Why I'm Like This (3 page)

But that's okay. Because sometimes, at night, we pretend that he is a border guard and I am a graduate student in archeology, and I am able to make do with that.

D
O
you love this? If you don't love it, don't take it. I'll give it to your cousin, because she will love it. How about this? I bought this in Singapore/Madrid/Palm Beach/Mexico City, in the gift shop of the
Queen Mary
/the Bel Air/the Georges Cinque/the Hong Kong Hilton. It is made of the best jade/ivory/gold and has little diamonds/garnets/rubies/seed pearls spelling out Lillian/LSS/Dearest. Take this little fish/heart/chai/elephant with the tusk up. It represents luck/life/love/wealth/health. I want you to have this. And this. One day.

When I'm dead.

 

Every time I visited my Florida grandmother, my mother's mother, Lillian Siegel, we made a full account of her jewelry. We would sit together on her bed and she would display her wares. Each necklace and ring, each bangle, each pin had a back-story, a provenance. She wore the baroque pearls on the ship the
France
and the captain had a mad crush on her. She haggled with a blind man in a shop in India for the ivory charm and surely there was not another of its kind in the world. She bought the ring with the serpent that climbed up your finger in a hotel in Beverly Hills just before she rode the elevator with Cary Grant.

“Oh, Mr. Grant, how do you do? Do you know that I've seen all your pictures twice?”

My grandmother was an extremely charming woman and I have no doubt that Cary Grant chatted with her all the way from the lobby to the penthouse. Men often attached themselves to Lil, even though she was married. Suave young men of Latin origin wrote her letters, addressing them
To my dearest friend
and signing them
With undying gratitude
. A priest she met in Singapore relied on her for spiritual advice. Dance instructors on cruise ships invariably forsook all other students so that they might dance the merenge each night with her. She was not a flirt, rather she was open-minded, lighthearted, intelligent, amusing. She made friends and had admirers wherever she went.

Lil often traveled without my grandfather, Ben, whom she had met as a teenager in Brooklyn. They required time apart;
they argued every day of their married lives, and they were married three times. Once at seventeen, before it was legal; once at eighteen, in front of their families; and once again in the seventies, after they had been divorced for a year or two. While they were divorced my grandfather had a brief, intermezzo marriage to a woman named Ruth who clearly wasn't up to the task. Too docile. My grandparents' divorce was, by my mother's account, an acrimonious affair, and during the proceedings Lil was offered the services of a retired gangster who was living on the other side of South Ocean Boulevard at the Diplomat Towers. She graciously declined his proposal to fit my grandfather with a pair of cement shoes and heave him into the Inter-Coastal Waterway, but she did accept a gold-plated pocket watch from him, which, during one of our sessions, she gave to me.

Lil liked everything around her to be special. She thought each and every one of her belongings was exquisite, and she would ask you, when you visited, if this or that wasn't the most exquisite you'd ever seen. As I got older it became clear that it was more a matter of it being the
only
I'd ever seen. Certainly no one else's grandmother had glued little ornate pillboxes to the tops of a pair of Chinese urns to give them “interest.” Or crocheted a border onto her bathroom rug. Or twined a garland of silk ivy around the naked body of a lamp nymph. Or sawed a couple of inches off some valuable dining-room chairs that seemed too high. Lil had only a cursory respect for a thing's intrinsic value. It's an antique? So what?
An ugly drawer pull is an ugly drawer pull. What it needs is gold leaf. My mother had a little inlaid-wood side table that I coveted. It had one tiny drawer which while I was growing up housed a single old-fashioned skate key, conjuring up fantasies involving a boy from my high-school hockey club. The table was one of a pair belonging to Lil, my mother told me, but she didn't know what had happened to its mate. On one visit to Florida, I noticed that a small side table with a top like a large porcelain platter had the same dark, three-legged base as the inlaid table. I asked my grandmother about it. Oh, she said, she had taken off the wood top and glued in its place a porcelain platter. Wasn't it exquisite?

In my grandparents' kitchen there was a charming glass-topped table and two chairs made of wrought iron and painted pink. On each chair there was a thick fuchsia-colored vinyl cushion and every time you sat down it released a sustained hiss, maybe fifteen seconds long, as it deflated beneath your weight. When you stood up it stuck to the back of your thighs, then slowly peeled away, making a sound like tape being ripped off a package. The price of beauty.

