After Jyllian left, someone mentioned it was nice of her to have stopped by, and Grandma said, “You can’t make a silk purse out of sow’s ear.”
That, in a nutshell, was my grandmother. She was quick to judge, had a tongue like a whip, and regardless of whether you were interested, she always said exactly what she thought. She was funny and smart and the only compliments she ever gave were to herself. She could be great fun to be around, but she was super self-absorbed.
I had begged her for years to add my name on her lease so I could one day inherit her giant, rent-controlled apartment but she categorically refused. She was worried she would be evicted, she said, which was nonsense. Even at the end of her life, when there was no risk of anything, she wouldn’t do it. So while my father and his brother, who is affectionately known as Uncle Bark, were busy making funeral arrangements, I was doing what any New Yorker worth her salt would do—plotting to take over her apartment. The rest of my family was so fractured and dysfunctional no one even noticed that I had become a full-blown squatter. I thought maybe Jyllian would have the gall to show up with her hand out (which I was prepared to cut off) but she never did.
Uncle Bark, for his part, was pleased to keep the apartment in our clutches, as it was just another way to stay close to Grandma. As the youngest son, he was the baby of the family and very close to his mother. Uncle Bark is one of my favorite people in the world but he is extremely sentimental and hysterical, in every sense of the word. Uncle Bark is constantly bugging out about something totally insignificant.
For example, the first Mother’s Day after Grandma died, the whole family planned to go out to a Korean barbecue restaurant for dinner. Well, Uncle Bark had a fucking meltdown. He started going on and on about his diet and his high blood pressure. And then he started screaming, “I am not going to a Korean restaurant so I can have a stroke from all the sodium! You can all go to the Korean restaurant and I’ll go weep over my mother’s grave.”
So while he can be a huge pain in the ass, his bark is much worse than his bite, which is how he got his nickname. But I digress. Other than Uncle Bark and my parents, I’m not even sure anyone noticed I had moved in. Even during the week we sat shivah to mourn, I was surreptitiously hauling suitcase after suitcase into the apartment, but the errant family members were so wrapped up in their own greed that mine went unnoticed. My role as grieving granddaughter was never overshadowed by my real role as new tenant.
And just to be clear, I was tight with my grandmother. She was awesome in her own way. She wasn’t a particularly warm person but I knew she loved me and I loved her, too. She taught me to stick up for myself and not to take no for answer. And even if she didn’t really mean to, she taught me to follow my dreams.
I eulogized her at her funeral. And even though she would never have admitted it, I think I made her proud.
I have to start by thanking my father and Uncle Bark for setting such an incredible example. Though they can both be a real pain in my ass, I am positively humbled by the way they took care of Grandma. But to pay true homage to Grandma, this speech has to be spunky not sappy.
So here goes.
I am so my grandmother’s granddaughter. From my stunning sense of style to my fabulous fashion to my good looks, I inherited all of Grandma’s good points. And there were many. She was smart and sarcastic and sassy and witty and wise and she was fiery and funny and you could always count on her to tell it like it was. I’ve inherited that, too.
Grandma never gushed over me or showered me with compliments—not because she didn’t love me but because that just wasn’t her way. She showed her love in other ways. Like how when I told her I loved her, the way she would say, “And I love you, too, dear.” Or just the way when I would crawl up beside her and hold her hand and she would let me. Letting you was a big deal with Grandma. With Grandma, there were no free rides. You had to earn your keep. Grandma didn’t mince her words. Compliments were few and far between and that was fine because when they came, you knew she meant them. She said what she meant and she meant what she said.
Like when I would say, “Don’t I look gorgeous, Grandma?” She would answer, “You get it from me, dear.” And I did get it from her. I got a lot of things from her.
Many years ago, I fell down a flight of steps and hurt my back. Grandma rushed to meet me at the emergency room. They were taking forever to see me and Grandma wasn’t having it. Finally, a nurse came up to me and said, “Please, we’ll do whatever you want, just please keep your grandmother away from us.” I can only hope that I was half as helpful when she needed me.
