I'm the Grandma Now

It is a bruised nectarine, but it’s sweet so I eat around the dark, wet parts like a woman in good shoes stepping over puddles. I don’t want the imperfections to get in the way of my pleasure in the fruit, tree ripe according to the little label.  Are the labels affixed by machines or by immigrant women lined up in plastic gloves? Who did the immigrant women leave behind in Guatemala, in Honduras? Other abuelas too hunched over to perform this essential work, manufacturing nectarines. If you peel away the layers of a story - any story - like the skin of the nectarine that comes off when you tear the label off the fruit, there are always grandmothers. It really doesn't matter where the story begins, whether it’s heading backwards or forwards, the grandmothers will rise up and demand to be heard. 

Photo by Eduardo Barrios on Unsplash

My grandmother Anna divided her time between our house and my Uncle’s four blocks to the south. At pesach, they “shipped her out” to a Jewish hotel in Spring Valley. My mother didn’t have two extra sets of dishes just sitting around all year waiting to be used on pesach. Anna had to leave the family on the holiday because the rules were not adequately kept. Seeded rye crept back into the breadbox. When she was at our house, if the weather was fine, she also divided her time. A little variety is a good thing. Sometimes she sat on the benches in between the north and southbound lanes on Broadway and sometimes she sat on a folding chair by the front door of the building near Mr. Stern’s candy store. Maybe on those days, her feet hurt or she didn’t feel up to navigating the traffic, what with all the Checker cabs and the number 104 buses and the delivery trucks bringing all the kosher cows to the butcher. 

Old people have secret lives, crumbs of memory coming and going. Anna at one time spoke six languages. English, French, German, Hebrew, Yiddish and Romanian. Once in Great Barrington, a white-haired woman arrived at our front door with a bewildered expression on her face bearing her own secrets. She was pleasant enough but didn’t know her own name. I guess she liked the look of the house with the wraparound porch, the etched glass and the old greenhouse. Maybe it reminded her of a house she used to live in in Connecticut before she started wandering off, before her family “shipped her out” to a place where they were supposed to keep her safe. But this lady was like a bat that flies in the living room window and just circles around and around. We couldn’t understand her story. We couldn’t figure out her flight pattern until I remembered that up the road and around the corner there was one of those memory units. It had to be at least a mile away. And there she was on the lam in her old coat.

They really could do better with the nomenclature. Imagine living in a place called a memory unit, a building full of underpaid people in scrubs who know they need the work and other people who don’t know why they live there. People’s lives shrink like spinach. When my mother was near the end of her life, her skin turned crepey and bruised like fruit. She knew six people, one for each of her mother’s languages. Three of them were her grandchildren. My son was the only one who was too far away to see her. When he was a little boy, she used to run from the back of the apartment on 83rd street, arms outstretched, to fling open the front door and gather him into her arms when he was visiting from the Berkshires. He will always remember her even though he didn’t get to hear her final rendition of the Marseillaise, delivered from bed about a week before she died, more memorable for me even than the one in Casablanca. My mother was born on 105th street in Harlem but she liked to think she had a certain Edith Piaf quality. 

Now I’m the grandma, the bubbe, the nonna. Getting old is an elaborate choreography, part sitting alone on a folding chair, considering what life has been and what might happen now and afterward and part ferociously hugging the grandchildren because in those moments of hugging I know where I come from and who comes after me. It’s the simplest kind of love, almost entirely free of expectation. It takes place in the memory unit of my heart, in the orchard, the pardes of my family. My job is to stick the labels on the fruit.

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Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. In September, poet and visual artist Rosemary Starace will join me for Part 3 of our inquiry into How Art Heals: Remembering Wholeness. All subscribers are now welcome to read and comment on Many Voices posts.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.