My grandmother blinks into the camera, serenely sipping apple juice. “How can I be expected to remember these things? I was a little girl.” In response to initial questions, she shrugs, almost flippantly dismissive. The video camera is placed on a pile of books my grandmother, framed in a medium shot, sits on the couch in her room. I distinctly hear the Petula Clark hit “Downtown.” “This is my grandson, the writer,” she says, beaming, and then, once that person has shuffled off, she offers some salient fact: “Pees in her pants,” or “Plays with herself all day,” or “Deranged, talks to himself.” She may be on the money about the enuresis and the masturbation, but the deranged guy-a gaunt man in an expensive silk shirt, his belt cinched up at the diaphragm-does not talk to himself he sings. I heedlessly scarf down humongous slabs of fish, doused in my grandmother’s weapons-grade marinade, and we head back to the nursing home.Įn route to her room, she introduces me to everyone we encounter. My grandmother is the last of the European-born Leyners, and there’s an anthropological imperative to get her story before it’s too late-her life span is already way off the actuarial charts. “Eat.”ĭad, meanwhile, is glancing at his watch. ”Why are you arguing with your father?” my grandmother says. ”What did she say?” my father inquires, cupping a hand around his ear. ”What did you call me?” she snarls, with her inimitably spontaneous and instantly evaporating belligerence. ”Dude, you’re some kind of gastronomic Hell’s Angel,” I say to her. “Not bad,” she says with a shrug, reaching across for a crab roll. Some of the green sludge dribbles down her chin. My father and I exchange an impish look, our brows raised in the pitiless pseudo-scientific curiosity of boys. A woman this age, this frail, could die from that, right? Someone should stop her. That caustic shit could eat through it like hydrochloric acid. At her age, the esophageal lining is like tissue paper. In a robin’s-egg-blue cashmere cardigan, a yellow scarf knotted jauntily at her neck, her white hair a wispy meringue-her elegance not vitiated in the least by the slight kyphotic curvature of her spine-she stirs up the wasabi (now brackish and clotted and looking like something brewed in gurgling vats during the Gulf War) and, trembling, precariously dips an enormous piece of yellowtail into it. Rose has just dumped an unspeakable amount of wasabi into her little ceramic dish of soy sauce.
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