Ladies and Gentlemen, the woman who started it all...
So first off, I’m aware that you’re going to think I’m weird and maybe disgusting, but I’m fine with that-I was fine with that years ago. But I’m sitting here on the beat-up love seat that used to be in my parents’ living room, holding the waistband of my late grandmother’s underpants and wrapping it around my hand like rosary beads. I wrap the band tightly, so that I can feel the squeeze of the elastic, and then release it so that the soft, gray writing becomes legible and I find myself mumbling the words, “Hanes Her Way,” the way other people whisper Hail Marys.
And I can hear my mother’s voice saying, “Excuse me? Her underpants?” but it’s not her underpants, it’s only the waistband of her underpants, because when my grandmother was through with a pair of underpants she would cut off the waistband and use it as a giant rubber band for holding her watercolor paintings together when she was transporting them to art shows. She had dozens of underpants’ waistbands hanging from the doorknob in her art studio and I took one the last time I was at her house-slipping it into my pocket, hoping that no one would ask why I was taking it, and as I write this now I am once again wrapping it around my fingers. It’s comforting to feel the pressure of the elastic around my skin. It reminds me of the automated blood pressure cuff they have by the pharmacy in Target-when I lived in California I would take my blood pressure all the time just to feel the tightness of the cuff squeezing my arm, like a family member grabbing me by the bicep, reminding me how much I was loved, asking why I had moved so far away. I missed my family when I lived in California. I would sometimes take my blood pressure 4 or 5 times in one sitting and I never once bothered to check what my actual blood pressure was.
* * *
Last time I was at my grandparent’s house, which is now only my grandfather’s house, he was giving their things away.
“Take whatever you want,” he said.
Most of us took my grandmother’s watercolor paintings. My sister took two paintings of gnarled trees which she eventually had re-framed at A.C. Moore and which she put in her entryway outside the door to the kitchen. She took an antique lamp and something that looked like a small milk can that she would eventually put fake peonies in. My mother took a painting of a gasoline pump and a tiny figurine of Abraham Lincoln that she found in the kitchen. I took an original pencil sketch of my great and great-great grandfather, in which they are both wearing straw boater hats. I took the family photo from my great-grandparent’s 50th wedding anniversary in which my father, aged 12, is making the sort of ridiculous, obnoxious face that all 12 year-old boys make in important family photos. And then when no one was looking, I took one of the underpants waistbands that hung from her doorknob. The collection was (not surprisingly) untouched.
My father had been with his mother when she died, but the rest of us drove up to Utica for the services. We arrived at my uncle’s house and the first thing I thought as we pulled into his driveway was that it was strange being there under unhappy circumstances. My uncle’s house was where my cousin Elycia carried me around on her back and first warned me about boys and breasts and puberty (“They’re all just completely terrible,” she said) and where someone was always nailing someone else in the head (good-naturedly) with a tennis ball. I stepped out of the car and walked toward the side of the house, the heels of my dress shoes sinking into the wet grass. I looked out at my uncle’s backyard- a flat expanse of green lawn with what used to be a small tree that got in the way of our soccer and volleyball and badminton games but was now a medium sized tree that got in the way of nothing.
He had gotten rid of the above ground pool. I didn’t know you could get rid of above ground pools. I thought they were there for life-installed by burly men with tan necks; at once becoming part of the topography, the way lakes are formed by glaciers or mountains are pushed up from under the earth. But my uncle had gotten rid of the pool, which makes sense, given that all of his children are in their late twenties or early thirties, and the abdomen-high water in an above ground pool is only moderately entertaining, even to a nine year-old.
We entered the house through the garage-that was the same as it had always been. We always entered through the garage, passing through the laundry room, which led directly into the kitchen, which led directly into the room that used to have a reclining sofa (I had begged my mother to buy one but she said no) and an Atari, but now held a large dining table and a china cabinet. My cousins had arrived at the house first, also carrying packages. Everyone was wearing dark colors and hugging everyone else and talking softly.
We had spent the morning at the funeral home and everyone was wearing black or gray and those of us with pants were covered in a sheen of white lint from the balled up tissues we had shoved in our pockets. Tony and Joe and Mark had been pallbearers and they sat around the table in dark suits, which is not at all how I remember them. I do not remember any of my cousins becoming adults, but it happened at some point when I was not paying attention. We were sitting in the same room where, twenty years earlier, when the room had had a reclining sofa and an Atari, my father had filmed a home video of our family.
