When we were kids growing up on Long Island, we used to go to my grandparents’ brownstone in Brooklyn every Sunday for dinner. My aunt and uncle would be there too, and my cousins, Robert and Roy, were twin boys around the same age as my brother Alexander. I was younger by two years, and completely left out of whatever it was that boys got into before they reached the age of realizing girls might have something to offer.
My parents had moved to the suburbs just after my brother was born, thinking it was a better place to raise a family. I never knew another life and was perfectly happy with our backyard and trees to sit under and fireflies to collect on a summer evening. But from a very early age, I was fascinated by my grandparents’ home, on a busy street with constant traffic and sidewalks that sizzled in the summer heat. While Grandma cooked, Grandpa would take all the kids to the Italian ice stand on the corner, or the pretzel shop or the bakery if we promised to be good (we always promised, and always got a treat). The boys ignored me, horsing around amongst themselves, but Grandpa always held my hand and told me stories about the neighborhood.
The rooms of their home were small and lined up next to each other: kitchen, dining room, bedroom, living room, and a tiny second bedroom, not much bigger than a walk-in closet. My mother had grown up there, and told me that she used to sleep on a roll-up bed in the living room while her older brother was given the bedroom. I thought it was unfair, but she said it was just the way things were.
Before dinner, the ritual was for Grandpa to stand each of the children up against the wall in the hallway and mark our height with different colored pencils and our initials and the date next to each pencil mark. Robert and Roy were slightly taller than Alex, and I was, of course, much smaller. From week to week, there was rarely much of a change, but as I became old enough to read, I could see that there was quite a progression from when the ritual had started. There came a time when all the boys decided they were too old to stand up against the wall to be measured. We’re not babies, I remember one of my cousins saying. So from that point on, I was the only one being measured, until I too outgrew the ritual. By that time, I had caught up with Alex in height, although still not quite as tall as either of my cousins.
When I was twelve, my aunt and uncle moved their family to Florida, and it was just the four of us visiting, and not every Sunday. Alex was into sports and hanging out with his friends, and Dad was getting tired of making the drive every week. Occasionally, the grandparents would come to visit us, but it was more complicated, as they didn’t have a car and would have to take a subway and a train, and then we’d pick them up at the station. The ritual of Sunday afternoons began to lose its luster, the excitement dimmed as we slowly grew apart from the center. Grandpa had quit working by this time, forced into retirement from a job he loved by a company that valued him greatly, but preferred to save money by hiring young people right out of school. He was philosophical about it, saying that young people deserved a chance, but he was never quite the same after that. He still dressed every day in his white button-down shirt and khakis, and remained clean shaven except for his familiar signature mustache. If I close my eyes even now, I can smell the scent of the soap he used, and remember how I used to sit on the edge of the bathtub watching him shave.
Not long after, he died peacefully in his sleep, and it was just grandma by herself. She was a strong woman, and yet she did not feel she had the courage to live in the house without her life partner. I see him sometimes in the shadows, she told my mother when they didn’t realize I was within earshot. I was not familiar with death, having never experienced it firsthand, and to me it almost seemed as if grandpa had just stepped away for a while but would be back. Even seeing him in his coffin, in his favorite blue suit, black shoes shined to a high gloss, gold wedding band on his strong weatherbeaten hands, did nothing to change that. I was looking at a wax version of my grandpa, not the real person.
At first, we thought grandma might move in with us, but she decided instead to join her son and his family in Florida. One of her neighbors had been wanting to buy the house for her daughter if it ever came on the market, and the deal was made. Grandma gave most of her furniture to her favorite charity, St. Vincent de Paul, except for a few pieces that my mother wanted for our home, including a Blue Willow patterned umbrella stand that must have weighed fifty pounds. My father tried to talk my mother out of taking it, why do we need it when we can just leave the umbrellas on the porch? But she said it had sentimental value for her, so dad gave in.
Alex was away at school, so I went with my parents to help clean and spruce up the house before the new buyers moved in. It felt strange walking up the stairs, not seeing the umbrella stand in the hallway, and even stranger opening the door to the sound of empty rooms. Mom started to cry but tried to hide it from me; dad put his arm around her for comfort. I could smell fresh paint, and as I walked through the rooms, which seemed to have doubled in size without their familiar furniture, I saw that most had been freshly painted a clean, crisp white. The kitchen and hallway were the last rooms to be done, the ladder and rags left behind by the painters until the next day when they were coming to finish the job. Grandma gave me a big hug, and I was surprised to see that far from being sad. She seemed lighter, happier, younger than I had seen her in a long time. She was always more practical than sentimental and said there was no point looking back when the future was ahead.
My dad started carrying down bags of trash while mom started in on the kitchen and bathroom. Grandma invited me into what was once the master bedroom; all that was left was a futon on the floor and several boxes and wardrobes waiting to be picked up. I saved these for you and your brother, she said, opening a jewelry box and handing me my grandfather’s pocket watch and gold cufflinks. I didn’t know what to say, so I thanked her and went out into the hallway to get control of my emotions. There, alone and as yet unpainted, were the different colored marks on the patch of wall, the last remaining testament to the four of us growing up in a house that would soon belong to someone else.