noodles. These she laid on the table edges. If she was in the right mood and I washed my hands three times, I was allowed to lay them in place.
Grace came in, a bag under her arm. She took out a cookie filled with crushed figs and raisins.
“For the bowels,” she announced, handing it to me. It was oven-warm. I bit into it, the fruits swirling on my tongue in a sticky sweet mess.
I was about to compliment her when she said, “That mother of yours never fixed you nothin’ like that.”
The cookie went sour in my mouth. What brought this on? Hadn’t I been nice to her? “She was too sick to cook,” I said.
“Shut up, Grace,” Connie said, though not harshly. She’d probably been thinking the same thing.
“I guess your father had to cook a lot, huh?” Grace asked.
A vulture of a memory landed on my brain, those greasy diners we went to after visits to the hospital. “We did fine.”
“Yeah?” Grace wouldn’t let it go. “Tell me what you ate.”
“Lots of stuff. What do you care?”
Connie grinned. I’d done all right, hadn’t betrayed either parent. “Eh, he’s restless today, with the girl gone,” she said. “Take him to the store.”
The A & P was a few blocks away. We passed Zip Aiello going the other way, a Santa Claus–sized burlap sack of soda bottles on his back. He was on his way to redeem them someplace on Atlantic Avenue.
“Howard Hughes!” Grace called out. “A millionaire in nickels and dimes!”
Zip wrinkled his face as if he smelled something bad, hitched his sack higher on his shoulder, and clinked away.
“What a nut. He never stands straight. Always bending down to pick up shit on the street. Bottles. Pieces o’ metal. You watch, they’re gonna have to bury him in a curved coffin.”
“Why?”
“ ’Cause he’s always bent over. Slow down, this ain’t the Kentucky Derby.”
She kept calling me back, the way a person would summon a puppy. One of the wheels of her cart was bent, so Grace had to give the thing a straightening yank every fifteen feet or so because it kept bearing away from her.
We passed under the elevated tracks just in time to meet a train roaring overhead. It made the ground tremble and then it was gone, striped sunlight back on the street. Grace reached for the back of her head.
“Madonna, my hair.” She grabbed at the blond snakes of her hair. The train breeze faded, diminishing to the puff of a child’s breath on birthday candles.
“That train scared you,” Grace said when we were in the store. She hefted packages of chicken, poked her finger through the cellophane, and sniffed the flesh.
“I wasn’t scared,” I lied.
“Hey, lady, don’t do that!” a man in a bloody apron said. “We spend all morning wrapping and you make holes?”
Grace pointed a bony finger at him. “You sold me a rotten bird last time. Don’t threaten me. This is the only way I know it’s good.”
She moved like a general to the freezer case, dug around, and yanked out a TV dinner. “I bet your mother used to buy these.”
“She did not,” I said hotly. Why was Grace doing this? Because my mother threw crumbs to sparrows instead of turning them into ersatz meatballs? Because her salads were lettuce and tomatoes instead of spinach and exotic greens? Because she’d died young and had no chance to grow as ugly as Grace?
The air conditioning seemed arctic. Sawdust under my feet felt like snow. I followed Grace around, watching her cart fill with groceries. Cracked eggs topped the pile.
“They’re cheaper, why pay more when they’re good for baking?”
When we got to the checkout line I said, “The only time we ever had TV dinners was when she was in the hospital.”
Grace’s eyes glowed with triumph. “So you did have ’em.”
“Yeah. What are you gonna do, put it in the newspaper?”
“You lied before.”
“She never bought them. My father bought them.”
Grace ignored the technicality. “Pass me the eggs. Be careful you don’t break them.”
“They’re already busted.” The people behind us laughed. Grace looked as if she meant to spit at me. I knew she wasn’t through with me.
We turned right when we came out of the A & P.
“We live the other way,” I said.
“I know,” Grace said. “But let’s take a little walk first.”
Something fishy was up — like Mel had told me on my first morning in Brooklyn, nobody around here walks.
When we’d traveled three blocks the buildings grew seamy. Puerto Ricans sat on stoops shaded by the elevated tracks, sipping from bottles of neon-colored soda. Sheet metal was nailed over many of the windows. Other houses were burned out. Missing windows gaped like toothless mouths.
“Grace, let’s go home.”
She puffed against the weight of the cart. Her slippers slapped the broken sidewalk. “One more block.”
She stopped abruptly in front of a yellow brick building with rusty fire escapes. The house beside it was rubble.
“This is where she lived,” Grace said, grinning, and I understood in a flash that I was being shown the former home of my mother.
I could see all of Grace’s teeth, long and brown, like those of a roasted pig. She knitted a stitch in her side with her bony fingers: the extra few blocks had taken their toll but oh, the expression on my face was worth it to her.
“The two of them,” Grace said. “Oh, they were a pair, all right.”
“Two?”
“Your mother and your grandmother. Your other grandmother.” A flash of those brown teeth. “I used to see your other grandma going to work in the morning, wearing those big hoop earrings.” She made circles of her thumbs and forefingers and touched them to her earlobes. “An actress, she wanted to be! Some actress.”
I’d never even seen a snapshot of my maternal grandmother. “She was an actress?”
Grace cackled. “Oh, that’s what she wanted you to believe. She sang, she danced, she went to auditions. Always this far away from the big break.” She held thumb and forefinger a fraction of an inch apart. “But she was just a waitress at some Howard Johnson’s on Broadway.”
My face felt as if it had been needled with an anesthetic. “You didn’t know that, Joey?” she asked,
