Authors: Frank Juliano
The wizened old man inside the green kiosk looked at them in startled surprise. “You can’t remember the Empire Theater,” he said. “It was torn down in 1953. Progress,” he shrugged, and turned back to opening cigarette cartons.
Debbie and Doug ran back across the street and stood in the parking lot. “Of course it’s another coincidence that Joyce parked on the spot her great-aunt disappeared from, 87
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and now she’s missing too,” Doug said, as if to reassure himself.
“Bee-dee bee-dee, bee-dee bee-dee.” Debbie hummed the familiar theme to television’s “The Twilight Zone.”
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Joyce wandered through her grandmother’s apartment, the bizarreness of the situation making her almost feverish.
She had heard this place described to her many times, but to actually inhabit it at the same time as her beloved grandmother filled Joyce with both wonder and dread.
What if I do something that screws up the future? she thought.
I could never get her to believe what has happened. She wouldn’t even know me, Joyce realized with a start.
She watched Muriel, standing at the sink peeling potatoes.
Muriel had long, coltish, dancer’s legs, small breasts and a small but round behind.
“She’s beautiful,” Joyce thought admiringly. Muriel’s chestnut hair had been chemically forced into tight curls that cascaded over her ears and turned inward before reaching her shoulders.
A foul smell like rotten eggs permeated the apartment and Joyce knew that was the home permanent her grandmother must have recently administered to herself.
Muriel’s hair had been long, white and perfectly straight all the time that Joyce had been growing up. Her grandmother had told 89
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her she was relieved when she could dispense with makeup and beauty treatments.
“So much nonsense and wasted time,” Muriel had scoffed. “And for what? So you can do it all over again the next week. Putting all those things on your skin and scalp can’t be good for you.”
Once she stopped the weekly henna rinse, Muriel’s hair had grown out in the color of dirty snow. Joyce knew that ever since Muriel was 38 she had been forced to use bluing in her hair to keep it white and clean-looking.
Maybe I ought to say something to her about the things she is using in her hair, Joyce thought. If she stopped now she probably would still have her natural color.
Coming up behind her at the sink, Joyce gently took the peeler from Muriel and picked up a potato from the colander.
“Let me do that for you,” she said softly. Muriel stared at her in amazement, until Joyce felt herself growing flush. “What?” she said. “You’ve never seen me do this before?”
“No, never,” Muriel said dryly. She sat down at the kitchen table, took out a cigarette from her purse and lit it extravagantly.
Well, I’ve never seen you do that before either, Joyce thought grimly to herself. My grandmother the health nut; who would have believed it?
“I heard somewhere that smoking is bad for you,” Joyce began tentatively. “And maybe all that stuff you’re putting in your hair is going to make you go bald or something. Why not go natural; you have pretty hair.”
“That’s a hot one, dearie.” Muriel snorted derisively, pulling in smoke and expelling it through her nostrils like Ferdinand the Bull. “You worried about me.
“Where have you been for the past four days, over in Jersey again? That guy Eddie cane here three times looking for you. He’s getting overheated.”
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Joyce just smiled blankly.
“How did you end up in the hospital? Did he do something to you? I’m telling you Connie, he’s the kind of guy who’ll slip you a Mickey Finn while you’re in the powder room. When you come back—lights out. Or have you already been around for lights out?”
Her grandmother was eyeing her the way she did when she suspected Joyce of riding her bike to the store without permission as a young girl.
Only this time she thinks she’s talking to her sister, the subject is virginity, and my grandmother looks like she wants to wink at me, Joyce thought. The answer really doesn’t matter, she realized in amazement.
Muriel is about the same age now as I am, and she has obviously been around more than I have, her granddaughter thought. This is just too weird. Joyce smiled lamely, which Muriel took as confirmation.
She shook a finger playfully at Joyce, and got up and took the potato peeler back. “You’re leaving too much on the skin,” she said. “Here, let me do it.” The cigarette still dangled from Muriel’s lip and Joyce watched in disgust as an occasional ash would fall into the colander.
“You’re a fine one to talk about MY hair. Look at you. Your hair is so long and straight, you look like someone’s old granny,” Muriel said.
