Love's Austere, and Lonely Offices

My grandfather’s sudden death left a 61 year old woman alone in a big house in a once safe neighborhood. My parent’s divorce a year later left a 9-5 mother with a two young children to care for. As if she’d ever really “shared” that responsibility. I was maybe two at this juncture.

In many ways my grandmother predated everything. She was always there.

My earliest cognitive memory, the oldest image I can conjure (without the aid of hypnotic suggestion) is of her.

It's blurred and choppy, like a dusty old film aging in storage:

Early morning and dark outside. Tangled in the sheets of my crib, I am wet, and crying. She lifts me out, and we walk hand in hand down our dimly lit hallway to the bathroom. I think I’m naked. The upstairs bathroom light is intense in the early morning darkness.

There is nothing before this.

One in a series of faded, photo album snapshots, I know some day it will be gone entirely.

.........

You couldn’t take me anywhere. My rages became hallowed things of legend, experienced by family and friends alike. Terrible didn’t just describe age 2 for me, but just about every stop thereafter. In my early childhood I’d gotten us “politely” evicted from restaurants, grocery and department stores, concerts and school recitals. Babysitting me for a day came only after lengthy negotiations and a lofty sum were agreed upon.

While my sister tries on shoes, and my mother looks for something I won’t outgrow in a month, I am made to wait with my grandmother. I am bored. I want to leave. Right now!

“Behave,” she warns.

I stamp my feet and curl my bottom lip to show I am not to be trifled with.

“You better behave…”

“Shut up!” I yell, and make a break for it. What began as steady whining has given way to a category three temper tantrum.

Down isles and behind display mannequins, I attack the men’s section by ripping off tags and tipping over racks of jeans. Before I can bring my assault to intimates and turn Bob’s Stores into a tinker tape parade of streaming pantyhose, my grandmother takes decisive action.

She takes hold of me, and before I can struggle free again, pins me to the floor.

From under her foot, I lay there, thrashing and wailing. Many would have stooped to bribery: Candy. A stop at Toys R Us. A video rental. More candy. But, appeasement be damned, she just stands with her hands on her hips as other shoppers walk past and stare.

The time for negotiating a behavioral truce had come to an end.

..........

At five years old I’m standing in the middle of the kitchen with a pack of the original Lifesavers. In an ill-advised move, I clamp down on the tube and with my front teeth slide half the role past my lips. I swish them around in my mouth, hoping for a fruit-punch effect of cherry, lime, orange and whatever the clear one was supposed to be.

Time slows down as I begin to choke. I can’t hear very well, but other senses become very acute. The pattern in the kitchen tile. The smell of old coffee lingering in the pot.

I know she is downstairs in her recliner watching her shows. I Panic. Falling to one knee I call out, hoping my guttural cries carry downstairs and over her television.

Harnessing the last bit of youth left in her body, she takes off in a sprint from her recliner and up those stairs, one long stride after the other.

Once behind me, she wraps one arm around my waist and pulls me to her, while driving the opposite palm down the center of my back.

In one powerful lurch, the bright candies accosting my air ways come up—with just about everything else I’d eaten that morning. Wet with spit and brown bile, they glisten in a wide, curdled puddle like Christmas lights strewn across muddy snow—one of countless messes of mine she’d had to clean up over the years.

I blame the clear mystery flavor.

Far back as I can remember I have never seen her bend her arthritic knees more than a few degrees, much less did I ever think her capable of movement that lithe. I would never see it again.

...........

What she may lack in kitchen prowess, my grandmother at least makes up for with a consistent menu of items: dried out chicken breast, a pasta sauce that tasted like tomato soup, shoe-leather pork cutlets, and a roast that came out of the oven so woefully overcooked it resembled a football helmet from 1926, to name a few.

Pair it up with a list of delectable sides that include soggy spinach, mostly-mashed potatoes, or an over-boiled rice and vermicelli combo all the salad dressing in the world can not save.

We liked to blame it on our electric oven, after all she had learned on gas. And maybe that her homemaking heyday came in the times before culinary globalization, and the discovery of such exotic spices as pepper and Old Bay. It was a time, my mother reminds me, when a type of potted meat scraped across toast could constitute dinner, or perhaps some kind of lower middle-class appetizer. Lucky for them, the first McDonald's in New England opened not far from their house sometime in the late 50’s.