My grandmother became known in her various apartment complexes in Hallandale for her handmade three-quarter-sleeve sweaters, or “bracelet sleeve,” which meant the arms were short enough to show off an elegant wrist and whatever exquisite thing dangled from it. Lil and I cataloged these, too, and my mother and I always wore them when we visited, to please her, although on us the sleeves did not look elegant,
just too short. There were probably more than forty sweaters, and they fell into several groups. There was the solid-pullover-with-the-little-V-neck-and-gathered-shoulders group, the all-over-tweedy-color-mix-with-contrasting-cuffcardigan-and-sometimes-a-sparkly-metallic-yarn incorporated group, and there was the variegated-stripe group, which consisted of sweaters with a contrasting stripe on one arm but not the other, or on one panel but not the other. Or stripes in front but not in back, or in back but not in front. Sometimes a whole sweater was red except for one white sleeve with a red cuff. And there was often some extra crocheted detailing. Like a little pocket, or a collar or loopy hem. Actually, my grandmother gave her store-bought jackets and hats and sometimes even her tablecloths the same treatment—a little crocheted border. She even held knitting classes poolside. All over South Florida there are scores of little old ladies in color-block sweaters with the sleeves too short, and just as many relatives up north too guilt ridden to give them away and too embarrassed to wear them.

 

My grandfather's main interests were his grandchildren, his stocks, and the beach, which he walked every morning. He had a deep tan and a head full of white hair, which I loved to comb, until my father, as a joke, told me it was a toupee. In his day, Ben had been what was called a natty dresser, but his fashion sense in retirement could only have been interpreted
as a conscious choice to antagonize his wife. Although they had plenty of money, he took to wearing slightly grungy, often loud sport shirts and mismatched shorts or bathing suits, and white loafery types of shoes, dirty canvas boaters, or worn-down flip-flops. I think he even owned a clip-on tie. No, I'm sure he owned a clip-on tie. I can suddenly see him standing in the apartment, handsome even in light blue leisure-suit-type pants and a short-sleeved oxford, clipping the damned thing on. My grandfather had the most wonderful look, as if he had boxed in his youth—sort of like a shorter, leaner, more Jewish Norman Mailer. When my brother and I were young, Ben's favorite thing to do was to stick his head out of a doorway or around the corner of a wall, and then grab it back with his own hand, screaming for help as he did it. He also coined the phrase “No coughing allowed,” which became a standard of the Siegel-Kaplan lexicon. Why it never caught on with the population at large is still a mystery.

Ben had a way with language and had been a comedy writer for the radio stars of the thirties—Jack Perl, who was known as Baron Munchausen; Joe Penny; the Marx Brothers, and Burns and Allen. He also had a job writing lyrics and poems for the Quality Art Novelty Company. He sat around with a bunch of WPA writers, one of whom was Robert Benchley, and wrote unprintable poems that started “Roses are red, violets are blue…”

There was nothing better than a visit with my grandfather.
We played endless games of ghost, tic-tac-toe, and dot, which is the game where you connect a grid of dots, one line at a time, trying to make boxes, which you then write your initial in. The one with the most boxes at the end wins. This is a
very
good game. We also walked South Ocean Boulevard looking for fallen coconuts so Ben could make a coconut shake. When we found one, we would take it to the side of his building's garage and smash it repeatedly against the concrete wall until it cracked. We played together in shuffle-board tournaments. Ben was a South Florida champion in his age category and had a considerable collection of paperweight trophies. They were not exquisite and so were relegated to the lower shelf of his night table and the powder-room medicine chest.

Ben was always up for something, or up to something. He hummed and whistled constantly, little doodly nothings, snatches of old-time songs, vaudeville numbers; there was a funny sly quality to it, like he was standing lookout for the big heist. He picked out songs like “The Michigan Rag” on our piano, running both hands up and down the keyboard, even though he didn't really know how to play. He told jokes and wrote poems (yes, “What's Gnu at the Zoo” was his) and he wrote fantastical letters addressed to My Li'l Cin and signed Dit Loves Cin, written in a heart with an arrow through it. My brother and I never called him Grandpa, or Pops, or Pop Pop, or any traditional endearment; we called him Dit, because when my brother was a baby he heard my
mother call him Dad, and Dit was the best he could do and it stuck. My heart still aches to see that configuration of letters.

