I WALKED INTO THE APARTMENT TO FIND MOM IN the kitchen, the counter crammed with ingredients. She was making spaghetti casserole, which was one of my favorites. Half the meal seemed to be spread on the front of her shirt.
“A little dash of this. A dash of that.” She shook two spices into the saucepan at the same time, swinging her hips, hula style.
I hadn’t seen Mom this happy in a while. I dipped a spoon into the sauce to taste it. “Someone had a good day,” I said.
“Hardly,” she said. “I’ve been trying to show Adelle how to put her dirty clothes in a hamper instead of dropping them wherever she takes them off. Jesus, you’d think I was trying to teach her to … I don’t know, to balance a checking account or something.”
I bit back a comment. Mom didn’t even know the password to the bank website. It fell under my domain, had been that way since she bounced the payment for my eighth grade Girl Scout camp. “Speaking of money, is Vickie in charge of Oma’s bills now?”
“Oma, huh?” she said, voice dripping with sarcasm.
“That’s what she asked me to call her.”
“Well, you know how bad I am about sending bills in on time, but I do most of the grocery shopping to make up for it.”
“So you like her? Vickie, I mean?” I added a teaspoon of basil and a few shakes of salt to the sauce, then put the spices back on the rack, turning the labels out so they could be read.
“What’s there not to like? She loves responsibility, and I don’t.”
I shrugged. “She seems nice, but a little too nice, you know?”
“Oh, right, I can see where that might be offensive.”
I sighed. “She acts like a preschool teacher. Like Oma’s a helpless child.”
Mom raised an eyebrow.
“Come on,” I said. “You know what I mean.”
She shook her head. “Vickie’s a godsend. I couldn’t do this by myself. I’d go crazy. Sometimes I think your grandmother uses the Alzheimer’s thing as an excuse. It’s like she doesn’t want to remember.”
“Alzheimer’s thing? Oma’s sick, Mom, really sick.”
She plucked a strand of spaghetti from the pot and flung it against the wall to see if it stuck. The al dente test. I’d have to wash the wall later.
“Listen, Liv, I have to keep reminding her that my father’s been dead for a few decades.” We watched in silence as the spaghetti curled in on itself and flopped to the floor.
“She still remembers things from when she was young,” I said. “How she loves to write, and about her sister—”
Mom gave a strangled laugh. “My mother never had a sister. Only a brother named Hans, but don’t ask her about him, or she’ll start screaming about how he bit the head off her doll.”
“She told me her grandmother lived in Holland,” I said, wondering how much Mom knew, how much she’d tell me.
“For Pete’s sake, Adelle’s family was not from Holland. I think she was from somewhere in Germany.” Mom reached absentmindedly for the pot of simmering sauce. “Damn it!” She yanked her hand back, flicking off the pain.
“Could we be Jewish, Mom?”
“No.”
“What about that silver box on Oma’s door?”
“My mother’s delusional, Liv. Maybe she wants to be Jewish.”
I passed her an ice cube from the freezer. She closed her fist around it. “Isn’t Friedman a Jewish name, though?” I asked.
“It’s also Swiss. My father’s parents immigrated from Lucerne to Pennsylvania, where he was born. No one’s Jewish.”
“Is it possible Oma converted later on?” I pressed.
Mom laughed as if the idea was ludicrous.
“You think she’s making this all up?”
“Listen, Liv, there’s no point pushing her on the details. She’s obviously a hostage to her warped imagination.”
“Maybe there are things you don’t know about her.” I made my voice sound mysterious. “You know, secrets she’s never told you.”
Mom plucked the whittled ice cube from her hand and pitched it into the sink. “She’s not altogether right up there. Never was. My mother was a liar before the disease. Difference is, when she does it now, no one blames her.”
At lunch on Thursday, Alex, Franklin D., Elizabeth, and I went to Grant High’s first-ever Chess Lunch Club. Alex, a nationally ranked chess player, was president. I’d never played before. Elizabeth taught me Scholar’s Mate, a way to win a game in only four moves. Inexperienced people don’t see it coming, she told me. As I played Franklin D., Candace’s voice rose from the recesses of my brain: Are you out of your mind? Chess is for nerds.
If chess was for nerds, what would Candace have thought of my memory? I’d never told her or Audrey the truth. Having a talent for recall and a love of facts would probably move me into the same category as my new friends.
Shut up, Candace, I thought, banishing her from my head once and for all.
