought about what I’d have to tell her in the morning, what we might have to do or not do. I listened for signals from somewhere.
Roberta Allen
Instead
It’s not easy to write about my first trip to Panama because I went there with a close friend I didn’t speak to for nearly a year afterwards, and although I want to write honestly about the trip to Panama--the casino in Panama City where she gambled and won, the oil-slick water on the way to the island whose name I forget, the mountain of garbage above the quaint village of wooden shacks and glorious flowers growing in profusion, the giant frogs leaping in the dark, the vultures devouring a dead dog on the beach below her hotel room--I don’t want to say anything bad about my close friend, anything that might endanger our friendship because, in retrospect, I was probably as crazy if not crazier than she was, since we are both independent and strong-willed, which is probably why we both prefer to travel alone, something we should have taken into consideration before blindly embarking on a trip to Panama. This is why I am writing, instead, about an earlier road trip I took through the Southwest with my ex-boyfriend (who was then my boyfriend), a trip that was nearly as disastrous as my first trip to Panama with my close friend, but I can write about this trip because my ex-boyfriend is unlikely to take my story as seriously as my close friend would, especially now that he has another girlfriend, who still worries about his friendship with me but this is irrelevant to the story I am about to tell except to say that my ex gives me a lot of slack, meaning that because he still cares he allows me to say and do things that might anger or hurt someone else, though he may complain about my exaggerating certain details, to which I will reply that this is only a story, but I am not exaggerating when I say that my ex liked (and still likes) to move quickly and cover a lot of territory in a short period of time whereas I preferred and still prefer to visit only a few places and get to know them well, but because he had a limited number of vacation days--he did not have the luxury of wealth, poverty, or self-employment--he could not stay as long as he pleased. Being the more experienced traveler and a decade older than my ex, I felt I should decide where to go but since he had lived in the Southwest and he was the driver--I had let my license lapse since I had never learned to drive despite passing my test in Tennessee years before just by turning on the left and right “blinkas”when driving around the block--my ex decided that he should plan our itinerary, which infuriated me, as we whizzed through Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, stopping at spectacular canyons, one after another, whose names I had hardly learned--and have now completely forgotten--before we were back on the road and on to the next, at speeds that almost made me believe the sights might vanish from the earth if we didn’t get to see them fast enough. The place that wasn’t The Grand Canyon but was not far from it, where I would have stayed the longest and might even have communed with God or Nature, its myriad pink spires and steeples reminding me of Cappadocia in Turkey and the Pinnacles in Western Australia and the strange volcanic forms in the White Desert in Egypt, did not move him the way I was moved though he might dispute this point. He would agree, however, that he wanted to stay longer in Las Vegas, where our plane had landed and where we had rented a car, but for me, staying longer was never an option, so appalled was I by the garishness, the ugliness, the crowds in the casinos, by all those gamblers like my father “losing their shirts,” I wanted to leave as quickly as possible, a thought I also had in Panama, especially towards the end of the trip I can’t write about, when I was stuck in the water after snorkling, unable to climb back onboard the motorboat we had hired, and my close friend, along with the boatman, tried to lift me over the side, nearly dislocating my shoulders while, at the same time, I was stung by a Medusa, the same kind of jellyfish that would sting me and leave two enormous welts, one on each thigh, when I returned alone the following year to a different part of Panama, on what I hoped would be a better trip than the one I had taken with my ex-boyfriend and the one I had taken with my close friend.
Valatie
Why must I read this story to the man I call my “new ex”? Just because I’ve read him other stories, must I get his approval on this one too? Before I even finish it? I know exactly what he’ll say after I read about the night he made me nervous enough in my Cabriolet to turn left without looking to my right, where a car zoomed towards us, missing us by a hair. Or the time he grabbed the wheel on Route 28 and drove into oncoming traffic.
He’ll say, Why don’t you write about the good times?
I’ll say, The good times in my Cabriolet?
I cringe at the thought. But he’s cool. He won’t impinge upon my “art.” “Impinge” is not a word he’d say in English. German is his native tongue. But I’ve heard him say a lot of other words in English. Especially on the road. Especially on the way to Valatie. The argument on the way to Valatie stands out. It lasted for hours; three, to be exact.
Here he’ll want to correct me on two counts.
1. He’ll say, You should mention that I’m from Austria--not Germany.
2. He’ll say, It didn’t take three hours, two-and-a-half at most.
Valatie (pronounced va LAY sha, not VAL-a-TIE) sounded an awful lot like fellatio when we yelled at each other in loud, excited voices, mispronouncing it again and again. The village was named by the Dutch for the “little falls” (vaaltje) that dominate its center, which our hosts made a point of showing us when we finally arrived.
Why I was invited was a mystery until our host’s partner told me she loved my novel and wanted to meet me. My new ex, who I was then seeing, had never met them before. (I refuse to call him my then boyfriend. A man in his sixties is not a boy though he may indeed act like one). Our host was also not a boy. He was younger than my new ex and me by more than a decade. I could say he was an old friend. But he wasn’t. He was an abstract painter whose ex-wife had once been my close friend. When I bumped into him recently, I hadn’t seen him for several years.
Though her smiles tried to hide it, I could tell that his partner, in face and figure, a younger version of his ex-wife, was as bothered as he was by our lateness. “How could it take you so long to get here?” our host, who once wore a ponytail like the man I was seeing, asked us, incredulous, as his partner, a writer like myself, reheated some fancy dish that was not supposed to be reheated. It was Easter Sunday with dyed eggs--lavender and blue--and bottles of good wine. “It should have taken more than forty-five minutes at most,” he said, his face flushed or maybe it was sun-burnt, I couldn’t tell which. Wine made me honest so I told them we’d had a terrible argument and gotten lost, but our host continued to look at us in disbelief.
