by Juli
My grandmother lived in a red and white house that looked for all the world like a barn. Actually, she only lived in the top half, at least for a while. My aunt and cousin lived on the first floor. At some point I think she moved downstairs as well, but it all gets sort of muddy for me, the moves up and down, so we’ll stick to upstairs. The apartment she rented was only two or so blocks down the street from ours, so my Grandma used to watch us while my mother worked at the bakery. Probably when my mother worked other places too, but I mostly remember the bakery. Our street was Bensch Street, and yes, that’s with an “s.” It’s a wonder any of us can spell, when your very own street misinforms you daily that there’s an “s” in bench.
When I look back, the walk from our house to Grandma’s included a pretty good hill just past our block. I always got tired at the top, although I can’t remember seeing that hill last time I went back. Is that what happens when you get older? Does your experience flatten your perception of everything, or does it make looking back more topsy turvy?
Hill or no, there were always a couple of pop cans to be gathered from here to there, and even back then, that was ten cents return for each can in Michigan. That’s how my brother and I got candy money, so we were always prowling for them, heads swaying back and forth on the look out for discards. I think people littered more back then, because I never see soda cans on the street anymore. But to this day I notice my brother walks with his head a little down, scanning the sidewalk. Me, I barely look where I’m going now. But back then, the stakes were higher, and I was closer to the ground, so we both looked sharp.
Through a small entryway, the steps to my Grandmother’s apartment drew up and twisted sharply and steeply to the left. Narrow, as I remember, even as a small child. They were covered with something that looks in my memory as though it must have been an early variation of green astroturf. But that could be the sweet Technicolor whisperings of the way-back-when machine. The carpet may have easily been a sculpted brown or tufted mustard yellow. It was the seventies after all. But I remember them bright green, worn in the center of each step, grossly florescent around the edges, so those are the stairs I’m climbing now.
I used to wonder how Grandma made it up and down that narrow little staircase, although I saw her do it plenty. I could barely get up them, granted I was only three or four when these memories were made and those stairs were scaled. My Grandma was a mighty large woman, I couldn’t even guess what she might have weighed. Three hundred? Four hundred? Now I look back and know she was obese, and realize that’s probably the main reason she died so young (in her mid fifties), but then I didn’t even think of her as fat. She was Grandma. She was wonderful. She was perfect. She had a big loud laugh, a mischievous smile, and the most distinctive warm smell I’ve ever smelled in my life. Even to this day I’ll catch a wave of something that smells faintly like Grandma, and it just about brings me to my knees with longing and grief.
Hope Ruth Cross had salty hair with a little pepper, slightly wavy and above her shoulders. Hope wore big house dresses and no shoes and no socks. She liked onion and mustard sandwiches on Wonder Bread, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, and Kool cigarettes. I remember sitting on her lap, watching her flick ashes in a big square ashtray the color of burnt umber. She’d let me take a sip or two of her beer and taught my brother, my cousin, and me naughty songs that made us laugh so hard tears would fall down our cheeks.
Popeye the sailor man
Toot! Toot!
Lived in a garbage can
Toot! Toot!
He liked to go swimmin’
with bare naked women,
He’s Popeye the sailor man!
Toot! Toot!
My cousin and I must have been only about four then, and my brother six. The same ages my kids are now. Maybe that’s why I’ve been missing her so much lately. The genetic imprinting of my children echoing back that harmony in time when a great woman loved three children who needed loving very much. I swear I hear her laughing in my children’s laughs.
There she is, surrounded by plumes of cigarette smoke and smelling faintly sour-sweet like beer. She’s propped up against an old steel and formica table that rocks a bit and is sprinked by cinnamon-colored rust. She’s smiling at us now and waving us over as she bends and pokes around for something we can put our pop cans in. A couple of bright orange trash bags are in the corner, spotted by neighborhood flies, buzzing and spinning, whirling and twirling, my earliest universe. She gives us big hugs, wet kisses, and there they are, on the table I can see them now, three glasses of milk and a box of Oreo cookies.
Thank you Grandma. You never had enough money to take care of yourself, but you always treated us. I just wanted to let you know I still remember.
And I love you.