Hope and Other Punch Lines(8)

* * *



—

“We need to talk, Abbi,” my mother says once we’re in line at the Churnery. We look up at the menu with our heads tilted back and our mouths open in awe at its offerings. In recent years, Oakdale has seen an influx of rich families from Manhattan in search of square footage and good public schools, and perhaps because those people prefer their ice cream not to taste like ice cream but instead a weird smorgasbord of the most random of flavors—fennel or parsnip or even Peking duck—we no longer have access to straight-up chocolate or vanilla. Everything is artisanal, which is a word that means fancy-pants and overpriced and borderline disgusting. I was about to suggest that my mom and I play a quick round of the game where we think up the grossest flavors the store could realistically serve for which people would still pay six bucks a scoop—I won handily last time with fish roe bacon vanilla.

“Okay,” I say, feeling only slightly nervous. If she knew about the cough, she would not be bringing it up here. In public. That would trigger DEFCON 9. My guess is she wants to talk college applications.

“Grandma was found wandering around without pants today,” she says, which is of course the opposite of what I expected her to say. Or not exactly the opposite, because that would mean I expected her to say Grandma was found walking around with pants, and obviously I didn’t expect that either.

“Thank God it’s summer,” I say. I realize this is not an appropriate time to be making jokes, but funny is easier than sad.

“She was a block from her house,” my mom says. “The police were called.” She’s smiling, but it’s not a happy smile. It’s the smile that she uses when she has to deliver bad news. A smile that is not a smile but a frown masquerading as a smile, because frowns are frowned upon in my house. When I was nine my parents sat me down with such big grins I thought they were finally buying me a puppy. Turned out they were splitting up.

My parents generally swear by the worldview that no matter what, the Goldstein family is A-OK, which is why my mother would think it totally normal to drop such big news on me in an ice cream shop. (Despite the divorce, we still consider ourselves a single family, because my parents are best friends who live two doors down from each other, and no, I don’t understand it either.) Anything that conflicts with this ethos of perfection and solidarity is met with ridiculous false cheer and feigned enthusiasm for the challenges ahead, usually accompanied by some athletic company tagline (Just do it!) or political slogan (Yes, we can!).

“I know we’ve talked about this before, but it’s getting worse. Grandma’s getting worse,” my mom says.

I should point out here that I have two grandmothers. My father’s parents live in Florida in one of those condo developments with a pool and a tennis court and a “clubhouse” that advertises a certain brand of growing old involving a chumminess I can get behind. That grandmother has deep brown leathery skin that resembles a dog’s chew toy because she spends her days lying in the sun, and a throaty smoker’s voice that I believe was earned not so much from cigarettes but from a lifelong affinity for gin. She always smells like Chanel and always hugs me with her hands stretched out, as if she’s worried I’m going to smudge her nails. I call her GiGi, because the word grandma makes her feel old. My mom’s mom, on the other hand, lives alone in Maine in a house that’s too big for her and with a diagnosis that’s too scary for all of us. So when my mom says my grandma was found without pants, it’s very clear which one she’s talking about.

As much as I love my GiGi, my mom’s mom has always been my favorite. My best memories involve those childhood summers in Maine; they smell like salty bathing suit and grass and roasted corn. I’d spend whole days with my grandmother, both of us barefoot, running around with matching silver colanders on our head pretending to be aliens visiting planet Earth for the first time. “Ooh, what’s this strange contraption?” my grandma would ask, and then point to random items around her house and reinvent their uses. A toilet was for washing hair. The stapler for decorating walls. Tweezers were to pinch naughty children.

She is one of the few people who have always understood me, who see the world through a similar distorted lens. She was the one who’d read me fairy tales, and she’d make up more exciting endings when I complained that my happily-ever-after needed more than being stuck in the drafty castle with the pasty prince. If I were going to confide in anyone about the cough and the dying thing—how I both know and don’t want to know, how I’m choosing ignorant bliss temporarily, how I’m choosing joy, which is way better than happily ever after—it would have been my grandma. But not now. Not anymore.

“I think it’s time we moved her in with us, whether she likes it or not,” my mom says. My grandmother has early-onset dementia, which, not unlike 9/11 syndrome, only gets worse with time. She no longer gets to wear confusion like it’s a game for laughs. This is another ball that only rolls downhill.

“I know she wants her independence, but I need her safe. The aides we hired aren’t enough,” my mom says, and again her voice is cheerful, like this is good news. She’s spinning this to herself (as she soon will to her friends and then to everyone else) as her mother coming home to us, when we both know that my grandmother, who has always said she’ll never leave that house in Maine unless it’s on a stretcher, is not the person who will be coming home at all. “Dad has already offered to take her a couple of days a week.”