She’s making a list

In May 2007, my mom called to tell me that my grandmother had stopped eating. 

There was a flurry of decision making and angst. Should I finish finals week? Should I pack up my on-campus apartment and come home early? Could I postpone my final project for my Advanced Composition Course? What about my Spanish Literature and Culture exam? 

I stayed at school. My grandmother held on. 

***

The strum of shuffling cards and the sharp smell of garlic filled my grandmother’s small apartment. 

As a toddler, my older sibling couldn’t say her name: Nancy. Nini stuck. 

Nini and I were playing rummy again. 

We probably ate my favorite garlic noodles. I loved the white pasta shells in a creamy garlic sauce mixed from a packet of powder (this was the 90s and I was ten–don’t judge). For dessert, Nini probably scooped chocolate cherry cordial sorbet (another favorite) into curly pink bowls. Our spoons clinked against the bumpy blown glass and our lips smacked at the cold sweetness. 

I’m sure I rambled on about the kids in my 4th/5th combo class with Mrs. Stanbach. Midgame, I must have jumped up to demonstrate my level 5 gymnastics floor routine. Nini listened patiently while I explained in detail my new favorite leotard–the silver starburst across the chest, the teal crushed velvet smooth to the touch, the keyhole clasp at the nape of my neck. 

Nini listened, nodded, and let me win. At the end of the game, we tallied our points and I wrote down our scores on the yellow notepad on the corner of her dark wood dining table. I added up the numbers; I meticulously kept track. 

***

“One-two-three-flip,” I instruct my son as I demonstrate with my own pile of cards. 

“When we have the same number, we break the tie with a war,” I explain. I tried to teach my six-year-old Rummy, but I couldn’t remember the rules. Sure, I could Google Rummy rules, but I know from the few times I played with other friends that Nini followed her own procedures. I viewed her special rummy rules as another one of her quirks, like how she would safety pin her socks to her pajama bottoms to prevent them from riding up and creating a draft on that tender inch of ankle while she slept or how she tracked her daily calorie consumption on a pad of paper on her dining table. 

“Did Nini play that you needed to have 4 in a straight but they could be any suit? Or did they have to be the same suit? Do you remember the rules?” I message my mom. 

My mom doesn’t remember. 

I teach my son War instead. Flip-grab-slide. Flip-grab-slide. 

***

“One-two-three-lift,” the CNAs repeat as they transfer my grandmother to her bed. The room is silent, no machines alert us to her internal arrhythmias, no wires tangle in her blankets. 

She signed a DNR back when she was lucid. Before Alzheimer’s or whatever callous disease wrenched her memory, safety, and security from her, from us. 

It’s Christmas Day 2007. She has outlasted all the doctor’s predictions and prognoses. She has made it to the one day of the year we are all guaranteed to be home from school and our various jobs and lives. She chose the one day we were guaranteed to be together. 

I like to think she waited for me. 

***

We kept a running tally of our Rummy scores. By the time Nini started forgetting the rules and playing became too tedious, we’d probably kept track of a decade's worth of points. I prided myself that our tally was untarnished. We had started with the whole family. As soon as I learned to spell the names, I wrote out across the sheet of paper: Aly Nini Cam (my younger brother) Penny (my older sister) Susan and Jerry (I always felt so grown up writing Susan and Jerry, not mom and dad). I wrote the score below our names. After each round, I added the points and calculated a new total. 

I stacked up the scores, never dropping or misplacing or starting over. I insisted. 

In hindsight, this could have been an early sign of my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder–compulsive accounting, rigidity, inability to let go or pivot, be flexible. 

Nini was the only babysitter we ever had, and my parents left us with her often. Quickly Jerry and Susan were dropped from the scorecard. Then Penny lost interest, preferring to play with transformers and Ninja Turtles instead. Cameron’s interest waxed and waned depending on if Penny was there to play with him. 

Two names remained: Aly and Nini. 

When my siblings did decide to join in, I would write their scores on a separate page. They could win that game that day, but they were disqualified from the long game, the real game, the real score. 

Game after game, I tracked our points and placed the updated card next to Nini’s calorie pad. 

