young woman in Portland. When you’re older you’ll read it. You and your brothers. You’ll be able to know me in a way that you cannot possibly now.” She looked at me. “That doesn’t make much sense to you, does it?”
I shook my head.
“You’re old enough to begin writing about your own life.”
“Write?” I asked, confused. “What kinds of things?”
“You can write about the world you’ve been born into. It’s always interesting, no matter when you are born into it. And you can put down a record of who you are to yourself.”
Who. You. Are. To. Yourself. These words meant nothing to me.
“And what the people around you are like.”
This I understood better. Or was beginning to understand better.
Grandma Huffy often gave me guidance like this. They weren’t rules exactly; they were more like principles to live by, sized down and age-appropriate—most of the time.
During the long, tedious, full-out Haggadah Seder at our cousins’ house in the deep Valley, for instance, after every few prayers she would whisper, “Spirituality has nothing to do with this excruciating tedium, remember that.”
If we were in a shop and she picked up an object and saw the words Made in Germany stamped on the bottom, she would set it down with a decisive thud and declare, “Never as long as I live—or you do either.”
“You must always be a Democrat,” she said to me one day. “In this family that is what we are.”
In this case there was no explanation—only the edict.
She told me stories too, some of which I could not stop replaying over and over in my head, like the one about the painting or Aunt Baby.
We were driving in her blue Oldsmobile one afternoon when I had asked her where Aunt Baby got her nickname. “It’s very simple. She’s the baby of the family.”
“But she’s not your baby”—even I grasped that much already.
“No, she’s not. But that doesn’t make any difference to me. To me she is another of my children. Would you like to hear how she came to live with us?”
I nodded.
“Her mother died when she was a small girl. Her father was a friend of your grandfather Sam’s from Portland,” she began, saying the name of her dead husband, my grandfather, for the first and, I believe, only time in the whole ten years I knew her. (There were no photographs of him standing on the top of her dresser, no sign of his existence anywhere at all in The Apartment.) “He was a decent man, but he was an alcoholic. An alcoholic is someone who cannot stop himself from drinking, and when he drinks is not, shall we say, at his most worthy. A father who drinks like that is not a good father. He cannot be. It is not possible. I saw this, and it disturbed me. Deeply. So one summer I invited Baby to come stay with us. She was thirteen, and she had a wonderful time. Your aunt was like a sister to her, your father a brother.”
She paused. “At the end of the summer I took her for a walk. Just the two of us alone. And I said to her, ‘Baby, I would like to make you an offer. But I want you to know first that my feelings will not be hurt if you say no to me. Do you understand?’ And she let me know she understood that, which was important. Then I said, ‘I would like to invite you to come live with us here in Los Angeles. To make your home with us for good. I want you to think it over, and let me know when you have.’”
“And what did she say?”
“She said she did not need to think it over for even one minute. She wanted to stay with us forever. Which, until she was married, she did.”
Looking through the windshield, she said, “It’s important to be able to decide matters for yourself sometimes. Even when you are still a child.”
She saw that as the point of the story. I saw something else: a child entrusted to parents who were not her own, as I was so often entrusted to my uncle and my aunt.
Precisely an hour after we climbed into our beds with our books, my grandmother announced that it was time for us to sleep. She turned off her light, and I obediently turned off mine. Then she arranged her pillows, centering herself between the bedposts with the leaping flames, and within minutes was definitively, snufflingly, out. I, instead, took what felt like hours to find a way to put myself to sleep. Everything in The Apartment was just so humming and unfamiliar and alive, from the bursts of traffic up on Hollywood Boulevard to the sound of Sylvia, who had returned from her concert, puttering busily (once Huffy’s light went off, she began walking from room to room), to the rumblings that originated from deep in my grandmother’s chest and didn’t seem able to decide whether they should come out through her mouth or nose. Every now and then there would be a raspy explosion, half snore and half shout, that would send me flying down under the blankets; I came up again afterward even more awake, with nothing to keep me company other than the wallpaper, whose embossed wreaths and urns I traced with my finger over and over and over. When that didn’t help I returned to Doré’s terrifying renditions of Adam, Moses, Jonah, et al., which were even more alarming when examined, squinting, in the dark of the night, or else I studied the bust of Madame de Sévigné that stood up on an onyx column and had been chosen, my aunt said, because she adored her daughter and wrote some of the most memorable letters in all of literature. In front of the bust a small, armless rocking chair moved back and forth on its own, very slightly, as if it were being rocked by a ghost.
And then suddenly, somehow, it was morning, a day awash with eyeball-stinging Southern California sunlight, and Sylvia was bringing me a glass of hand-squeezed orange juice strained of its pulp, which, wasting nothing, she herself ate with a teaspoon. “Drink, Michaelah,” she said. “Good health is built on vitamin C. Every day a dose.”
Huffy was already up and dressed, a rarity and something that happened only on the days I slept over, since normally she waited in bed, reading, until my aunt came for Morning Time.
After I finished the orange juice, Sylvia asked if I’d like to help make the bed. “I can show you how to miter the corners the way they do in a hospital,” she said.
A bed with hospital corners? It sounded exciting, a nifty trick, something to be good at. I loved tricks and I loved learning. I got up eagerly.
First we angled the mattress frame slightly away from the wall. Then we pulled up the crisp white sheet and the blanket. She lifted up the mattress, folded one sandwich of sheet and blanket underneath, held it there firmly, then reached around for the other flap.
“It’s like wrapping a package,” I said.
“Yes, exactly,” she said with a smile.
Suddenly from the doorway a sharp voice: “But whatever are you doing?”
Sylvia stiffened. “Teaching him how to make a bed with hospital corners,” she explained.
“Oh, please, the boy is never going to need to know how to do anything remotely like that.”
Sylvia, her shoulders deflating, abandoned the bed-making where it was and hurried off to the kitchen.
I was still holding the edge of the blanket. I watched her go, paralyzed. Even though Sylvia