Anyway, it went on a bit, but that was the gist of it. After the eulogy, Uncle Bark’s rabbi (who pulled up to the gravesite in a convertible red Porsche) told me that my grandmother was lucky to have had such a good-looking granddaughter, which was superclassy.
The other person who was classy was Aunt Ruth. Uncle Bark was fuming because Aunt Ruth, who didn’t even like Grandma and certainly hadn’t lifted a finger to help while she was alive, had actually approached him at the funeral home and literally, while standing over Grandma’s dead body, tried to take Grandma’s gold cuff off her corpse because it was “a shame to bury her with it.” If that wasn’t bad enough, she then asked what her cut would be.
I was like, “Listen, B, just tell her that you and I went through the will and what she’s getting will probably fill a condom. So she can bend over and I’ll shove it up her ass.”
Uncle Bark began howling with laughter. I knew he was devastated but I also knew I could always make him laugh with a good Aunt Ruth joke. Aunt Ruth was ridiculous. She was tall and large like a man, and she wore so much mascara she looked like a drag queen. She acted and dressed like she was a sixteen-year-old prostitute. A typical outfit for Aunt Ruth was a skin-tight dresses with her tits hanging out and a Hello Kitty handbag. Just looking at her was embarrassing. Beyond that, Aunt Ruth wasn’t even really an aunt; she was Uncle Bark’s second cousin or something. The whole thing was ridiculous, but apparently they had some huge falling-out about ten years prior and he was still upset about it. Pretty much what it boiled down to was that Uncle Bark might be crazy but Aunt Ruth sucks.
What made the whole thing that much more absurd was that there wasn’t even anything to divide. I mean it’s not like Grandma was a fucking Vanderbilt. Beyond that, as far as I was concerned, I was the one living there and possession was nine-tenths of the law.
And anyway, Aunt Ruth and Jyllian didn’t deserve anything. Ruth was a greedy, self-absorbed bitch. She didn’t even offer her condolences. And the apple didn’t fall from the tree. Jyllian, her illegitimate half sister, showed up at the hospital after years of being MIA and then again, out of nowhere, at the shivah—and with an entourage, to boot. We literally hadn’t seen her in years. She had distanced herself from the entire family upon finding out we had Spanish roots. And when I say Spanish roots, what I mean is that a hundred some-odd years ago some random ancestor was apparently of Spanish descent. As I’ve understood it, she was on FamilyTree.com or something and came across this and became irate at the whole family for “hiding” this information from her. As if anybody knew. Or gave a shit. In any event, Jyllian moved to Spain and hooked up with some dude who owned a youth hostel in Madrid. When she showed up at our grandmother’s house to pay a shivah call, with Felipé in tow, she was actually talking to me with a Spanish accent. And if it weren’t bad enough that she showed up at all, there were like six other Spaniards with her.
I was running around cleaning and serving, as was Uncle Bark, while Aunt Ruth was shoveling bagels into her mouth. To watch her would be to think the woman hadn’t eaten in a year and believe me, if you saw the size of her, you would know for shit sure that wasn’t the case. Before she piled whitefish, tuna, lox, cream cheese, and egg salad on one bagel, she said, to no one in particular, “I’m starving.”
I looked at Uncle Bark and whispered, “She doesn�
��t look like she’s starving.”
He immediately started laughing uncontrollably. The great French philosopher, Henri Bergson, in Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of Comic, concludes that laughter is corrective. I may have been depressed but at least I could still summon my sense of humor every now and again.
While I was trying to laugh my way out of a deep depression, Jyllian, Felipé, and their amigos sat in the corner, speaking among themselves in Spanish and barely even glancing at anyone else in the room. It was about ten o’clock at night and I’d been cleaning up for the better part of the past hour, trying to kick everyone out, but they didn’t bat a fucking eye. They were just sitting and talking and eating and I was at the end of my rope and couldn’t take it anymore. So I was finally like, “Listen up guys, I’m not running a tapas restaurant here. If you haven’t noticed, I’m cleaning up. If you haven’t noticed, I’m trying to close up shop here. In case you haven’t noticed, people are actually mourning here.”