After school I stopped by the apartment to drop off my backpack, then hiked over the hill to Oma’s. The other day, I’d told Mom that Oma needed exercise. I couldn’t believe it when she agreed.
“Why don’t you come directly from school and take her around the neighborhood?” she said. I figured she liked the idea of knocking a half hour off her shift.
No one answered my knock on Oma’s door, so I rang the doorbell. Where was Mom? I remembered her saying something about an extra key in a plant on the porch. A fake-looking palm sat in the corner. I ran my fingers through its plastic leaves until I found the key, hammocked on a leaf and covered in a coat of rust. It had probably sat outside for the last twenty years. It took a minute of finagling before I could turn the lock.
I stepped into the foyer. “Hello?”
No answer. Only a distant squeak like a train moving away. Had Mom forgotten to mention a doctor’s appointment? Wait, I recognized that sound. The teapot! The whistle stuttered as it ran out of steam. Someone must’ve left the stove on. My palms went clammy at a horrible thought: Please, God, don’t let me find my grandmother dead.
“Oma? Are you here?” I called, not very loud. I flicked on the hallway light. A yellow gauze spilled across the floor. I walked toward the kitchen, the heel of my boot striking the floor with each step. The door was closed. I rested my hand on the cold metal knob, took a breath, and turned it.
My grandmother glared at me, wide-eyed and alive, a frying pan raised above her head.
I flattened myself against the wall. “It’s me, Oma!”
“You missed roll call.”
I gingerly pried the pan from her fingers. “Well, I’m here now, okay?”
The teapot gave a final hiss.
“Please don’t take me back to camp.”
“What’s wrong with camp?” I said, desperate to keep things lighthearted. “There’s swimming. And canoeing. Sleeping under the stars …”
Mom was right—in the past few weeks, she’d gone downhill. I turned off the burner, then spotted the note on the fridge.
Liv,
Need a cup of coffee. Go ahead and walk Adelle. Vickie should be here when you get back. See you at home.
Hugs,
Mom
Walk Adelle? She made my grandma sound like a dog.
Getting Oma’s sneakers on was no simple task. She curled her toes, giggling like a child. “It’s a warm day, Oma. How about we take off that blouse and get you into a T-shirt?”
She clasped her hands behind her back. “No! No! No!”
Vickie and Mom had warned me about Oma’s need for privacy. She never let anyone help her get dressed, even though it took her a half hour to do. Lately we had to help her eat so all the food wouldn’t end up in her lap. Still, I couldn’t blame my grandma for clinging to the last bit of independence. “I’ll get you a shirt,” I said. “You can put it on by yourself.”
“So cold.” Oma drew her elbows together.
I threw my hands on my hips, frustrated. “Fine.” Maybe if she got good and hot, she’d be more cooperative the next time. If she remembered.
Ten minutes later, I knitted my fingers through hers, and we started up Fillmore toward the bakery on Sacramento Street. Oma had a sweet tooth. I knew she’d love the almond bear claws. At the intersection, I waited as she leaned against a traffic sign, fanning herself with a hand.
“Hey, remember when you told me about your sister? That she was obsessed with getting good grades?” The conversation I’d had with Mom had been bugging me all day. How could Oma have forgotten the gender of her sibling?
Oma looked at me blankly.
I inched forward with my questions like a soldier through a minefield. “When did you move to the United States? Did you meet my grandfather here?”
“Herbert’s a soldier. He comes to visit me when I’m sick, and he stays a very long time.” She frowned. “Belsen wasn’t such a nice place, after all.”
Belsen? “Why not?” I persevered.
“Potato peels!” She pounded her fists on the signpost, laughing at a joke that made sense to no one but her. “Potato peels and turnips!”
Her hands would get bruised if she didn’t stop, but if I grabbed them, she’d freak out. I tried to keep my voice calm. “Oma, if you’re hungry, we can …”
“The sister, Margaret, wants bread, lots of it. Not me. I prefer bean soup. It’s cheap and good to eat. But Herbert says we have plenty of money now. We can eat whatever we want.”
The disjointed babble blurred in my head. “It’s okay, Oma. I’m here. It’s all good.”
She lowered her fist from the sign. “Did you have a nice day, Gretchen?”
I laughed, not because she was confused, but because her shifting moods threw me off balance. “I’m fine.”
“Where did you go?”
“To school.”
“That’s good. I went all the way to the eighth grade. Are you in the eighth grade?”
“Eleventh.”
“Oh, aren’t you a smarty!”
