When my grandmother died it was sudden. She was on a seaside vacation in France when my father was just She was In the only photo I have of her, she is smiling warmly, her hair bobbed with a Marcel wave. Your Toll House cookie kind of relative, Aya was not. Our annual holiday greetings over the telephone were usually accompanied by the sound of ice clinking in her scotch tumbler. She could describe failing body parts in encyclopedic detail. She could be vulgar and cranky.
She needled my father, her brother, constantly. Aya could write poetry. She attended the now defunct Bradford Junior College in Haverhill. I could write too. I was bold. I was irreverent. In high school, I boycotted my senior prom.
Proms were too establishment for me and my friends. We traded tuxes and satin dresses for jean jackets and had a Frisbee party in the park. A magazine editor wanted to publish the essay I wrote about it. Would I make some edits? I never did. It went unpublished. No children, although Aya married twice. She tried to throw herself out a third floor window when her mother died.
She was lost. There were rumors: she had an abortion in the s. Her first husband was killed in a car crash soon after they were married. She lived with her second husband in Florida. They fought. They were once arrested in a domestic dispute. She stayed overnight in a jail cell where she befriended a prostitute. When I was still single, she telephoned.
A long lecture was in the offing. When I married she sent me 10 engraved silver spoons that belonged to my grandmother. But what I really wanted was to read her poetry. The stone is a peridot — the color green the sea turns in a summer storm. Art Deco in style, the setting has a half-naked woman with wings, displaying the stone on her shoulders. When they did, I told her, I would feel her mother, my grandmother settling protectively over me, this woman I never knew.