And I was in mourning—not only over my grandmother’s death, but also over my life, which was becoming a bigger shit show than ever. After I finally got everyone out, I went to bed. I woke up feeling like I had been hit by a truck and became totally consumed with dealing with the logistics of the apartment. Nightmare as this was, it was easier than dealing with my life. More depressed than ever, I spent the following days languishing about the apartment, drinking too much espresso, chain-smoking, and lying on my grandmother’s fifty-year-old pink, plastic-covered couch, watching episode after episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.
It’s funny how things work out. I had been coveting this apartment for nearly my entire life. And now here I was, actually living in it, and I was more depressed than I ever knew possible. To say nothing of the fact that the place itself was depressing—the apartment hadn’t been renovated in over half a century. My grandparents were cheap and had bad taste, which was reflected in everything they owned. The apartment was filled with all of my grandparents’ earthly belongings, and though my grandfather had died years earlier there was still tons of his crap strewn about as well. Plus, my boxes were everywhere and I was pretty much living out of a suitcase since there was no room to put anything.
The closets were filled with thousands of plastic necklaces and hundreds of pairs of vinyl shoes. The bathroom was peach—peach tiles, peach towels, peach shower curtain, peach plastic tissue holder. My grandparents hadn’t slept in the same bed in over a quarter of a century and, as such, the bedroom had two single beds in it. In an attempt to pretend my life was normal, I pushed the beds together to form some sort of fake king-size bed, which resulted in an enormous bed in the middle of the room with a giant dent down its middle.
I had fashioned the second bedroom, which had been my father’s and Uncle Bark’s bedroom and was brimming with heinous pictures of Aunt Ruth, Jyllian, and other family members we hadn’t spoken to in years, into my office. This meant that it had thousands of pieces of paper strewn about, but more to the point it was pretty much a giant ashtray.
The living room housed the giant pink couch, which was actually very cool in a French chaise longue kind of way. The only problem was that I was too depressed to take the plastic cover off. The kitchen was beyond disgusting. Fake tile, cheap dishes, old, crusty stove, plastic containers shoved in every corner and, of course, the requisite three million packets of Sweet’N Low my grandmother had stolen from every diner she had ever been to. Never mind that she didn’t even use Sweet’N Low.
I was trying to create a home for myself amid the chaos but there was no point in unpacking because I had no idea how long I was going to be there since I was there illegally. The apartment was in a state of chaos, and literally and figuratively everything was a mess. I was reeling. In addition to hardly eating, chain-smoking, drinking way too much espresso, I had begun to spontaneously gag. Even my own body was turning against me. I hadn’t spoken to Noam in ages and I couldn’t even say his name without bursting into tears.
My mother—my wonderful, dear, amazing, loving mother who I adore with every fiber of my being—was driving me crazy. I knew that she was worried sick about me and just trying to help, but she was nevertheless making me insane.
She had taken to sending me e-mails like these:
It was so nice to spend time with you yesterday (it never is enough time).
I appreciate your comments re: not speaking with food in my mouth, so you will not be offended by the following comments:
1. Your hair—you simply can’t imagine how this “hairdo” destroys your appearance. I understand that you are upset and stressed but this looks ill-groomed.
2. Why wear a dinner dress with flip-flops? This looks like a resident in a nursing home who wants to look glamorous but can’t wear nice shoes because she has old feet.
Okay, I will stop only because I do not want to stress you more. I am trying to help you improve by being objective.
I will not embarrass you in front of others (even though you do it to me).
And most of all I love you and care about you more than anyone.
