The Clancys of Queens Read Free Page B

pull down, hard, like THIS”—and
rrrrrip!
“Ah! You see how it tears? Right down the middle!
Minchia!
”
    I’d get to work on my stack, looking up at her and dangling my dismembered Hallmark in the air for approval the first few times. She would nod, and soon enough we’d be ripping apart card after card with no more emotion than a pair of farmhands shucking corn. The whole scene strikes me now as some tough-ass urban women’s version of elder tribal ladies teaching the wee ones to work a loom:
You see, my dear grandchild, now you’re learning the age-old tradition of our people saving two bucks on a dustpan.
    When it came time to scoop up some garbage, and Grandma grabbed a couple of cards from the drawer, perhaps the strangest prayer I ever prayed was that the face-up side, instead of the little cat holding a balloon or some smiling snowman, would be the inside of the card, because I got an extra twinge of irreverent joy watching the inscription— HA*PY B**TH*AY ! L*TS OF L*VE, AU*T CAMILLE —disappear under the crumbs.
    Right below Grandma’s disgraced-greeting-card drawer was a cabinet exploding with dozens of emptied and cleaned plastic Polly-O ricotta containers, Temp Tee cream cheese tubs, and glass Mancini roasted red pepper jars, because Tupperware, like dustpans, was considered an extravagance. So opening Grandma’s “Frigidaire” was like peering into a portal to some magical miniature city. And a search for one spoonful of ricotta cheese could turn into a full-on culinary tour of Southern Italy. The last place the cheese would be was in an actual Polly-O container, but you would open it anyway, only to find last night’s
braciole,
then to the cream cheese tub stuffed instead with
pasta e fagioli,
and on and on until you were so enticed by everything else, you didn’t want ricotta cheese anymore.
    On top of these skyscrapers of leftovers, like spires, were dozens of tiny shimmering foil packages. A quarter-inch slice of sausage, a hunk of Parmesan cheese no bigger than a sugar cube, a dollhouse-scale bouquet of cauliflower florets—every last scrap of food was saved, then thrown together come Saturday morning in one of Grandma’s off-the-wall-delicious frittatas. Even if I wasn’t looking for something to eat, I loved to just stand there and stare.
    —
    Anyway, back to my great-aunt and her grapefruits. Having completed her “Don’t fuck around at Mary’s” speech, Grandma leads me down the single flight of stairs that separates her apartment from her older sister’s. At this point, 1985, Grandma is sixty-eight, and Aunt Mary is seventy-two, and in all of their years they have lived either under the same roof or not more than a single city block apart. Their childhood home was a lower-level apartment in a brownstone on Union Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn. After getting married, Aunt Mary moved as far as the upstairs apartment. Grandma made it a hair farther; she got married and moved around the corner. And there the sisters remained until 1978, when they moved to Queens (together, of course).
    When we reach the landing, Grandma grabs my hand and shuffles down the hall in her standard-issue, open-toe, terry-cloth slippers, pausing every few steps to look down at me and whisper-scream (all her usual anger, one-eighth her usual volume) her mantra, “You eat the grapefruit, you leave!!” We arrive to find Aunt Mary’s door open. Grandma stiff-arms me back as if I’m a lion raring to jump into the crowd, not a stunned five-year-old in the throes of terror because she’s about to eat a half a grapefruit with her elderly great-aunt. Grandma juts her head into the doorway and starts screaming again. “Mary! I brought the kid for the grapefruit! You ready? Mary? Mary?! You there!? I got the kid!! Mary? Mary?! You ready!?”
    Hours, days, weeks pass before Aunt Mary responds, from somewhere in the abyss, the exaggerated calm of her voice ever so gently reprimanding her sister’s craziness.