Cobwebs

by Karen Romano Young

  “But, Granny—”

  Granny was still speaking, saying over and over, under her breath, “Just like your mother. Just like your mother.”

  “I am not!”

  Granny looked up at her, muttering, “Don’t you dare be.”

  Nancy banged the door of the greenhouse open. Rachel was on the floor, inside the loom, warping up yet again, as though there were some great rush on gray silk shawls. “Mama!”

  Rachel practically clobbered herself, jumping. “What?”

  “Pay attention.” Nancy climbed into the loom beside her mother, crouched holding her skirt around her feet, knees to her chin. “There’s a woman—”

  “What woman!”

  “She lives in Cobble Hill.”

  Rachel’s face closed up. “Yes …”

  “She’s got a little girl, just ten, did you know that? And she’s sick, Mama. She’s so sick, she can’t heal. And Granny’s helping her. She’s trying to heal her.”

  Rachel nodded. “It’s not going well,” she said.

  “It’s taking her away.”

  “The woman?” asked Rachel.

  “She’s taking Granny with her.”

  Rachel’s eyes reflected the color of the grass outside.

  “Her name is Rose Browning. Mama, you can help her, and she can help you. You’ve got to.”

  Rachel ran her strong, graceful, hardworking hand across her silver-gray warp strings. “What help do I need?”

  “She’s a counselor, Mama. A therapist. She could help you get out of here.”

  “Can’t you see I don’t want to get out?” Mama’s voice was as languid as the green afternoon.

  “Mama, I love you. Dad loves you. What are you going to do, stay inside forever?”

  “It’s not in me, Nancy,” Rachel said.

  “Oh, nonsense,” said Nancy. The word was stronger than the worst swear, and said exactly what she meant. Nonsense, like not listening to the universe, fate or destiny or whatever Grandpa said. “It’s what people choose that matters!” she hollered.

  “Or what chooses them?” her mother yelled back.

  “Like my sweater stripes?” asked Nancy. “I don’t know which is true, Mama. Only this—what you always tell me to look at—the pattern. But you’re not looking.” She strode out of the greenhouse and down the steps to Rachel’s apartment, and there she spun around and stood nose-level with the grass, like Thumbelina, stuck in the hole with the mole.

  “You ought to, for Dad and me,” she said to her mother, loud in the shady courtyard.

  Rachel rose and came to the door of the greenhouse, the fingertips of one hand fussing with the fingers of the other. “How can I?” she said in a hoarse whisper.

  “Not even for Granny?” Nancy said.

  In a daze the Greene Mamba went back to her loom, picked up her shuttle, sat, and trod on the treadle, resumed sliding the shuttle back and forth.

  Nancy dashed back to the greenhouse. She sank to the floor beside her mother, leaned her head on Rachel’s knee. Rachel couldn’t press the treadles that way. “Oh, Ma,” Nancy moaned. “My granny. She’s losing power, Grandpa says.”

  “She’s also giving it up,” said Mama. “And that’s a different situation.”

  Nancy, turning quickly, saw the corners of her mother’s mouth forcing their way down. “Why? I don’t want her to!”

  “But she’s giving it to you, my pet.”

  “You’re the one who needs it.”

  “Me? I’m not weak at all,” Mama said.

  “And I am? I need power?” Nancy drew herself up angrily.

  “Not the way you used to,” Mama said.

  “Who says? I’m the one who goes out. None of this ‘I can’t live up high.’ ‘I can’t live down low.’ You two! You and Dad! I live in both places. I go to school. I do the shopping. I ride the subway.” She was yelling into Mama’s face.

  Rachel didn’t flinch. She placed her hand on Nancy’s head, tangled her fingers in the hair that wouldn’t behave.

  “Help Rose,” Nancy told her mother, “and you’ll save Granny. And yourself, too.”

  38

  The phone rang. Granny looked vaguely toward it as though trying to remember the purpose of this odd invention. Nancy knew she didn’t remember Grandpa saying not to answer it.

  “Should I?” Nancy asked. Granny nodded. “Hello?”

  “Tell the doctor to come tonight,” said the man’s voice. His voice was flat, plain, but around the edges there was a ripple of emotion. He was afraid.

