by Tara Clancy
The half-cocked head of Tina, complete with jumbo pink curlers, painted-on eyebrows, and crooked lipstick, pops into my line of vision mid-spin. “Eh! Ya gonna make ya’self sick, you don’t stop that!” I snap out of it, “Sorry. Mornin’, Tina!” I throw my arms around her waist in a genuinely loving hug but with the less savory secondary intention of sneaking a peek down at her golf-ball-size bunions. Wow. And then I’m off.
In three running leaps I cross the concrete driveway that separates Tina and Lenny’s house from Anna and Joe’s, and land at the Paradises’ side door with both my arms straight up over my head like Mary Lou Retton after sticking a floor routine. Their kitchen window is just to the left of the door, and I shout up into it, “I’m heeeeerrrre!!!” In no time, Anna’s plump frame appears in the doorway, “G’mornin’, my sweetheart!”
She opens the door into her tiny sunlit kitchen full of glowing, ’70s-era, harvest-gold appliances. White lace curtains frame the windows, and a ceramic relief of fruit hangs on the wall above the small round oak table—it’s about the most pleasant five square feet on Earth. I hop onto a chair at the table and wait for Anna to pour me a glass of orange juice, cut by half with water, as always. We don’t say much, but it couldn’t be any sweeter. Anna leans into the counter and smiles as I sit there drinking my juice, and when I’m finished, I kiss her on the cheek and skip on out again, this time back to Grandma’s house.
If Tina’s place is preserved in my memory like some tacky funhouse, and Anna’s is a scene from a Norman Rockwell painting, then the two-family house that my grandparents share with Aunt Mary is something of a towering Japanese pagoda. Grandma and Grandpa live on the top tier, Aunt Mary is in the middle, and the bottom level is a finished basement with wall-to-wall folding tables where all thirty members of my immediate family come together for holidays. (In order for us to fit, we kids had to crawl under the first two rows of tables to get to our seats. When someone yelled, “Dinnertime,” all eighteen of us would drop onto all fours and make our way through people’s legs and around chairs, like a great tide of mice.)
I run back up Grandma’s stoop, shoot through the door, up the stairway, and into her kitchen, ready for my debriefing on the day’s mission. Let me explain. If other kids spent the odd weekday off from school at Chuck E. Cheese’s, say, I might spend mine at Key Foods working up a scheme with my grandmother to get around the ten-per-customer rule on sale items. I can see it now. The two of us are huddled behind a display in the canned-food aisle, and she whispers the plan into my ear: “You take ten, and I take ten. And then you wait on the other line, by yourself, and if the cashier looks at you funny, you say, ‘My mother sent me, ALONE, to get these cans of tomatoes.’ Then pay and walk out! We’ll meet up outside, a few blocks down, on the corner. Minchia!”
So I was trained to be ready for anything. But today’s particular mission holds great significance for Grandma, which I know, because she had been preparing me for it every day for a week.
“You eat the grapefruit, you leave!” Grandma screams, for no other reason than that’s just how she talks. “Mary likes it there alone! It’s very nice she invited you for the grapefruit, but that’s it! She don’t want you to stay long!” She keeps at me, standing at the stove, her eyes never leaving the pot of tomato sauce she’s stirring. “You go downstairs, you eat the grapefruit, you leave!!” After repeating the refrain, for maximum effect, in one fluid motion she rips her wooden spoon up out of the pot, sucks off the sauce, sends it cartwheeling into the sink, and then starts to turn toward me to deliver her typical closer face-to-face, “Fahng—” but saves that second syllable until she is fully spun around, “gool!” (Fahngool is the Italian American pronunciation of the slang word vaffanculo, which translates to “go do it in the ass” though is used more like “fuck off.” Either way, it’s not a nice thing to yell at a five-year-old. But Grandma means nothing by it. “Fuck” is just her go-to, catchall punctuation.)
I’m a few feet below Grandma’s sight line, so she’s unable to spot me when she first scans the room, her head slowly swiveling left, then right, then left again with a fixed, fuming gaze, looking like a cyborg in a housedress. Right before her eyes start pulsing red and she turns real-life Terminator, her head tilts down, and there I am, standing right at her heels and choking down a laugh because it just occurred to me that, until now, it looked as if she was yelling at her meatballs. But the fun is short-lived. Grandma shoots me a look, and I am right back to being dead serious about my great-aunt Mary’s grapefruits.
