Whirligig (11 page)

We were at opposite ends of the house and of the life span. A hall, a stairway, the den, the dining room, and another hall all lay between us. But even up in my room with the door shut, even listening to the radio loud or looking at my old dolls and scrapbooks, my mind a million miles away, I was conscious of my grandmother's presence. I was always waiting, listening, imagining. Always aware someone was dying downstairs.

When it was just the two of us home, the entire house seemed to resound with her heartbeat. I'd plug in the portable intercom by my bed and count the minutes until my mother came home from errands or my father from the university. Fortunately, my grandmother slept a lot. My mother assured me she was doing just that when she left to go shopping one day in July. I was reading a collection of Anne Frank's father's letters, then realized that I'd stopped and was just staring at the intercom. Five seconds later the sound of my grandmother clearing her throat came through the speaker, a long overture of scraping and swallowing. My heart began to race.

“Rachel…”

I closed my eyes. Rachel was her sister, long dead.

“No. Deborah.”

Her daughter. My mother.

More throat-clearing. “Deborah. Please come.”

The words catapulted me off the bed. Her moment had arrived. Impossible, I answered back. Everyone said the chemotherapy had helped. I flew down the wood stairway, pushed by duty, pulled back by dread. I loved my grandmother, but I did not love shots, bedpans, puking, or the sight of stitches. I was fifteen and still hated taking pills. I rushed down her hall and opened the door.

“What's the matter?” I almost yelled the words.

She was still in her pink nightgown, propped up in her old canopied bed. Her head turned slowly from the intercom to me. “Jenny. I called for Deborah.”

“She's gone out.” I scanned her. The skin hung in accordion folds on her cheeks and drooped below her eyelids but didn't seem to be flushed or pale. Her small eyes were bright.

“Why did you call? What's wrong?”

“What?”

She refused to admit that she needed a hearing aid. I sat on her bed and bellowed as if she were across the Grand Canyon.
“How do you feel?”

“Weak,” she said. “No strength.”

Talk like this was a change for her. Until lately she'd always answered “Like Jesse Owens” or “Like Joe DiMaggio.” She was an amazingly positive person for someone who'd been in Auschwitz. I took her hand and stealthily looked, for the thousandth time, at the place on her wrist where her number had been tattooed. She'd had it removed, and seemed to have done the same with her memory of that time. She never brought it up and wouldn't answer my questions.

“What do you need?”

“Is Joseph home?” she asked in return.

“He's still at work.”

She looked down and mumbled her disappointment. Then her head rose. Her eyes scuttled over me. “Do you drive,
kindelah?
”

“Yes, Grandma.”

“So grown-up you are, Jenny.” She viewed me with pride. “So tall. Such beautiful brown hair.” She smiled. “Let's go, then.”

I stared back at her in panic. “But I don't have a real license yet. Are you kidding? Go where?”

“Somewhere.”

I knew where, from my parents' experience. To a pharmacy way out on El Cajon where the trustworthy son of a friend of hers worked. Or on a scavenger hunt for a brand of cracker that hadn't been made in twenty years, or a cheese she remembered from back in Poland. Nothing had tasted good to her since the cancer treatments had started.

“Grandma, listen! I'll call my father. He'll stop by on his way home. What do you need?”

“This he can't bring me. First, help me dress.”

“But I only have a learner's permit,” I stammered. “An adult always has to be with me.”

“I'm not an adult? I'm not old enough?” She gave a laugh, which started her coughing. Her left hand pointed at the closet while she hacked.

“The navy blue dress,” she got out at last. Her accent was still thick. Then again, Yiddish was her first language, English her sixth. “And the black shoes, Jenny dear.”

Practically all of her shoes were black. I stood before her clothes and bit off two fingernails. With my mother gone, that left only the old Toyota, a manual. I hated shifting. I turned around.

“But, Grandma, my mother can take you. She'll be back in two hours. At—”

“No more waiting,” she declared. “Waiting is dangerous when you're my age.”