“I don’t think the natural look is doing you so well,” she teased. “Have you given up on being a blonde, dearie? You have almost no color at all in your hair.”
It seems to be the reverse from 2007, Joyce thought, where young women wear their hair long and as they get older they cut and style it. Grandparents are more likely to have short hair, and long, flowing hair is seen as sensual and sexy in my time, she thought.
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Muriel was wearing a lavender dress with a flared, pleated skirt and a wide collar that lay flat against her shoulders. A wide black belt was wrapped around her waist; its buckle too loose to have any effect on keeping the dress on straight.
Joyce noted that her grandmother’s stockings had seams—
which were not entirely straight—running down the back of her long legs. She wore black leather shoes with a low heel and a strap that bisected her instep.
“You’re all dressed up; where are you going?” Joyce asked.
Muriel tucked her chin in her chest and looked out from the tops of her eyebrows. “I’m going to work dearie. Surely you’ve heard of it. As soon as we eat.”
“Oh. Where do you work now?” Joyce tried to sound casual.
Was Muriel performing somewhere in the city? What a unique opportunity that would be, to see her in her prime!
“I work at the theater Connie. Where I’ve worked for the past three months. What is wrong with you anyway? You’re not acting right tonight.”
Joyce drew the housecoat she was wearing tighter around her.
“I’m fine. I just got out of the hospital, remember. You have to cut me some slack.”
“What?” Muriel came up to her and picked up Joyce’s chin in her hands, looking deeply into Joyce’s eyes with a concerned frown.
I used slang she wouldn’t recognize, Joyce thought wildly. She already suspects something is up and if she takes a good hard look at me she’s going to see I’m not Connie.
Joyce waited, almost flooded with relief that she could tell her grandmother what was going on. Together we’ll figure out something, she thought.
But Muriel concluded her examination by feeling her scalp for lumps, and then said, “Connie, you’d better stay in tonight.”
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Joyce’s heart fell. “I planned to,” she said quietly.
Muriel’s eyebrows shot up. “Well. You must not be feeling well.”
“It isn’t only that,” Joyce said. “I haven’t got anything to wear.” Under the housecoat she had on a thin chemise that Muriel had brought to the hospital. A pair of scuffed mules were on her feet.
“Oh Connie. Nobody spends more on clothes than you do.
You have lovely things. Don’t go thinking that singing the blues will get you to wear something of mine. You stretch everything out with your…bosom.”
Joyce noted with surprise that Muriel’s boyish figure was smaller than hers, not only in the breasts but also the hips. She wondered if Connie was as full-figured, and if she’d be able to get into her great-aunt’s clothes.
“Why don’t you go back and change while I finish making dinner?,” Muriel suggested.
Joyce started to agree, but then realized she didn’t know which bedroom and closets were Connie’s. “No point in it,” she said.
“I’ll make dinner. What are we having?”
“Stew.” Muriel wore that quizzical smile again.
Joyce diced carrots and onions and blended them into a small can of tomato paste and some boiling water. “You didn’t know I could cook, did ya?” she asked confidently.
“Actually, I knew you couldn’t cook,” Muriel laughed. “Who taught you to make stew?”
“You did,” Joyce said too quickly. The worried frown was back on Muriel’s face. “I mean, it must have been mama.”
“No matter,” Muriel said. “If this comes out right, you’ve got the job every stew night. Don’t forget the garlic salt.” She got up and took the stew meat out of the ice box, unwrapping it from the waxed paper.
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Joyce’s heart went out to her grandmother. Even raw, the pieces of meat were singularly unappetizing. They were stringy and greasy, and were obviously the butcher’s cheapest offering.
She set the meal on the stove, turning up the gas jet until the blue flames licked the bottom of the pot. Then she partially covered it with an enameled lid from a saucepan. She positioned the smaller lid over the pot so that a half-moon was uncovered, venting the steam.
Joyce set the table with the heavy, chipped plates she found in the cupboards. Jelly jars served as drinking glasses, just as they did in 2007 at the family’s summer cabin on Lake Sebago.