In the video Joey is maybe 6 or 7, wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and continually commenting that he would like to grow up to be a truck driver who smashes cars into trees. Mark, who was a year older, was wearing a generic baseball shirt with the number 88 on the front, with a widow’s peak reminiscent of Eddie Munster and hair spiked violently enough to prevent birds from landing on it. Someone had given him a trick ice cream cone whose top would shoot off when you pushed a button, which he proceeded to shoot at the camera for the majority of the video. Mark is older now and as my mother’s friend commented, “very handsome!” and at the wake for my grandmother the funeral director would ask if he was Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark would say no, he wasn’t, and so the funeral director would ask if he had at least seen the movie “Titanic.” And Mark would say yes, he had, and would proceed to carry my grandmother’s casket toward the hearse.
We are all sitting quietly around the table, remembering my grandmother. Elycia is holding one of her two children and I remember back to when Elycia was ten, because in the video someone asks how old she is and she tells them using her fingers. In the video she has a ponytail and a shirt with two women on it and one of the women is looking at a man walking by and has a thought bubble that says, “What a hunk!” I remember that shirt because I wore it next, as a hand-me-down, and hated it. In the video Elycia is perpetually squinting into the camera, nose scrunched, as if staring into a solar eclipse. In the video we are all running tireless laps around the house, interspersed with appearances by my grandmother and exhausted cameos by our parents.
I am tightening the underpants waistband around my fingers, watching the blood drain from my fingertips. The top of the band is scalloped, which I hadn’t previously noticed, but I assume Hanes does this to distinguish them from men’s underpants. Whoever made the decision to scallop the top of women’s Hanes Her Way underpants might think that this detail has gone unobserved, and I want to look them up to tell them that no, it looks very nice, and that I have spent the last twenty minutes admiring their handiwork. I have been asked to write the eulogy for my grandmother and I have come to the conclusion that I will somehow derive inspiration from her underpants’ waistband-that within its elastic are insights into my grandmother’s life.
“What sort of things do you say in a eulogy?” I ask my mother.
“You could tell a story about the person,” my mother says, “or you could just talk about them in general-their traits or what you remember about them.”
“Any story?”
“Any story that’s appropriate.”
“Appropriate how?”
“Write something and I’ll tell you if it’s appropriate or not,” she says.
I begin the decision-making process over which of the stories about my grandmother to tell and which not to tell, which is hard because there are a great number of stories about her that are interesting and catchy and fun and these are the ones that in no way belong in a eulogy.
There are two stories about my grandmother that I would like to include. One is appropriate. The other is maybe inappropriate, but I am not positive. I am the type of person who holds onto her grandmother’s underpants’ waistbands, imbuing them with deep, emotional meaning, so I am probably not the best person to turn to during the “appropriate/inappropriate” decision making process. I have never had the best judgment. There is a scene in the home video where you hear my two year-old sister Karen crying off-camera as I, eight years-old and climbing up onto a stool beside my mother, say, “But she hit me with a tennis racket.”
* * *
My grandmother loved being the center of attention but in the home video she appears only briefly. My father approaches her with the video camera and as my father films her she is sitting in the corner, balancing her checkbook. She is wearing a bright orange and pink shirt because my grandmother loved bright colors and always dressed as though she were a citrus fruit or a collection of reflective traffic signs. She is wearing a sun visor over her perm and concentrating and my father’s voice says, “There she is! The woman who started it all,” and she looks up and smiles and my father goes, “Give us some attitude for the camera, Ena,” and my grandmother makes a face where she opens her mouth outlandishly, as if she has won a trip to Disney world, and puts her hands up in mock surprise. She shakes her torso back and forth, smiling, and remains on camera until my cousin Tony, who is twelve in the video, arrives in front of the camera from nowhere, making elaborate chewing faces.
“Tony, out of the way,” his mother’s voice calls from off screen.
My grandmother smiles excitedly for the camera again but Mark appears, doing an imitation of a Godzilla-type creature and other faces (mine, Pam’s, Elycia’s) appear from the background with various protruding tongues, blocking the camera’s view of her. She tries to shoo us, the way you wave away clouds of gnats but more grandchildren appear until the screen is filled with them and my father is forced to turn off the camera.
“Your grandmother liked being the center of attention,” my mother says.
“So do most of her descendants,” I say.
The appropriate story I wanted to tell was from when my grandmother was a little girl-she was the same age as my sisters and my cousins and I in the video my father made. The age at which we were running through the house like lunatics, screaming and tackling one another. I do not know if my grandmother was like this as a little girl but the fact that her seven grandchildren resembled (on a frequent basis) British soccer spectators initiating a riot, I can assume that she did not spend her entire childhood indoors doing needlepoint and practicing concertos. The story I told about my grandmother as a young girl took place in the 1920’s when her father’s wealthy friend visited her family in Tampa, Florida, which was where she grew up. Her father’s friend was a bachelor with more money than he could spend on himself and that first year he visited he took my grandmother’s oldest sister out on the town, buying her whatever it was she wanted-clothes and food and dolls, and all of the things that young children admire from store windows but can so rarely attain. And my grandmother looked on, excited.
