Eyebrows Part One

The following is part of an original short story I wrote reflecting on memories of my late grandmother:   

     The thing I remember most on the last day I saw my Grandma at her wake before the casket was closed would have probably made her furious.

    My Grandma was a kooky old bat for as long as I could remember, but I loved her anyway; in fact, that was probably why I loved her so much.

Something my Grandma once told me really applies to this reflection when I had serious memory problems: “The mind is not a filing cabinet: you can’t find what you’re looking for by the alphabet.” And so, these stories will be told as the come to me, rather than the order they happened in

            My Grandma lived in an apartment in Yonkers, New York on the thirty-fourth floor. I always hated going there because the elevator was so slow it took about six minutes to reach there, as long as no one else stopped to get on, which happened about seven or eight times each visit, so it took about fifteen minutes to reach her floor. I was five years old when I first visited, and I felt that everyone there was old and smelly, which was pretty much true.

            Upon reaching there, my Grandma would throw open the door and cry out, “Timmy! Come here and give me a kiss!” I hated it for two reasons: by the age of eight, I had started to hate being called “Timmy” and he also hated giving my Grandma a kiss. I thought she had a cold face and that she wore too much perfume, so much so that it almost choked me.

            A visit with my Grandma used to bore me. She always had on old romance movies; My Grandma loved romance. She also was a heavy reader and loved romance books; My mom always bought books for my Grandma based on how little clothes the people on the cover wore, something that really grossed me out. My Grandma would always tell me about her sleazy books, something which made my mom say, “Mom! He’s too young to hear about dirty things like that!”

            I was also bothered by the bathroom. It reeked of my Grandma’s perfume and was covered in baby powder. When I got up, my pants were covered in the white stuff.

            My Grandma was also a heavy tea drinker, something that I hated and she always served it to me. She was also a terrible cook and almost everything she made was charred.

            My Grandma also wore a lot of make-up. Her face was pale, her lips bright red, and the areas around her eyes blue; but she had no eyebrows. She always penciled them on, and I thought she did it very well.

            My Grandma moved into my Aunt’s when I was very young, about seven. Over the years, my Mom would work and she and my Dad got divorced, so she sent me to stay there a lot, and if she were around, she would be out shopping with my Aunt, while my cousin was at college, so that was kind of unwanted. But I learned to appreciate her. Sure I still hated “Timmy, come here and give me a kiss!” as the door opened, but she wasn’t so bad. We spent many good hours together.

            How could we ever forget out six hours watching Stephen King’s “The Langoliers?” We waited, excited, dying to see what could possibly be so bad. And then, there they were… Black furry Pac-Men with teeth. We went for six hours for those? The two of us stared at the screen and each other, after six hours expecting something really scary. So disappointing.