Our fight started, I said--as though details would help him understand--when I turned on Ms. Garnier, which is the name I gave my GPS. Naming her made her feel like a friend. Like a friend, Ms. Garnier is not always right. Once when driving to a party (held by a photographer with the name of an Egyptian goddess) Ms. Garnier announced, while I was making a hairpin turn, that I had arrived but there wasn’t a building in sight. Recently she failed to find a party in a converted church that didn’t have a street address, only a number on Route 28. More often than not, however, she had guided me to the right destination, so I couldn’t understand why the man I was seeing always disputed her directions, finding what he called better routes on a map. While he and Ms. Garnier competed for my attention on the way to Valatie, I became so confused I shrieked, “Stop telling me how to drive!” Then I froze on 9N. Or was it 9S? Or 9W? I softened this scenario when relating it to our hosts but they got the idea. The man I was seeing did not object to what I said. He was usually easy (except in my Cabriolet). I had to admit that sometimes in the car I felt hazy. Unfocused. Dreamy. Dreamy says it best. I didn’t tell them I was better behind the wheel when he was not in the car, though maybe I should have. Learning to drive and passing my test a year ago at age sixty-one was no small feat.
I know what my new ex will say at this point.
He’ll say, Why haven’t you mentioned that I helped you learn how to drive?
I‘ll say, Because you act as though I still don’t know how.
There wasn’t any test to prepare me for his nonstop orders on the road.
At one point, I’d been befuddled enough to ask, “Is that left?” while looking at a left-pointing arrow.
Astounded, he’d said, “What are you--three years old?”
Often his directions were wrong though not in the case of Valatie. As it happened, Ms. Garnier, which I had switched off, then on again, in protest, eventually directed us to Main Street--but in the wrong village. My new ex will like hearing that. Still, his being right did not justify him screaming at me.
“Why didn’t you turn left? Didn’t you see the sign?”
I exploded, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! I can’t stand you screaming at me anymore!”
My sudden and extreme outburst was comparable only to the “Fuck you!” he had shouted in terror, when I’d come close, months earlier, to colliding with a car in the next lane on The New Jersey Turnpike. I expect he will nod in agreement at how scared he was--if he’s still awake. (Once or twice he’s dozed off while I read him a story). I won’t mind him dozing through the next part. There wasn’t a “pleasant” way to write that I didn’t understand most of his directions because his foreign accent became ever more foreign (read unintelligible) when he was angry or excited or upset.
If he’s awake, I can imagine him saying, You make me sound like a Nazi!
I’ll say, I do not!
Our hosts finally stopped me from going on and on about our argument by showing us around their cottage. I had called the cottage “adorable,” because it was, especially the kitchen, which was roomy enough for the table where we were eating. The cottage even had a washer and dryer which mine does not.
The washer and dryer remind me that I have to be at the laundromat by 4 PM. It’s almost that time now.
If I didn’t have to leave, would I try to say something insightful to end this story? Something surprising perhaps? After I drop off the laundry, will I be able to admit that my new ex and I enjoyed that afternoon in Valatie? Or instead of continuing my story, will I turn my attention to the tall pines, the maples, the cloudless sky, and go to the swimming hole for the remainder of the day? After all, it is very hot and still too soon to remember the good times, especially since this is Friday, the day he usually took the earliest bus from the city and, while I slept, let himself in with the key he would take from the mailbox beside the door.
"Adventure Paradise"
I barely remembered my trip to Grenada seven years ago until someone asked me for information, which made me think I had something to say about the island but it turns out I have nothing to say about Grenada though I do have something to say about “The Senator” I met there, who was not a senator but a retired CEO who looked like a senator, but it turns out I don’t even have something to say about him since I didn’t go sailing with him around the Caribbean, after he invited me, though it probably would have made for a good story and is something I probably would have done, had I gone to Grenada a few years earlier, and met him, although, after sailing around the Caribbean, I probably would have felt used or, for some other reason, sorry about accepting his invitation, but since I didn’t accept it and didn’t have to feel sorry afterward, I have nothing to say about Grenada or The Senator, who, by the way, was married, or about the divorced American expat I almost forgot who gave me a huge discount on a bungalow in this “adventure paradise” when he heard I was coming alone. We were swimming in the bay one afternoon when I told him I had a boyfriend at home and he tried to bully me into swimming with him all the way out beyond the bay to the violent breakers, something I would never do, especially with a man whose spastic strokes barely kept him afloat, so, instead, I watched him from the shallows until his head, no bigger than a dot, disappeared in the fearsome foam and I wondered--but only for a moment or two--how he’d make his way back.
Kathrin Perutz
La Cucaracha
(Excerpted from Have Fun at the Holocaust Museum: My Aunt’s Story)
The door of her room is ajar and from where she sits she can glimpse the corridor and catch a sense of movement around her, people coming and going, wheeling carts, making visits in the world outside. She points towards the hallway with her chin. “They leave the door open,” she says, “to drop the dead bodies in here.”
A smile passes over her face, not humorous or bitter, just acknowledging the inevitability of their routine. She’s seen it before, she understands that this is the way of doing things here. Years ago she told me how efficient they’d been, the way they figured out every last detail, their technological superiority.
“I am happy,” she says a moment later, “that I didn’t have children.”
“You would have been good with them,” I tell her. “You would have been a good mother.” I know of course that this is impossible, that she never could have had them. She didn’t mind adopting, she told me years ago, except Max wouldn’t agree.
