I’ve heard about people going to great lengths to buy a house — making an offer sight unseen, waiving the inspection, packaging their family’s happiness as a sales proposition in letterbox drops[1] — but I’ve not heard of anyone who agreed to buy a house and inherit a grandmother in the process.
We might have realized that the second floor of our house was still ~occupied~ when we did a walkthrough and saw the fridge in the second-floor kitchenette was stocked top to bottom with Chobani — there may as well have been a Post-It on the fridge announcing “SOMEONE’S MOM, LIVING ALONE.” But we had spinning houses in our eyes and didn’t care about any of the stuff we saw that day. Getting a broker to show you houses feels sly, like you’re enlisting someone to smuggle you into the realm of property ownership at a time when single-family zoning feels untenable in many parts of the country. The American dream!
The agreement was that the grandma would stay an extra month after the closing, her daughter and son-in-law having already moved out with their kids. There was the whiff of a suggestion in the arrangement that one grandma is interchangeable for another, portable like air conditioners. We moved in, and got a grandma and outdoor projector screen as part of the deal. On closing day, we met her. She was short, with glasses like overhead projectors, and surrounded by pad footed furniture, in a self-contained floor that didn’t match the rest of the house. At the end of the hall sat a wheelie cart with a gas tank in it — her nighttime oxygen, she explained. “Just be aware that gas tanks can explode if they’re not properly kept,” came a handy piece of input later on. But I was thinking: Would you leave your mother and her lung condition behind in a creaky Victorian during a viral pandemic? Discuss.
We had a locksmith meet us that day to change the locks on her — not out of spite, but just to set up expectations that she use the side entrance and not, say, drift out into the stairwell in a nightgown at odd hours. She turned out to be from Eastern Europe, the knowledge of which made it feel she had not only been left alone in a strange house, but alone in a strange house in a strange country. “Don’t make her feel too welcome or she might stay longer!” came another bit of counsel, but how cold can you be with someone’s sick mom [who may know folk magic]?
We introduced her to the kids, who would pass her door on their way up the stairs from the first floor to the converted attic, where we all slept. “I don’t like her,” said Scout when out of sight. No one is as perceptive as Scout when it comes to subterranean veins of emotion, and I figured she had tapped into the sadness of an old lady, left behind. “She looks scary,” she elaborated. A strange woman appearing from behind the white door in the middle of your house — it is a little bit Grimm, you have to admit.
Watch out for the lunatic in the attic, we learned from Jane Eyre — in that case Rochester’s wife Bertha Mason, who had been banished to the top floor, secretly(?!), with nothing else to do but scream into the turrets and yank on the curtains. But Bertha Mason was also a kind of Jane-double, a warning, like that retired lady on the beach in that superannuation ad who walked up to her younger-self and said, “I’m you, twenty years from now,” a moment intended to be reassuring, but actually quite ominous, even in the nice white slacks.[2] Bertha burned the house down, you know.
Point being, consider how you treat the woman you might become.
I checked on her after the locksmith left. “The door is good,” she told me, satisfied, demonstrating the ease with which she could turn the knob on her side of the door to lock and unlock it. Then, to the house, “This is a beautiful house, it did us well.”
Yes, beautiful house, I was saying, looking at the keyhole on my side of the door. The locksmith had installed the lock backwards. She wasn’t locked in, she could meander out whenever she wanted.
In the early weeks, the grandma indeed floated out a couple of times without warning. She also called me wanting to know why her mail wasn’t arriving anymore (her daughter had filed a change of address in her name), and why her cable wouldn’t work (this had been in her daughter’s name). One day, I found our internet had been cut off — she had contacted the cable company to override our service and reinstall her own so she could have TV when she babysat her grandson. Then she texted to let us know that she needed to stay an extra month because her new apartment had a lead issue. Perhaps, we thought, we could have pushed back on the $16/day rate specified in the original contract; it seemed too good a bargain at this juncture, less the province of the landed gentry and more Deadwood flophouse rates. “She’s very difficult, can’t you see how unreasonable she is?” whined the son-in-law when pressed on some of these things.
