The Other Grandmother

You know that dinner with your father's mother, an event you put off for the better part of a year, is not going to go well when your first question, the one you thought was pleasantly innocuous, is answered with "Nothing's new. I sit on my ass all day."

Great. A real conversation starter and ender.

But I had put off visiting with The Other Grandmother, the one that is not fun, about as long as is possible considering that I live less than ten miles away. She's 85 and losing her mind, but she's physically very healthy and will probably outlive the rest of the family. Not that she cares to--as she said, she sits on her ass all day staring at the television in her condo in the Valley. For some kind of structure, she cleans, does a load of laundry, or goes grocery shopping.

If she were someone else, I might feel bad for her. But after decades of total bitchdom, her ability to engender sympathy is pretty much zilch. She has never been a warm woman. My parents' marriage began with my mother threatening to forgo shoes at her own wedding after The Other Grandmother made too many New York Jew demands. (My mother wanted to elope, or alternatively, to keep things very simple. The Other Grandmother, who at the time considered herself something of a success in the Bronx where she and The Other Grandfather owned a deli, wanted a certain display of riches--fancy photographers, florist, venue, etc.--that she had no intention of paying for.) My own personal highlight real is an endless loop of her asking about my weight and commenting that I look like a Spic. For almost 30 years, before every godforsaken visit, I have fantasized about simply calling her a bitch and walking away. Out of some perverted sense of decorum, I never do, but the instinct will not leave me.

So last night The Brother and I tried to eat our obligatory Italian dinner as fast as the waiters served it. We skipped salads or appetizers, went straight to the meal, and said no to dessert without even pretending to look at the menu. The Other Grandmother had about three questions in her repertoire which she rotated and repeated for an hour. Technically, her dementia is to blame for this, but even in her better years, I don't remember her having any more questions than this. Her questions:

How's work?
Do you have a social life?
How often do you two see each other?

To the first question, The Brother and I both said that we had been busy. I tried to offer up a handful of funny and odd details about my work at the courthouse, details which normal people are usually amused by (hello, I am currently making dummy files to thwart TMZ, and just this week had a special sheriff's detail after a litigant in one of my courtrooms killed his wife and then himself; my job is fucking interesting). The Other Grandmother's only show of interest in this subject was her particularly inappropriate follow-up comment to a certain celebrity divorce I'm working on: "So she's white and he's black, huh?"

Then we moved to the dreaded social life question. I said I go out with friends. The Brother said he barely has time to go out because of his job (i.e. enslavement) at a white shoe firm. She turned to The Brother, giving him her beady little eagle eyes, and said, "Why haven't you got a girlfriend? Go get yourself a girlfriend. You're abnormal." I took a big gulp of my wine and fought the urge to tell her that The Brother gets four different cocks a night. Black ones. Big black cocks every night. The Brother tried to change the subject, but with her dementia, The Other Grandmother was right back at the social question two minutes later. This time, I couldn't help myself. I said, "he's got a lot of girlfriends. He sleeps around." Finally, The Other Grandmother said, "Good for him," and shut up for a while as she dug into her scampi.

The third question, for some unknown reason, got repeated more than the others. I must have had to say at least 25 times that The Brother and I see each other about once a week. And each time, she said, "Good. Neither of you has anybody else." Sometimes she got positively chatty and added, "This way you have someone if you want to go out to dinner." Right, because as long as I'm single, I'm really worried about how I'm gonna get dinner. Finding a mate has little to do with love or comfort or sharing a life or feeling whole: it's about getting fucking dinner.

I think the waiters understood our pain and thankfully brought the check quickly once we'd finished eating. The Brother and I dropped off The Other Grandmother at her condo and went for a positively medicinal drink at a dive bar in Sherman Oaks. We had each been to the dive bar years ago for weekday happy hours when we worked in the area. But we had never been there on a Saturday night, and after a single beer we called it quits because it was just too sad and icky feeling to watch the mix of desperate middle-aged singles, yuppies trying to forget their small children at home, two misplaced lesbians, old time alcoholics kissing random people on the lips, and two different men who made Goliath look small. I came home, showered off the Valley germs (The Brother insisted on hand-sanitizer even in the car), and went straight to bed. I figure I don't have to do another dinner with The Other Grandmother until Christmas, and just between you and me, I'm hoping that her dementia will be so bad by then that I'll be able to tell her we went to dinner without actually having to go to dinner.