I’m home for the holidays and it’s Christmas Eve day, meaning time for the obligatory sojourn to visit our grandmother in the “assisted living facility” (”It’s not a nursing home!” she growls, as if the words denote a maximum security prison). Reaching the entrance, a stately awning that looks just like every other seasoned apartment complex in the neighborhood, my sister and I set our shoulders and assume expressions of fixed good cheer.
After four minutes of intense pounding on her apartment door, the latch clicks at last. “Hi Grandma!” we beam in unison.
“Oh look who it is! Come in kids, come and sit down. Not much of a place I’ve got anymore, but what can you do.”
We settle into brittle chairs, remnants from her old townhouse. The apartment is a strange doppelganger of her former living room, with moth-eaten Chinese rugs and crackling Indonesian silk prints relocated to a sparse and antiseptic one-bedroom. The cleanliness, that part is new; the oatmeal wall-to-wall carpeting is fresh and spotless, the bureau dust-free.
“Grandma, why don’t we go sit in the lobby? There are lots of people in there,” I say in the voice that we all use with her now, a sandwich of kindness, pity and condescension. Maybe we use it because we feel it’s appropriate; maybe it’s just because we can finally get away with it. “Hey look, the daily schedule says there’s going to be carolers soon. That sounds like fun.”
“Eh, I don’t want to,” she scoffs.
“Why not?”
“Those women who hang around the lobby. I don’t like them.”
“Why? What’s wrong with them?” my sister asks.
“They’re the group. You know the group. There’s always a group.”
“What group?”
“The ones who think they’re better than everyone. There’s this group of little old blue-haired ladies who sit in the lobby. They take the bus to the beauty parlor every week because they insist they have to get their hair done, even though it looks like blue tupperware pasted on their heads. When we go to dinner - you know we have this dining room where we all go for dinner-”
“Yes Grandma, we know. We ate with you last time we were here, remember?”
“Well the food is dreadful, I can’t believe they call that stuff edible. Anyway at dinnertime all the blue ladies wear their suits from Lord & Taylor, these ridiculous fancy things, and they wheel around the lobby wearing old furs when it’s fifty degrees. They’ll sit in a huddle and whisper about people. I call them the fogey patrol.”
“Grandma, that’s not very nice.” My patronizing tone would have gotten me a smack across the mouth twenty years ago.
“Oh fiddlesticks. They’re a bunch of ogres. And this one time at dinner - you know we have this dining room where we all go for dinner-”
My sister and I exchange a look, both electing to stay silent.
“And this one woman, her husband was some sort of big deal in the oil business when he was alive. She decided she and her fogey group wanted my table, so I would have to move. Like I should move because these snobby old ladies want me to. I wanted to hit her with my cane.”
“Grandma! You can’t go hitting people! You could hurt someone!” My indignation is a total pretense; secretly I’m swallowing gulps of hysterical laughter. It’s just too ironic; your entire life passes, almost ninety years of experiences, mistakes and adventures, here you are with all the benefits of wisdom and keenness that accompany age, and it’s right back to the junior high lunch table. I guess some patterns are with us for life. Too bad it had to be the ones generated in eighth grade.