Please take care,
Mommy
In addition to having to contend with my mother and Uncle Bark, my genius plan of moving into my grandmother’s apartment and taking over her lease was not going as smoothly as I had imagined. The reality was that I was illegally squatting and it became eminently clear that if I wanted to stay there, I was going to have to get a lawyer. And fast.
I had been delusional to think I would be able to just take Grandma’s apartment. I had no legal right to be there. In the biggest real estate sale in the history of New York, Stuyvesant Town, the complex where my grandparents had lived since its inception, which had originally been created for the working people of the city some sixty-odd years ago, had recently been purchased by Tishman Speyer for several billions of dollars. Tishman Speyer basically owns half of New York City. When they bought the complex they began a massive overhaul, billing it as “luxury living in the city.” This is a crock of shit the proportions of which I can hardly begin to articulate. The complex looks better than it did when I was a kid, to be sure, and from a business perspective, not that I know jack shit about business, it seemed like a smart move. Most of the original residents were dead or dying and the moment a tenant kicked it, Tishman Speyer would swoop in, renovate, and quadruple the rent—which was precisely why they bought it.
Like most of their first residents, when my grandparents moved in they were paying fifty-some-odd dollars a month for their relatively large two-bedroom apartment.
By the time my grandmother died, her rent was around a thousand dollars. Of course everything is relative and while a thousand dollars is more than most people in the world make in a year, a thousand dollars a month is dirt fucking cheap for a two-bedroom apartment in downtown New York City. True, I had no business living there, but thousands of other people did. Tishman Speyer didn’t give a shit about that. They were in the midst of trying to evict innocent elderly people and vacate as many apartments as humanly possible. They wanted to avoid, well, people like me at any and all cost.
They were like vultures and their little scheme wound up blowing up in their greedy little faces as the whole deal eventually went bankrupt. I may have had no business being there, but you can’t just kick old people out of their homes. The other thing you apparently can’t do is pretend you’re a dead woman in order to take advantage of a rent-controlled apartment. At heart, even in my darkest moments, I must be an optimist. I really thought I had a chance.
I found an attorney, a nice fellow named Herbert Lust, of all things, to try and help me. I told him the whole history, how my grandparents Lillian and Seymour Aschenbrand moved into apartment 4B in 1948 and my grandmother lived there until her death on September 12, 2008. I told him that my grandfather may or may not have fought in Pearl Harbor, that my grandmother was a New York City public school teac
her, that my father and Uncle Bark had grown up in that apartment, and that it was only right that it be handed down to me. I even talked about how I was a struggling artist and how that should count for something. After I got through my heartfelt tale, I asked him whether he thought my writing an impassioned plea to Stuyvesant Town explaining all this would help my situation. Mr. Lust looked at me and said, “Tishman Speyer wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.”
He told me I could sue them if I wanted to and that he’d be happy to represent me but I would wind up spending tens of thousands of dollars (that I didn’t have) and I would never win.
So I switched tactics. I decided to wait them out. I figured my best bet—and quite frankly my only option at that point—was to stay put until they realized I wasn’t my grandmother, at which point they would kick me out. This, as it turned out, was exactly what happened. It would take them about nine months and we would eventually settle.
In the meantime, my newly found freedom felt more like prison. In the midst of my suffering, Uncle Bark decided we had to go through Grandma’s stuff and decide what we were doing with everything so we didn’t get stuck doing it when I suddenly received an eviction notice, which could happen at any moment. My father, who likes to keep things as simple as possible, wanted nothing to do with the apartment. He likes things done by the book and illegally squatting in a dead woman’s apartment does not fall into that category. My dad’s job was to handle all of Grandma’s bills and other similar affairs, which he did meticulously. As far as he was concerned, we could have set everything else on fire and that would have been just fine with him. My mother was more concerned than ever—and she was calling me more than ever. And as a result I wanted to put my head through a pane of glass. Even though my mother came to this country from Israel fifty years ago, she still has the most ridiculous accent in the world.
Me, answering the phone at noon, having just dragged myself out of bed, with raspy voice: “Hello?”
On My Knees Page 4