Her father’s friend returned the following year, taking out the next oldest sister for a day of ice cream and candy and toys and my grandmother waited impatiently at home, told that next year would be her year. That next year it would be her turn. And my grandmother waited for him, eager, making a list of all the things she wanted-dresses and games and chocolate, and to travel around town in his car while people looked at and admired her. And she waited for him in the frantic way nine year-olds wait when they cannot contain their excitement, but the following year her father’s friend didn’t come back. She waited for him, buoyant, because my grandmother was always buoyant, but my grandmother’s turn came in 1929, which was not a wonderful year for rich bachelors who were heavily invested in the stock market. Her father’s friend lost his fortune in the crash but not all nine year-olds were privy to updated financial knowledge, and so my grandmother waited patiently, wondering why he had never come back for her. My grandmother, telling others the story, teetered between incredibly disappointed and abysmally heartbroken.
“Why would you tell that story?” my mother asked. “It’s so sad.”
“It’s not that sad,” I said. “It’s interesting.”
“It ends on a sad note.”
“But I like that story,” I said. I had always liked that story because she had first told it to me when I was very young and I had understood her disappointment so strongly. And because it was more appropriate than the other story I liked, which involved my grandmother driving somewhere with such determination that her van knocked the rear view mirror off a postal vehicle. And Mark, who was in the van with her, shouted, “Grandma, you knocked the mirror off that truck!” and my grandmother responded coolly, “Oh honey, don’t get worked up. The government’s got plenty rearview mirrors.”
* * *
We are sitting in the enormous Catholic church that is only a few blocks from my grandparents house, with my grandmother’s casket standing solemnly by the altar. The priest is saying a bunch of things about how my grandmother was wonderfully devout and my cousins are sitting together in a row of black suits and dresses, looking solemn. The priest mentions maybe thirty times that my grandmother is in heaven now and I am trying to think about my grandmother but my thoughts keep going back to the priest and how he could make his public speaking more effective by using emphasis and projecting his voice. I am sitting next to my father who has a small passage to read during the service that he is gripping uncomfortably. I have seen tears in the eyes of both my father and my uncle over the past few days. I can tell when they are about to cry because they will abruptly stop talking-even if they are in the middle of a sentence-they will stop talking for as long as it takes to subdue the sadness, and then they start again from where they left off, never acknowledging the silence. My aunt, my father’s sister, has been sobbing outright, and is in the front row next to my grandfather, her hand on his back to steady him.
My father goes up and reads his piece clearly, straining it of emotion, and walks back down to his seat. I am happy for him that he did not cry while he was reading it. I am up next and my father mouths the word S-L-O-W-L-Y and my mother mouths the word A-P-P-R-O-P-R-I-A-T-E and I walk to the lectern and begin to talk about my grandmother.
I am overwhelmed with the number of things I have to say about my grandmother and begin by saying that I loved her very much so if I cry forgive me, but that most of the memories I have of her are absurd and hilarious, so if I laugh, forgive me also.
I read the story about my grandmother as a little girl. I talk about her loopy handwriting and the little glass jars she used to collect from garage sales and one of the magnets on her fridge I had seen the other day that said, “If getting older is getting better, then I am magnificent.” I talk about how she used to love wearing hot pink and how she made quilts for all her grandchildren that weighed more than the lead aprons you wear at the dentist’s office but were less effective at keeping you warm, and how she would tell people “Grandmas are just antique little girls.” I say that if she IS in heaven, within a week all the angels will be wearing bright purple pants suits and enormous red hats, and that all the wall space in heaven will be taken up with watercolor paintings. I briefly mention the story about the rear view mirror and the postal vehicle and look for my mother’s face to make sure I am ok, that I am being appropriate, and my mother and my cousins are quietly laughing. And my grandfather is laughing gently and my aunt and her friends are laughing, and so are some of the other people in the church that I do not know. Anyone who is not laughing is smiling. I mention that if my grandmother is in heaven, I hope very much that she meets up with her mother and her father and both of her sisters, but that I also hope that she meets up with her father’s rich friend, and that he finally buys her toys and candy and ice cream and everything she’s ever wanted.
I finish with the eulogy and return to my seat. My grandfather, smiling, grabs me by the shoulders and says he had wanted to hop over the rail and hug me and that he thought it was a wonderful eulogy and I gave him a quiet kiss on the cheek. And then for a moment we are quiet. My cousins and my parents and my aunts and uncles, all of whom only twenty years earlier had been in front of a video camera shouting and waving their arms over their heads, did something I didn’t think my family was capable of doing-they stood completely still and fell completely silent.