My uncle Max was Lisa’s husband. At one time in my early twenties when I became pregnant by mistake, I thought of carrying the fetus for them. But then the consequences bore in on me and by the time I was in my third month I flew down to Puerto Rico for an abortion. They never knew of my intended gift; however, the three of us have always been close.
Lisa is in her big chair, smiling, the white bear in her arms. She fondles the stuffed animal, stained now, that I gave her a year ago around Valentine’s Day. She frets over it, examines the fur as if for midges or other insects. I wonder if she thinks of the bear as a child or pet, something for her to watch over, though I’m sure she knows it isn’t alive. And she couldn’t take care of a living being now in any case, can’t even feed herself properly or control her bladder. A year ago she was much better, she still left her room sometimes, she wore her teeth when visitors came and could hold her own in any conversation, though she liked to dominate, partly because she is quite deaf and it’s easier to talk than to listen.
She strokes the white toy bear, kisses it, comforts it in her arms. If someone comes too close, an aide bringing a meal or trying to rearrange the pillow that keeps slipping down behind her head, Lisa shrinks back and panic seizes her face as she hugs the bear closer. It has become a personality to her, someone she’s known in the past perhaps or a small animal from an earlier time dropped into her room (hidden in the lager?) and in need of her protection.
“I worry about the parents,” she says. “They are old, you know.”
At the railroad station, she’d told me, her mother was sent left, she to the right.
“Not us, we can manage – but them!”
I nod, though I’m not sure what she means, where we are now, how she sees us. She’s 86, I’m 68; whose parents are the ones that may not pull through?
“A place like this . . .” Her eyes scan the room. “It’s no good for them.”
“No.” I follow her gaze, the pictures on the wall, the soiled sofa, television turned off, the door at the end opposite her chair with the small refrigerator to the right and the telephone table next to that, unused by anyone. Whatever she’s talking about, I’m glad to listen. Earlier this morning she wasn’t saying anything. Now it’s afternoon, I’m back after my lunch and she’s animated. Despite the dead bodies she just told me about, she seems in a much more cheerful mood than a few hours ago, when she didn’t use words at all and her only sounds were indecipherable.
Her eyes come back and settle on my face. A smile is playing in them, as in children who have a secret. They are still remarkable: deep-set, large jade-blue eyes in a head that reminds me of Dante’s death mask. High cheekbones, no extra flesh; even a few years ago her face was so extraordinary that strangers came up to our table in a restaurant to tell her she was beautiful. She laughed, shaking her head as if refuting the compliment, but after they left she repeated it several times, still shaking her head at the idea. “Imagine! Me, beautiful! Of what are they thinking?” and laughing again while she went on nursing at the compliment, trying to make it last as long as she could because she’d been thirsting for compliments for years. Max didn’t praise her, he was not the kind of man to tell a woman she was beautiful or even that she was wearing something pretty or had cooked a good meal. He was essentially passive, though an intelligent man, and she missed the flattery. While in no way coquette (she was the opposite of that, frank as a new-minted coin), Lisa also had streaks of vanity and was proud of her looks. When she first came to America, she’d been an eye model for an optical company. Her eyes were more gray-blue then, irises changing color with the light, catching glints of green or even gold. I always forget how beautiful they are until I see her again and am amazed. Not only by the changing color; there’s something that seems to be moving beneath the surface, as if eyes could have tides. But they could also turn hard on an instant, eagle eyes that let nothing escape.
They are jade now and I am trying to read them since talk has become more rare and it is up to me to figure out what she needs or what pains her. This morning I had nothing but the eyes to guide me, to indicate if she even knew who I was. But mainly they were closed. She was sleeping and when she woke she was swept back into sleep again.
A few days ago she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, but she doesn’t know that and there’s no point telling her. Her mind has been wandering lately, particularly since Max’s death, four and a half years ago. Dementia, the doctors said, but Lisa’s been eccentric for so long it hardly matters what they call it. Her idiosyncrasies have always been the main components of her charm and vivacity. Because she has no public persona, no outer skin to protect her, she is shocking in her candor. Like a child, she insists on saying or trying to say what she means, no matter how inappropriate that might turn out to be. She will keep talking about whatever is foremost in her mind at that moment, trying to capture it in a language she doesn’t command. Her English remains blotched with Czech rhythms and words of her own invention. (She says “gel” with a hard g for girl; “muchly” is the word she uses for emphasis, as in, “she is muchly afraid what she will be eating for dinner is no good.”)
Lisa relies on gesture to convey her meaning. There has always been so little of her in height and weight that she often seemed to be dancing, arms arching out, her body contracting and releasing as she’d learned when studying modern dance with Martha Graham in the 50’s. She would speak through her movements, through her muscles, and what she was saying couldn’t be captured on tape. When we tried collaborating on a book more than fifteen years ago, the tape recorder was almost a liability, as I discovered when I tried transcribing her words and found they didn’t contain the gist of what she’d said.
The idea of doing a book together came up around the time the Holocaust Museum first opened in Washington. In those days they lived in Georgetown, my aunt and uncle, in a little house on P Street close to the Key Bridge. Lisa had transformed the backyard space into a Japanese garden, a thin forest of bamboos lining the wooden fence on either side and bonsais carefully placed in the layered miniature landscape, with a little fountain close to the table where we would have drinks in good weather while nibbling the canapés she’d prepared. Lisa didn’t join us however. She hated alcohol and didn’t like to see people drink. It made her think of the Russians. They were always drunk, she’d told me many years earlier, talking about her escape from the firing squad near the end of the war; always drunk, she insisted, during that time after she and the other Lisa started running when a Polish partisan began shooting into the line of SS officers, on the death march out of Auschwitz. The two girls ran towards the Polish border, the Oder River and met up with the oncoming Soviet Army, which they joined as translators. Evenings, the Russian officers would come to the house where the two Lisas were billeted. They arrived with vodka, they drank, they sang and then lunged for the girls. “They were stinking, you know, like pigs.”
