Eyebrows Part Three

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

            My Grandma would take forever to put on her make-up. I mean, she would take five hours to do it.

            I remember my Grandma had a walker. That thing made so much noise. It squeaked, it rolled, it clunked. You could always tell she was coming, just from the noise. It was just “Oh, Grandma’s coming!” But she got all the way to the living room and folded it away, then switched to her cane. And, boy, she was good about her walker. Her walker never got in anyone’s way, amazingly enough.

            My Grandma was very short, like almost everyone in the family, but she was most likely the smallest I know. Now me, I worked genetically different from everyone else in the family and am pretty tall, some people can’t believe I came out of my mom. So, even though she was my Grandma and I looked up to her and all, but she literally looked up to me.

            When I would be seated next to her at the kitchen table reading. We’d be reading right next to each other, and I highly enjoyed reading next to her. Every so often, somehow we’d both look up and ask, “How’s your book?” “Good, how’s your book?” It was just like she knew.

            Then there were the things my Grandma did to upset my Aunt. My Aunt has a statue I call “Naked Lady,” which could not be more accurate to describe the statue. My Grandma hated it. She tried to smash it every time she walked past it. She never managed to destroy the thing, much to her dismay, and it is still there today. And she antiqued. She would accidentally bump into something, and my Aunt would call out, “Careful, Ma, that’s an antique!” My Grandma just smiled, pulled her cane back and slam into the item, and then said, “Now it’s even MORE antique!” then march off into the kitchen. I really don’t know how this setup would just happen every time, but it was always entertaining, just to see the wicked smile.

My Grandma told wonderful stories, and I started to like them. She would talk about all kinds of crazy things, like her deceased siblings and how they were brought up; the cultural stories her mother told her; her troublemaking in school; and her deceased husband and how their romance story was, something that was just like her romance novels and movies, and I thought some of those were a little untrue. But the best part of her stories were that she was so old she couldn’t remember things and each time the stories would change, which I always found amusing. Sometimes the endings would be completely different, so it was always entertaining. It was like the game “Telephone.” It started one way, but as it got passed down more and more, the original message changed at the end. She told it one way to start, but she was old and forgetful, so that the story would change slightly until it as relatively different each time.

Another funny thing about her was food. My cousin went to culinary school and is a very good chef. She makes so many good meals. While my cousin was away at college, my aunt did the cooking. When she’d ate most of the food, my aunt asked, “How it is?” to which my Grandma would reply, “Not bad.” She said that about every time she ate.

And I can’t forget he mysterious bathroom noises. As I said, she spent hours in the bathroom. And there were just the noises. No one knew what they were, they just happened while she was in there. Nothing was broken, nothing was out of place, there were just the booms, crashed and thumps. And when we asked “what was that,” her reply was always “Nothing.” We’d look, and it really did look like nothing had happened.