And then, amplified tenfold in the acoustic horn of the church I learned that my grandmother had had only one request for her funeral service, which was that her casket be wheeled out of the church to a recording of New York, New York by Frank Sinatra.
If you have never listened to Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” in a church with wonderful acoustics, it is something I would recommend. The song thundered through the pews with its opening kickline of Broadway-style beats, a row of my Aunt Pam’s friends clapping along in the way my grandmother would have hoped for. My family gathered, alternately crying and laughing, blowing our noses and snapping our fingers, as his voice spilled out through the church.
Start spreeeading the news--
I’m leavin’ today.
I want to BE a part of it-New Yooork, New Yoork.
“She requested this?” I asked.
“Are you surprised?” my mother asked, wiping tears from her cheek with a folded tissue.
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
These vagabond shooes--
Are longing to straaaay
Right through the VER-Y heart of it
In old, New Yoooork!
My grandfather had tears in his eyes but continued smiling, his rosary beads clinging to his hand, and I reached down into my purse, feeling for the elastic of my grandmother’s underpants, which I proceeded to wind around my knuckles until I could feel the blood rushing into my fingers. We wheeled my grandmother down the aisle as she shouted that she wanted to wake up in the city that never sleeps. As she announced brightly, as she so often did, that she was both king of the hill and top of the heap and (if it’s not too much to handle) possibly even A#1. And as Sinatra wound down, the pallbearers, smiling, buckled their knees and lifted my grandmother into the air like ancient royalty. She rode out of the church on the shoulders of her loved ones, the well-deserved center of attention, without (for once) her grandchildren jumping in front of the camera, begging the cameraman for their fifteen minutes.
* * *
In the best part of the video-the reason all of us like watching it- my father questions us, one by one, standing against the white aluminum siding on the side of my uncle’s house. My sister Pam slides in to the frame, her dark brown hair hanging in her face as she tells the camera that she is six. My father asks, “What do you do for a living?” and she responds: “I fix garages.” And he says, “What do you want to be when you grow up? And Pam, declining to answer, sticks out her tongue at the camera before exiting.
And my father shouts, “Who’s next?” so that as Pam leaves, my cousin Mark walks on screen, three-and-a-half feet tall, his hair standing on end.
“What’s your name?” my father says, his voice playfully impatient, as if conducting a job interview where all the applicants who had shown up that day were under the age of ten.
“Mark.”
“How old are you, Mark?”
“I’m seven years-old!”
“What’s your wife’s name?”
Mark scratches his chin, smiling, looking pleased and horribly embarrassed. He is grinning. He shouts, “I don’t have one!”
And my father says, “What do you do for a living?” And Mark answers that he plays baseball.
And my father says, “Thank you very much. Next?”
He runs the gamut through my cousins and his own children, learning that Karen is two and that I am eight and want (at that point) to be a lawyer and that Joey, though embarrassed on-camera to reveal his fondness for dinosaurs, twice reiterates that when he is older he would like to have a fast car that he can smash into trees.
And I am sorry now that he never asked his mother to come out for her questioning-asking her to stand against the side of the house with everyone else who was itching to be captured on film. My grandmother would have gotten excited and opened her mouth wide, as if she were titillated and screaming, and would say, “My name is Ena Marquis D’Apice and I’m sixty eight years old!
And my father would offer a gruff, “What do you do for a living?” and my grandmother would say, “Honey, I’m an artist!”
And my father would say, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And my grandmother would fall silent for a moment, excited, forgetting that she had already grown up several decades earlier. We would watch her visibly thinking on camera, biting her lower lip, rifling through possibilities. She would go back and forth between President of the United States and Mouseketeer. Backup Singer for the Glenn Miller orchestra. Professional Artist. Queen of Everything.
And I am sitting here alone, thinking about my grandmother, wrapping the waistband of her underpants around my fingers. I took the waistband as a way to remember her idiosyncrasies but I find that within a minute of picking it up I am wrapping it tightly around my hand again, feeling pressure that makes the tips of my fingers pulse. That there is something comforting in the squeeze of the elastic, the same way there was something comforting in the blood pressure machine holding me firmly by the arm, assuring me things would be ok.
And I know she is gone. I watched her casket as it was lowered into the earth by burly men with tan necks. I am positive she is gone but the elastic is warm and tight and fused to my skin and it feels, I finally realize, like someone is holding my hand.
My grandmother is simultaneously buried in a small cemetery in Utica and dancing through all of our imaginations in a red hat. My father is filming her with the video camera against my uncle’s aluminum siding.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” my father would ask.
