My Grandmother’s House

My grandmother lived in a little, one-story ranch-style house, with seven rooms.

The Front Room
There was what we referred as the front room—a substantial foyer that easily could have been a living room, but where we hardly spent any time, and that I get the impression Grandma didn’t put to much use. The carpeting was all forest green circles with orange leaves interspersed. There was a bar on the far end that I imagine previous owners might have used for entertaining, and that my sister and I occasionally used for play, creating imaginary scenes that riffed off of Cheers. I think of this space largely as excess, though—for my grandmother who had spent her first sixty-something years in New York City apartments, a luxury that she rarely put to the use.

Most of my memories set in the front room happened on Christmas. The space was larger than the proper living room, affording space for a Christmas tree, presents, and comfortable seating for not only our normal Sunday visit crew of Grandma, my mother, my father, my sister and me, but also my Uncle John who visited just once a year and came to stay with Grandma. Once we were through with presents, we typically migrated to the kitchen or the living room, but for the overwhelming majority of my Christmas presents, it’s that front room where the holiday happened.

Secondarily, I remember New Year’s Eves, and that five or six year period when my sister and I made a tradition out of spending the night at Grandma’s. Fetching the crystal punch bowl from the crawl space above the bar. Sleeping on the fold-out couch in the front room.

The Guest Room
Those New Year’s Eve nights my sister would sleep in the guest room. All considered, this room, with its red-white-and-blue shag carpeting, an old armoire, a little television, was probably the room I spent the least amount of time in, though I do recall certain Sundays in the early 1990s stowing away in there for an hour to watch episodes of Global Wrestling Federation show on ESPN.

What I remember best about this room, though, was that each Christmas, when Uncle John came to stay, my grandmother retreated to the guest room, giving her son the bigger space, the bigger bed.

The Master Bedroom
I remember the master bedroom clouded in smoke, not from my grandmother, who didn’t smoke (at least in my lifetime) but from my uncle’s stays, and that each time he left and we visited the room, I imagined it wouldn’t be the same again, but somehow it always was within a week’s time.

I remember the dresser where, somehow or other--probably from my sister’s keener observational skills--we deduced that Grandma hid our Christmas presents, and sneaking peeks at Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figures.

The Bathroom
Grandma’s bathroom always smelled better than the bathroom at home, for just a single regular user who was more attentive cleaning than anyone in my immediate family. Everything in that room was blue--my grandmother’s favorite--from the tile floor to the tub. I remember that she had a shower head that detached and could be used like a hose and that seemed novel and tremendously fun to experiment with on those occasions when I showered at Grandma’s.

I remember taking the latest issue of TV Guide into the bathroom with me and reading the better part of an issue over the course of a half hour on the toilet.

The Kitchen

No one would mistaken me for an expert chef, but what kitchen knowledge I have has its roots in my grandmother’s kitchen. In my own house, my father maintained tight control over the kitchen, protective against making messes or anyone hurting themselves to the point that I don’t believe I ever cracked an egg in my childhood home or preheated the oven.

At Grandma’s house, I recall collaborative efforts to make Hungarian Goulash and Cornish game hens; routinely cutting the lettuce for salad into impossibly small pieces after Grandma complimented me the first time I did it, saying that’s how professionals prepared salads in fancy restaurants (it would be years before I recognized it as a way of keeping me occupied while she and my sister tended to more pressing tasks).

And I remember concoctions. More often than not, mixtures of sodas, and a New Year’s punch that included juices and, one ill-advised year, milk. The freedom to decide what went in.

I don’t drink soda all that often nowadays, but a couple times a year, the mixture of Mountain Dew and Diet Coke, patented in that kitchen, will still hit the spot.

The Living Room
The living room sticks with me, in part because it’s the spot from which the most furniture was salvaged. End tables that made it to my house, a sofa and TV that made it to my childhood home.

The room had a fiery orange carpet and a great big front window that looked out on the driveway. We rarely used the front door there, in favor of the side door and mudroom that afforded room to take off shoes and coats before heading into the house, but there was a door to the living room, too, that I remember my father sprinting out of when neighbors from across the street backed into the door of his Oldsmobile, leaving a crater of a dent in the front driver’s side door. They settled without using insurance, but my father never actually had the door repaired, instead pocketing the cash and still parking the car in full-view of the neighbors on a weekly basis.

