Grandma Never Flattened Me Like a Pancake

 “If you sleep in bed with Grandma, she’ll flatten you like a pancake,” Daddy would say when Grandma Helen visited. So what did I do? I slept in bed with Grandma. Yes, there was risk; with the exception of her skinny left leg, she was a large woman. (The leg hadn’t healed properly after she broke it jumping off a train on its way to a gas chamber in the Holocaust). If you’ve lived off potato peels for months in an attic, you get to eat piles of chicken wings and whole cheesecakes when you come out of hiding. When you’re a survivor, you get to not use napkins, and no one gets to say a damn thing. Thus, Grandma was a large woman who had to throw her giant pocketbook to the bottom of staircases to free her hands to use her cane and the banister. (She asked for help only with washing her back in the tub).

            But Grandma of course never flattened me like a pancake as Daddy said she would. I also never got sick eating the unwrapped candies from her pocketbook. I didn’t give a hoot about where the candies came from or why they were unwrapped; it was candy. While my peers tried their first cigarettes and beers in their parents’ basements, I had sleepovers with Grandma and ate unwrapped candies from her purse. Past my bedtime, we made crumbs while eating saltine crackers and watching “I Love Lucy” reruns. Such was my manner of rebellion in adolescence.

            “Thank you for loving me,” she’d often say –– rubbing my back with her fat, soft hand. Instead of playing with friends, I played cards by her rules, drew flowers with her, painted her nails, and brushed her hair. I’d run my fingers over the lump on her head from where my mother said a Nazi had kicked her. But I never asked Grandma herself about it. We never talked about sad things. With her new family in America, I think she wanted to start over. And so I let her. 

            I have since felt no greater love for anybody as I did for this woman.

            When Grandma wasn’t visiting, I’d call. In her Polish accent, she’d answer with the same Hello? That sounded like she was rolling marbles at the back of her throat.

            Me: “What are you up to?”

            Her: “Wheel of Fortune.”

            Me: “Okay. I love you.”

            Her: ”I love you more than you love me.”
            Me: “No. I love you more.”

            Her: “Oh no no no . . . Call me later?”

            We’d hang up.

            Only an hour later, I’d call again, and we’d have a version of the same conversation. Hearing her voice reminded me she was still alive, and her death is what I most feared. Sometimes I’d sit on a stool by the phone –– calling over and over again until my parents made me eat my tortellini. Or keep writing one of my stories about enchanted worlds where you can smell colors and do other things I stopped imagining possible once I grew up, got fired and dumped, and started doing taxes.
            “You have a Phone Bug,” Daddy once said. By the time I was fourteen, we’d learn that what I had was OCD, but until then it was called “being a pest.” The only time I wasn’t anxious was when I was with Grandma. In the presence of a survivor, you know you’re always safe.

            We fed Grandma like the Queen of Sheba she said she was. She’d sit at my mother’s kitchen table in her special green chair –– demanding chicken wings. I’d eat them with her. Grandma was a large woman with a large heart but honest when she didn’t like something. Once, my mother made her chamomile tea:

            “How’s the tea, Ma?’

            “It stinks.”

            Accepting and appreciating Grandma, my mother tolerated such comical antics; she believed her mother–in–law was a good woman and had been deprived enough in her lifetime. Other behaviors, however, she and the adults in the family tried and failed to mitigate. Once, Grandma showed up for the street fair in her nightgown. Daddy and I had picked her up from where, with that giant pocketbook in her lap, she’d been waiting as always on her porch –– a dilapidated, wooden structure with an arthritic railing. (This was the same porch of the house Daddy grew up in and that his mother now, without explanation, let nobody near. Years later, cleaning out her house after her second stroke, we’d discover she was a hoarder). 

            In the incident with the nightgown, she and my mother stood in the doorway of our own house. My mother: “Are you gonna get dressed, Ma?”

            Grandma: “This is my dress.” Her silk, floral-printed nightgown was torn at the hem above her fat ankles. She wore the dirty white shoes she always wore –– even in bed when she forgot to take them off. When I close my eyes, I sometimes still see those shoes like imprints of light. In dreams, I see them on her feet but also in the trash. 

            My mother: “It’s a nightgown.”

            Grandma: “Oh well it isn’t what I’m gonna wear, Paul.” She called my mother Pauline “Paul” –– as if saying the final syllable was too much effort. In the doorway, she unzipped her nightgown and let it drop. Underneath was a green slip. “This is my dress.”

            My mother: “It’s another nightgown.”

            But Grandma had already turned away, thrown her pocketbook down the stone steps leading up to our house, and was lumbering down leaning one hand on the railing and the other on her cane. If she wanted to wear a nightgown to the street fair, she’d wear a nightgown to the street fair. I was the only one who wouldn’t try to stop her. She was fearless and independent of others’ good opinions, and in those ways I wanted to be like her.

           

            Grandma Helen died of dementia and old age when I was 25. I flew in from Denver with only two hours to spare and crawled into the hospital bed beside her for the last sleepover.
             Nuzzling her shoulder: "I love you more than you love me."
             She couldn’t talk, move, or open her eyes.
             "Or maybe we loved each other the same." 

             Her collarbone dug into my forehead. She was no longer a large woman; she hadn’t walked in years and her muscles had atrophied. Now I ran the risk of flattening her like a pancake. I placed one hand on her heart to feel a few of the last beats. I closed my eyes. “I’m scared, Grandma, but I’ll try really hard to be a survivor like you were.”

            Grandma never did flatten me like a pancake, but she did a lot of other things in her lifetime. Many of them I will never know as I carry with me only shards of her story, but one thing she did was teach me Love. For that I am grateful.