Alcohol still disgusted her, though she was forced by the requirements of good taste to make her peace with wine at dinner. But any sign of inebriation turned her eyes hard. Once when I was staying with them in their P Street house, I’d needed to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, got up and slammed my leg sharply against a chest with metal edges, cutting my shin and bringing tears to my eyes. In the morning I limped down the stairs to breakfast and suggested they move that chest to where it wouldn’t maim their overnight guests. Lisa said nothing. She wouldn’t even greet me that morning, wouldn’t look at me. I could feel her tight anger and was annoyed. I wasn’t drunk, for Christ’s sake, it was pitch black and I couldn’t tell where I was going. But I didn’t say anything, partly because it wouldn’t have helped and partly because I did always drink too much.
When we’d come in from the garden to the dining room she had us in the palm of her hand. We’d been aware of her slaving in the kitchen while we chatted and sipped and she took full advantage of our discomfort. We were hers at dinner; whatever she had to say on whatever unlikely topic and no matter how much she tortured the language, she had an audience hanging on every syllable.
The meal was usually good, served on the gleaming long mahogany table from Brazil where Max had been working for several years for the National Science Foundation. The salad bowl, too, proclaimed the joy of its making, smooth and irregular, much too large: a piece of wood honed and shaped by an artist craftsman in the depths of the Amazon. Dessert, served on porcelain, was often a reminder of their shared childhoods in Czechoslovakia (and mine in New York), chocolate palatschinken (thin rolled pancakes dusted with sugar) or fruit dumplings, knedliki, served with melted butter and sugar. However, Lisa prepared the dessert so well in advance (perhaps the night before if she had a dance or exercise class on the day of our dinner), that by the time it reached the table the pleasure it gave us arose more from our sense of nostalgia than taste.
Afterwards Lisa cleaned up, insisting we all retire to the living room. She martyred herself not only willingly, she demanded it. But on nights when I was alone with them we cleaned up together, Max silent, Lisa talking a blue streak, entertaining us with stories about her day at work - during the years when she was a saleslady - or later about the people in her classes: spinning her tales and soap operas, the characters enmeshed in problems of love, money, clothing (what to wear?), often leaving us hanging on a cliff as she walked out of the room to put away the place mats or get out a brush and shovel; then laughing as she returned to rescue us with the outcome. Despite her sometime hit-and-miss relation to English vocabulary, she was an inspired storyteller.
She was the entertainer, Max the audience. Her energy was indefatigable until later on, a year or two before Max’s death, when she self-diagnosed her condition as “a little bit Alzheimer.” It wasn’t Alzheimer’s she had though, but another form of dislocation, a jumbling of events, past and present, fact and fantasy.
From the time I first knew her, in the 1950’s, she would get up at 4:30 or 5:00 each morning to clean the house. The whole house, every day. It was useless for Max or anyone else to tell her the house was spotless, that she was wearing herself out, that all her work was like Alice and the Red Queen running as fast as they could to remain where they were. She saw dirt where none of us could see it. She felt the dirt through her fingertips, or smelled it in the air. Every morning before dawn she took out vacuum cleaner and polishes, dust rags and scouring pads, the mop for the kitchen floor, Ajax in the bathrooms. We all said it was pathological, but I don’t think any of us thought she could change her behavior, or even that it was appropriate for her to try. This was simply something she did, and even when she began to suffer from it, when she said that she was growing too old, that she couldn’t do this hard work of housecleaning anymore, we all knew better than to suggest she hire someone, or that she stop doing it. Certain behaviors were as necessary to her as breathing, or scrubbing away the past.
When we first met I couldn’t stand her. She wasn’t at all the kind of woman I wanted at the side of my darling uncle. I imagined him with blondes, with the kind of regular-featured pretty bland young women I admired as Miss Rheingold or Miss Subways. Lisa was dark, small and foreign. Never mind that our whole family was foreign, that the only native born American who came to the house besides my friends was Meekness Humble, a maid sent from Father Divine; I dreamed of Betty Grable for him, a girl with an Ipana smile who spoke without an accent and resembled the bobbed, shirt-waisted happy people in magazines. Or (later) maybe a Marilyn, the kind of sex bomb I myself had dreams of becoming - but certainly not an interesting-looking small person whose English was riddled with mistakes and whose whole way of being was not that of any adults I knew. She didn’t say the right things or behave the right way. She wasn’t like my parents’ friends, refugees from Central Europe in the arts and professions – psychoanalysts, painters, theater people, writers, doctors, a judge, an art historian - who spoke with authority in many languages and were all, according to my mother, who drew out the article when she mentioned them, turning it into an honorific, the person in their field.
Lisa was as unaccomplished as a kid as far as I was concerned, and I didn’t like it. I knew what the blue tattoo of numbers on her arm signified but that only made me more leery of her. She wasn’t like the others; she didn’t even seem fully grown up. I wrote scathing poems to or about her, of which only a couple of fading lines remain:
Though you will hate me fierce, my dear
I’ll loathe you ten times more. . .
I felt superior to her, able to express and comport myself as an American (the gold standard), more familiar with the clichés and expectations of my country than she could ever hope to be. She was strange, she sat curled up hugging her knees and staring into the fireplace for hours, a look of terror on her face.
