"A women's hopes are woven of sunbeams; a shadow annihilates them."
George Eliot, 1866

Gigi

In my favorite photo of my grandmother, Bernice Maxwell Mapson, she is dressed in a checked shirt, jeans and bandanna.  She wields a fishing pole like a pro.  It's a perfect composition, the way only black and white photos can be, but entirely staged.  My grandfather won a few awards for his pictures, but they weren't his passion.  I don't know what was.  Maybe alcohol, for a time, and for sure, money.  He enjoyed the trappings of wealth-boats, a custom waterfront home, and travel.  In those days people went to Maine, or the Cape, and perhaps the most exotic of all, Hawaii.  My grandparents did.  They brought us back poi, which tasted like barf, and wilting leis we kids only took off when the flowers started to turn black.  That his wife be beautiful and well kept mattered to my grandfather.  They married while they were students at Stanford.  She was studying nursing.  Instead of becoming a doctor like he wanted to, he opted for a law degree and became rich enough to retire before he was fifty.  From the photo albums, it looks like he was in love with Bernice, but he married her because she was pregnant with my father.

I didn't learn this interesting bit of family history until I was married myself, climbing my family tree for potential writing subjects.  In a poem about my grandmother, I remarked, "In those days you got and stayed married."  Bernice was "striking," which is when plain women know how to dress, apply makeup, and which perfume to buy to exude the air of first class.  Her closet was filled with shoes in every color.  Like foot bound Chinese women, she wore a startlingly small size two.  Though I never saw a wedding bouquet, behind it I imagined under her brocade dress, silk lingerie, and her ivory skin, lurked the seed of my father.  Through no fault of his own, he rewrote her history, and dented his own.  Whether it was careless passion, one determined sperm cell, fate, or God's will-I know my grandmother must have wept.  Later, when my grandfather came to resent her openly, when they were heavily into the alcohol, they traded insults like prizefighters.

In my grandparents' day, birth control consisted of condoms or diaphragms, that is, if a single girl could acquire either one.  Today, it's considered shameful not to bear an unwanted child, and some call it murder. It's as if our species can't get beyond a woman's anatomy forever being her destiny.  Regardless, I see a peace in Bernice's face in those early years. She loved her children, my father and later, my uncle.  She loved being a grandmother, though she clearly favored boys.  I remember her lipsticked smile, her tiny, dark, merry eyes darkened by mascara, and how her rings, with the cold, clear sparkle of diamonds, seemed to me the acme of a woman's success.  A visit to their terraced home struck me the same way that Frank Lloyd Wright houses awe me as an adult.

Maybe facades exist only to crumble.  I know that when I began to spot the cracks, it was already too late for me to learn from them.  From birth I was an understudy to this woman, her cigarettes with the lipstick imprint on the burned-out butt. She introduced me to fine things: wheat berry bread, not yet popular, definitely not affordable.  From that moment on, white bread no longer cut it for me.  She fed me artichoke hearts, pine nuts in the shell, and whole cashews.  She taught me to play a cruel hand of gin rummy, and take losing like a lady.  She could sit down at the piano and play anything--Baby Elephant Walk, Alley Cat, a complicated rendition of Chopsticks, and my favorite, Heart and Soul.  When she stopped to take a drink of her highball and rest her hands, I listened to her swirl the melting ice in her glass as carefully as I did the music.  Soon I could play the chords of Heart and Soul, and drain what was left of her drink and at the same time. 

Because my sister, the first grandchild to arrive, couldn't pronounce Grandma, we called her Gigi, and somehow that nickname, neither relative nor common, elevated her to this exotic otherness.

Gigi made Waldorf salad, always serving it in a brightly glazed Chinese bowl my mother whispered was very expensive.        

3/4 cup walnuts halves
3 apples (she used red)
freshly squeezed lemon juice
2 stalks celery, peeled, and sliced on the diagonal
1/2 C mayonnaise
2 T sour cream
3/4 t grated lemon zest
1 t sugar
2 T sliced chives
1 T minced flat-leaf parsley
fresh ground black pepper
1 head Boston or Bibb lettuce, trimmed, washed, and dried

Half, core, and cut the apples into 3/4-inch pieces, leaving the skin intact. Mix the apples with the lemon juice, celery, and walnuts, and set aside.

Whisk together mayonnaise, sour cream, lemon zest, sugar, chives, parsley, and pepper to taste. Add the dressing to the apple mixture and stir to coat. Refrigerate if not using immediately. When ready to serve, divide the lettuce leaves onto 6 salad plates or a platter. Place the salad on the lettuce and serve.

My mother made fruit salad-cantaloupe, grapes, watermelon, and if she was feeling festive, maybe threw a few maraschino cherries scattered on top.  This was a huge step up from our usual canned fruit cocktail, where we kids fought over the wilting cherries.  Waldorf salad was in another league.  The acid in the walnuts hurt my mouth, and sometimes I'd bite down on a piece of shell left in by mistake.  When Gigi got "dingy," our kids' word for her dementia, she'd throw curry into the mix and render her signature meal inedible.  It wasn't so much that I liked Waldorf salad; it was more the idea of her knowing how to make it and having the ingredients on hand that impressed me.  How she wowed guests with her presentation.  That, I paid attention to.

The fifties were a decade of cocktails and snack foods, of card games and mono record players. Huge speakers were cranked high to fill up a room with the dwindling Big Band music, sounds that commemorated winning the war, wives who worked to keep the world going, and the period of plenty that followed, that is, if one could dismiss the fear of Cold War and nuclear attack.  Rock and Roll was beginning to erase my parents' music.  My grandfather, keeping up with the times, played me a 45 of Chubby Checker's "The Twist," placing his hands on my bony hips to show me how the dance was done. On that day the world cracked open. There was no going back.  I had Waldorf salad.  Wheat bread.  My very own pelvis.  My grandmother was the first woman I knew to own a pair of pantyhose.

But Gigi did not like girls.  They loved having me stay at their house, I suspect so that they didn't have to speak only to one another. Every night I'd sleep with my grandmother in her room, where two twin beds side by side, covered with heavy gold fabric, held center stage.  Her room was separated from my grandfather's by a long bathroom with two sinks.  The bathroom was divided into two countries: his side with the masculine shaving soap and brush, the spicy scent of aftershave, and thick, plain towels.  Hers was a treasure trove of womanly things: loose face powder, cake mascara in the little red box with the sliding cover.  Ointments, unguents, lotions, nail files, pumice stone, nail polish, polish remover, and scads of cotton puffs.  Pills, douching equipment, and scissors rounded out the mystery, turning the fluffy stuff dangerous.  Gigi's towels were embroidered with her initials.  Sometimes I'd stand in the middle of the bathroom and try to put my toe on the line where the two camps became one. 

Gigi subscribed to every mystery book club in existence, and read constantly, but never encouraged me to. She chain-smoked Kent cigarettes, and never gave a thought to the secondhand smoke she bathed me in.  In her room, we could lie quietly for hours while she slept off a migraine, nursed a hangover, or retreated from my grandfather. But she didn't polish my nails or show me how to apply makeup.  She lacquered her own with blood red polish, and later, when she developed a disfiguring vitiligo, I watched her paint her face, arms and neck with heavy Derma blend makeup.  In her domain, I was merely a witness.

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