In the three years that I spent among The Geriatrics of 251st Street, I was solidly schooled that the two most important things to Grandma were her older and only sister, Aunt Mary, and her kitchen floor. She referred to the floor only as “my linoleum.” If I were to go skipping by on it, she would yell, “Watch with my linoleum!!”—the tone of her voice clearly conveying that she was proof positive that her perfectly preserved polyvinyl floor covering would up and crumble beneath the prancing feet of a forty-pound kid. At some point she must have convinced me, because I remember—even if I was running full blast—I would stop dead before I entered the kitchen, then tiptoe over that linoleum like a cartoon cat burglar.
Grandma scrubbed her floor at least three times a day, jabbing at it rapid-fire with these short, furious strokes that made the mop look like a tommy gun in her hands. And once she was done pumping it full of lead with her mop-cum–machine gun, she would get onto her hands and knees to scrub the tough-to-reach edges and corners by hand with a rag.
Of course, before the mopping, and probably an additional half dozen times a day, Grandma first swept the floor, gathering the flecks of dirt, crumbs of Italian bread, and strands of hair into a little pile, as anyone else would do. But then, instead of using a dustpan, she scooped up the pile with the torn halves of an old greeting card. An entire kitchen drawer was dedicated solely to storing all those torn cards, and after Christmas or Easter or her birthday, I helped her replenish the stock. “Come, today you help me rip the cards!” Grandma would say, and I’d follow her around the house, the two of us unsanctimoniously snatching these ill-fated tokens of affection from the windowsills and tabletops. Eventually we’d work our way back to the kitchen table, and, as we sat side by side with little stacks in our laps, she’d take the first card off the top and demonstrate the technique. “Tight, you hold it, like this!” she’d scream, pushing her fisted hand an inch away from my face to make sure I saw the preferred, white-knuckled grip. “Then, high, you lift it, like this!” Now she’d raise that fist into the air like a Black Power salute. “And with the other hand, you pull down, hard, like THIS”—and rrrrrip! “Ah! You see how it tears? Right down the middle! Minchia!”
I’d get to work on my stack, looking up at her and dangling my dismembered Hallmark in the air for approval the first few times. She would nod, and soon enough we’d be ripping apart card after card with no more emotion than a pair of farmhands shucking corn. The whole scene strikes me now as some tough-ass urban women’s version of elder tribal ladies teaching the wee ones to work a loom: You see, my dear grandchild, now you’re learning the age-old tradition of our people saving two bucks on a dustpan.
When it came time to scoop up some garbage, and Grandma grabbed a couple of cards from the drawer, perhaps the strangest prayer I ever prayed was that the face-up side, instead of the little cat holding a balloon or some smiling snowman, would be the inside of the card, because I got an extra twinge of irreverent joy watching the inscription—HA*PY B**TH*AY! L*TS OF L*VE, AU*T CAMILLE—disappear under the crumbs.
Right below Grandma’s disgraced-greeting-card drawer was a cabinet exploding with dozens of emptied and cleaned plastic Polly-O ricotta containers, Temp Tee cream cheese tubs, and glass Mancini roasted red pepper jars, because Tupperware, like dustpans, was considered an extravagance. So opening Grandma’s “Frigidaire” was like peering into a portal to some magical miniature city. And a search for one spoonful of ricotta cheese could turn i
nto a full-on culinary tour of Southern Italy. The last place the cheese would be was in an actual Polly-O container, but you would open it anyway, only to find last night’s braciole, then to the cream cheese tub stuffed instead with pasta e fagioli, and on and on until you were so enticed by everything else, you didn’t want ricotta cheese anymore.
On top of these skyscrapers of leftovers, like spires, were dozens of tiny shimmering foil packages. A quarter-inch slice of sausage, a hunk of Parmesan cheese no bigger than a sugar cube, a dollhouse-scale bouquet of cauliflower florets—every last scrap of food was saved, then thrown together come Saturday morning in one of Grandma’s off-the-wall-delicious frittatas. Even if I wasn’t looking for something to eat, I loved to just stand there and stare.
