when it had melted into a pool an inch thick in the big black skillet, she would drop in the pork chops, or the chicken, or the hamburgers. If necessary, she cooked eggs in it, though she clearly felt that the ideal medium for the cooking of eggs was the grease from a half-pound of bacon.
She wasn’t trying to kill him: she was just a farm girl from the simplest part of the old country, where a breakfast or dinner that “stuck to your ribs” was more than a colorful expression. Once I saw her drop my grandfather’s toast in the bacon grease. At first, I thought this was a mistake, but she left it there and when it was soaked through, she slapped it on his plate.
“A little grease makes your insides work,” she once told me, thus giving me the notion that lard was the culinary equivalent of a good thick motor oil and suggesting to me that Grandpa was probably healthier than he looked. For his part, however, the old man frequently claimed that after one of her breakfasts he often lost the feeling in his lower legs.
A typical dinner was chicken or pork chops, potatoes, sometimes soup, a vegetable. And jello. In the years we were together she served me jello perhaps two thousand times, and it was always lemon: perhaps she found the color soothing, or had heard lemon jello had magical properties, so that was what we had. With dinner they split a quart of Meister Bräu, and indulged in the fantasy that this small quantity of beer was my grandfather’s “ration,” ignoring the fact that he’d put away a half-pint of Jim Beam earlier in the afternoon.
She made me drink milk, except on Saturdays when she gave me Pepsi-Cola. Fried pork chops, boiled potatoes, green beans, lemon jello, Pepsi. To this day, if I’m served pork chops I expect it to be followed by lemon jello, and I can’t think of any of these things, can’t taste them, without thinking of my grandmother.
Each morning when I awoke she was already up and dressed for work and tending to the needs of “the two simple-minded children that live in my poor house.” She made us sandwiches for lunch, wrapping them in a thick waxed paper, and fixed “eggnog” for him in a tall glass. It appeared to be sugar and a raw egg in a glass of milk, and after it had set a while, the contents separated into layers. Grandpa would hold it up to the light and peer at it, then shake his head.
“Oh, look at that, would you? Something in there’s moving.”
Then he would stir it and drink half of it down at a swallow, gasping afterward.
“Is it like the eggnog we have at Christmas?” I asked him once.
“Good God, no.” He stared at his eggnog and spoke in a stage whisper, “She tries to poison me.” Then he pretended to have a brilliant idea. “Here, Danny-boy, do you want it?”
I told him I had cereal, and I did, multi-colored balls of cereal that went soggy in milk and dyed it the colors of spumoni ice cream. In any case, I had no need for this glass of milk with disgusting elements of raw egg floating around in it. For his part, he seemed to find my little soggy bits of cereal repellent, and frequently I’d find him grimacing as I fished for the last shapeless bits swimming in the now-colored milk.
After she went to work, I’d play or read and he would smoke Camels at the kitchen table—a practice that seemed to be a male responsibility in most households: my uncles all did it and I remembered seeing my father sitting at our kitchen table smoking and staring out the window.
In the afternoons we went on our trips, and when we came back, he would settle in under the glow of a couple of snorts and take a short nap. As he slept, I would explore the house, unfettered by an adult hand. I went through my grandparents’ drawers and studied old photographs, read old mail, explored the dark recesses of Uncle Tom’s closet and the dresser where Uncle Mike kept magazines with pictures of girls without clothes. I understood that these magazines had something to do with sex and that I mustn’t look at them, and so I rooted them out like a termite on old wood. I went through my uncles’ pockets in search of scandal and found loose change, scraps of paper, work-related notes, receipts. I crept into the pantry and drank Log Cabin syrup straight from the little tin chimney atop the painted cabin, I spooned honey straight from the jar, I tried wine, which I found acridly repulsive, purloined hard candy from a hidden jar, stuck a greedy finger into the raspberry reserves and, finally, I sank my exploratory fangs into the wax fruit on grandma’s living room table. It was, like most wax, tasteless, and I was surprised that anything so colorful as her wax peach could be so bland. I tried to smooth out the toothmarks and set the peach back in the bowl, then bit into the wax grapes, in case the peach had been set out as a decoy.
Eventually, she was to find the tooth marks, and it happened when I was in the next room, in the dining room, where I had covered the entire dinner table with my toy soldiers. From the corner of my eye I saw her bend over the glass bowl and freeze and I shot her a quick glance. She was holding the wax peach and staring at it open-mouthed. Then she glanced from it to me with the look that she’d probably have used if I’d told her I’d gone dancing naked down Clybourn. In the end, she replaced the peach, bite marks down, and said nothing. As she walked into the kitchen, she was shaking her head.
And on another lazy afternoon in my company, my grandfather set fire to the couch.
He had nodded off with a Camel between his tobacco-stained fingers and I was playing a few feet away on the living room floor with my soldiers. I had noticed the cigarette but was still convinced at that stage of life that adults normally knew what they were doing. A while later, I saw that his hand had dropped down and loosened its grip, and the cigarette was now directly on Grandma’s sofa, her lovely flowered sofa, the prize of her living room, the cigarette coal in the center of one of the cushions. As I watched, the cigarette burned a small hole into the cushion, and then the hole grew a bright thin orange glow, and this tiny layer of fire began to eat at the sides of the hole ’til it was the size of a baseball.
I began to get nervous—not for my own safety, for thought I could outrun the fire, but for Grandpa’s: I feared that my grandmother would kill him. I remember the growing panic in my heart and then I went over to wake him: it took me several minutes and when I finally got him to open one eye, I pointed to what his wayward cigarette had done.
He bounced up like a cartoon character and stared at the burning circle for a moment, and then said, “Oh, Jesus Christ. I’m a dead man.”
Then he began to beat at it with his hands. He could do that, beat out fire with his hands, because of something that had happened to him all those years of standing in the open doorway of a streetcar in the cold. He’d lost some of the feeling in his fingertips, and I’d seen him put out matches and unused cigarettes by casually squeezing matchhead or coal between thumb and forefinger. Now he beat at the offending flame and sent me for a glass of water, and I had to go twice because I spilled the first glass on my shirt.
When the fire was out, the room heavy with the acrid smell of wet, burnt cloth, we sat there on either side of the accusing hole. My grandfather coughed and made an irritated gesture of waving away smoke that I couldn’t see. Grandpa didn’t speak, he just kept sighing. Finally, we got up and he flipped the cushion so the hole was hidden. Then he looked at me.
“Don’t tell your grandma, or we’ll both be dead men.”
“Why me?”
“Because you were here.”
“But I don’t smoke.”
“It won’t make a bit of difference. She’ll say you were my accomplice. We’re in this together. If she finds out, there’ll be no corner of the earth where we’ll be safe.”
For weeks my grandfather attempted to hide the problem from her by the simple expedient of sitting on the
