DIED 1993
EVERYONE BOSSED HER AROUND: her silent, disapproving, soup-sending-back husband The Painter, her imperious Australian mother-in-law, her two sisters, and all four of her children but particularly my father, her oldest, who treated her with utter impatience and exasperation. Call your mom, my mother would remind him, and when he finally did, you could hear him bellowing for the next ten minutes. She was a talker herself, with a rasp that was the product of a million filterless Chesterfields, effortlessly filling in the paragraphs between my grandfather’s monosyllables, running cheery interference around his dour comments. She said ideer for idea and fathuh for father, and did she tell you about how she dated Richard Rodgers when she was a girl in Manhattan? She did hilarious impressions of her friends at the card table or mah-jongg, how every blouse and skirt Betty Becker ever bought sat up and drawled, “Well, hellooo, Betty,” when she walked into the store. I’m sure Betty Becker bossed her around too.
She was bulletproof as only a purely sweet person can be, as if she were filled up with the honey she spooned into our mouths at Rosh Hashanah in her apartment, a tradition tailor-made for her and the only one she observed. Except for Johnny Carson, who was her nightly companion, followed by hours of insomnia. Well it’s 2:30 a.m. now, so I guess I’ll go to bed, reads a letter in her loopy penmanship. A love letter, about how good we are to her and how dear. She had a permanent quality of anticipation, as if something wonderful we had planned was just about to occur, and because she loved us all so much this was true. Even a phone call from my father was something to look forward to, and his death was something there is not a word for. The last time I saw her, dying in the hospital of pancreatic cancer at eighty-three, she was eager to get a peek at my three-month-old son. On the table, she had some chocolate, a bag of pastel mints, a huge wheel of sweetened dried fruit. Take it, sweetie, she said, take it all.