DIED 1986
NOT UNTIL MY SISTER and I were almost grown up did we know we had a stepgrandmother: my mother claimed to have nearly forgotten herself. But then came the phone call, and the story. After her parents divorced each other for the second time and my mother returned to New York after graduating from college, she lived with her strict, short-tempered father in his apartment on West End Avenue. It was a tenuous arrangement and fell apart altogether when his girlfriend, a Rockette from Radio City, moved in, dumping all my mother’s clothes out of the closet by way of a wedding announcement. My mother moved down the street to her own mother’s apartment, where she lived until she married in 1952. She did not invite her father and his new wife to the ceremony, though she called him afterward from the reception and asked him to come. He didn’t, and he died not long after that.
About thirty years later, this mystery stepmother called my mom. She had no family, she was getting older, and, as my mother and her sister decided, she herself had never meant to hurt anyone. She turned out to be a sweet lady, still trim and well turned out, and we took her to my aunt’s house in Delaware for Thanksgiving.
When she died, she left us what she had. A pearl necklace for my mother and a diamond ring for my aunt. My sister, a freshly certified accountant, did her estate taxes and cleaned out the apartment. My brother-in-law, the trash king, rolled her TV down the street in a shopping cart. When I came up from Texas for a visit, they took me over to get my share of the hair clips, the hats, and the dozens of gloves: lace, houndstooth, elbow-length, kid, lamé, and leather. Even the kitchen drawers were filled with feminine accessories, except for a couple devoted to take-out menus. For years I wore her zebra-striped wraparound dresses, and my sister still has her little sewing box, packed with thread in a dozen shades of purple. A slip of paper is taped inside with a motto typed in capital letters: TRUST YOUR LIFE TO GOD & LOOK OUT FOR NUMBER ONE.