Once, when Ben was visiting us in Connecticut, I complimented him on his sport shirt. That night I found the shirt folded on my bed with a note that read,
You can always have the shirt off my back
.

He died the year after I graduated from college. We flew down to Florida and stayed in the same hotel as Aerosmith. I cried everywhere we went. I was crying in a corner at the funeral home when I suddenly heard the familiar whistling and humming. I turned sharply to find a Not Quite Ben, a Faux Ben, who was in fact my grandfather's brother, Frank, whom I'd met maybe once. They looked alike, and obviously they'd had the same noisy habit. He trailed me the entire funeral, a puckish apparition, and I know it was ungenerous of me but by the end I wanted to kill him.

During the service Lil, who loved a grand gesture, threw her arms around the casket.

After Ben's death, I occasionally flew down to Florida by myself to see Lil. As soon as I arrived I would change into a bathing suit or shorts and a T-shirt, and we would go sit by the pool. She would show me off to whichever friends were not across the boulevard at a spa called Le Mer, or, as they called it,
the
Le Mer, which, for the benefit of those who do not speak French, means The The Sea. Lil always had something to say about my summer clothes. No shorts were ever short enough. No midriff sufficiently bare. “It's what all the
young people are wearing,” she would say. In her insular South Florida world, that is, her building, “young people” could only mean the succession of foxy Jamaican girls who shopped and cooked and kept house for her. She loved these girls, loved their beauty and their youth, and they in turn loved my grandmother's high spirits and her generosity. Lil also had a fondness for voodoo, and together they indulged in their mutual superstitions. Lil even read tarot, although, ever genial, she had pulled the death card from the deck so it would not come up in her readings. One afternoon, we went across the street to the Diplomat, where a recently deceased friend's daughter was staying, to pay a sort of belated shiva call. When we left, my grandmother stopped in front of the elevator. She said: “That woman gave you the evil eye. Turn around three times and then spit three times.” I turned around. “Puh puh puh,” I said. “Puh puh puh,” she said. “Okay, now we can go.”

 

Besides her jewelry, there was one thing that Lil really wanted me to have. Or to do. She knew I wanted to be an actress and she thought that if only someone could get in touch with Nat, I would be set on my way to international stardom. Nat was my grandmother's uncle, Nathan Birnbaum, or, as he was known to the world, George Burns.

“You must write to Nat,” my grandmother said every time she saw me.

“Why would he read a letter from me?” I asked.

“You just tell him that you are Lily's granddaughter, his sister Annie's great-granddaughter.”

Lil's idea of help probably included a seven-year studio contract with Warner Brothers (if they were still giving those out) or at least a screen test for the next God movie. Maybe George would introduce me to Brooke Shields. Or get me an agent. Even Lil knew a person had to have an agent, although she was probably thinking along the lines of the agent character Red Buttons played in a terrible 1960s biopic about Jean Harlow. According to the movie, Red discovered Jean trying to filch a drumstick from catering on a film set she'd crashed. He was convinced that she had “it” and would someday make them both rich. So he took her on. He drove her from audition to audition. He introduced her to lecherous stars and producers. But he was not a pimp. He just believed in her and that's how you got known in those days, scampering about in a bathing suit at a famous person's pool party. Maybe this was why Lil was always after me to show a little more skin.

“You know that Nat discovered Ann-Margret?” said Lil.

After several years someone in my family finally coughed up a number. I spoke to George's secretary, who had been with George for decades and whose name may or may not have been Jack. I explained my pedigree to Jack and what I wanted, which was just to meet George, that's all. Lil gave me two pictures to bring with me. One was a formal of her mother and father and the other was of George, Maurice
Chevalier, Al Jolson, and another man, their arms slung around each other's necks, laughing. It was a wonderful picture. Even though it was fifty years old, I felt a pang that no such glorious picture would ever be taken of me. I often experience a sense of loss for having been excluded from events that took place decades, if not centuries, before my birth. I still have a crush on Joseph Cotten.