“Give me a minute, honey. Give me a minute.”
And if she took too long, of course, my father would have said, “Ok, Next!” the way he did with everybody, but until that point he would capture her alone on camera, letting her enjoy the attention she craved-her bright pink shirt reflective against the white of the house, her face illuminated by a spotlight.
And I can hear my mother’s voice saying, “Excuse me? Her underpants?” but it’s not her underpants, it’s only the waistband of her underpants, because when my grandmother was through with a pair of underpants she would cut off the waistband and use it as a giant rubber band for holding her watercolor paintings together when she was transporting them to art shows. She had dozens of underpants’ waistbands hanging from the doorknob in her art studio and I took one the last time I was at her house-slipping it into my pocket, hoping that no one would ask why I was taking it, and as I write this now I am once again wrapping it around my fingers. It’s comforting to feel the pressure of the elastic around my skin. It reminds me of the automated blood pressure cuff they have by the pharmacy in Target-when I lived in California I would take my blood pressure all the time just to feel the tightness of the cuff squeezing my arm, like a family member grabbing me by the bicep, reminding me how much I was loved, asking why I had moved so far away. I missed my family when I lived in California. I would sometimes take my blood pressure 4 or 5 times in one sitting and I never once bothered to check what my actual blood pressure was.
* * *
Last time I was at my grandparent’s house, which is now only my grandfather’s house, he was giving their things away.
“Take whatever you want,” he said.
Most of us took my grandmother’s watercolor paintings. My sister took two paintings of gnarled trees which she eventually had re-framed at A.C. Moore and which she put in her entryway outside the door to the kitchen. She took an antique lamp and something that looked like a small milk can that she would eventually put fake peonies in. My mother took a painting of a gasoline pump and a tiny figurine of Abraham Lincoln that she found in the kitchen. I took an original pencil sketch of my great and great-great grandfather, in which they are both wearing straw boater hats. I took the family photo from my great-grandparent’s 50th wedding anniversary in which my father, aged 12, is making the sort of ridiculous, obnoxious face that all 12 year-old boys make in important family photos. And then when no one was looking, I took one of the underpants waistbands that hung from her doorknob. The collection was (not surprisingly) untouched.
My father had been with his mother when she died, but the rest of us drove up to Utica for the services. We arrived at my uncle’s house and the first thing I thought as we pulled into his driveway was that it was strange being there under unhappy circumstances. My uncle’s house was where my cousin Elycia carried me around on her back and first warned me about boys and breasts and puberty (“They’re all just completely terrible,” she said) and where someone was always nailing someone else in the head (good-naturedly) with a tennis ball. I stepped out of the car and walked toward the side of the house, the heels of my dress shoes sinking into the wet grass. I looked out at my uncle’s backyard- a flat expanse of green lawn with what used to be a small tree that got in the way of our soccer and volleyball and badminton games but was now a medium sized tree that got in the way of nothing.
He had gotten rid of the above ground pool. I didn’t know you could get rid of above ground pools. I thought they were there for life-installed by burly men with tan necks; at once becoming part of the topography, the way lakes are formed by glaciers or mountains are pushed up from under the earth. But my uncle had gotten rid of the pool, which makes sense, given that all of his children are in their late twenties or early thirties, and the abdomen-high water in an above ground pool is only moderately entertaining, even to a nine year-old.
We entered the house through the garage-that was the same as it had always been. We always entered through the garage, passing through the laundry room, which led directly into the kitchen, which led directly into the room that used to have a reclining sofa (I had begged my mother to buy one but she said no) and an Atari, but now held a large dining table and a china cabinet. My cousins had arrived at the house first, also carrying packages. Everyone was wearing dark colors and hugging everyone else and talking softly.
We had spent the morning at the funeral home and everyone was wearing black or gray and those of us with pants were covered in a sheen of white lint from the balled up tissues we had shoved in our pockets. Tony and Joe and Mark had been pallbearers and they sat around the table in dark suits, which is not at all how I remember them. I do not remember any of my cousins becoming adults, but it happened at some point when I was not paying attention. We were sitting in the same room where, twenty years earlier, when the room had had a reclining sofa and an Atari, my father had filmed a home video of our family.
In the video Joey is maybe 6 or 7, wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and continually commenting that he would like to grow up to be a truck driver who smashes cars into trees. Mark, who was a year older, was wearing a generic baseball shirt with the number 88 on the front, with a widow’s peak reminiscent of Eddie Munster and hair spiked violently enough to prevent birds from landing on it. Someone had given him a trick ice cream cone whose top would shoot off when you pushed a button, which he proceeded to shoot at the camera for the majority of the video. Mark is older now and as my mother’s friend commented, “very handsome!” and at the wake for my grandmother the funeral director would ask if he was Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark would say no, he wasn’t, and so the funeral director would ask if he had at least seen the movie “Titanic.” And Mark would say yes, he had, and would proceed to carry my grandmother’s casket toward the hearse.
