There are many reasons for your family to get together: reunions. Birthdays. Weddings. Funerals. Taco Night. These events can be fun and relaxed or end with people screaming with their shirts off on the front lawn.
When there are old people around, these get-togethers can seem like they’re playing on a loop, because they act the same way every time. They use the same lines and get in the same fights, as if they’re characters in a never-ending Broadway play. Any time I saw my grandparents they started playing their roles right on cue.
“Your grandmother is nuttier than a fruitcake rolling around the loony bin, ooh boy!”
That was my grandfather’s line while in the middle of one of his classic anti-family rants. I remember sitting in the passenger seat of his yellow Honda Civic, watching him chain-smoke cigarettes and spit profanities about our family, all while speeding through town under yet another overcast New Jersey sky.
“And your uncle is a little light in the loafers, ooh boy. He really loves watching that figure skating. I had to get the hell out of there. I couldn’t breathe,” he said as he puffed another cigarette.
This happened at every family gathering, which happened about once a week, not because it was anyone’s favorite thing to do, it was just what we did. My grandfather enjoyed it the least, becoming more and more annoyed until he was on the verge of exploding, at which point he would come up with some excuse to run to the store, tell me to get my coat, and we’d escape.
I liked that he picked me and not one of the adults and definitely not one of my two sisters. What would he talk about with them anyway? Ballet? Flowers? No, he asked me because I was a man. A ten-year-old man. He knew we could talk baseball and guy stuff and, more than that, I wouldn’t run back and tell everyone what he had said about them during our ride. My sisters would totally tell.
“Your father is a piece of work, ooh boy. Who does he think he is, sitting on my side of the couch? He thinks he’s a regular king of England that one, driving around in a Buick and a ten-dollar shirt,” he said as he ran another red light.
Sure, he was taking the stuffing out of my own father, but he was good with a phrase and the only adult who ever asked me if I wanted a smoke. I liked that, even though I never accepted. The only thing I was hooked on at the time were Pixy Stix and Fritos. My grandfather, however, inhaled cigarettes like they were keeping him alive, which for many years they did. Until they didn’t. He constantly had smoke pouring out of him like he was a house on fire. He smoked like they did back when health wasn’t even a word. Back when Lucky Strike was considered a breath mint.
I understood why he ran away from his own home like this every week. It was a suffocating, small house in Clifton, New Jersey, about five miles outside of the city. The type of neighborhood that wasn’t quite industrial but wasn’t quite hospitable, either. There was a factory nearby that constantly pumped sweet-sour smoke into the air that smelled like a mix of baby food and burning tires. Whenever I asked my grandmother about it she’d wave it away and tell us not to worry.
“I kind of like it, don’t you? It smells like bubble gum.” That was enough for me. What kid is going to argue with a mystery factory that filled the sky with candy?
The house was so small that everyone looked bigger when they were in it. That’s part of why I liked it. I was adult-size there. The door handles were at my level, I didn’t have to reach up on my toes to get a glass from the cabinet, and the tiny bathroom made me feel like I had already gone through puberty. The only downside was that it made the adults seem larger too, as they drank wine out of thimble-size glasses, bumping into furniture like drunk giants trapped in a dollhouse.
Even their dog was small. His name was Pip-Squeak, Pip for short. He was a miniature poodle–Chihuahua-chipmunk mix. He was the smallest and ugliest dog I had ever seen. There was a time when I wasn’t sure he was a dog. He had strange little ears and his legs were all different lengths, which caused him to wiggle and roll across the floor like he was always sneaking up on something. The biggest thing on his body was his eyes but even those weren’t right. Not only did they go off in different directions but they didn’t even start off in the right place. One was spinning off to the right and the other seemed to be doubling as a nose.
The TV room was the size of a walk-in closet. The only place to sit was a plaid corduroy couch wedged in the corner. My father, who is a large, broad-shouldered man in normal spaces, would sit on this couch wedged between my grandfather and my uncle Richard like they were fighting over the last seat on a crowded subway car.
The TV was rolled into the room on a shaky metal stand with four white plastic wheels that were never headed in the same direction. This was back when no one really knew how to make things and the things they did make didn’t work so well. Everything was made of metal: wastebaskets, lawn chairs, beds—all metal. Metal springs stuck out of mattresses and couch cushions. Children fought for their lives on metal playgrounds. Even aspirin came in tiny metal boxes. And, in my grandparents’ house, there was a metal antenna that stuck out of the TV that was used to capture shows from out of the sky as they were flown through the air to your home.