  “Come where?” But she knew who it was. Didn’t he recognize her voice?

  “Just tell him to come, girl.” He hung up.

  This house call was not like the other house calls.

  To begin with, Grandpa Joke insisted on going alone, only to be shouted down by Granny, who out-insisted him. Once Granny was going, Nancy refused to be left behind.

  “I’m going in to check on the situation,” Grandpa told them. “There will not be anything that can be done.”

  Nancy horned in. “Granny won’t stay in the car.”

  Granny refused to vitiate her energy by even arguing. She simply got her jacket on, and her shoes, and grasped her canes in her gnarled hands. She stood in the doorway, Nancy just behind her, daring Joke to go down the stairs without her.

  He tried. He tried to get past them both, hiding his face behind the hat he pretended to be putting on as he went through the door. But Granny’s grip, strong from years of doing everything that mattered with her hands, landed on his elbow. “Giacomo,” she said, and the moment would be frozen forever in Nancy’s mind: Granny looking up intently into Grandpa’s face, her eyes smoldering hot on him, Grandpa’s face under the hat, riveted on his wife. He was unable to refuse her. No, there was never any question in Nancy’s mind, afterward, that this was what her Granny wanted to do.

  But Grandpa said, “I’m going to tell him you’re too ill to come. He won’t know you’re here. You’re not even in the car. I’ll do what I can for the woman, and then we’ll go.”

  “To Häagen-Dazs,” suggested Granny, in a weird moment.

  “Right,” said Grandpa Joke, exchanging a glance with Nancy. “And eat ice cream.”

  “And that’ll be the end with Niko Papadopolis,” Granny continued.

  And Rose Browning, Nancy thought.

  Grandpa put his hand on Saint Christopher’s foot before opening the door to the street. “Saints preserve us,” he said.

  “Forevermore,” said Granny.

  And Nancy said, because it was a prayer, “Amen.”

  When Grandpa Joke parked in front of the house that was in the middle of the block of maybe the only curved street in Brooklyn, things looked different. The house was not gray and faceless and dark, not trying to go unnoticed, not tonight. All the lights were on, bold and bright and blazing into the street, and opera music played though the open window.

  Niko came charging out the front door. Nancy slouched below the seat, pulling Granny down with her. (Grandpa had been right to put her in the back with Nancy.) Niko took Grandpa’s arm as if he were his long lost best friend, and ushered him as quickly as he could across the sidewalk, a muscled arm across his back.

  Nancy’s arm was around Granny, keeping her down low. Niko wasn’t looking back at the car anyway, too anxious, Nancy supposed, to get back inside with Grandpa. But what would he do when he heard that Granny Tina wasn’t here?

  Suddenly Nancy snapped to attention, never sure what came over her (was it Dion’s presence inside the house?). She jumped out of the car and yelled, “Grandpa? You won’t be long, will you?”

  Everything froze. Niko halted as he was dragging Grandpa along. They each stared back at Nancy with a different kind of dismay.

  “Nancy!” called Grandpa, reaching for the post at the bottom of the stoop as if he needed support.

  “In,” Niko ordered Grandpa. The door shut.

  Grandpa, Nancy thought, did not want Granny to worry
about what was going on in Niko’s house. Nancy would worry for her, then, worry how she could possibly help fix things for Dion’s family and for hers. “Just what am I supposed to do?” she asked Granny in desperation.

  Granny’s hand reached toward Nancy through the open window. “Nancy,” she said. “I want to ask you—”

  “What?” Nancy bent to look through the window.

  “Whether I ever told you how Giacomo and I decided to get married?”

  “Gran,” she said, “what kind of ice cream are you going to get?”

  “He didn’t propose. He didn’t ask my permission. Like your grandpa.”

  Like Grandpa? She’s gone from me, thought Nancy. Next she’ll be calling me Josie or Rachel or Joke.

  “You need to know this, if you’re going to be going around with boys,” said Granny.

  “Boys?” What boys? Where?

  “It’s so romantic,” said Granny. “I’m going to go tell Giacomo.”

  Nancy stood back from the car to field her. But Granny didn’t move. “Listen,” she said.