—
Anyway, back to my great-aunt and her grapefruits. Having completed her “Don’t fuck around at Mary’s” speech, Grandma leads me down the single flight of stairs that separates her apartment from her older sister’s. At this point, 1985, Grandma is sixty-eight, and Aunt Mary is seventy-two, and in all of their years they have lived either under the same roof or not more than a single city block apart. Their childhood home was a lower-level apartment in a brownstone on Union Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn. After getting married, Aunt Mary moved as far as the upstairs apartment. Grandma made it a hair farther; she got married and moved around the corner. And there the sisters remained until 1978, when they moved to Queens (together, of course).
When we reach the landing, Grandma grabs my hand and shuffles down the hall in her standard-issue, open-toe, terry-cloth slippers, pausing every few steps to look down at me and whisper-scream (all her usual anger, one-eighth her usual volume) her mantra, “You eat the grapefruit, you leave!!” We arrive to find Aunt Mary’s door open. Grandma stiff-arms me back as if I’m a lion raring to jump into the crowd, not a stunned five-year-old in the throes of terror because she’s about to eat a half a grapefruit with her elderly great-aunt. Grandma juts her head into the doorway and starts screaming again. “Mary! I brought the kid for the grapefruit! You ready? Mary? Mary?! You there!? I got the kid!! Mary? Mary?! You ready!?”
Hours, days, weeks pass before Aunt Mary responds, from somewhere in the abyss, the exaggerated calm of her voice ever so gently reprimanding her sister’s craziness. “Y-e-s, Rose. I…am…here. I…am…ready.” Grandma turns back to me, cocks her head, and says, this time only with her eyes, “So, you eat the grapefruit AND…?” My eyes answer right quick, “I leave!!”
With her palm on the back of my head, Grandma nudges me past the threshold into Aunt Mary’s apartment; then she’s gone. In front of me is a tiny two-top kitchen table set with two little glasses of water, two serrated grapefruit spoons, two pre-dissected half-grapefruits in flowery china bowls, and, in the center, one of those plastic teddy bears filled with honey. Facing me from across the table is a sweet, smiling wisp of a woman, who, by some miracle, is my grandmother’s full-blooded sister.
Compared to my grandma, even a lumberjack could appear frail. With her as my old-lady litmus test, it’s entirely possible that Aunt Mary wasn’t as much a “wisp” as she was simply “relaxed.” But, no matter the exact right way to describe Aunt Mary, it’s safe to say that, when contrasted with Grandma, their differences couldn’t have seemed more extreme. Grandma bulldozed through a room; Aunt Mary floated. Grandma was squat; Aunt Mary was lithe. Grandma never went more than a minute without cursing, singing, barking orders, or telling raunchy jokes; Aunt Mary was an unofficial mute.
On the whole, Grandma never had much use for dainty types. When word came over the radio in her kitchen one day that Donna Reed had died, and I asked, “Who’s that?” she just replied, “A chump.” Sometime later, when I heard the name Mae West and asked Grandma who she was, she said, “My kind of woman, that’s who!” In fact, it seemed that Grandma divided all of humankind into these two camps: the Donna Reeds and the Mae Wests. If you were at all “relaxed,” like Aunt Mary, or “happy,” like my mom, you were instantly deemed a Donna Reed. And Grandma, more Mae West than Mae West, felt herself your personal Catcher in the Rye, taking it as her life’s mission to prevent you from falling off that cliff into chump-dom.
Still, Grandma was in awe of Aunt Mary. “A saint, my sister is! And is she elegant? And how!” On the other hand, Grandma was downright petrified that Aunt Mary would come apart at the seams if you as much as sneezed in her direction—which is why she treated my perfectly pleasant, practically wordless, ten-minute, grapefruit-eating date as if it were a private audience with the Pope. Well, that’s half the reason.
Several months later, two days after my sixth birthday, I learned the other half. I was out playing in the front yard when I heard the excruciating howls of what I imagined was a dog that had just been hit by a car. I spun around a few times, trying to figure out where the sound was coming from, before my ears pointed me toward Grandma’s house. There, crammed into the entryway and spilling out onto the stoop, I made out five of The Geriatrics of 251st Street—Tina, Lenny, Anna, Joe, and Grandpa—and I took off running to reach them.
