Note: this is a rough edit of my memoir essay. it's very long, and i wrote the segments in a totally different order, so im not sure if this is the order they'll end up in. please tell me what parts should be taken out, what parts are necessary, and anything else you think is helpful. thank you!
Sometimes it’s hard to believe my mother and I are related. I’m sitting cross legged on my floor surrounded by photo albums and loose pictures, rummaging through them as I sweep off layers of dust and germs that have probably lived on these for several months. She walks into my room and frowns at the mess. “What the hell are you doing? Are you going to clean all this up later? Why haven’t you thrown you old school books out yet? Didn’t you just wear that shirt on Monday?” My mother is the queen of asking too many questions before I have the chance to process them, let alone answer them. I sigh, because it’s no use. I am messy and my mother is a neurotic neat freak. In our house, we have a couch you’re not supposed to sit on, towels you’re not supposed to dry your hands with, and a garbage can you’re not supposed to throw things away with. I’m constantly sad for the items she buys that will never be used for their true purposes. She comes over to where I’m sitting and picks up a picture of her mother during Christmastime from about ten years ago. “I miss her” she says softly, and I nod my head. I look up and notice that I’ve never seen my mother look so vulnerable.
It’s 1130 pm, which means it’s time for lunch. Which means it’s time for our salad platters. Salad platters are Grandma’s idea of a healthy lunch, which really means her idea of a quick way to feed us and get rid of leftover cold cuts. I think salad platters are the only thing my mother doesn’t fear us eating here, and since I’ve grown up on them, I love them dearly, like the way you learn to love your favorite sports team even though you know they always lose. I love the hardboiled egg half she always gives us, the pieces of provolone cheese, my favorite, and the rolled up pieces of salami and ham that I dip in Italian dressing. I even love that, even though this is a salad platter, there is technically no salad whatsoever in it. Grandma was always a comedian.
At three o’clock on the dot we rush into the living room to watch “General Hospital.” Grandma resumes whatever afghan she was knitting the day before, and I pull out a word find and a highlighter and try and find the words. I’m pretty sure “General Hospital” is the only TV show my grandma watches because she doesn’t have cable and usually falls asleep around 7pm anyway. Between the hours of nine and three, my sister and I can do whatever we want. Usually we alternate between playing bingo with Grandma or watching reruns of “Empty Nest” or “Saved By The Bell” on TV. Sometimes I pull out old photo albums from the 70’s and 80’s with the psychedelic printed covers, searching through the pictures of my aunts and uncles on family vacations and holidays. Everyone’s hairstyle seems strange and their clothes look extremely old fashioned.
Underneath all the trees you can barely tell it’s sunny out. I’m lying on a hammock in grandma’s backyard with her and my sister, staring up at the branches of the tree. I play with grandma’s soft black hair as she tells us the story of how my mother had a pet duck that followed her to school one day. I’ve heard the story about 100 times, but I always ask to hear it. This is my favorite part about going to grandma’s house, hearing her tell the stories from my aunt and uncle’s childhoods. Looking around the backyard is like seeing a museum from my family history. There’s the swing my grandfather put up years ago, a tire swing hanging from the tallest tree in the yard. Further back (this is the biggest backyard I’ve seen my entire life) there is the red shed, and my Uncle Andrew’s old dog is buried in front of it. In the middle of the yard should be the above ground pool where my mother almost drowned, but it was taken apart decades ago. On the white cement steps that lead to the backdoor are handprints and names of my three aunts and two uncles, one name per step. I trace the imprinted names with my fingers every day. When we go inside I ask to see the tape that I’ve watched about 30 times since I discovered it, the tape that has no sound other than the old music someone recorded over all the scenes. It isn’t black and white, but in a kind of fuzzy color that seems extremely vintage. On it are small episodes in my family’s history; my aunt and uncle’s wedding in the late sixties, a christening of a cousin, my great-grandma’s birthday party, and my mother dancing around the basement with her friends as a teenager. Everything on this tape makes me nostalgic for a past that I never was a part of.
My six year old sister Nicole looks nothing like me. She’s my half sister, born with my mother as her mother and my step father as her father, but she doesn’t resemble me at all. She does, however, have my attitude and pieces of my personality. Right now she’s asked me to put in a tape that she’s watched at least 20 times in the past month. It’s the video of my mom and step father’s wedding, something that occurred when I was nine and when she wasn’t even a twinkle in my mother’s eye. She is transfixed by this tape, which is so old that it’s a VHS, something that looks ancient to me now. Nicole and I watch my nine year old self dancing to “greased lightening” and my mom and Aunt Laura do the electric slide. I’m embarrassed by the late nineties dance music, but Nicole loves every second of this video, even though she’s nowhere to be found. When she saw it for the first time, she kept asking “where am I?” After I told her she wasn’t born yet, she didn’t seem to care anymore. She still watched, hypnotized by the images of a family that looked so dated to me.
