Domestic Affairs Read Free

also an immigrant from Russia, who came from a much poorer country family and courted her through the mail, in letters filled with his watercolor illustrations and rich, romantic prose. “Precious Rona!” his letters begin. “If only my arms were around you.” “Your loving friend,” they end (as little as one week before the wedding), “B. Bruser.”
    My grandfather, like the classic characters in Isaac Bashevis Singer stories, concerned himself with heaven more than earth. He ran one failing store after another, moved his family from town to town across the Canadian prairies, trusting the least trustworthy of customers, investing in doomed businesses, painting gentle watercolors, while his wife balanced the books and baked the knishes.
    Their children, my mother in particular, were the center of their life. The story I loved best as a child was of my grandfather opening every box of Cracker Jacks in his store, in search of the particular tin toy my mother coveted. Though they never had much money, my grandmother saw to it that her daughter had elocution lessons and piano lessons, and the assurance that she would go to college.
    But while she was at college my mother met my father, who was not only twenty years older than she was, and divorced, but blue-eyed and blond-haired and not Jewish. When my father sent love letters to my mother, my grandmother would open and hide them, and when my mother told her parents she was going to marry this man, my grandmother said if that happened, it would kill her.
    Not likely, of course. My grandmother was a woman who used to crack Brazil nuts open with her teeth, a woman who once lifted a car off the ground when there was an accident and it had to be moved. She had been representing her death as imminent ever since I could remember and had discussed, at length, the distribution of her possessions and her lamb coat. Every time we said good-bye, after our annual visit to Winnipeg, she’d weep and say she’d never see us again. But in the meantime, while every other relative of her generation, and a good many of the younger ones, had died (nursed in their final illness, usually, by her) she kept making borscht, shopping for bargains, tending the most flourishing plants I’ve ever seen, and most particularly, spreading the word of her daughters’ and granddaughters’ accomplishments.
    On the first real vacation my grandparents ever took, to Florida—to celebrate their retirement, the sale of their last store and the first true solvency of their marriage—my grandfather was hit by a car. After that he began to forget his children’s names and could walk only with two canes. After he died my grandmother’s life was lived, more than ever, through her children, and her pride, her possessiveness, seemed suffocating. When she came to visit, I would have to hide my diary. She couldn’t understand any desire for privacy. She couldn’t bear it if my mother left the house without her. Years later, in the nursing home, she would tell people that I was editor of The New York Times and my cousin was the foremost artist in Canada. My mother was simply the most perfect daughter who ever lived.
    This made my mother furious (and then guilt-ridden that she felt that way, when of course she owed so much to her mother). So I harbored the resentment that my mother, the dutiful daughter, would not allow herself. I, who had always performed specially well for my grandmother—danced and sung for her, offered up my smiles and kisses and good report cards and prizes, the way my mother always did—stopped writing to her, ceased to visit.
    But when I heard that she was dying I realized I wanted to go to Winnipeg to see her one more time. Mostly to make my mother happy, I told myself (certain patterns being hard to break). But also, I was offering up one more particularly successful accomplishment: my own dark-eyed, dark-skinned, dark-haired daughter, whom my grandmother had never met.
    I put