The Clancys of Queens Read Free Page A

grapefruit, you leave!” Grandma screams, for no other reason than that’s just how she talks. “Mary likes it there alone! It’s very nice she invited you for the grapefruit, but that’s it! She don’t want you to stay long!” She keeps at me, standing at the stove, her eyes never leaving the pot of tomato sauce she’s stirring. “You go downstairs, you eat the grapefruit, you leave!!” After repeating the refrain, for maximum effect, in one fluid motion she rips her wooden spoon up out of the pot, sucks off the sauce, sends it cartwheeling into the sink, and then starts to turn toward me to deliver her typical closer face-to-face, “
Fahng—
” but saves that second syllable until she is fully spun around, “
gool!
” (
Fahngool
is the Italian American pronunciation of the slang word
vaffanculo,
which translates to “go do it in the ass” though is used more like “fuck off.” Either way, it’s not a nice thing to yell at a five-year-old. But Grandma means nothing by it. “Fuck” is just her go-to, catchall punctuation.)
    I’m a few feet below Grandma’s sight line, so she’s unable to spot me when she first scans the room, her head slowly swiveling left, then right, then left again with a fixed, fuming gaze, looking like a cyborg in a housedress. Right before her eyes start pulsing red and she turns real-life Terminator, her head tilts down, and there I am, standing right at her heels and choking down a laugh because it just occurred to me that, until now, it looked as if she was yelling at her meatballs. But the fun is short-lived. Grandma shoots me a look, and I am right back to being dead serious about my great-aunt Mary’s grapefruits.

In the three years that I spent among The Geriatrics of 251st Street, I was solidly schooled that the two most important things to Grandma were her older and only sister, Aunt Mary, and her kitchen floor. She referred to the floor only as “my linoleum.” If I were to go skipping by on it, she would yell, “Watch with
my linoleum
!!”—the tone of her voice clearly conveying that she was proof positive that her perfectly preserved polyvinyl floor covering would up and crumble beneath the prancing feet of a forty-pound kid. At some point she must have convinced me, because I remember—even if I was running full blast—I would stop dead before I entered the kitchen, then tiptoe over that linoleum like a cartoon cat burglar.
    Grandma scrubbed her floor at least three times a day, jabbing at it rapid-fire with these short, furious strokes that made the mop look like a tommy gun in her hands. And once she was done pumping it full of lead with her mop-
cum
–machine gun, she would get onto her hands and knees to scrub the tough-to-reach edges and corners by hand with a rag.
    Of course, before the mopping, and probably an additional half dozen times a day, Grandma first swept the floor, gathering the flecks of dirt, crumbs of Italian bread, and strands of hair into a little pile, as anyone else would do. But then, instead of using a dustpan, she scooped up the pile with the torn halves of an old greeting card. An entire kitchen drawer was dedicated solely to storing all those torn cards, and after Christmas or Easter or her birthday, I helped her replenish the stock. “Come, today you help me rip the cards!” Grandma would say, and I’d follow her around the house, the two of us unsanctimoniously snatching these ill-fated tokens of affection from the windowsills and tabletops. Eventually we’d work our way back to the kitchen table, and, as we sat side by side with little stacks in our laps, she’d take the first card off the top and demonstrate the technique. “Tight, you hold it, like this!” she’d scream, pushing her fisted hand an inch away from my face to make sure I saw the preferred, white-knuckled grip. “Then, high, you lift it, like this!” Now she’d raise that fist into the air like a Black Power salute. “And with the other hand, you