Within a year at most I came under her spell. It was through her stories mainly, stories of the camp, her escape and afterwards; incredible stories I couldn’t get enough of, savoring each grisly detail, wanting to hear them again, to learn more, to be able to picture it in horrifying clarity. She talked about things that had been done to her with a bleak humor, noir long before it came into fashion. She spoke with the gallows humor of German children’s books, a Struwwelpeter come to life, grinning and laughing as she spun her tales, though sometimes the laughter went on too long, and her frequent wise guy flourishes left me speechless.
“So I am standing there and they cut off a leg and hand it to you. No anesthesia, of course not, they are not wasting this muchly expensive stuff on subjects, I am telling you. And what would be the point anyway? - mostly they will be dead soon. And then they give you a leg and you better not let go of it or it’s all gone with you.”
“Jesus! Didn’t you faint?” I was fifteen or sixteen when Lisa first began telling me her stories and didn’t know how to react. “What did you do? I mean, my god!”
“Held onto it.” My gee-whiz type of questions spurred Lisa on. She was performing now. “You don’t faint if you’re in Mr. Mengele’s operating room. That’s a no-no. If you faint – pfft! That’s it and you are never getting to hold another leg again.”
“You don’t . . . ?”
“You do the job or there is nothing left of you to do nothing.”
My friends were enthralled when I told them about my aunt, that she had spent four years in Auschwitz-Birkenau and was one of only a few survivors of the infamous experimental block of Josef Mengele, also known as the Angel of Death, who stood at the railroad station at Auschwitz watching the prisoners being unloaded from the boxcars and sorted them with a nod of the head according to his instant evaluation: death to the left, life to the right. Those who survived his selection became subjects for his experiments – he was fascinated by identical twins – or, like Lisa, one of his assistants.
We all wanted to get close to that horror, to lay claim to a part of history that couldn’t be understood. Having Lisa as my aunt made me more interesting. I became a sort of proxy-celebrity, as close as many of my friends could come to actual accounts of the concentration camps and of Auschwitz in particular, the camp of camps, with the greatest atrocities, the most unspeakable torture. For us, entering our teens in the early to mid fifties, the Second World War was the major unspoken fact of our lives, an event that had utterly transformed the world while we were still barely conscious of inhabiting it.
The friends I’m still in touch with who met Lisa during those years, especially those who came down to Washington with me, remember her as a kind of childhood heroine, or as a leading character in a book that influenced their lives. Here was someone who had gone through experiences so atrocious, so exaggerated that by all rights they would have to define her, to make her into something very different from us - and yet here was Lisa, living, breathing, fixing meals, making us laugh. We read Freud in those days, we were believers, and couldn’t understand how it was possible for anyone to redeem a life of such trauma. But mainly it was the excruciating details we wanted to hear. The things she had to do, the sawed-off limbs, the mysterious serums injected into her, the dead bodies covering her, the testing of her endurance by tying her legs together and forcing her to make her way across the fields – quickly! quickly! - her refusal to faint, to give up or give in; her survival of the operations she witnessed, the lack of food, the screams, the constant stench of death, smoke from the chimney, ashes raining down from the sky, blowing across the courtyard - all these made her larger than life, iconic, the masthead on the ship of death and evil.
We listened to Lisa’s stories again and again, eager for more, thrilled by the brutality and her survival, somehow trying to recreate her stories in ourselves and always confronted by the boringness of our own lives, our lack of suffering or usefulness – we middle class teenagers (Jewish but secular) who had Christmas trees and Easter bunnies, avoided religion but were drawn to the teachings of Buddha or Lao Tze and unsure of who we were or how we belonged to the world around us.
On the day I turned 16 I dressed in black and announced that I was “in mourning for my life,” à la Mascha in The Seagull. Nothing had ever happened to me: no man had died of love for me or even written me a poem. I had not faced death, like Anne Frank, or love, like Juliet. I was still latent, incubating my fetal genius in layers of baby fat. Lisa was lean and experienced. She contained all the material a writer could need for a lifetime of novels, even epics. What did I know? What had I lived through? I’d written poems in hotel rooms in Paris or Buenos Aires, while my parents were out to dinner with clients; writing on trains and ships and the back seats of chauffeured cars while my parents occupied themselves in their grown up world. How could I hope to become a great writer until or unless the world thrust itself upon me?
The door remains ajar, the bodies pass to and fro. Lisa doesn’t complain. It’s not something she knows how to do, though she can become angry. What she dislikes she ignores as far as she’s able. But me she recognizes. She smiles, reaches out her hands, strokes my face. She kisses me, then presses her hands together as if in prayer and raises them to the heavens in gratitude for the chocolate I bring her. Lindt, extra dark. She used to say that she wanted to spend her life on a chaise longue eating chocolates. This is the dream life she missed, luxury and languor, lying in her long chair, the odalisque musing over her bonbons. Though Lisa could never have been a model for an odalisque. It was the smallness, the wiriness of her body that allowed her to survive, she told me years ago, and added, “You wouldn’t have made it. Too big.”
With a body like hers, weighing 100 pounds at its fullest, she never required many calories to stay alive. Not then and not now, lying in her chair, her face buried in the toy bear’s fur.
It was about this time last year that I visited her with boxes and bars of chocolate and the little polar bear they’d given me at Lindt after I’d spent more money on chocolate than any sane person would. It was a nice-looking bear but my little grandchild didn’t go for animals of any kind, live or stuffed. So I took it along to Washington, thinking I’d give it to Lisa in an offhand way that I could turn into a joke if she seemed indifferent or possibly offended. “His name is Valentino,” I planned to tell her. “He is your Valentine because he comes bearing love. BEAR-ing.”
When I presented him after giving her the chocolates, Lisa ignored my little speech. She picked up the bear and studied it carefully while moving a large dark chocolate truffle around in her mouth. “Why a he?”
