First Encounter

Age nine. The brick bungalow off Narragansett Avenue on Chicago’s west side a treeless street, houses clustered one after the other in neat blocks where my grandparents lived in a little shoebox of a house for decades, since Grandpa returned from the war.

For weeks Grandpa lay in his sick bed, a stocky man built like a barrel, with square, black glasses and thick features deeply tanned skin that seemed to be always sweating. Before his illness, he would scoop me up with hard, muscular hugs and say my name with warm nasal vowels in a teasing tone and swat my bottom playfully. A man who had worked half a century with his hands, weekends filled with baseball and nights with billiards or bowling, who stormed the beaches at Normandy, never spoke of the war, went out dancing in his youth, swinging to trumpets, trombones, sipped coffee and ate buttered toast while reading the paper on the greasy kitchen table, drank, smoked, played cards with his friends in basements and bowling alleys. On Saturdays, I played in the narrow, low-ceilinged room which could just fit an orange upholstered couch and television, lit by a single small window. I liked to spin myself dizzy in the padded swivel chair where I put up my legs, scuffing the white wall with socked feet, pushing myself in circles like a merry-go-round. When my mother had to work late I slept the night in the corner bedroom, lulled to sleep with the wafting scent of soup boiling on the stove, tucked in cool sheets by Grandma, shuffling back and forth in dusty slippers. My grandmother lived in the kitchen, always emerging with flour-lined hands. On a tray, she would carry me a grilled ham and cheese sandwich that sweated in the center of a white porcelain plate where I lay sprawled on the carpet watching cartoons. Stealthily, I sometimes rifled through her jewelry box with the forbidden thrill of searching for treasure – chunky necklaces and green rhinestone earrings laid out on her bedspread, categorized by color. Scooting down the stairs to the cold basement, I rolled colored balls back and forth on Grandpa’s pool table next to his makeshift bar with the neon sign by the laundry room where Grandma strung up her nightgowns on sagging lines clipped with wooden clothespins Or lingered in the postage-stamp backyard bordered by a chain link fence where in summer I rode my wobbly bike in the alley or played with the plastic bat and whiffle ball that I hit, again and again, into the neighbor’s yard guarded by the black barking dog each time, asking Grandpa to fetch it for me.

That morning in February outside, the bright shock of cold made the slippery ice glitter on the sidewalk’s cracked pavement where women skidded in heels and frosted, jagged air stung protruding noses and gloveless fingers. Entering the house, the air felt heavy— pungent with the smell of damp carpet, of chalky medicine and perspiration and a body nearing death. Grandpa’s closet was crowded with plaid shirts, leather belts he could no longer wear, the room shrunken with bulky brass-buckled wooden dressers, boxes of tissues, stacks of towels. The house was thick with people— my mother and father, uncle and aunt, Grandma with her canes and swollen legs, nurses streaming in and out the back door letting in biting gusts of wintry air. That morning I peeked into the bedroom where my grandfather lay motionless, heaped with woolen blankets, no longer able to move his arms, the eerie sound of his heaving breaths mingling with the respirator’s electric hum, his eyes flickering open and closed again— something significant was happening. As I played in the TV room I remember thinking that I should be sad but I couldn’t help feeling light, elated caressed by shards of sunlight that streamed through the small window, pleased with my toys, with the stories in my head as I bounced a rubber ball off the corner wall, only disturbed sometimes by the hushed murmuring of voices. I knew something was wrong when my mother’s face appeared in the door frame, strangely shriveled. At first I thought she was laughing. Uncle Tom told me the news through strange, high pitched sobs— the first time I heard a grown man cry. I snatched my picture book and joined Grandpa’s motionless body on the bed. I read to him, my side brushing up against his limp arm as I progressed through my chapter about ponies or cats. I didn’t understand that it would be the last time I would see his body before it was stiff and waxy with chemicals in the casket, that this was the end of my childhood weekends spent snugly in this little house, on this humble street, embraced by the warmth of my grandparents. A few days later: the stinging winter morning of the funeral when they lowered the casket into the frozen ground, the sharp sun glistening off car windshields and the white puffs of breath exhaling from blanched mouths and chapped cheeks. My grandmother and elderly aunts— smelling sharply of rose petal perfume with their tight, grey permanents— steadied each other, held each other’s arms, wept noiselessly. The morning felt starched and formal— the echoes of organ pipes and hymns in my ear, neighbor ladies in hats and black nylon stockings, distracted by the static buzz of my hair as I tugged at my lace-collared dress underneath a puffy winter jacket. All of us gathered around the rectangular hole in the earth clumped densely so we could feel each other’s breath, my mother clutching my shoulders from behind, gripping them so forcefully that she was hurting me, her face red and strained. Knowing it was not the time to protest, I bore the pain quietly and held myself stiff as the priest neared with his flat, droning words of sheep, pastures, and the heavenly father. The strangeness of it: how the ones we love end up buried in the earth but continue to live on in our minds. I didn’t then, but I wonder now if Grandpa carried the memory of his own long-dead grandparents with him that morning into the frozen soil of his own grave.