Grandma
Her English is Italian peppered with Americanized onions:
“honey,” “g’baby,” “yeah?” and her huge smile is bright but her
hands flutter and twist in the air, the apron, the housedress, and she
shuffles across the thick carpet in her worn pink or blue slippers, talking loudly to everyone, to everything in a strange confection of convent-school perfection streaked with a guttersnipe twist. It is melodious and fluid and beautiful — the mystery of Mass in Latin, where street urchins slide across the marble, dropping the Bible for punctuation.
In the somber dining room she stands beneath the Depression-Era portrait of my father, his brooding misery forever trapped between his toddler bowl-cut and sailor suit, and shows me the dark and heavy breakfront filled with cream-colored china that bears a lovely purple thistle —
(she just likes thistles, which is good since her son married my mother)
— with fine gold trim. In one locked drawer sits a fat wedding album of my Aunt looking like an old-style movie star. The key is in a box in a drawer in the basement, only taken out for special occasions, like the settings. You might ask why; I know I did, once, when I was too young to remember the answer.
I can smell her perfumed talcum when she hugs me, it has no name, it is just Powdered Old…