  All right, it didn’t matter, as long as Granny continued to stay out of sight and safe in the car. If listening to a story would keep her there, Nancy would do it.

  She didn’t get in the car, though. She plopped down on the sidewalk, which was still warm from the day’s sun, though the sky was already dark. She didn’t want to hide in the car. She wanted to be present, here on the sidewalk like a gift from Grandpa’s real life (the one he had outside this house).

  “He never came and found me,” Granny said.

  “Who?” Nancy wanted to wash her cobwebby mind out until things seemed clearer.

  “Grandpa. Instead he was always there, when I arrived somewhere. He’d make sure he got there first, make it look like I was doing the finding.” The Brooklyn evening stilled. Had Grandpa made Niko turn down the music? Niko had shut the windows, that was what had changed. It was too warm, almost muggy, sticky, to have all the windows closed. Nancy didn’t see any air conditioner.

  “You should have seen his face, how he’d grin when I’d turn up at some party.” Granny threw back her head and laughed. “Oh, you should have seen him!”

  Nancy would have liked to see him now. Nancy and Grandpa, getting Granny home to a nice cup of tea and her soft bed. She could feel the house behind her, unyielding, guarded.

  Granny went on with her tale. “Well, I asked around, you know, and all the doctors seemed to think he was a good prospect. The nurses, well, they were just gleeful about him.”

  “Gleeful?” Gawky Joke couldn’t have been a ladies’ man.

  “We used to sit and knit at the nurses’ station, passing the time. Yes, everyone was a knitter back then. When they showed off their knitting, they all had rows he’d done. Good with his hands, and smart to boot. One day I walked into the coat room and of course he was already in there, though he’d never admit he knew I was coming. And he said to me, ‘All right. You want to get married? We’ll get married. Come on.’”

  Granny had skipped over a lot, Nancy thought, then realized that she’d heard the missing bits, or somehow knew them. It was as if she were inside young Tina back in the Bronx as she bustled down the hall behind young Giacomo. Nancy could see out of Tina’s eyes. As she slipped her arms into the sleeves of the coat Joke held for her, she felt the satiny lining. As she hurried to keep up with long strides, she felt the tension in her calf muscles. As he led her down the ward steps and out onto the sidewalk along the Grand Concourse, not pausing till a red light held them back, she felt her excitement.

  “Giacomo, where are we going?”

  He spoke gently then. “To the church.”

  “What church?”

  “We’ll walk to the first church we come to, and that’s where we’ll get married.”

  “Today?” His eyes stayed ahead, ignoring the people waiting for the bus, the roller skaters, the ladies with strollers full of babies.

  All right. Why not marry him today?

  There appeared a church of gray stone and stained glass.

  “Do you know what it was?” Granny asked.

  Nancy shook her head.

  “Presbyterian. Scots Presbyterian.”

  Catholic Joke had known all along that the first church they would come to was the kind Tina had gone to back home in West Virginia.

  It was the end of the story. Granny Tina leaned back in her seat, closed her eyes, still in the story, in whatever they said and did after finding that church. She didn’t have to tell Nancy. Nancy knew. She could feel the arms around her, feel the warmth—

  Where am I? Who am I? Nancy. Here on this street on this sidewalk.

  Granny was resting too deeply, her dreams too heavy. Nancy held her breath, listened to Granny breathe, to the rustling sycamore leaves, to the distant subway rumble, felt the movement of the city through her bottom, through the sidewalk, through the dirt beneath.

  “Nancy?” Granny sounded weary. “I’m thirsty.”

  How unlike her it was to ask for anything. “Thirsty?” Nancy sat straight up and looked around. No thermos, no water bottle. Oh Lord, thought Nancy. Why did I let her tell me another story?

  “I’ll run up to the corner,” she said. “It won’t take a moment. Don’t move.”

  “Nancy, where would I move to?”

  At least she knows it’s me. At least she’s that clear.

  “Okay,” Nancy said. She went charging down the street through the shadows.

  A screech of metal stopped her in her tracks at the corner. A clothesline overhead? No, it was the gate of the grocery store being cranked down. Through the diamond webbing she saw the lady working the crank.