*** 

My mom and I scooch closer to Nini on the bed. We each hold a bony hand, caress her cold fingers. The drum of my heart takes the place of any monitors. Bum-bum, bum-bum, bum-bum. 

My mom whispers, “We love you, we love you, we love you,” and her tears drop onto the white, starchy sheets. 

Nini’s breath rattles and her sharp inhales drift farther apart until we think it’s over. We are frozen in the silent, negative space. We don’t move or breathe. Our eyes lock. Minutes march on. 

I’m about to release my hand from Nini’s stony grip when she sits up and gasps, strong and startling. We jump. This happens three, maybe four more times until we’re convinced it’s not the end. She stopped eating in May and now it’s Christmas and if anyone can hang on, she can. 

***

Nini kept a notepad on her dining table to track her calories. 

In her scrawling cursive, she’d write: Blueberry muffin: 200 calories, a splash of Lactaid in the coffee: 20 calories, a glass (or two) of wine: 120-240 calories. 

She was always stacking, always adding, always tracking. How did I never notice we were the same? 

I wish I could ask her now. Had her doctor given her these strict orders? Did she ever miss a day and how did that make her feel? Could she stop tracking if she wanted? Were we driven by the same anxiety? The same compulsion to track our progress, the same need for certainty to “know” we followed the rules and did the right thing? Said the right thing? Ate the right thing? 

Are we the same? 

***

In the cold nursing home room, we wait and wait. The minutes stretch longer. I notice the chipped polish on my thumbnail, I try to unbend her knobby knuckles, not knowing if they’re clenched with arthritis or stiff with death. 

“You did a good job, Mom,” my own mom says. “It’s okay to let go.”

We wait until the silence does not give way to another striving breath.

We wait until we know. We wait until we’re flooded all at once: a rush of relief and grief and disbelief. 

I move my hand from Nini’s, grab my mom’s, and squeeze. 

***

If you ask me what a grandmother’s love is like, I would reply in a smorgasbord of senses. A grandmother’s love smells like garlic and onion and browning meat. It feels like the cold squish of raw meatball mixture in the palm of my hand. It tastes like M&M cookies and melting butter on fresh baked blueberry muffins. 

Love sounds like the shuffle of cards and the ramblings of a shy girl finally releasing her words to an attentive audience. Love looks like “doing our cuticles” together. She never called it girl time or a manicure, or–horrors–a mani/pedi. Nini would fill a bowl with warm, soapy water and let my fingers soak. Then gently, so gently, she’d push back my cuticles with a wooden tool. 

During our sleepovers, we would play Rummy, watch I Love Lucy, do our cuticles, cook, and bake. 

I remember sitting on the counter making cookies, the mixing bowl pressed between my feet as I stirred with a wooden spoon. I piled the dry ingredients into a dome-shaped mountain, then watched as the wet ingredients flowed down the volcano. I would stir until my arms tired and I’d switch hands. 

A grandmother’s love smells like fresh baked cookies and looks like a rummy score card spanning a childhood. A grandmother’s love looks like a woman who tracked her every calorie, baking us the good stuff anyway. 

***

“Uno, uno, dos, dos, tres, tres,” I deal out the cards to my son, counting in Spanish to reinforce his immersion kindergarten program. 

I think about grabbing a pad of paper to keep score, but stop myself. I want to say that I’ve loosened up my rigid thinking. That I no longer care about keeping score, but I confess I don’t grab for the pad because I’m not sure I’m doing it right. We’re trying Rummy again and I can’t remember Nini’s rules. Am I teaching him the right way? If I don’t write it down, then the wrong rules don’t count. 

I force myself to sit, to teach him anyway. I let him peek at my cards and I point out his own matches. His giggles fill our living room.

If I’m going to track and count and tabulate, can I stack these moments instead? Can I pile them, one on top of the other, never crossing out or starting over, adding up to a childhood of feeling loved? 

My son talks about what he wants for Christmas (a transforming lizard) and he pauses every so often to demonstrate his ninja moves. I listen and nod. I let him win. 

***