We are all sitting quietly around the table, remembering my grandmother. Elycia is holding one of her two children and I remember back to when Elycia was ten, because in the video someone asks how old she is and she tells them using her fingers. In the video she has a ponytail and a shirt with two women on it and one of the women is looking at a man walking by and has a thought bubble that says, “What a hunk!” I remember that shirt because I wore it next, as a hand-me-down, and hated it. In the video Elycia is perpetually squinting into the camera, nose scrunched, as if staring into a solar eclipse. In the video we are all running tireless laps around the house, interspersed with appearances by my grandmother and exhausted cameos by our parents.
I am tightening the underpants waistband around my fingers, watching the blood drain from my fingertips. The top of the band is scalloped, which I hadn’t previously noticed, but I assume Hanes does this to distinguish them from men’s underpants. Whoever made the decision to scallop the top of women’s Hanes Her Way underpants might think that this detail has gone unobserved, and I want to look them up to tell them that no, it looks very nice, and that I have spent the last twenty minutes admiring their handiwork. I have been asked to write the eulogy for my grandmother and I have come to the conclusion that I will somehow derive inspiration from her underpants’ waistband-that within its elastic are insights into my grandmother’s life.
“What sort of things do you say in a eulogy?” I ask my mother.
“You could tell a story about the person,” my mother says, “or you could just talk about them in general-their traits or what you remember about them.”
“Any story?”
“Any story that’s appropriate.”
“Appropriate how?”
“Write something and I’ll tell you if it’s appropriate or not,” she says.
I begin the decision-making process over which of the stories about my grandmother to tell and which not to tell, which is hard because there are a great number of stories about her that are interesting and catchy and fun and these are the ones that in no way belong in a eulogy.
There are two stories about my grandmother that I would like to include. One is appropriate. The other is maybe inappropriate, but I am not positive. I am the type of person who holds onto her grandmother’s underpants’ waistbands, imbuing them with deep, emotional meaning, so I am probably not the best person to turn to during the “appropriate/inappropriate” decision making process. I have never had the best judgment. There is a scene in the home video where you hear my two year-old sister Karen crying off-camera as I, eight years-old and climbing up onto a stool beside my mother, say, “But she hit me with a tennis racket.”
* * *
My grandmother loved being the center of attention but in the home video she appears only briefly. My father approaches her with the video camera and as my father films her she is sitting in the corner, balancing her checkbook. She is wearing a bright orange and pink shirt because my grandmother loved bright colors and always dressed as though she were a citrus fruit or a collection of reflective traffic signs. She is wearing a sun visor over her perm and concentrating and my father’s voice says, “There she is! The woman who started it all,” and she looks up and smiles and my father goes, “Give us some attitude for the camera, Ena,” and my grandmother makes a face where she opens her mouth outlandishly, as if she has won a trip to Disney world, and puts her hands up in mock surprise. She shakes her torso back and forth, smiling, and remains on camera until my cousin Tony, who is twelve in the video, arrives in front of the camera from nowhere, making elaborate chewing faces.
“Tony, out of the way,” his mother’s voice calls from off screen.
My grandmother smiles excitedly for the camera again but Mark appears, doing an imitation of a Godzilla-type creature and other faces (mine, Pam’s, Elycia’s) appear from the background with various protruding tongues, blocking the camera’s view of her. She tries to shoo us, the way you wave away clouds of gnats but more grandchildren appear until the screen is filled with them and my father is forced to turn off the camera.
“Your grandmother liked being the center of attention,” my mother says.
“So do most of her descendants,” I say.
The appropriate story I wanted to tell was from when my grandmother was a little girl-she was the same age as my sisters and my cousins and I in the video my father made. The age at which we were running through the house like lunatics, screaming and tackling one another. I do not know if my grandmother was like this as a little girl but the fact that her seven grandchildren resembled (on a frequent basis) British soccer spectators initiating a riot, I can assume that she did not spend her entire childhood indoors doing needlepoint and practicing concertos. The story I told about my grandmother as a young girl took place in the 1920’s when her father’s wealthy friend visited her family in Tampa, Florida, which was where she grew up. Her father’s friend was a bachelor with more money than he could spend on himself and that first year he visited he took my grandmother’s oldest sister out on the town, buying her whatever it was she wanted-clothes and food and dolls, and all of the things that young children admire from store windows but can so rarely attain. And my grandmother looked on, excited.
