On the heels of college graduation, I packed up my red pickup truck and set off across the country for home. My best friend Samara had flown out to New York to make the drive back to California with me. The first day we drove straight through to Chicago and pulled up at 1120 Hohlfelder Rd. in the lakeside suburb of Glencoe just before dinner. My grandmother’s house is one of the few Prairie Style homes still standing in this neighborhood, a low-slung throwback set in a field of McMansions. Everything about the house is original. This is the first thing your nose tells you when you walk through the front door.
I could never keep straight who was living at my Grandma Lisa’s house. They were all of Eastern European Jewish descent, like her; some were blood related and some were not. All lived for “free” with the dubious duty to “help Lisa out”. From what I could tell most were treated like the hired help. A pock-faced Polish woman who was overjoyed to see me but whose name I could not remember ushered us in to the living room. Samara’s jaw dropped a little. It was 1950 all over again, only more dingy and matted. The white shag carpet clumped in places, though it was bright and untouched underneath the yellow, faded couches which had likely not been moved in over a half a century. A high pitched, falsetto voice rang out from the kitchen, “Arielle, is that you my darling?” And there was Lisa.
She emerged from the kitchen in a slow shuffle. In her 90s she would go on to let her natural hair show, sparse wisps of white. But then, still in the glow of her early 80s, Lisa would only reveal herself to guests wearing a wig. Today’s selection was short and blond: Showgirl Grandma. Her predilection for faux jewelry added to the effect. Grandma Lisa’s liver spotted hands were quickly upon me, holding me in their intractable grip while she smothered my face in kisses, the tip of her cold pointed nose punctuating each smack. When she finally pulled herself back to get a good look at me, revealing herself to be a much shorter woman than I had remembered, she thanked god for such a beautiful granddaughter, and promptly asked if I was hungry.
The contents of her old refrigerator never failed to turn my stomach. Plates of smoked fish covered with a paper towel, generic brands of dairy and strange pieces of deli meat. I told her I was not hungry. She sat us down, and upon seeing how pretty my friend was, scooted off to her bedroom for a moment. She returned with photographs of her younger self - skiing in Italy after the war, perched next to hibiscus in Hawaii on her honeymoon - when she was dark haired and ravishingly beautiful. Her long fingernails gripped the photos as her proof: we weren’t the only ones who knew what it was like to be attractive. Someday we might be drawing in our eyebrows and wearing wigs just like her. I was lucky, she said, that I had a college education now. I didn’t have to rely only on my looks. I could probably marry a doctor. Or a lawyer.
My grandmother’s beauty had aided her escape from a work camp in Poland during the Holocaust. It helped her seduce my grandfather on a golf course in Chicago when she desperately needed a caretaker. It brought her boyfriends when her husband was dying of Alzheimer’s (never mind the fact that he was still alive.). Opera music, romance novels, overbearing love of her children and good looks were all she had then, and now, with her looks and voice fading, and two of her three children tragically passed, it was just the novels.
“You look just like your mother, God bless her soul,” she crooned, two octaves higher than normal range and lightly accented, more Russian Princess than Romanian Jew. “I think about my dear Susie and dear Danny every day, I kiss their photos at night before bed. God willing you will be healthy and happy and live a long life. And marry a man who takes good care of you.”