I gathered her clothes and helped her get into them. The temperature was in the nineties, but she insisted on that wool dress, broiling and ancient. Likewise on a wig from the Eisenhower era to hide her chemo-caused baldness. Though our house was quite modern, with lots of glass and odd angles, my grandmother's clothes and furniture made her room into a time machine. From her heavy, claw-footed dresser I got the gold brooch that she asked for. Then I helped her up and put her cane in her hand. The bend of its handle matched her back. We inched our way down the hall.

“We go left here, Grandma. It's shorter.”

I was now a full head taller than she was. I pulled her gently to the left and winced at the sight of her baggy dress. She'd lost weight and height in the past few years. I let her rest.

“No hurry,” I said. It was a week since she'd been out of her room. Only a year before she'd lived in her own apartment, walked to the grocery, taken cabs to visit her friends. When my mother insisted she move in with us, her doctor visits increased but the rest of her world began shrinking—first to the house, then to her room, and finally to her bed. Leading her out the front door, I couldn't help but think how little she resembled the woman who'd walked in the summer before.

“Grandma, where are we going?” Judging by her clothes, it was someplace fancy.

“I'll show you.”

The car was sitting out in the driveway and was hot as a sauna inside. I opened the doors to cool it off, got her seated, and turned the key. The engine gave a growl like a guard dog and died. It took two more tries to get it going. The air-conditioning didn't work, naturally. I let the engine warm up a long time while I looked down at the gearshift knob, its handy shifting pattern worn away. For a full minute I searched for reverse. When I found it, it turned out to be fourth. I stalled, which saved us from ramming the garage door. I hunted some more, reminded myself of my excellent record in driver's training, found reverse, and shot back out of the driveway at a speed that threw both of us forward. Thank God the car was too old to have airbags. I fiddled with the gearshift, found first, and proceeded down the street as nonchalantly as possible. I realized my grandmother was eyeing me.

“Maybe it's better I wait for—”

“Grandma,
I can drive.
Just tell me where you need to go.”

She knew San Diego well, which was good since I was giving all my attention to finding the clutch with my floppy sandals and getting into first without stalling. We drove a long way down Morena. The breeze from the open windows kept me cool, until my grandmother had me roll hers up. We drove along Mission Bay, then reached Old Town.

“Stop!” she called out.

I slammed on the brakes. So did the ten cars behind me. There was honking. I was stopped in the middle of the street. I wanted to yell, “My grandmother
told
me to!” Cars zoomed around me. Mine had stalled and didn't want to start again. I could feel the blood rise into my cheeks. I glanced furiously over at my grandmother and found her staring at a white-barked tree.

“All right, Jenny dear. Go on.”

I was speechless. She was completely unaware of what was happening. I felt like getting mad at her, but then I saw that her face had that unfocused look it had more and more lately. She was often confused or lost in her thoughts. How could I blow up at her for that?

I got the car going. I put it into first and took off, trying to forget the whole scene.

“Turn right when you come to the furniture store.”

She navigated by landmarks, in Old World fashion, not by blocks and street names. I turned. My bangs were damp on my forehead. We entered downtown. Too many cars and buses. My hands were sweaty both from heat and nervousness.

“Next time you want me to stop, Grandma, give me a little warning,” I said.

“What?”

I was repeating myself at a higher volume when she suddenly called out, “Here it is!”

I almost braked, then looked in the mirror. Nothing was behind me. I stopped.

“Go back a little.”

I rolled my eyes, fumbled with the gearshift, found reverse, and backed up. We were somewhere on Fourth. She was staring at a little Chinese restaurant. Cars were coming. I put on my turn signal, then the warning lights just to be safe.

“Again it's changed,” she said. The wave of traffic washed around us. She sat and stared.

“Grandma, there are restaurants closer to home. With good Jewish food—”

“Keep going,
kindelah.
”

I don't think she heard me. She looked back at the restaurant as we left.

“Keep going where?”

“Straight. I'll tell you.”

