More Ida, Less Sam

I didn't fall asleep last night until about 1:00, since the Hubs had been out teaching and got home close to midnight. I wasn't worried about him, but I would doze off and a little noise would wake me up (thinking it was the door opening or something) and then once he did get home I was too awake. Bummer. So I'm working on about four and half hours of sleep today, which is hardly my optimum. The SCM is out, but my favorite sub of all time (other than K, who is in for someone else) is here.

So while I was trying to fall asleep, I was thinking about the story I posted yesterday, and that I wanted to show you this picture of Grandma and Grandpa:


This was taken on their 50th anniversary, so that would have been New Year's Day, 1966. So I thought you might like to hear another story or two, although not in the same vein as yesterday's. (Thanks for the lovely comments, btw.)

This was during the time they lived in Florida, which was Grandpa's dream, but not Grandma's. She did make the move with him, although they moved back a couple of years later. My mother flew down there to celebrate their anniversary with them; they had a big party, as they had many, many friends (but no family) who had either moved to Florida too, or who became their friends there. They were incredibly social people, btw, which is interesting, considering that my sister and I could live happily as hermits. But I digress. My mother took this picture; her brother did not make the trip from California. The rest of us didn't go because it was too expensive to fly.

Anyway, the following spring, so I was 13, Grandma flew up alone for a visit. I actually still have a letter from Grandpa to my mother in which he says he wishes he could come too, but a $98 plane ticket is just too expensive. (He had some sort of job down there too, folding newspapers or something, for pocket money. Other than that, they lived on Social Security.) I went to the airport with my parents to pick her up.

Oh, the hugga-mugga. Grandma without Grandpa was generally a high-drama sort of person. And of course she arrived with a number of bags, suitcases and parcels, as well as the obligatory black patent leather purse over her arm. I was wearing a new dress that I loved; it was sleeveless, which was unusual for me because I rarely wore, or wear, sleeveless, but this was real Carnaby Street and I adored it. I thought I looked very grown up. I sat in the back seat of the car with Grandma, who chattered away in a combination of English and Yiddish, and then suddenly looked at me and saw what I was wearing, and grabbed my arm and pulled it up, and looked.

Shocked, she said to me in a loud whisper "Did you shave under your arm?" I wish I could reproduce her accent for you; arm was a two-syllable word. I grinned and nodded. This was part of the excitement of the sleeveless dress for me; I had finally been allowed to shave under my arms when I got it. Grandma made a face, and then followed perhaps the most memorable thing she ever said to me:

"I shaved under my arms once and it never grew back." Clearly, this had been some kind of disapointment for her.

Now the story on this, I may have written before, was that only a few years earlier, she was going to a family wedding or Bar Mitzvah or something, and had gotten a dressy sleeveless dress, and my mother refused to allow her to go unless she shaved under her arms. In which case she was probably the only one of her sisters, or of any of the women her generation, at the event whose armpits were naked ("like a little girl") and trust me, they were all wearing sleeveless. Whether or not they shaved their legs, I don't know, but I doubt it. Grandma and her sisters were all very fair and blonde, and by the time they were old, there probably wasn't much there anyway. Which is why it never grew back, I guess. Anyway, she shrugged, as if to tell me that shaving under my arms was a choice I was going to have to live with, and we rode home in chatty fun.

Once she was settled into my room, she called me in and asked me, again in a loud whisper, "So, are you a lady now?" A tough question here, because as I grinned and said yes, I also backed out of her reach. These old ladies from "the other side," as we said, had some funny ideas.

They did not tell their children about sex, certainly, and not about puberty and what went with it either. I guess this was supposed to be something you learned by observation, I don't know, since Grandma herself was one of twelve children or so. So my mother knew nothing except what her older brother, the Authority on Everything, had told her about getting her period. (He had probably read about it in the encyclopedia, which he read cover to cover, as well as the dictionary.) So when her time came, she knew what it was, and then her mother came home and she told her she was bleeding. At which point, Grandma took a swing and gave Shirl a zets -- a smack -- that knocked her onto the floor. Because getting your period was a sign of womanhood, a good thing, which meant that the Evil Eye might notice you and try to steal your happiness, so you had to look as if you were being punished. So naturally, when she asked me, I didn't want to be within arm's reach.

But she hadn't knocked any of her other granddaughters to the floor, and I was the youngest, so I guess somewhere along the line my mother must have said to her "DON'T DO THAT ANYMORE!!" She didn't, but she was delighted that I was now "a lady" too.



WATCHING TWO AND A HALF MEN :: ENTRY #1959
READING: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell by Susanna Clarke