I jumped and ducked, trying to get a clear view of the source of the strange and awful sound. Finally I dropped to the ground, crawling my way through the crowd, and by the time Anna noticed my head poking out from between her legs, it was too late. Collapsed on the floor of the hallway and wailing in a way that was more animal than human…was my grandmother. I instantly started crying, too, but kept weaving through the wickets of legs, trying to make my way to her. Before I could reach her, Tina swooped me up into her arms, then shielded my eyes. Both Grandma and I were thrashing and clawing now, me toward her and her toward Aunt Mary’s door.
“Mary! Oh, Mary! Oh, my sister!” she cried, as my grandfather hooked his arms under hers and lifted the dead weight of her body up into a folding chair. As soon as he placed her down, Grandma’s head fell to her lap with such force that it seemed the momentum might pull the rest of her behind it, so Grandpa quickly dropped to his knees and put his hands on her rounded shoulders to keep her from tumbling to the floor. Grandma stayed that way, head down, back rising and falling with each monstrous sob, as Anna and Tina carried me away.
—
Family lore has it that, at sixteen, my grandmother coldcocked a couple of teenage boys for picking on her younger brother Jerry. Then, as a mom, when her middle son—my Uncle Sal—tried to join a Brooklyn gang, she burst into their pool-hall hangout, cursed everybody out, and beat my uncle over the head with her purse until he agreed to come home. Years later, when she was in her late sixties, I watched her chuck a pot of boiling macaroni water at my grandfather because she had convinced herself that he was screwing some lady in New Jersey. The water landed an inch from his feet; hence, she didn’t do any time. And, at seventy-five, she won a tug-of-war with a purse-snatcher in an Atlantic City casino by busting the guy’s nose open with an elbow to the face, immediately after which she went right back to playing her slot machine. (Mom and I were in the hotel room when she returned, six hours later, and she only mentioned the incident in passing: “The slots are no good to me today, fahngool…oh, and some guy tried to rob me.”) So I am by no means exaggerating when I say that seeing my grandma bawling in a heap on the floor after Aunt Mary died was as devastatingly sad as watching the slow-motion, knee-by-knee collapse of a dying rhino in a National Geographic video. Rabid packs of teenage boys, gangs, and thieves posed no threat to her. Like nature’s most powerful animals, my grandma had only one true predator: grief.
But, as rocked to the core as I was seeing Grandma in that state the day Aunt Mary died, immediately afterward I was also pretty confused. Up until this time Grandma had handled death with the same awesome irreverence as she did greeting cards. Dying was never referred to as “passing away” or “passing on” or “going to heaven” or pussyfooted around whatsoever; it was only called “croaking.” Grandma talked about death as casually as other people talked about last night’s ball game. I remember the time I wa
s standing next to her in church when the congregation started the hymn “Here I am, Lord,” crooning, “Here I am, Lord. Is it I, Lord? I have heard you calling in the night.” She winked at me before she began singing her own doctored lyrics, thrusting her open arms into the air and pointing down at herself, belting, “Here I am, Lord. COME AND GET ME!! I AM READY TO CROAK TONIGHT!!” Afterward, she doubled over laughing so hard at her own joke that her forehead hit the back of the pew in front of us, which only made her laugh harder.
It didn’t take long to realize, however, that Aunt Mary’s death was not something we would be joking about. She died in June, and though it was pretty well hidden from me, Mom later said that Grandma spent the entire summer “broken.” For reasons we still don’t understand, Grandma didn’t tell my mother or me until after Aunt Mary died that she had been diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer six months earlier. Suddenly Grandma’s ultra-heightened paranoia over my last grapefruit date made sense. But even when it hadn’t, I had done as I was told that day: I ate the grapefruit, and I left.
—
The sole upside to Aunt Mary’s death is that it was the catalyst that took me from having a VIP guest pass to the wonderful world of The Geriatrics of 251st Street to being a full-fledged member. Not long afterward it was decided that Mom and I would take over Aunt Mary’s apartment.
There was little to deliberate over. My grandparents couldn’t afford the house on their own, and my grandmother had never lived with anyone who wasn’t blood. Since Grandma took care of me after school, I was already going to PS 133 in Bellerose, as opposed to a school in Rosedale, where I technically lived, so living there would mean a lot less shuttling around for Mom.