I thought of the time she'd led my mother starting and stopping all over town in search of a phantom bakery. Why had I agreed to this? We drove down to Broadway, then turned left. The neighborhood started making me nervous. I checked the gas, something I now remembered you were supposed to do before you left. I had a quarter tank. We turned up Thirtieth.

“Are you sure you know where we're going?” I asked.

“At the brick church there, make a right turn.”

I turned. She stopped me a few doors down in front of a stucco house shedding paint. Two little black girls stared at us from behind a palm tree in the yard.

“Grandma, are you lost? There's no stores on this block.”

She was silent. Then she said, “Rachel lived here.”

I gazed at the house. My middle name is Rachel, given in honor of my grandmother's sister. Strange, I thought, that my parents had then given me a first name like Jennifer, as far from the Old Testament and the Old Country as you could get. Then again, maybe that was the point. To put Poland and Hitler and the camps behind them. To blend in for a change, instead of sticking out. They'd done this so well—never going to synagogue, avoiding speaking of my grandmother's experience, even getting a Christmas tree—that they propelled me in the opposite direction. I'd enrolled myself in Hebrew school, older than all the other students, and had nervously, proudly chanted my portion of the Torah at my Bat Mitzvah in May. I'd read every grisly account of the Holocaust I could find and gave all my birthday money that year to Simon Wiesenthal's Nazi-hunting group. Never, I'd vowed, would I visit Germany. My mother warned me that I was too serious and didn't smile enough to attract boys.

“Grandma?”

“Go now,
kindelah.
”

I got back on Thirtieth and headed north. We were nearing my grandmother's old neighborhood. At the red light at University she began pointing like a tour guide.

“That building there, that was a pharmacy. We used to have our ice cream there. You couldn't keep ice cream at home, not then. It would melt in the icebox. And there's the theater!”

The old Fox North Park was still standing, like a Mayan pyramid overgrown by jungle. I caught “Tom Cruise” on the same marquee that had probably advertised Charlie Chaplin.

The light changed. I was not surprised to find my grandmother taking us on a detour to her old house, two blocks over, on Kansas. I found it and idled. It was hard to believe that the squat white bungalow before us, with its torn screen door and dead tree by the walk, was the site of my mother's golden childhood, my grandfather's neighborhood croquet tournaments, the boisterous family get-togethers I'd heard of. Two seagulls circled above it like vultures. The house looked abandoned. Maybe it was.

“Grandma, I'm going to run out of gas if we keep this up.”

She mumbled something—not in response to me, I realized. I cocked my ear. She was speaking in Yiddish. I only know a few words and had no idea what she was saying. She went on and on, facing the house, one hand on the gold brooch she was wearing. My eyes skipped from the sagging awning to the littered porch to my grandmother's face. Her eyes were closed, her lips still moving. Then she was silent. Then she said, “Please go.”

I put the car into first and moved on. Stopping at a light, I saw ahead a little deli that I knew she liked. It dawned on me that she'd been leading us there. I was suddenly feeling hungry myself. We approached. I slowed to grab a parking place.

“Why are you stopping?” she asked. “Back home now.”

“But Grandma, you never—”

She didn't hear.

“Thank you,
kindelah.
Very much.”

“But we never got what you wanted!”
I shouted.

Her head wobbled toward me.

“Where did you want to go?”

She looked puzzled. “To my house, where we just come from. To Rachel's house, God give her rest. To the stationery store we had, twenty-six years, until Jacob died.”

I pictured the Chinese restaurant. I swallowed.

Then I thought of our first stop.
“What about the tree?”

“A birch tree,” she said. “There were very many birches in Poland where I grew up. The white bark. So beautiful.” She inhaled deeply and wiped her eyes. “All these I wanted to see. A last time.”

I was the driver but hadn't understood the journey. All at once I could barely see for the tears. I gripped the wheel tightly with both hands, trying to keep control of both the car and myself.

“But you're getting better, Grandma! You've got lots of life left!”
I was doing my best to convince both of us.