To read previous vignettes from this fictional series, visit Bunny’s Vignettes.
Obsessive Love – 1965/66
Childhood memories are slippery things. My earliest was being in my grandmother’s arms, waving goodbye to my mother as she left our apartment building one morning and walked down the street in the direction of the parish church and the train station.
I say our building because we owned the three-storey structure, with one seven-room apartment on each floor. Later, I would be told that my grandmother paid for the building. Later still, I’d hear that my father used the GI Bill to secure a mortgage and that Grandma had nothing to do with it.
How old was I? For Grandma to hold me in her arms, I must have been three or four at most. I wasn’t a baby – I didn’t stay in her arms for long – but I needed to be lifted to see out the windows in the sun parlour, to watch my mother’s chubby form walk away and turn briefly to wave. I’m sure she smiled, her even white teeth framed in coral-pink lipstick. She always wore lipstick when she went to church or downtown – for what would later become work. That and face cream were her only makeup.
Her mother, my grandmother, wore cherry red lipstick, beige foundation to hide her freckles, green or blue eyeshadow, and black mascara over brown lashes. She regularly powdered her nose, always carrying a compact. On that day – my earliest memory – Grandma must have been around fifty-seven and more blond than grey. Even though we were indoors, she was likely wearing stilettos. Unlike her daughter, grandma was bony and long-legged, and in stilettos she looked like a stick-insect. This was the 60s, and she only had them in four colours: red, green, yellow, and black. In the 70s, she added white and tan. I only ever caught her in house slippers once. Outside, she wore those stilettos most of the year – except during Chicago’s brutally cold, snow-packed winters, when she switched to high-heeled boots and somehow managed to walk at pace while the rest of us were plodding and sliding along behind her.
That day, her stilettos must have given her – and me in her arms – an extra three inches to look through the panes of glass onto our street. I could see across the way the near-identical three-storey red-brick building, nestled among other such buildings, all with front lawns, all with one tree – following Dutch Elm disease, only nascent maples and a few sturdy old oaks lined our street. From the sides, I could peer into the sun parlours of our neighbours’ apartments, separated by narrow gangways about two yards wide. On one side lived the Novaks, the Williamses and the Marino’s- on the other, the Steins, their in-laws, and children.
Many moments like this marked my childhood – waving off my mother, staying with my grandmother. But this one stood out. My younger sister must have been asleep in her crib. My older sister and brother were at school. My mother wasn’t going to work – she didn’t return to work until I was five. This moment mattered because Grandma was stressed and worried. I sensed it the way children – emotional sponges – do. A few years later, I realised that was either the day my mother went to see the priest to report that my father ‘was hitting her,’ or the day she caught the el (Chicagoese for ‘elevated train’) downtown to see a lawyer and begin the legal separation from my father. Later, my mother would tell me that when she went to the priest – speaking as if it had only happened once – he asked her what she had done to deserve it. So, a man could hit a woman if she deserved it? That was, according to mother, what set off the divorce process.
That morning, I played with my dolls and later coloured in a Disney colouring book, probably the Mary Poppins one, my favourite. My grandmother made Danish chocolate fudge – dark, thin, and melt-in-your-mouth fudge that left a grainy, sugary layer on your tongue. The kitchen air filled with bittersweetness as she sat across from me at the table and waited for the fudge to harden. She had a cigarette in one hand – from the two packs of Winstons she smoked each day – and a felt-tip pen in the other. In a stenographer’s notebook, she busied herself writing, smiling at her own loopy script. A couple of years later, I would understand what she was writing as this was one of her usual pastimes. My mother’s full name – first, middle, and maiden – never her married name. Grandma would write ‘Joyce Agnes Larsen’ over and over. One line per full name. About twenty lines per page. When one page was full, she’d take a protracted drag from her cigarette, sometimes light a new one, and flip to the next blank page and continue.
Paola Trimarco 