“Would you tell me about your sister?” I prodded gently. “Her name was Margaret?”
“The war made her disappear. Do you think she left on the last train out? Perhaps she escaped. Perhaps they both did. Perhaps I did, too.”
Maybe Oma had kept her sister a secret from Mom, but I couldn’t figure out why she would do that. I considered how Mom had lied to me about my grandmother in the first place, and an uncomfortable thought came to mind: Was keeping secrets a family trait?
“Who escaped?” I demanded.
“Oh, no, the train’s leaving, heading away from hell. Hurry, get on it now!”
The word train shook a memory loose. Hadn’t Mom mentioned leaving that way to the East Coast, the last summer she’d visited her mother? Maybe Oma remembered, on some level, that the woman who took care of her now was the college student who left her all those years ago.
“Gretchen’s come back to take care of you,” I said, watching for a reaction.
“Oh, are you Gretchen?”
I sighed. “No, I’m Livvy. Your granddaughter.”
A woman walked by with her dog. He sniffed the signpost. I cringed, afraid Oma would start shouting Scheisshund! Instead, she leaned back as if she was afraid that the poodle was going to bite her. Her teeth began to chatter. She gripped her chin, leaving an angry mark with her fingernails. I gently pulled her hand down, blurting out the first thing that came to mind. “I met a new friend named Franklin D., Oma. He gets in trouble sometimes because he blurts out whatever’s on his mind.”
The good thing about Alzheimer’s—if there was anything good—was that Oma’s fear vanished once I got her mind off the dog. I kept talking as the woman walked the poodle up the hill. “Our teacher doesn’t like Franklin D. much, but what he says keeps the rest of us from slipping into a school-induced coma.”
A furrow lodged between her eyebrows. “Tell that friend of yours not to say too much.”
“I meant that he asks questions that most people don’t have the brainpower to answer,” I clarified.
A tiny smile cracked her hard exterior. She rarely smiled, but when she did, it changed the entire landscape of her face. She looked like somebody’s sweet grandmother. My grandmother.
“What’s his name?” she asked.
“Franklin D. Schiller,” I repeated.
“Jewish?”
I thought about when Franklin D. had defended himself in debate class, telling everyone about his great-grandfather, Hymie Lipschitz. “Yeah, I think so.”
“God bless his soul,” she said somberly.
As we headed up the hill again, I couldn’t stop myself. “You’re Jewish, too, Oma, right? Just like …”
“Shh,” she whispered, her head whipping around. “They might hear you. Hide your jewelry! They like gold and diamonds. In the middle of the night, they come and steal it.”
“Who? Who steals it?”
She wrapped her arms around a parking meter. “I don’t know! I don’t know! I don’t know!”
I tried to unknot my shoulders, hoping to look calm and in control. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter—your religion, I mean.”
“What’s going on here?” Vickie, a grocery bag on her hip, glared at me. Where had she come from?
“Oma and I are taking a walk.”
“I can see that.”
“I’ve lost everything,” Oma murmured. “Everything. Everything. Everything.”
I rubbed the headache pressing against my temples. Vickie pried my grandmother’s arms from the parking meter. “You shouldn’t talk about the past. It upsets her, Livvy.”
Oma slipped her hand into Vickie’s like a compliant child. I watched helplessly as they continued up the hill. A bewildering sense of guilt spread through me.
“I’m sorry, Oma,” I whispered to myself.
For weeks Herbert held washcloths to her forehead, dabbing at the stubborn fever that wouldn’t let go. She didn’t say much, so he talked, and she listened, smiling at his dreams for the future and frowning when he ventured to the past.
“I’ve lost everything,” was all she would say. “I can’t talk about it.”
He soon stopped asking.
It was eight weeks later, under a blue moon, that he placed his calloused hand on hers. “I must know. Do you think you will ever be capable of loving again?”
Could she? The hatred mixed black as coal inside her blood. She wasn’t even sure what or whom she hated anymore. “If you can accept me as I am right now, you will never be disappointed,” she told him. Had it been so long since she’d believed that everything was rosy with the world?
He pondered her response. She saw the flash of hesitation, an uncertainty. Silence pressed down on her lungs, leaving little room for air. “I’ll take my chances,” he said at last. “Hope is all we have to rely on, anyway.”
It was that same hope that carried Adelle from her birth country to Brooklyn, New York. Her new husband, always a gentleman, averted his eyes from the abyss of the past, and in doing so, permitted them a future.