Imagine that.
I was forced to sit on the floor because it was the only remaining space and the men liked to put their feet on me like a human ottoman, when they weren’t using me as their remote control and antenna adjuster. These three giant men, squeezed together on the couch like martini olives, would bark orders at me to change channels and hold the antenna at different angles, sometimes during the entire game, because for some reason the signal was stronger when it passed through my body.
On this particular day, my grandfather was quickly losing patience because the only program we could get was men’s figure skating, which made him very uncomfortable, especially while snuggled up with these two couch mates. Then my grandmother, who I called Nana, came in and really set him off.
To be clear, I loved this woman. She dressed in bright colors with flowered patterns that most people only had on their wallpaper or shower curtains. She had flowers on her shoes that matched the flowers on her headband, that matched the flowers on her dress and purse.
I was her first grandchild and clearly her favorite. No one even came close. She called me “The Miracle” and, although my sisters hated to hear that, I had no reason to doubt her. She was the greatest. But that was my relationship with her.
Her relationship with my grandfather was a different story.
They met as teenagers when she was in love with Frank Sinatra. My grandfather had Sinatra-type hair, which apparently was good enough, as my grandmother didn’t seem to notice that his face was closer to that of a basset hound than Ol’ Blue Eyes. They fell in love, got married, gave birth to my mother and my uncle, and lived happily ever after. Or at least for a couple years, until the stress came in.
No one called it “stress” in those days, they just called it “life” and it was hard and you didn’t complain, you just did your best to deal with it. There were no massage parlors or therapists or friends who wanted to hear your bellyaching. You quietly got stressed, got angry, and eventually exploded. Men punched each other in the face on a regular basis. My grandfather wasn’t violent and he wasn’t a drinker, he was just a confused man who wandered onto the deck of a ship called “Fatherhood” in the middle of a storm and suddenly everyone was calling him Captain. But he didn’t know a single thing about sailing, so he just held on to the mast and screamed his head off.
Yelling in my family didn’t mean you were angry, you were just communicating in a timely fashion. Today, the neighbors would be concerned and call child services or marital services or whatever kind of services that stop people from screaming in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, but yelling, to us, was normal.
We knew the screaming was about to start the minute we heard Nana marching in her daisy shoes down the short hallway to the TV room.
“How much time is left in this stupid game?”
“Two minutes,” my grandfather would yell back.
“Oh, sure. I’ll believe that when monkeys fly.”
“Well, they must fly because there are two minutes left. Ooh boy!” he yelled louder.
“Don’t you ‘Ooh boy’ me. And, Tommy, don’t stand so close to the TV, your eyes will turn to jelly.”
“Leave the kid alone.”
And this was when my grandfather would turn to me.
“Goddamn it, get your coat, Tommy, it’s time to go to the store!”
Relieved that I could finally let go of the antenna, I ran and grabbed my jacket and we went out into the candy-coated air and drove away. Sometimes we’d really go to the store, but most of the time we just drove around and he’d yell and smoke until he calmed down. I always thought it was funny that no one ever questioned us when we returned without any groceries, but they were probably just relieved to have him out of the house for a while.
His peaceful nicotine state didn’t last long when we returned because then it was time for dinner. The time when everyone was forced to sit at the table. Together. My parents, my sisters, cousins, my aunt and uncle, and a random neighbor or two, maybe their kids and my great-grandmother, who lived in the attic.
That’s right. I had a great-grandmother who lived in the attic. We called her “Oma.” And it was my job to go up there and get her. People don’t live in attics. Ghosts live in attics. Scary things that hide from the living stay in the attic. Seriously, who lives in the attic?! And why was it my job to go get her?
Fifty steps straight up, each step creaking with doom and dead things and demon spirits. I’d climb each death-defying step, gripping the handrail until I got to the top, where I’d knock on the door, slowly open it like a coffin lid, and there she was.
And the fear went away.
She was a smart, funny, eighty-year-old German immigrant who would simply rather stay up there in her room than have to deal with my grandmother. I could coax her down by making her laugh, which she always did, but when she smiled things would get scary again because she had no teeth. Many times they were left on the table, still biting on a cracker.
Ooh boy.
I’d get her teeth in and lead her down the stairs.
“Everybody, sit down and eat!” yelled my grandmother.
There we were, multiple generations of stressed-out, overworked, funny-looking people with flowered headbands, crooked teeth, and tar-stained fingers, screaming and eating while Pip-Squeak licked at our ankles with a tongue that stuck out of where normally an ear would go.
What more could you ask for?