“Because he is called Valentino.”
She examined the area between its legs. “It’s not a he,” she said.
“O.K.”
“Bears don’t have to be he’s. They can be she’s.”
“Right.” I was relieved she hadn’t rejected it outright.
“He’s a she.”
“Fine.”
She brought the bear up to her face and held it against her cheek for a long time before bringing it down. “La Cucaracha,” she named it, the cockroach. Where the name had come from I couldn’t imagine. She scrutinized La Cucaracha for a while as she sucked the last of the chocolate and began to stroke its fur. But when she turned to get another truffle the bear began toppling and I reached out to stop its fall.
Lisa grabbed her bear. “No!” she screamed, hurtling back into her chair. Her face showed panic, an unfocussed terror. I sat back, amazed by the intensity.
For the rest of my visit, Lisa held onto La Cucaracha. She slept with it, caressed it, kissed it, played with it. For the rest of the week, and then for the weeks and months following, the bear was always with her, always in her hands. She groomed it like a monkey mother, picking at it, bringing it to her lips to remove the insects that might be hidden in the fur or perhaps just to kiss it.
A year later, La Cucaracha is considerably worse for wear. Traces of food and fluids spilled or dribbled on her have not been completely removed by washing. Her fur is not as lush or brilliant as it was when new; some of it clumps together, the white has turned yellowish in parts. Her face is still sweet, however, and she rests comfortably on Lisa’s shoulder with Lisa’s face buried in her fur.
The aide wakes Lisa with lunch. Lisa shows no interest in food. The aide tries to give her medicine and Lisa accepts the first spoonful. The second also, but then she balks. The aide looks at me and I shrug, though I go through the motions of telling my aunt to take her medicine because it’s good for her. She’s too deaf to hear in any case, but beyond that I recognize the stubborn streak in her and I know that no matter who does the coaxing or how, Lisa will not have another taste of it. She turns to Cucaracha and fondles her. She is ignoring the aide, not-seeing her. She smoothes down the fur around the eyes, then brings Cucaracha up to her lips and kisses her snout. She kisses the bear again, then again. Her lips are puckered, her cheeks puff out, filled with air. Again and again she brings the bear up to her face and presses her mouth against the snout. She is trying to blow air into the bear’s mouth. She is trying to resuscitate her.
Edith Konecky
Nicky and Barbara
"I am trying to paint! Can't you see that mother is working? Just because I’m here doesn't mean that I’m here."
Nicky's unhappiness and rage crescendo further, the loud and honest bawling of a young animal. If he could speak, he would say: but you are here. I can see you. I can hear you. He would say: I am the center of the universe, but so are you.
"You're supposed to be having your nap," she screams, tears choking her voice. Their frustrations are equal. "I'm supposed to have an hour or two free of you, goddammit, an hour or two of my own."
Nicky doesn’t go away. He knows she is angry, displeased with him, but he doesn’t know why. If he could speak he would say: there's shit in my diaper and it's burning my ass and my balls. I hate it. Take it away. But she stands there filling the room, glaring at him, her eyes full of tears and hate. She hates him. Hate, hate, hate.
"Your father can leave the house and go away and do his work, but I'm on call twenty-four hours a day. What I do isn't important. What I do is the least important thing that goes on around here."
Nicky stumbles across the room and throws himself against her. He buries his face in her knees. His face is wet with snot and grief. If he could speak he would say: my father isn't important. Because he goes away. You are that part of me that gives me what I can't give myself. Do it now.
But Nicky cannot speak. He has one word, a blanket word that says it all. He cries that word into her knees: "Mamamamamamama."
"You stink," she says, sniffing. She puts down the brush and bends over him. "All right," she says, but her voice is grim. She tears apart the velcro tabs of his diaper and straightens up, holding the diaper folded in her hand. "All right!" she shouts. She opens the diaper and slaps his shit onto the canvas on which she has been trying to work, on which there has begun to appear a roomful of flowers. With her hand, she smears his shit across the canvas. "There!" she says. "And there! That says it all." She stands back to admire it. Nicky stops crying. This is interesting. He sees that she is smiling, a funny, grim smile, but a smile nonetheless. He has brought her his shit and she has used it. It pleases her.
"Yes," she says. "This is what it's about. You know what the name of this piece is, Nicky? Motherhood." She begins to laugh. "Motherhood Number Two." She is laughing, but she is also crying. Nicky is frightened. "The first in a series. Probably a long, a very long series, all of them Number Two."
The next day, when Nicky trots hopefully into the room with his loaded diaper, expecting to make her smile, she frowns at him and wrinkles her nose. "Phew," she says. "I think it's time you started using the toilet. You can walk. You can climb. Why not?" The following day when he brings her his load, she takes him into the bathroom. "Here," she says, putting a contraption on the toilet seat. She lifts him and straps him into it. "This is a toidy. Baby talk. Use it." If Nicky could speak he would say: but I already did it. You're putting the cart before the horse.
Nicky does not like the idea of sitting over a hole. At the bottom of the hole is water. He has watched and heard that water roar up and then swirl and tumble away, making loud sucking noises, going who knows where. He is sitting right on top of all that. He begins to scream.
"Now what?" she says. "God, Nicky!"
But every day she puts him on the toidy, though earlier, before he fills his diaper. He sits there in terror, every muscle tight. Sometimes she leaves him there, goes away, talks on the telephone, does something in the kitchen. He screams. When she comes back she looks into the toilet and sighs.
"You don't seem to get the point," she says. She takes him up and puts the diaper back on and brings him to his bed for his nap. He stops crying. He relaxes. He is sleepy. His bowels flow comfortably into the diaper.