  “Wait!” she shouted. She sighed and waved through the grocery store gate. “Please!”

  The lady tried to wave her away. She came near the window and told Nancy, clearly and slowly, “I am closed.”

  Nancy pressed her face through the diamonds of the gate so the lady could see how sweet and innocent she was. “Please?”

  Again the squeaking sound came. The lady wasn’t making it. She opened the glass door without opening the gate and said, “Cerrado.” Just in case Nancy spoke Spanish. But the lady was Korean, and Nancy didn’t speak Spanish, so it made her smile.

  “I need a water for my grandmother. Please?” She poked her money through the gate. The lady bustled off, shaking her head, and brought the water.

  “’Komapsumnida,” Nancy said, the way Granny had got Mrs. Kim to teach her to say thank you, years ago at the grocery near their house. A safety net of kindness, extended to this neighborhood, too.

  The lady locked the door again and walked away. As Nancy headed back to the car, again came the squeaking sound, so familiar. It was a funny time of night to do laundry.

  A moment later she thought it might have been the car door squeaking. It had been opened, all right. Granny was gone.

  39

  She ran up the steps of the house. For some reason she didn’t knock. She stood there and listened and tried to feel. A wrong mood, a weird mood, a mood about this place made her not knock. Then a noise in the hallway inside sent her leaping off the stoop to crouch behind it in the dark on the ground. The water bottle fell splat behind her and sent a silent puddle of water out around it. Nancy’s foot was getting wet and her thigh throbbed, but she stayed still, still as Ned on any rooftop.

  The hinge creaked, the door opened, and Niko’s voice barked, “Go on out!”

  Oh, thank God. Let it be my grandparents.

  But the figure coming toward her was Mina.

  How could her father shove her out alone? was Nancy’s first thought. What was going on inside that they’d put her out? was the second. And if she hadn’t been so busy wondering where Dion was (her third thought), she’d have paid attention to the fact that Mina was standing watching the stream of water bubbling across the stoop. “I thought you were out here,” Mina said.

  “You thought—what?”

  �
�You’re always here, aren’t you?”

  “How do you know?”

  “How do you know that I’m here?” the girl asked. Nancy kept her face straight, but inside she thought: I like this kid, the way I like her brother. For the first time she wondered what their parents were really like.

  “I’ll show you what else I know,” she told Mina, and unwrapped the jump rope from around her wrist. She taught Mina cat’s cradle. The soldier’s bed sprang up. Candles lit beneath it, folded their light into a manger. The manger’s straw turned to diamonds, like a miracle out of “Rumpelstiltskin.” The diamonds blinked and glimmered, became cat’s eyes. And the cat’s eyes looked for a kitten and wove the cat’s cradle again.

  Then Nancy took the rope from Mina and twirled her hands through Jacob’s ladder, so fast and sure that Mina was dazzled.

  “Show me that!” she begged.

  “Inside,” Nancy said.

  “They don’t want me inside,” Mina said.

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “My daddy. And that doctor. And the old spider lady.”

  “What about your mother?” Nancy asked gently.

  Mina wound the jump rope tightly around one hand in a way that didn’t form any figure, and twisted it even tighter.

  “What about Dion?”

  “Dion who?” the girl said angrily, with a look of her father about her.

  “Your brother?”

  “He should have been here before.”

  “He’s here now?”

  “That’s why I’m out here.” Mina mimicked an adult voice. “‘Too many kids in here!’”

  “Dion sent you out?”

  “I’m supposed to be getting—”

  “Getting what?”

  “Ice cream.” It was the snack of the evening. Mina stopped. “You want to go in, don’t you?” she asked.

  “If you let me in, Mina, I’ll teach you Jacob’s ladder.”

  “Pinkie swear?” They linked pinkies, and Mina took a ribbon from around her neck and used the key on it to open the door without a sound. “You have to be silent,” she whispered. She slipped off her shoes, crept barefoot down the hallway, and stopped just before a door that was ajar. Nancy followed. Inside, a pale dark woman wrapped in silk of silver-gray, in so many layers it was as though she’d never be warm. Granny, slim as a ghost in the chair beside the bed. And Grandpa Joke, hovering above them both and looking breakable as a bubble.