Gam’s outfit in the coffin was all wrong. I know Ma wanted her to look good, but Gam wouldn’t have picked that blouse. It was a deep navy, polyester posing as silk, with ruffles down the front. Gam liked purple. Since she retired, she liked pull-over sweatshirts, usually worn inside-out because they were fuzzier and softer in the inside. She liked jeans with elastic waists and Reebok sneakers. At least the make-up person had drawn Gam’s eyebrows in. She always drew on her eyebrows before going out. Don’t shave them off, she told us, no matter how fashionable, or you’ll spend the next fifty years drawing them on every goddamn day. Another bit of Gam wisdom: Always pour your beer into a glass. Only sluts drink right from the bottle.
I don’t know why I went grocery shopping after Ma called and told me Gam was gone. Perhaps I wanted to resurrect her in the aisles.
Going grocery shopping with Gam was an experience. She needed a tall person, because she was barely five feet and couldn’t reach the high shelves. I took after my father’s Amazon sisters. “You there, girl,” she would say, and point to what she wanted. I’d get what I thought she wanted. Cans of tomatoes. She’d shake her head. The other one. A can of stewed tomatoes. No, she would say. “‘Have you ever seen this shit in my house?” This often took three or four attempts.
The worst was tea. Gam drank tea by the gallon, the Irish way, with a splash of milk. If we came back to that shopping cart with Lipton teabags, we were yelled at about how Lipton was the Antichrist’s tea because it was a British brand and did we understand how the British have treated the Irish for centuries and why the hell would we give anyone or anything British a single cent? Years after her death, I spent part of my honeymoon in London, and felt a little bit guilty wandering around Westminster Abbey.
If we grandkids had done a good job helping while food shopping, we would get a prize. Nothing whipped my three siblings and me into a frenzy more than — A PRIZE. It didn’t matter that we were all over twenty. An awesome prize was a half-moon cookie. In New York, they’re called black and whites – chocolate frosting on one half; vanilla on the other. Gam said New Yorkers don’t know what they’re talking about, which is why they got the name wrong. She said, look at them rooting for the Yankees.
Prizes usually came from the Prize Drawer, the most holy artifact of our childhood. Gam would stuff this drawer, located on the bottom an old cabinet in the drafty front hall, with a cornucopia of delights. Barbie outfits. Matchbox cars. Marvelous fake jewelry and make-up, studded with glitter.
If we fished out a prize intended for someone else, Gam would shake her head, and sometimes get pissed. No, she would say, through the smoke she exhaled. “Would I get THAT for you?”
My mother seemed to dress me to match the treasures that came out of the Prize Drawer — pink and purple; pants studded with silver and tacky flowers; sweaters festooned with butterflies and fairies. These things looked good on my sister, with her waist-length blonde hair and habit of playing tea party with her Cabbage Patch Kids. These did not look good on me — a chubby girl with the bust of an old-fashioned secretary and a home perm that blew my hair into a shape reminiscent of the Goodyear Blimp. As soon as I escaped my mother’s world of lime-green tennis dresses and teal corduroy pants, I took to wearing black every day. But Ma kept buying me those Rainbow-Brite outfits. I learned to say thank you on birthdays and Christmases, fold up the shirts, and donate them to the Salvation Army. On my 25th birthday, Gam apparently got tired of seeing me smile nicely and be polite. “For Chrissakes, Noreen,” she said, taking a long drag on her cigarette. “She doesn’t wear that shit. Give her money.”
Gam would slip us cash. As soon as we got old enough to travel with friends and then boyfriends, she would pull us aside before departure and slip us a bill. Sometimes it was forty bucks. Sometimes it was twenty. “Don’t tell your mother,” she’d say. “And if you come back with something for me, I’ll kick your ass. Get something for yourself.”
After having a stroke and then, years later, a heart attack, Gam wasn’t supposed to smoke. But she did. And she snuck her butts with me. We’d sit in her apartment, her drinking a Miller Lite, me the diet Coke she bought specially for me, and chain smoke. “Don’t tell your mother,” she said. “I don’t know who the hell she is, telling me what to do.” When my mother showed up, we’d deny everything, partners in crime skipping a generation.
We sat there on those old dining-room style chairs at the funeral home in Belmont; an aging Irish funeral home with unironic green carpeting and a frilly ladies’ lounge.
That lounge was an over-perfumed oasis. A yellow curtain separated the stalls from the sitting room, where a lady would not be expected to find her father.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him.
“Why not?” Dad, a telephone lineman, was wearing his only suit, dark blue. It worked for weddings or funerals. He was sitting on a pink and yellow overstuffed chair, firing up a Marlboro.
“It’s the LADIES’ ROOM, Dad”
“It’s the only place in the building I can smoke”.
Us kids never viewed Dad the same after my mother, asking Gam if her new sandals made her legs sexy enough to attract Dad’s attentions, elicited this response: “John couldn’t care less about your legs. He has always been a tit man.” It was a home run of a comment; making her daughter, grandchildren, and son-in-law all turn red as a fire engine.
My mother didn’t enter the ladies’ lounge. She sat, stiff and straight, in the first chair to the right of Gam’s casket. Ma, let us get you tea. No, she said. It would not be proper to drink tea right now. We got her tea anyway. And she drank it.
Gam was not concerned with ‘proper’. “If anyone doesn’t like what you do, tell them to go suck a lemon”, she’d say.
When I was six, I was the flower girl in my Uncle’s wedding. My mother was appalled when she found me in my velvet dress and flower basket sitting at the bar with all the old WWII boys, who were buying me rounds of Shirley Temples and listening to my tales of first grade. My mother began to yell, and I began to cry. “Noreen,” said Gam, “It’s a party. And is she causing any trouble?”.
As part of the wedding entertainment, my grandmother donned a traditional Celtic getup and, along with the other old girls from the South Boston projects, showed off her Irish dancing for the crowd at the Belmont VFW Hall. I wanted to dance like Gam. So I ran out on the floor. I remember the audience laughed, and my mother telling me to come back and sit down. I was mortified. I thought I had ruined the party.
Gam waved away the laughter and her daughter telling me no. She took my hand. “This is how you dance”, she said.
I try to remember that, now, as I go through life without her. I try to dance the way I want to dance. And if anyone doesn’t like it — well, they can go suck a lemon.