Nicky is five. He and Jamie, who lives next door and is his friend, tiptoe past his mother's room. The door is open. She is sitting crosslegged on the bed, her back straight, her eyes closed.
"What's she doing?" Jamie asks, frowning.
"She's meditating," Nicky says. "Shhh." They go into Nicky's room and close the door.
"What's meditating?" Jamie asks.
"I don't know," Nicky says. "You have to be very quiet till it's over."
"My mother doesn't do meditating," Jamie says. Nicky feels ashamed. He loves Jamie.
It is a long time after dinner. Nicky is supposed to be sleeping but he is listening to them. It would be hard not to since they are very loud.
"I'm an artist," she says. Her voice is desperate.
"So who's stopping you?"
"This life is stopping me. I don't know how I got into this shitty suburban housewife mother act."
"It's not supposed to be an act. It's real life, damn it. You don't seem to know the difference."
"All I do is run errands for you and Nicky. Buy the food, cook it, serve it, clean up after it, clean up after both of you, do the laundry, drive here, drive there."
"He's at school now. You should have plenty of time for yourself."
"It's not merely a question of time."
"What is it merely a question of?"
"Oh, God, I don't know. I'm just so bored. Bored, bored. bored. I feel as though I'm drowning."
"Maybe you need to see a shrink."
"I need to do my work, that's what I need."
"So do your work and let the housework go. We can get a cleaning woman."
"You don't understand. It's this life. Why do we have to live in a neighborhood?”
“What do you mean? Any place you live is a …”
“But this one! The houses are all so carefully different but inside are all the same stick figures, the husband, the wife, the children, the maid, the dog, the one or two cars in the garage. And then there are the schools. It’s all so fucking normal.” Her voice changes into a parody voice. “This is ideal. This is the way it’s supposed to be. This is happiness.”
“For those who can afford it,” he says angrily. “The lucky ones.”
“Luck, shmuck,” she says.
“You know what you are?” he says. “You’re nothing but a selfish bitch!”
The room in which she paints is filled with paintings. She paints while he’s at school. She paints when he’s at home. He has Jamie to play with, and sometimes Marcie. He doesn’t need her. He is seven. Sometimes he needs her. She paints and paints and the smell of turpentine and oils permeates the house. At the center of almost all her paintings is the figure of a woman who looks like her. There are sometimes other figures, but the woman is dominant. She is at the center. In each new painting she grows a little larger. She knows what she’s doing. She knows that soon she will spill off the canvas, swallow it, become pregnant with it. Maybe die of it.
“I don’t like my mother,” Nicky whispers to Jamie. “My father doesn’t like her, either.”
“How can you not like your mother?” Jamie asks, shocked.
“She is,” and he has it on good authority, “a selfish bitch.”
Jamie’s mouth falls open. “You shouldn’t talk like that about your mother,” he says. “You should love your mother. I love my mother.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t love her. I said I don’t like her.”
“You can’t not like somebody you love,” Jamie says with disgust.
Nicky is not sure he knows the difference between like and love. There is that nagging feeling of connectedness that he calls love. She is the dominant family member… his family… she has always been there, she has, as she sometimes reminds him, made him, she is, for better or worse, as familiar to him as his own feet. Often, he doesn’t think about her, but she is always present somewhere in his mind. That is what mothers are. He accepts her as he accepts no one else, not even his father. That is what love is. For like, you have to pass certain tests. Unless you are a dog. If he had a dog he knows he would love it. Without tests.
“I love you, Jamie,” Nicky says.
“I know.”
Nicky is fifteen. He is holding a plastic glass of ginger ale with two ice cubes in it. There are a lot of people milling about and Nicky is feeling inconspicuous because he is. He’s not unhappy about this.
His mother is being given a show by the Eugenides Gallery, a one-woman show, her first show of any kind. She is all dressed up and looking, Nicky thinks, gorgeous. She is trying to look calm and subdued but she is all aglow, excited. The walls are hung with her paintings, only hers, and Nicky is standing in front of one of these, the last in her self-portrait series. It is hard to be sure what this painting actually is but it looks like a huge stomach with a swollen navel at its center. This may be a navel meant for self-contemplation. Or it may not. Nicky is pretty sure that he is the occupant of this belly, attached to the other side of that navel. He is sure that this is as close as she can come to a portrait of him, but it is still a portrait of Barbara, a Barbara hideously stretched with impending motherhood.
Nobody is really looking at the paintings any more. They are standing in clusters with their backs to them, laughing and talking, people at a party. His father is at one end of the room with a group of their friends, what his mother refers to as their ‘social circle.’ His mother is a few yards away talking flirtatiously to a tweedy man with an incredibly long, thin beard.
“And who is that handsome young man?” he hears the man ask. He means him, Nicky. His mother takes the man’s elbow and steers him to where Nicky is standing in front of the stomach painting.
“This is my son,” his mother says, beaming. “Nicholas.”
“And this is my mother’s portrait of me,” Nicky says, pointing to the stomach.
His mother’s eyes narrow, but she laughs, and introduces the man. Arthur Tolentino. Nicky recognizes the man’s name. He is an important art critic.
“And what do you think of your mother’s painting of you?”
“Flattering,” Nicky says.
“A little self-centered?” Tolentino asks. He is flirting with Nicky.
“Of course it’s self-centered,” his mother says happily. “Look at that navel.”
“But when it comes to painting, we shouldn’t psychologize,” Tolentino says. “Though it’s sometimes hard not to.”
“Do you like the show?” Nicky asks, not knowing that he isn’t supposed to ask questions like that.
“Oh, Nicky!” his mother says.
“Yes, I do,” Tolentino says. “Your mother is unusual. And what about you? What do you think of the show?” It’s as though his mother is no longer present.
