![]() She and my great grandma made baccala in great batches and called them pizzas. No matter we’d just eaten: “How about a little sandwich then?” she’d press after we demurred, “it’s still a long time until dinner.” On holidays there were angel’s wings and ricciarelli in pastel colors. Old Perry Como and Louis Prima records spun at a respectable volume while she exhorted us to “just drink a little juice” out of paper Dixie cups. When the house woke up, the radio clicked off and the record player kicked on. My first lessons in mis en place were in her kitchen, and to this day I find it almost effortless to time dishes so that they all hit the table at the same moment, a hereditary trait passed down in the same chain as a severely arched left eyebrow and a resting bitch face. She would be up with the earliest birds on holiday mornings listening to AM radio, getting breakfast ready (sunnyside up eggs for my grandpa, always) and preparing for the feast to come. (Sometime in the late 80s, I opened a Poison cassette on the carpet in that room from my favorite auntie.) Curtains and bedspreads changed seasonally and she’d be well into her 70s before she’d stop climbing on chairs and hire a girl to help her. No one ever went into the living room, save for Christmas morning, after the kids had opened Santa’s presents and everyone had showered for the larger festivities when aunts and uncles and cousins arrived. She kept an impossibly clean house in the old style, down to the dusted plastic fruit on her dining room table and the plastic covers left on the lampshades, each of which she’d remove before company came for holidays and replace once everyone left. She was my grandma, and I’d like to tell you about the things I remember. I cannot, however, reconcile the ongoing narrative given to the world with the woman that I knew. Maybe she was an evil mastermind who worked diligently, and with purpose, to slyly speak terrible things to only one person in her life there was undeniable damage done, I can attest, before my time. Slights described that seemed to me, much different in the telling. Words quoted as having being said in my presence that absolutely were not. ![]() ![]() Stories have been told about times when I was present that are absolutely different from my experience of them. Yet, I cannot point to any experience of theirs that holds true to my own memories. In my almost 40 years on earth not a single kind word escaped their lips about her the vitriol and sour grapes poured forth freely from a bottomless well of ill-will and hatred. They would spend the two plus hour drive down talking about how awful the visit was going to be and then spend the equivalent ride home discussing how awful it had been.
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