She couldn’t boast to have served billions of people daily, but I am quite sure that I alone had happily consumed several hundred of my grandmother’s pan-fried ‘briquette burgers’ over the years.

..........

Christmas time. Her gift sits unmistakably atop a tower of brightly wrapped presents in that same bag with the same Rockwell print on it depicting a boy in pajamas SHOCKED to find Santa’s beard and red jacket in his parent’s dresser.

Like any kid wide-awake since 4:30 I attack my gift pile like a hungry piranha. After the frenzy she sifts through the war-zone of plastic, paper and bent cardboard and rescues the bag before the cats have their way with it. With a cup of coffee in her other hand, she seamlessly folds and tucks it away for Next Christmas.

Over the years that bag held a myriad of things: action figures; Nintendo and Sega Genesis games; Some CD’s; a gold chain for a cross; a bottle of expensive, tersely named cologne. When I started asking for simple cash, she’d tuck it inside a thick, ornate card and bury it in the bag under several layers of green tissue paper, I think, to grant it the illusion of substance.

That bag is now a decorative mainstay at the holidays, retired next to the stockings and wreaths, and above the porcelain Santa Clauses, angels, and scented candles. The same tag still hangs from the red-rope handle.

To: Adam

From:
Love, Grandma Marge
...........


Whatever provokes an eleven year old to call his grandmother a “candy-ass” I am not quite sure. Probably something terribly unreasonable on her part, like “no, it’s too late for you to go to his house now’, or ‘you can’t eat that, dinner is almost ready.’ Whatever the reason, in hindsight it was the wrong thing to do, not so much because it was rude or disrespectful, but because it couldn’t have been FARTHER from the truth.

Standing toe to toe on my back porch, I look her in the eye and utter those ill-begotten words. What transpires then shakes the air like a clap of thunder, louder than the gunshots that claimed Bambi’s mom and Old Yeller combined with twice the ballistic force. Writhing on my back, I clutch a section of my chest where there is now a giant red hand print.

Nearly three houses down, my friends are scratching their heads about now wondering where I am, but mostly what that loud crack was, and the girly yelp that followed it.


............

Mid summer on a Friday evening. Mother is at work, while sister is out doing what older sisters do. Whatever a sixteen year old male’s equivalent is, I have no clue.

I sit, legs resting limply like prostheses on the coffee table while the rest of me piled onto the couch like a scoop of something instant slapped onto a cafeteria tray. I stare, listless and unblinking at the television.

Strike-two.
Ball-one.
Foul tip.

If I have nothing else, I can at least bank on my favorite baseball team winning every six nights out of ten. It’s like a (for now) $175 million insurance policy. This then, must be that seventh or eighth night.

Pitch out.
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She slowly makes her way up the stairs. These days her body knows no other speed. She sits in the uncomfortable pink Victorian chair next to the couch and fixes her eyes on the TV with a weird smile.

This is absurd. I know she cares little for baseball. HER television works just fine, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t she rather sit in HER chair?

She turns to me between pitches with that smile still on her face.

“That colored ballplayer you like sure is doing good, isn’t he?”

The colored ball-player. Like the colored friend that would come by looking for me as a kid. I could explain Bernie Williams’s Puerto Rican heritage to her, but lack the drive.

“Yeah.”

The infuriating part is that she is right. He has been leading the league in batting average for the past month.

“Ya hungry, Ad?”

“Hmm?”

“Want me to make you something?”

By now fixing us our meals has become, like cleaning, one in a long line of thankless tasks she is very vocal about reminding us of, and as such has tapered back considerably.

“No. I’m good.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m not hungry.”

I am starving. She knows. It’s impossible to hide anything from her.

The game plays on and she continues her pointed observations. O’Neil’s temper, the rise in Jeter’s errors this year, Torre’s ever-present scowl and the often reprised “They sure are playing like crap tonight, aren’t they?”

“Mhmm.”

She continues to glance over at me with that feigned smile. Maybe it’s some dumbass, skewed adolescent concept of impeded privacy that stirs my Ire.

“What?” I snap

“What?” She retorts.

“You keep doing…that.”

“Doing what?”

“Nothing…Nothing.”

I slouch lower in my seat.

“Ok…” She says, and turns back to the television.