“Ma, this can expired in 1997.” My mother is annoyed, and slightly embarrassed. She taps her foot and tries to reason with my grandmother, who seems oblivious and earnestly confused. “What do you mean? It’s soda, I’m sure it’s fine!” Meanwhile it’s 2002, and six years haven’t aged the Pepsi well, so when my grandmother isn’t looking my mom chucks it into the garbage. Grandma’s basement was like an ancient archeological dig, if you happened to be digging for outdated cans of soup and vegetables and boatloads of fabric and apoulstry. My grandfather was a carpenter, and even after he died she never got rid of all the fabric in the back of our basement. I guess she figured she would need it, just like she figured she would need all those six year old cans of creamed corn and broccoli. In her muumuu and favorite, possibly only, pair of Ked’s slippers, my Grandma prepares dinner for my family. My mom and aunt Andrea are watching her closely as she makes spaghetti and meatballs, making sure the ingredients she uses are fresh, and that she doesn’t end up accidentally putting peanut butter in the sauce instead of basil. It’s never happened before, but I really wouldn’t put anything past her at this point. Grandma’s getting old. Her memory isn’t what it used to be and her cooking, well her cooking is what it always was, a little scary, but always made with love.
I am constantly singing. It’s completely subconscious at times, and utterly embarrassing when I don’t realize I’m doing it. I’ll sing in the shower, sure, but unlike everyone else in the world, I also sing when I’m walking, when I’m working, when I’m around complete strangers, and when I’m around new friends. Everyone who knows me at all knows this about me. They will completely attest to my occasional belting out of “Edge of Seventeen” or “Whole Lotta Love” or basically the entire collection of songs by The Beatles. All my friends are aware of my aspiration to be a lounge singer and my endearing yet unhealthy obsession with American Idol. I guess the oddest part of all of this, the part that makes me slightly more embarrassed than the fact that I will serenade a crowd of strangers with “Michelle” and mess up all the parts in French, is the fact that I cannot carry a tune for the life of me. I’d like to say I’m a pretty good singer, but this would be a lie. In reality, I’m a mediocre singer who is occasionally tone deaf and should never be allowed near a microphone. It’s a wonder how I’m so drawn to music, lyrics, and the art of performance, and always have been. Or, almost always.
Grandma had one of the longest driveways ever. If I was to visit that house now, I’m sure the driveway would seem long, but not scary long. However at eight years old it seemed to stretch out into an eternity of never-ending blacktop. In the middle of the driveway, on the left side, was a small concrete set of steps leading into the side entrance of the house. There were two small steps on either side of a large platform which was enclosed by a rusty black railing. The platform was just big enough to fit me and occasionally my sister, and during those many summer afternoons at Grandma’s house, acted as my stage for all the shows we would put together. Grandma was born in 1927, smack in the middle of the Great Depression. She grew up in Bayone with her two older sisters during a dreary time, and with her father in Italy, my great grandmother had to take care of her three daughters mostly alone. I remember her telling stories about her youth, but more so I remember photo albums with fading pictures and dated hairstyles which I made fun of. Grandma was enthusiastic about a lot of things, but singing and dancing were her most revered activities. She taught my sister Caitlin and I tons of songs from her childhood, and was never happier as when we were making up songs and dances and performing them on our makeshift stage. Grandma would sit on her crappy folding chair with a glass of unsweetened Iced Tea in her hand, (which you couldn’t have gotten me to drink if you had paid me, and I was eight) beaming at us and clapping with delight. Our silly little performances were her greatest entertainment, and I learned to love to sing and dance all those summers ago, even though I knew I wasn’t remotely talented at either one.
Grandma is a huge Yankees fan. If we’re outside, which we usually are as long as the sun is shining, she has her portable AM radio with her to check the scores of the baseball games. If you ask her favorite player, it will always be Joe Girardi, and secondly Derek Jeter. Today we’re in the living room of my house, sitting with my step dad Steve, my mom, my sister, and my grandma and grandpa. The topic of baseball comes up, and Steve is also a huge Yankees fan, so he and grandma start a conversation about the current team. Enthusiastically, she says “That Jerek Deter is something, isn’t he?” I laugh. Steve laughs. Grandpa is to deaf to have heard her, but I’m sure he’d laugh too, after he yelled at her. My step dad stops laughing long enough to correct her mistake, but she doesn’t get it. “I said his name right, didn’t I? Jerek Deter! That’s not right?” Then she realizes her mistake and laughs with us. It’s no surprise that anytime someone in my mother’s family says or does something stupid yet endearingly funny, we call them “Mary” after my grandmother’s name.
She died about five years ago. I remember a lot of tears at the wake and the funeral, I remember my mother touching grandma’s soft black hair for the last time and saying she looked beautiful, but I also remember laughter. I have a lot of cousins, aunts, and uncles from my mother’s side of the family, and countless amounts of stories about my grandma were being told those few days we mourned, stories that I had already heard but loved hearing again, and new stories that grandma never told me. My favorite story happened right before the funeral, and didn’t involve my grandma at all, except in spirit. A few days before her funeral, my aunts and uncles gathered at Grandma’s house to sort through things, like who would be a pallbearer and what kind of casket they would buy. They were deicing on which mass card to use, and after looking at one for several minutes, my Aunt Andrea, the one with the personality most like my grandma, said “I like this one the most. Except, who’s this guy they have on the front of it?” My Uncle Andrew took the card away and smiled, then laughed. He passed it around to my aunts and uncles and they all laughed too. Finally, my Uncle Gary spoke. “Good job Andrea, or should I call you Mary. The guy on the front of the card is Jesus.”