The living room was littered with ceramic cats. My grandmother had kept cats for years, only to have to give it up when she discovered my mother was allergic. She had a modest sampling of cat figurines to decorate her living room. My sister and I latched on to this interest, and more cat-centered things became the focal point of every gift giving occasion. Cat calendars. Books with pictures of cats. A truly ridiculous number of ceramic or stone cats in a collection overwhelming enough that she eventually had to ask us to stop giving her that gift. (In an instance of what may be karmic payback, my sister’s love for stuffed frogs yielded an unwieldy collection after a series of Christmases and birthdays in her own adult years, until she, too, had to ask family and friends to stop. Somehow, I’ve gone unsaddled with such a collection—thus far.)

The Construction Room Of all of the spaces in my grandmother’s house, the one I remember best is the Construction Room.

It might have been an office, a spare bedroom, or storage space. But Grandma was dedicated enough to my sister and I, her only grandchildren, that it instead became a space dedicated to us, called the Construction Room for our drawing and painting and Lego projects.

The room contained an old wooden table with leaves that folded up or down to double or triple its surface area. As we grew up, we made a little less at Grandma’s house and focused more on games. Pinochle, Scrabble, Canasta, and Double or Triple Solitaire were our steady favorites, but Uno, Skip-Bo, Pitch, Poker, and Clue each had their days as well. I developed some of the best and worst parts of myself in those games. A sense of play and curiosity that I fear I too often forget in my adult life; early semblances of strategizing as I schemed triple-word-scores and how enough well-planned freezes and natural canastas might allow me to win a game in a single hand. Just the same, I also learned a competitiveness that wasn’t entirely healthy, and an excessive commitment to plans that left me disproportionately disappointed when games didn’t proceed as I had anticipated. I remember not wanting to clear the Scrabble board after one game, when I had achieved a particularly high scoring word, because I wanted to show it to my parents when they came to pick me up, as invested in impressing them as I could be as a kid.

And Construction Room had our mailbox—a department store box relabeled with my name and my sister’s where my grandmother left chocolatey treats, or the issues of the wrestling magazines she subscribed to for me as gifts. Where we left hand-drawn magazines we wrote and drew on lined paper for her. Where, in time, I left my grandmother stories, and eventually manuscripts of full novels, and where she left me notes “From the Editor’s Desk” praising what I had done, telling me to keep going.

Leaving The House
Early in my high school years, my grandmother moved out of the house, into an senior citizen’s apartment building. A smaller, more manageable space for her to maintain, with access to emergency help at the pull of a string if she fell or hurt herself.

I still saw her there for a period of years. Through the end of high school. Through visits back home most of my college years.

Then she fell.

I forget the exact sequence of events, but Grandma started using a green metallic walker she named Esmerelda. She grew tired, falling asleep in the middle of conversations, between turns at board games, watching television shows. She had a stroke.

Toward the end of my college career--probably junior or senior year--she decided to move into a nursing home.

Days later, she told my father, her last steady connection in town, that she had made a horrible mistake. That they were going to steal her money and she wanted to go back home.

Her house had long been sold. She’d made a financial commitment to the nursing home, too, and it wouldn’t be feasible to go back to the apartment building. The only option would have been for her to move into the downstairs space of the house that my mother and father had originally intended for her to live in when they put in the electricity and plumbing, back when she'd preferred her independence. My father made mention of that as a possibility, I think to show her that the nursing home was still the better option. By then, she said yes, she would move in. It never happened.

He was on the front line to recognize her changes. That she was deteriorating and that the process accelerated after she moved into the nursing home--a combination of age, a brain rattled by a stark change in environment, and, we suspected, medications that the staff might pump into their charges to keep things calm and quiet.

Though I caught glimmers of my grandmother as she once was, in a hug, in a clever play on words, after she moved into the nursing home, I never saw her in her right mind again.

Three years out of college--the same year I had moved out of state and stopped coming home to visit more than a couple times a year--Grandma passed away.

I sent a thank you card to the nursing home staff, in appreciation for taking care of my grandmother in her final days. A feeble gesture. In visits home to follow, here and there, I swung by her apartment building. Just above every visit, I made a slow, late night drive past the old house.

The house--once white--is now painted tan, the black shutters replaced with blue. The pavement space where my sister and I drew in chalk, and where I played spin the bottle with school friends for my fifteenth birthday party, is now host to a basketball hoop. A minivan parks out front. I assume there are children. A family.

Sometimes, the living room lights were on. I wondered if, inside, the carpet were still orange. If anyone scotch taped drawings to forest green wood-paneled walls of the kitchen anymore. If kids run to that side door with a sense of wonder at the world waiting inside.