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But finals are still three weeks away, and Mom is breathing down my neck right now about these jobs. So as we pull into Grandma’s high-rise, I tell her that I’m still mulling it over and then I skip out of the cab to help Dad with the bags.
It’s so strange. Mom is the most formidable person I know, but when Grandma opens the door, Mom seems to shrink, as if Grandma is some ogre instead of a five-foot bottle blonde in a yellow tracksuit and a KISS THE MESHUGGENEH COOK apron. Grandma grabs me in a fierce hug that smells of Shalimar and chicken fat. “Ally! Let me look at you! You’re doing something different with your hair! I saw the pictures on Facebook.”
“You’re on Facebook?” Mom asks.
“Ally and I are friends, aren’t we?” She winks at me.
I see Mom wince. I’m not sure if it’s because Grandma and I are FB friends or because Grandma insists on shortening my name.
We step inside. Grandma’s boyfriend, Phil, is asleep on the big floral couch. A basketball game blares from the giant television.
Grandma touches my hair. It’s to my shoulders now. I haven’t cut it since last summer. “It was shorter before,” I say. “It’s sort of in between.”
“It’s better than it was. That bob was awful!” Mom says.
“It was a bob, Mom. Not a Mohawk.”
“I know what it was. But it made you look like a boy.”
I turn to Grandma. “Was she traumatized by a bad haircut in her youth? Because she seems unwilling to let this go.”
Grandma claps her hands. “Oh, Ally, you might be right. When she was ten, she saw Rosemary’s Baby and begged me to take her to the children’s beauty parlor. She kept making the lady go shorter until it was all off, and as we were leaving the salon, another mother pointed Ellie out to her son and said, ‘Why don’t you get a haircut like that nice little boy?’” She looks at Mom, smiling. “I didn’t realize that still upset you, Ellie.”
“It doesn’t upset me, because it never happened, Mother. I never saw Rosemary’s Baby. And if I had, at ten, that would’ve been entirely inappropriate, by the way.”
“I can show you the pictures!”
“That won’t be necessary.”
Grandma eyes Mom’s hair. “You might think of trying that pixie again now. I think you’ve been wearing the same style since Bill Clinton was president.” Grandma gives another wicked grin.
Mom seems to shrink another inch as she touches her hair—straight, brown, in a low ponytail. Grandma leaves her like that, pulling me into the kitchen. “You want some cookies? I have some macaroons.”
“Macaroons are not cookies, Grandma. They’re coconut cookie substitutes. And they’re disgusting.” Grandma doesn’t keep anything in the house with flour during Passover.
“Let’s see what else I have.” I follow Grandma into the kitchen. She pours me some of her diet lemonade. “Your mom is having such a hard time,” Grandma says. When Mom’s out of sight, she’s sympathetic, almost defending her, like I was the one who riled her up.
“I don’t see why. She has a charmed life.”
“Funny, that’s what she says about you whenever she thinks you’re being ungrateful.” Grandma opens the oven door to check on something. “She’s having a hard time adjusting, with you being gone. You’re all she’s got.”
I feel a pit in my stomach. Another way I’ve let Mom down.
Grandma puts out a plate of those gross jelly candies I can never resist. “I told her she should have another child, give her something to do with herself.”
I spit out my lemonade. “She’s forty-seven.”
“She could adopt.” Grandma waves her hand. “One of those Chinese orphans. Lucy Rosenbaum got a cute one as a granddaughter.”
“They’re not dogs, Grandma!”
“I know that. Still, she could get an older one. It’s a real mitzvah then.”
“Did you tell Mom that?”
“Of course I did.”
Grandma always brings up things the rest of us don’t. Like she lights a memorial candle on the anniversary of when Mom had her miscarriage all those years ago. This, too, drives Mom crazy.