Her father’s friend returned the following year, taking out the next oldest sister for a day of ice cream and candy and toys and my grandmother waited impatiently at home, told that next year would be her year. That next year it would be her turn. And my grandmother waited for him, eager, making a list of all the things she wanted-dresses and games and chocolate, and to travel around town in his car while people looked at and admired her. And she waited for him in the frantic way nine year-olds wait when they cannot contain their excitement, but the following year her father’s friend didn’t come back. She waited for him, buoyant, because my grandmother was always buoyant, but my grandmother’s turn came in 1929, which was not a wonderful year for rich bachelors who were heavily invested in the stock market. Her father’s friend lost his fortune in the crash but not all nine year-olds were privy to updated financial knowledge, and so my grandmother waited patiently, wondering why he had never come back for her. My grandmother, telling others the story, teetered between incredibly disappointed and abysmally heartbroken.
“Why would you tell that story?” my mother asked. “It’s so sad.”
“It’s not that sad,” I said. “It’s interesting.”
“It ends on a sad note.”
“But I like that story,” I said. I had always liked that story because she had first told it to me when I was very young and I had understood her disappointment so strongly. And because it was more appropriate than the other story I liked, which involved my grandmother driving somewhere with such determination that her van knocked the rear view mirror off a postal vehicle. And Mark, who was in the van with her, shouted, “Grandma, you knocked the mirror off that truck!” and my grandmother responded coolly, “Oh honey, don’t get worked up. The government’s got plenty rearview mirrors.”
* * *
We are sitting in the enormous Catholic church that is only a few blocks from my grandparents house, with my grandmother’s casket standing solemnly by the altar. The priest is saying a bunch of things about how my grandmother was wonderfully devout and my cousins are sitting together in a row of black suits and dresses, looking solemn. The priest mentions maybe thirty times that my grandmother is in heaven now and I am trying to think about my grandmother but my thoughts keep going back to the priest and how he could make his public speaking more effective by using emphasis and projecting his voice. I am sitting next to my father who has a small passage to read during the service that he is gripping uncomfortably. I have seen tears in the eyes of both my father and my uncle over the past few days. I can tell when they are about to cry because they will abruptly stop talking-even if they are in the middle of a sentence-they will stop talking for as long as it takes to subdue the sadness, and then they start again from where they left off, never acknowledging the silence. My aunt, my father’s sister, has been sobbing outright, and is in the front row next to my grandfather, her hand on his back to steady him.
My father goes up and reads his piece clearly, straining it of emotion, and walks back down to his seat. I am happy for him that he did not cry while he was reading it. I am up next and my father mouths the word S-L-O-W-L-Y and my mother mouths the word A-P-P-R-O-P-R-I-A-T-E and I walk to the lectern and begin to talk about my grandmother.
I am overwhelmed with the number of things I have to say about my grandmother and begin by saying that I loved her very much so if I cry forgive me, but that most of the memories I have of her are absurd and hilarious, so if I laugh, forgive me also.
I read the story about my grandmother as a little girl. I talk about her loopy handwriting and the little glass jars she used to collect from garage sales and one of the magnets on her fridge I had seen the other day that said, “If getting older is getting better, then I am magnificent.” I talk about how she used to love wearing hot pink and how she made quilts for all her grandchildren that weighed more than the lead aprons you wear at the dentist’s office but were less effective at keeping you warm, and how she would tell people “Grandmas are just antique little girls.” I say that if she IS in heaven, within a week all the angels will be wearing bright purple pants suits and enormous red hats, and that all the wall space in heaven will be taken up with watercolor paintings. I briefly mention the story about the rear view mirror and the postal vehicle and look for my mother’s face to make sure I am ok, that I am being appropriate, and my mother and my cousins are quietly laughing. And my grandfather is laughing gently and my aunt and her friends are laughing, and so are some of the other people in the church that I do not know. Anyone who is not laughing is smiling. I mention that if my grandmother is in heaven, I hope very much that she meets up with her mother and her father and both of her sisters, but that I also hope that she meets up with her father’s rich friend, and that he finally buys her toys and candy and ice cream and everything she’s ever wanted.
I finish with the eulogy and return to my seat. My grandfather, smiling, grabs me by the shoulders and says he had wanted to hop over the rail and hug me and that he thought it was a wonderful eulogy and I gave him a quiet kiss on the cheek. And then for a moment we are quiet. My cousins and my parents and my aunts and uncles, all of whom only twenty years earlier had been in front of a video camera shouting and waving their arms over their heads, did something I didn’t think my family was capable of doing-they stood completely still and fell completely silent.
And then, amplified tenfold in the acoustic horn of the church I learned that my grandmother had had only one request for her funeral service, which was that her casket be wheeled out of the church to a recording of New York, New York by Frank Sinatra.