Her prolonged occupation confused our notions of ownership; the house had known her longer, and the son-in-law sometimes crept past the dining room window as we ate dinner, throwing us an awkward wave as he headed to the side entrance to pick up his toddler from his old house. We pulled into the driveway one day to find an elderly man sitting on the porch staring out at the yard. “Afternoon,” the hubs called out. The man didn’t move, an owl so still you aren’t sure if it’s stuffed or has a life force. “Hello!” we tried again. He blinked without turning his head. It wasn’t until we walked up onto the porch that his shoulders jumped. “Hearing’s not great,” he gestured at his ears. He was waiting for the grandma. We texted her for him. Other neighbors came by, frozen halfway up the steps with banana bread in their arms outside her entrance. “I’ll text her,” I’d call out from the backyard, where Japhy was practicing for the Major League in his enormous batting helmet.
We had managed to compartmentalize[3] the idea of someone living sandwiched between the floor we slept on, and the floor we lived on, moving about an interstitial plane of mysterious noises and cooking oil scents, when the spots in the downstairs ceiling appeared. “Do you mind if we just take a look inside your apartment to see if there are any signs of a leak?” I texted. “Of course!” the grandma replied, “I’m not home, just let yourself in.”
You know, with my key.
I only had to open a closet door to find what she had failed to notice each day retrieving clothes and belongings from the space: there was a gaping hole in the ceiling, pieces of plaster flitting to the floor and mold sending runners down the walls. It looked a little like that scene in Ghostbusters II, where the portal opens to the next dimension from the fridge in the mezzanine of that Upper West Side apartment building (occupied by, yes, a single woman!). “Oh dear, Janet, that wasn’t there before!” she responded to the photos I texted. Still, the prospect of a mold infestation didn’t entice her over to her lead-rimmed apartment any sooner.
We found a roofer and started a countdown to her departure. As the week arrived, we would ask the kids, “guess what happens in four/three/two days?” “The grandma is leaving!” Scout would say — she couldn’t have her dream bedroom until we moved downstairs, so she had real skin in the game.
On moving day, the daughter was present to supervise the movers. “How’s it going,” I said when she arrived. “Well, it’s pretty hectic with two full-time jobs, two young kids, trying to run a business, and, you know, my mom,” she said. Ah yes, but who was really looking after her mom?
She and her husband had hired seemingly the cheapest moving company one could find — in fact just two teens with a U-Haul truck. Not my furniture, I thought, and took the kids down the road to the open house at their school. There, I missed the daughter’s call, which was followed by a text: Hi, please call me ASAP.
“The good news is the apartment is swept and tidy and all the furniture is out,” she told me over the phone. “The bad news is that the moving truck hit your car when they were leaving. And unfortunately, they didn’t stay.”
To bring fortune into this!
“I see,” I said, literally stroking my chin. As it was said, so it had been. They had not hit our car as much as driven through it. The back rear looked like an ACME prop from a cartoon bingle, lights and bits of plastic on the ground, and the bumper hanging off. All that was missing was a steamrollered roadrunner painted onto the bitumen.
I received one final text from the grandmother that evening, installed to her new home: “Good luck and good health to you and your family!”
***
My sister and her husband got one of these from a family of four this year in their letterbox.
For more aging-woman-as-horror, see also: Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story: “She thought about the cardboard aunt, Aunt Theodora Goodman, who was both a kindness and a darkness.”
“I take all the negative emotions and just bottle them and bury them and they never come out. I've basically never been better.”
How it happened…
Do you love someone who wants to be a traffic cop?
On the one hand, the shitty history of policing the road; and on the other, the sheer excitement on his face when I made him a too-small police hat out of colored paper, like he wanted and, later, a stop sign. I spent the rest of the afternoon unable to walk around the house without being forced to stop and wait until he said I could proceed.
Goodies
Does the secret mom-escape hidden in this pandemic concept house not remind you vaguely of Jane Eyre??
Also in postcolonial reconsiderations: I wrote an essay for Popula on convict pajamas, singing about sailing to Botany Bay, and other tall-ship propaganda from my childhood — but it’s really about how travel has complicated our lives/migration/etc.
SPEAKING OF CHILDHOOD, my very own sister just became a published illustrator with the release of Goodnight Toes, written by Justine Adams!! And it is a bee-auty <3
I really loved Max Rorty’s Covid vignettes.
My favo(u)rite podcast right now is Brooke and Linda’s Dream Club (thank u Mills), which is just a laughy jokey pop-culture pleasure.
“You can’t fool me / I saw you when you came out.” — saw Ben Folds play here in Troy, and ahh. (also 😭 )
BIG NEWS UP HERE: Lorde reviewed some onion rings in the Catskills.
I did not know Tom Scocca was still doing his weather reviews!
This is the Succession essay I have wanted.
That’s all I know, I think.
Thank you for reading KAFKA’S! <3 <3
Not funny but so funny!🥂