A MILLION AND A HALF A YEAR

When I was a kid I thought my grandparents were rich. The evidence:

They drove matching Cadillacs.
They traveled around the globe.
My grandpa wore a suit to work.
My grandma said “upchuck” instead of “vomit.”
They drank cocktails every night.
They used tablecloths every day. And real silverware.
They had a “summer place.”
Their fragrance preceded them into a room.

They did things my parents did not do, like eat artichokes and play bridge.

My grandpa always gave us kids several dollars after a visit. They lived in Wisconsin and drove down a couple of times a year, on holidays, in their Cadillac. My grandpa had a money clip with precisely folded bills. I take as a significant difference in our personalities that he never had my daily experience of fishing a wadded-up bill from his bag to smooth out and hand to a clerk. He treated money like it was actually his, a possession to be cared for, to be proud of, not something you temporarily stash and pass on. So at our partings there were quick hugs and crisp dollars. Goodbye. Here is my money.

Later I found out that they were not rich, at least not as fabulously rich as I had imagined. They were upper middle class for sure. They had periods of vast prosperity. Trips to Morocco and Japan. Closets full of clothes. The other day my grandpa was telling his hospice nurse about the business he owned, how he had worked himself up from a Royal typewriter salesman to the owner of three office supply stores. “I had 17 employees,” he said, “and I was doing a million and a half a month in sales.”

His hospice nurse, who was sorting his pills into a plastic box, said, “Wow, Paul, that’s great.”

“Did I say month?” he asked a minute later. “I meant year. A million and a half a year.”

“That’s still great,” she said.

Then he said, more quietly, "I lost most of it during the recession."

And she said, "Well, let's elevate your feet."

They are not even my actual grandparents. My real grandparents were Depression era farm people who had six kids, including my mom. Their names were Alma and Edmund. Alma died of breast cancer at 42, when my mom was 7. Edmund died the next year of brain cancer. My mom was adopted by Edmund’s sister, Zella, and her husband, Paul, the typewriter salesman. They had no children of their own. They gave her a different life than she was born to. They took her to a part of the country where she would meet my dad.

My mom used to tell me that if I were a boy she would have named me Paul Edmund, after her two dads. This made me feel a kind of affinity for him, but we never had a deep connection — from the time I was a little kid until I was a grown woman and he was chiding me to take my husband’s name when I got married. I was somehow always upsetting his notion of rightness and order.

I never wanted to sit on his lap. I never wanted to do the chores that he asked only the women in the family to do. “Get me a glass of water.” “Help your grandma with the dishes.” “Put on a dress for church.” My sister did these things gladly, practically without being told.

My sister was his “Princess.” I got the nickname “Angel” only because I asked for it. One day I noticed that he called my sister “Princess," and I said, “What am I?” He said, “You’re my angel.” I observed to my mom that he favored my sister. It was so obvious that it would have been pointless for her to disagree, even at that tender age, even to spare my feelings. It didn’t bother me, though. The observation of favoritism was merely clinical, not emotional. I was my mom’s baby and was coddled by both her and my dad. I didn’t need or want to be my grandpa’s favorite. Plus, my real focus during their visits was on my grandma. The way she smelled, the softness of her skin, her polished fingernails on my back at night — she always slept with me when they visited — the mirthful way she said “oh brother” when I’d tell an unfunny kid joke, the way she’d walk around the house in her bra and slip when only women were around, the way she was always getting ready for something, for dinner, for bridge, for drinks, for an evening of ballroom dancing. I loved her name: Zella Celeste. She had seven brothers. She called her parents “Mother” and “Father,” as a form of direct address and also when speaking about them. Never “Mom” or “Dad” and certainly never “my mother.” She’d say, for example, “Mother always wrapped a wet towel around the jar to keep the cookies moist.” As if in the whole universe there was just one mother and everyone knew who she was and that she was not to be questioned.

My grandpa told his hospice nurse, “My wife is 87 years old, but if she walked through that door right now you’d swear you were looking at a woman who was 67.”

The hospice nurse said, “I wish she were here to hear that. You should tell her that.”

But he wouldn’t do that. The compliment was not meant for my grandma, as maybe the nurse had surmised. It was meant for him. I have a beautiful wife. I made a million and a half a year and I have a beautiful wife.

The differences between my grandpa and my grandma can be summed up in this: When we were kids my grandma took us to a haunted house on Halloween. On the way home, driving in an unfamiliar neighborhood, she crossed some railroad tracks at way too high a speed, causing all of us, unseatbelted, to fly up and bump our heads on the Cadillac roof. Hysteria ensued. “Do it again!” And she turned the car around and assailed the tracks from the opposite direction. Don’t tell your grandpa.

In the hospital, they told him he could have anything he wanted now. The point was to be comfortable. The diabetes doesn’t matter. The congestive heart failure doesn’t matter. He asked for a Miller Lite, and they brought him one. He wanted to watch golf on TV. He said he had wanted to die in Florida. Florida had been their dream. A cushy retirement in the sun with grapefruit trees in the yard. But they got too sick and frail and had to come back. My mom helped them pack, calling me from Florida in disbelief to say, “Grandpa has at least 75 pairs of walking shorts.”

She found them a retirement apartment and they filled it with new furniture. Right before he went to the hospital for the last time, they were talking about how they still needed a kitchen table. “Why can’t you eat off the dining room table?” we asked. “That’s just for show,” my grandpa said.

He introduced me to his hospice nurse like this, “That’s my granddaughter. She teaches at the university. And she’s a lawyer.” I felt like he was talking about someone else in the room. The things I find least remarkable, even tedious, about myself are the ways he identifies me. I have a beautiful wife and my granddaughter is a lawyer.

The hospice nurse tells him he needs a lifeline and a liftchair. He has refused a hospice bed because he is afraid it will detract from their new furniture. He asks what color the liftchairs come in. He wants it to match. The real issue with the chair, though, is that it costs $45 a month. Although this is longer than he will live and less than he might spend on a pair of walking shorts, he doesn’t want to spend this $45. He tells my stepdad that would detract from my mom’s inheritance. “I have always wanted to leave her an inheritance.” There is silence. The hospice nurse looks around, unsure what to say. He has said this many times, but only now do I understand what it is: It is his last affirmation of success. It is love, in his way. A last self-reflection in the Cadillac mirror. Quick hugs and crisp dollars. Goodbye. Here is my money.