Grandma and I were so close that when I shut my eyes, I can still count the spots on her aging skin, which reminded me of an almond in its smoothness and color. If I concentrate on my fingers, I can feel her silver hair, which even in her extreme old age was soft as silk and streaked with coal black. I can see her standing before her mirror in a pale pink slip, rubbing face cream on her high cheekbones and into her neck, all the way down to her graceful shoulders, doing “face yoga” to keep away the wrinkles, her gold and turquoise earrings quivering in her ears. They had been in her earlobes since she was eight days old, when her ears were pierced in the Romanian Jewish equivalent of a bris for a girl. I spent so much time looking at those earrings that their existence was more intense, more fully real to me than that of other objects. You could say the same of the way I saw my grandmother. She was so beautiful, even her dentures seemed glamorous, in my favorite shades of seashell pink and pearly white. “Your teeth fall out when you don’t have enough food,” she’d say in a matter-of-fact tone when I admired them in their little cup, secretly hoping she’d lend them to me one day. “So I got mine young. But maybe when you’re very old you can have some, too.”
My earliest memory was of her, of bouncing on her outstretched leg as she chanted a Romanian Yiddish nursery rhyme: “Pitzili, coucoulou …” Not on her knees but on her outstretched leg—my grandmother was the strongest woman I knew. She taught yoga to a group she called “my old ladies” and had a chin-up bar in the doorway of her bedroom. Lest you think she was some sort of health fanatic, I hasten to add that she also drank a pot of coffee a day and had a secret fondness for Little Debbie cakes. My grandmother’s perfume was one of contradictions: she smelled of Roger & Gallet lavender soap, Weleda iris face cream, and raw garlic. Beneath that, her skin had a floral and slightly metallic scent, which put me in mind of roses and iron playground bars. When I open her papers, I can still smell it, growing fainter with the passage of time.
Her home in New York was like a ship pulled up onto an unknown shore, a bulwark she’d fitted out against the oddities of America, intensely personal in a way that indicated she knew she was here for the duration and was determined to make the best of her stay. Taste-wise, it was a mishmash: fine textiles; valuable etchings by her artist friend Isaac Friedlander; paintings by her psychiatric patients; furniture salvaged from the curb; rag rugs; giant plastic flowers in a gaudy ceramic umbrella stand from Portugal; and the bits of Judaica and African art that are standard-issue home decor for left-wing Jews of a certain age. Her wardrobe was a similar jumble. Her dresses and jackets, custom-made for her by a couture seamstress she’d befriended in Paris, had been subjected over the years to endless alterations, additions, and improvements. She was devoted to a pair of flesh-colored orthopedic ghillies called “space shoes” that a retired figure skater had made for her in the 1950s to relieve the pain in her frost-damaged toes. Her preferred accessories were a child’s sun hat with a bright blue splatter-painted band and matching sunglasses.
The year after I was born my grandmother bought the house next door to my mother’s house in Asheville as a second home. It was the ugliest house in the neighborhood, but Grandma was extremely proud of it. It looked like a badly constructed pontoon boat had eaten and failed to digest a mobile home, then crashed into the mountainside. It had white aluminum siding and a flat tarpaper roof, with red aluminum awnings that made its doors and windows look like sleepy, half-closed eyes. But my grandmother didn’t care. The house was hers, and that was what mattered.
Before she moved in, she shipped herself a coal-burning stove and a box of bricks from her house in New York. Grandma sent a lot of things to Asheville over the years, including a pair of fuchsia suede high-heeled sandals too large for anyone but my father, a fur wallet made by one of her psychiatric patients, and a kerosene lamp and cookstove, with live fuel included, “just in case.”
A lot of things were just in case. Candles and cough drops, the woolen bandage she always carried in her purse. My grandmother practiced a peculiar and intensive form of self-sufficiency. She wasn’t a wilderness type; she just knew that in the end, the only person she could truly rely upon was herself.
My grandmother lived alone in a way that seemed natural, inevitable, and inviolable, and for all our closeness, it never occurred to me to wonder with whom she had managed to produce her two children, my mother and uncle. She seemed perfectly capable of doing such a thing unassisted, and where in her life would a companion have fit in? Still, I remember a day when I was about five years old, and my mother handed my grandmother a photograph of me posed with my grandfather in a Sears, Roebuck studio, taken that summer on one of his infrequent visits to Asheville.
My grandmother examined the picture. “What a nice photo. Who’s that with Miranda?”
My mother replied, “That’s Daddy.”
My grandmother’s smooth forehead wrinkled into a map of sadness. She looked carefully at the picture, as if searching for a sign. Then she set the photo on the table in front of her.
“I would never even have recognized him.” She sounded the words out slowly, shaking her head. “I wouldn’t know him if I met him on the street.” She picked it up and looked again. “May I keep this?” she asked.
“Sure,” my mother said, sounding surprised.
Later I found the photograph tucked into a picture frame beside my grandmother’s bed, where it remained until her death. At the time I wondered why she wanted to keep a picture of me with someone she didn’t know. I was too young to put one and one together and realize my grandparents might once have been two, to discern they might ever have been anything but strangers to each other.
CHAPTER TWO
HOW COULD I, AT THAT AGE, HAVE THOUGHT TO match my grandmother to my grandfather? He wasn’t apples to her oranges; he was pine cones or prickly pears: a remote and vaguely terrifying figure who noted corrections in the margins of his dictionaries, sent my letters back marked up with red pencil, and occasionally appeared in our house with tasteful gifts and an inclination to take umbrage in toxic doses. He was retired from the UN civil service and had been an interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials. I didn’t know what the Trials were (we called them “the Trials,” as if they were some kind of kissing cousin or family vacation spot), except that they added to his aura of prestige and authority.
Yes, he and my grandmother were more than opposites, or perhaps less; they were like the north poles of two magnets, impossible to push close enough together in my mind to make any kind of comparison, let alone a connection. The idea that they might be linked first came to me on the day we began addressing invitations to my bat mitzvah, and I pointed out to my mother that my grandfather hadn’t been included on the guest list.
“I guess you could send him an invitation,” she replied. “But he’s not going to come.”
“Why?”
“Think about it.”
I could think of a number of reasons my grandfather would choose not to attend my bat mitzvah: for one, he was an avowed atheist; for another, he only came to America when work brought him here, never just to see his family. Or he might be taking silent exception to an undisclosed inventory of offenses and injuries suffered during his last visit. Really, the possibilities were limitless. I chose the most likely among them. “Is he mad at us?”
My mother shook her head. “He didn’t come to your uncle’s bar mitzvah. I didn’t have a bat mitzvah, but I’m sure he wouldn’t have come to it if I had. He didn’t come to either of my weddings. He didn’t come when you were born.”
“Why?”