The kitchen table was wooden, with spindly legs turned on a lathe so that they bore a simple design near the top, and sat on sturdy, square bases. The table surface was pitted and scarred, and painted a kind of sherbet green.
Joyce did not recognize the table and chairs; they must have been judged unworthy even to serve the summer cabin back in Maine. The chairs had two scalloped wooden backrests, and seats that came grooved for two wide thighs.
While the meal was cooking on the stove, Joyce went into the living room and sat down on the divan. Across the room sat the graceful Queen Anne chair with its tufted, buttoned upholstery that would become Joyce’s father’s prized possession.
This room is full of heirlooms, she thought. Joyce filled with a sense of wonder as she picked up and handled the carnival glass ashtray, with its translucent orange pattern of a cluster of grapes.
The stem formed the rest for lit cigarettes.
This ashtray is a valuable antique at home now, she thought, rubbing the caked gray ashes off the bottom with her thumb.
There was a delicate, fluted vase in opaque, cobalt blue, and a fluted oil and vinegar flask in pale green glass. Each side was a 94
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bulb that was fused seamlessly together at the base, ending in a slender spout with a tiny cork stopper.
Joyce’s mother collected this type of glassware, beginning her collection with the items in this apartment. The younger Mrs.
Waszlewski persisted in calling the items “Depression glass,” a name that brought no end of scorn from her mother-in-law.
Although the value had increased sharply over time, Muriel had confided to Joyce that she had paid about 10 cents for each piece of glassware when it was new.
“It’s called carnival glass, for the suckers who buy it,” she’d say. “It’s really junk, spelled j-u-n-q-u-e.”
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There was the black onyx snuff box on the coffee table, with its design in metal on the lid of a geometric fan. “Dipping snuff was a terrible habit old ladies in my day used to have,” Muriel had told her.
“I never dipped myself, but I bought a snuff box once because it suited me so well. It was brash and confident, and that’s how I felt.”
Joyce picked up the box that later in her grandmother’s life would serve as a symbol of her days in New York. The box was with Muriel when she died in the nursing home; it was given to a friend of hers at the memorial service.
That reminded Joyce she was still wearing the watch Muriel passed on to her. She slipped it off her wrist and set it on top of the tall radio cabinet.
A few moments later, Muriel breezed through and, seeing the watch, picked it up and put it on. “I was wondering where I’d left that,” she said.
While they ate, Joyce searched her mind wildly for appropriate dinner conversation. She did not know her grandmother’s life well enough to know exactly what man she’d be seeing or job she’d have at this particular time.
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And although she’d had to come and get her out of the hospital, Muriel wasn’t treating “Connie” like the incident was anything unusual. Except for giving her aspirin for her pain, Muriel hadn’t seemed interested in playing nurse to her sister.
“What do you hear from Joe Waszlewski back home?” Joyce asked after an uncomfortable silence.
“Who?” Muriel was searching her mind. “That farmer who has the land up by Route 1? Why would I hear from him?”
“Didn’t he propose to you before you left?” Joyce pressed on.
Muriel laughed. “Yea. Wildly passionate that Joe. But when you get proposed to as often as we do, you don’t remember them all.” She punched Joyce playfully on the upper arm.
“Well, do you ever think of him?”
Muriel stared at Joyce from under raised eyebrows again. “You got a good knock on the noggin’, didn’t you? I haven’t heard from him in more than a year and I can’t say I think about him. Too much going on here.”
“He’s a good man, don’t you think?” Joyce continued on.
“Someone someday to settle down with and raise a family?”
It was a calculated risk. Joyce hoped in a way that the question would spark her grandmother somehow to recognize her by getting her to think about her later life.
It wasn’t interfering in family history, she felt, because Muriel and Joe did marry and had a long happy life together.
“He’s kind of colorless, like that new cell-o-phane, don’t you think?” Muriel finally said. “He’s a good man I guess, but I’d never want to go home. That would be admitting failure, having to look at those people in that little town day after day, and have them whisper when you went by, “she left but she had to come back’.
“Besides, I don’t see myself as somebody’s wife and especially not as somebody’s mama.”