“Sure you don’t want anything to”—

“No,” I say, my voice tired and disdainful, “I’m fine.”

“All-right”, she says, gets up and slowly makes her way back downstairs, and closes the door.

Alone in the living room with nothing but the light of the television and the ground crew spreading the tarp over Yankee Stadium, my stomach begins to quake, and not from hunger.

I stare at the line of light from under her door, and yet all I can do is sit.

A few minutes later, it goes dark.

...........

Winters in Connecticut made things hard enough. Waking daily to the reminder I am a severely depressed and anguishing teenager wont graduate high school and will probably end up in a mental institution lest he dresses and soldiers through another day at the place that consistently beats him does little to lift my spirits.

Typically after my mother has given up trying, I wrap myself in the oblivion of sleep until about eleven or twelve.

Arthritic knees and hips made one flight of stairs a daily burden for my grandmother, but two some kind of corporeal penance. Nevertheless, she climbs the second tier.

As my mother curses at herself down the hall, my grandmother quietly stands just inside my doorway. She looks at me.

“Adam. Get up…”, she whispers.

I lay in my bed, staring at the ceiling.

She moves to my bedside.

“Adam. Get up”, she repeats.

“Grandma, I don’t…feel good.”

“But, you have to get up”

“But… I hate every day…”

“I know, I know. But…you—you just have to get up.”

There is something strange there in her face and her voice, some fear I have never witnessed before.

She is no longer the same disciplinarian, but then again I am not the same defiant, energetic child.

She came to this house for my sister and me, for US. That was the unspoken trade-off: Keep yet another home, help raise two MORE children, and be spared isolation in a big empty house, the indignity of assisted living complexes, and the loneliness of aging.

At least for this one morning my shame outweighs my depression.

I crawl out of bed and throw on a pair of jeans.

She rubs my shoulder, as if trying to conduct some kind of heat through me.

“Alright. I’ll go get your lunch money. Ok?”

............

Eighteen years old. Home from school, I am greeted with shouting. From the doorway I can see my mother and sister standing over my grandmother, trying desperately to get her attention. She is slouched in her recliner, her face expressionless, eyes wide and sometimes blinking.

Their calls to her become louder and slower. The tension builds in my mother’s voice and it begins to crack. My sister calls an ambulance.

I can only stand there.

What they describe in the hospital is an incident stemming from a loss of oxygen and slow wear and tear of clusters of blood vessels in the brain.

I.E., A massive stroke.

After a priest reads her last rights my grandmother holds out for an additional week, I suspect out of spite for trying to usher her along so quickly. Like everything else, she would go on her own time.

On the afternoon of December 16th, 2003 the machines show faint signs of life in her, but she had, we know, long since given up the ghost.

In accordance with her will, my mother and uncle instruct emergency room doctors to stop the respirators and pull the feeding tubes.

Like everything else, she would go on her own terms.

The service is held just a few days before Christmas. She is laid next to my grandfather.

............

My grandmother used to sit at our kitchen table staring out the sliding glass door sometimes for an hour or more, transfixed on the backyard as if waiting for something to move. To come to life.

An occasional Squirrel would dart across the lawn and up a tree trunk, while birds glided between the high, bare branches from time to time, but that was the extent of it.

It was usually mid-afternoon, after lunch and Regis, after household stuff was done, cats fed, dishes put away counter tops wiped down, and before the news on TV or the school-buses rumbled down the street.

There was this certain shade of light that would pour in that time of day. Bright, not the yellowy gold of sunlight, but more the white of a lightening bolt screened through a cloud. It would cast everything in the room its iridescent bleach and freeze it into a Vesuvius-like diorama. It always felt cold, a repressed world without sound.

In certain countries across the Atlantic many people choose to sleep this time away. Housewives opt for that second glass of wine, or cut a lime for another gin and tonic.

My grandmother wasn’t a drinker.

To see her sitting there was a profoundly lonely sight. She’d sit, hands folded, an expression not quite sad, or angry, but “pious” in a way, a look and a posture that, to me results after sadness calcifies, and you are given the choice to either tear into the scar tissue, bleeding the bruised blood of whatever life handed or took away, or take an occasional standing (or sitting) eight-count, remember what there is, and soldier on.

I wonder if she knew I was watching all those times.