“I think it’s splendid,” Nicky says. Splendid is a word he has been using frequently of late. He thinks of it as a dodge word and also he likes not only the sound of it but the feel of it in his mouth. Tolentino smiles at him.
“Shall I give it a long, thoughtful review?” he asks, his eyes twinkling. He is definitely flirting, Nicky thinks happily. Wait till I tell Jamie! He and Jamie have been lovers for almost a year.
“Oh, you’re an art critic,” Nicky says, pretending not to have known.
The man smiles at him. “How old are you, Nicky?” He thinks about lying, but his mother instantly says, “Fifteen.”
“Fifteen,” Tolentino says. “I can’t remember fifteen. I can remember twelve and sixteen, but nothing at all about fifteen. Tell me about fifteen.”
His mother takes Tolentino’s elbow and tries to steer him away. She looks grim. This encounter has taken a little of the glory off her day. “Let me find you something to drink,” she says to Tolentino, who is waiting for Nicky’s answer.
“You’re right to have forgotten fifteen,” Nicky says. “It’s just a year on the way to another year.”
Tolentino smiles and turns to Barbara. “Your son is an intelligent young man,” he says. “And quite possibly a poet.” He lets her lead him, reluctantly, away. Nicky stands there, feeling happy, feeling a power growing inside him, a conceit. Soon, men will be falling in love with him. Women, too, probably, but he doesn’t care about women.
Gerry Albarelli
Young, Old
My grandmother held up her breasts. “Look!” she said to the young emergency room intern who like me was trying not to. She had pulled down her hospital gown. He was busying himself filling out her discharge papers. She moved her hands away and the breasts sagged back into place. Then, emphatically, she raised them again one last time, and hands cupped underneath them, held them out in his direction. “I usea to be beeg, beeg!” she said.
He nodded twice and smiling politely, said, “Okay, please sign here.”
I was seventeen. This was my grandmother from Naples, the one who came over every Sunday for dinner, the one who had never learned any English except the most basic.
About a week later I drove her to see the family doctor just to make sure everything was all right. Everything was all right though she was ninety-five years old. In the car on the way back, I reminded her: “I’m going away. Next week. Next Thursday.”
She turned and said, “You go away?” as though I hadn’t already told her three times before.
“Yes, Grandma, look--” I said, motioning with my hand, “Europe, Spain, far, far away, across the ocean.”
“Oh, hmmm,” nodding her head, highly impressed.
Then I pulled up in front of a bakery, Luigi’s, and turning the ignition off, said, “Come on let’s go inside. We won’t take long.”
She wanted to wait in the car. “Me old, me funny,” she said, touching her gray hair wound in a bun at the top of her head. “Funny-looking.”
“What are you talking about?” I said, helping her out of the car. “Come on!” Once she was steady on her feet on the sidewalk. I slid my arm through hers. “I’m proud to be seen with you. I’m proud. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Hoho!” she laughed, and shielding her face from me with one hand, she waved me away with the other.
“A loaf of Italian bread, please.” I told the girl behind the counter.
“Sliced?” said the girl.
“Sliced,” I said, and my grandmother, as though I was asleep and she wanted not to wake me, slowly slid her arm away from mine. She made her way to the back of the bakery and stood in front of the soda cooler, with her back to us, looking at the bottles.
”Anything else?” the girl asked.
“Give me a half a pound of those,” I said, pointing to some green and pink star-shaped cookies on a tray.
As the girl was carefully placing the cookies in a box, one at a time on a piece of tissue, my grandmother called out: “Mmmmm! I like!” I turned around. She couldn’t have seen the cookies from where she stood.
Then the girl and I watched as my grandmother, arms outstretched, face all lit up, advanced on a fat woman in a sleeveless shirt. The fat woman stood still in surprise. She didn’t know my grandmother. My grandmother walked up to her, looked her up and down and said, “You fat!” The girl behind the counter giggled. “Fat eh good. Good-a,” said my grandmother, nodding her approval. She patted the woman’s belly, then patted her own shrunken belly.
“Kiss,” she said -- this old habit of kissing strangers --“Kiss.” And the fat woman, smiling politely, lowered her cheek to my grandmother’s lips.
When we pulled up in front of my grandmother’s house on East Main Street, she waited till I had turned the off engine, then opened her pocketbook, searched around in there and pulled out a dollar bill.
“Grazie,” she said, passing it to me.
“What’s this?” I said.
“Grazie,” she said, pressing the bill into my hand.
“I don’t want this,” I said. “What’s this? You think I’m a cab driver?”
I gave it back to her.
“No? Per che no!” she said.
“I don’t want it,” I said.
“Cuando era young you tooka money from me.”
“Well, I’m not a boy anymore,” I said.
She gave me a long look, then shrugged.
I went to open the car door, but she placed her hand over mine.
“Cien a cien,” she said. “You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Gooda luck! A hundred thouse time!” Then she was quiet.
Then she said, “You good, you gooda to me.” And then overcome by some emotion I didn’t quite get, she opened her pocketbook again, pulled out some tissue and quietly cried.
Then I was walking her toward the house.
This is an old story, this old story comes back to me, thirty years later. I see the two of us, walking toward the house, an old tenement on Deacon Street. It's dusk; the sky is inky blue. We’re walking up the three front porch steps.
I see the two of us, my grandmother on my arm, shuffling her feet across the floorboards of the porch, taking her key out of her pocketbook. I see the lace on the beveled glass of the front door, the fat pink rose bushes on either side of the porch, their blossoms already brown at the edges. I see the two of us standing there, as if from a great distance, one still young, the other already old, standing on the porch in that late last light.