If you have never listened to Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” in a church with wonderful acoustics, it is something I would recommend. The song thundered through the pews with its opening kickline of Broadway-style beats, a row of my Aunt Pam’s friends clapping along in the way my grandmother would have hoped for. My family gathered, alternately crying and laughing, blowing our noses and snapping our fingers, as his voice spilled out through the church.
Start spreeeading the news--
I’m leavin’ today.
I want to BE a part of it-New Yooork, New Yoork.
“She requested this?” I asked.
“Are you surprised?” my mother asked, wiping tears from her cheek with a folded tissue.
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
These vagabond shooes--
Are longing to straaaay
Right through the VER-Y heart of it
In old, New Yoooork!
My grandfather had tears in his eyes but continued smiling, his rosary beads clinging to his hand, and I reached down into my purse, feeling for the elastic of my grandmother’s underpants, which I proceeded to wind around my knuckles until I could feel the blood rushing into my fingers. We wheeled my grandmother down the aisle as she shouted that she wanted to wake up in the city that never sleeps. As she announced brightly, as she so often did, that she was both king of the hill and top of the heap and (if it’s not too much to handle) possibly even A#1. And as Sinatra wound down, the pallbearers, smiling, buckled their knees and lifted my grandmother into the air like ancient royalty. She rode out of the church on the shoulders of her loved ones, the well-deserved center of attention, without (for once) her grandchildren jumping in front of the camera, begging the cameraman for their fifteen minutes.
* * *
In the best part of the video-the reason all of us like watching it- my father questions us, one by one, standing against the white aluminum siding on the side of my uncle’s house. My sister Pam slides in to the frame, her dark brown hair hanging in her face as she tells the camera that she is six. My father asks, “What do you do for a living?” and she responds: “I fix garages.” And he says, “What do you want to be when you grow up? And Pam, declining to answer, sticks out her tongue at the camera before exiting.
And my father shouts, “Who’s next?” so that as Pam leaves, my cousin Mark walks on screen, three-and-a-half feet tall, his hair standing on end.
“What’s your name?” my father says, his voice playfully impatient, as if conducting a job interview where all the applicants who had shown up that day were under the age of ten.
“Mark.”
“How old are you, Mark?”
“I’m seven years-old!”
“What’s your wife’s name?”
Mark scratches his chin, smiling, looking pleased and horribly embarrassed. He is grinning. He shouts, “I don’t have one!”
And my father says, “What do you do for a living?” And Mark answers that he plays baseball.
And my father says, “Thank you very much. Next?”
He runs the gamut through my cousins and his own children, learning that Karen is two and that I am eight and want (at that point) to be a lawyer and that Joey, though embarrassed on-camera to reveal his fondness for dinosaurs, twice reiterates that when he is older he would like to have a fast car that he can smash into trees.
And I am sorry now that he never asked his mother to come out for her questioning-asking her to stand against the side of the house with everyone else who was itching to be captured on film. My grandmother would have gotten excited and opened her mouth wide, as if she were titillated and screaming, and would say, “My name is Ena Marquis D’Apice and I’m sixty eight years old!
And my father would offer a gruff, “What do you do for a living?” and my grandmother would say, “Honey, I’m an artist!”
And my father would say, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And my grandmother would fall silent for a moment, excited, forgetting that she had already grown up several decades earlier. We would watch her visibly thinking on camera, biting her lower lip, rifling through possibilities. She would go back and forth between President of the United States and Mouseketeer. Backup Singer for the Glenn Miller orchestra. Professional Artist. Queen of Everything.
And I am sitting here alone, thinking about my grandmother, wrapping the waistband of her underpants around my fingers. I took the waistband as a way to remember her idiosyncrasies but I find that within a minute of picking it up I am wrapping it tightly around my hand again, feeling pressure that makes the tips of my fingers pulse. That there is something comforting in the squeeze of the elastic, the same way there was something comforting in the blood pressure machine holding me firmly by the arm, assuring me things would be ok.
And I know she is gone. I watched her casket as it was lowered into the earth by burly men with tan necks. I am positive she is gone but the elastic is warm and tight and fused to my skin and it feels, I finally realize, like someone is holding my hand.
My grandmother is simultaneously buried in a small cemetery in Utica and dancing through all of our imaginations in a red hat. My father is filming her with the video camera against my uncle’s aluminum siding.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” my father would ask.
“Give me a minute, honey. Give me a minute.”
And if she took too long, of course, my father would have said, “Ok, Next!” the way he did with everybody, but until that point he would capture her alone on camera, letting her enjoy the attention she craved-her bright pink shirt reflective against the white of the house, her face illuminated by a spotlight.