My granddaughter visits me today with her mother, my daughter. They come in from the rainstorm damp and cheerful and carrying containers of soup and pastries. My granddaughter unwraps her long stylish scarf from around her tiny neck and throws it on the floor. "Nonna we brought you lemon tarts. Sweet Melissa is the best bakery in the world," she says in her passionate voice. She is going to be five next week. That was the age I was when my father committed suicide, but who's thinking of that? I am too ill to be held accountable for what I say anyway. Having caught a cold from my daughter and her daughter last week, I spiraled instantly into pneumonia mode with my lousy lungs. Even so I smoke while I choke. But so what? My little life is not worth a fig in this world now anyway. But that is just the sick person speaking. You can't blame me for what the high fever speaks. "Nonna here is vitamin C," my granddaughter continues, while her mother puts the groceries away in my kitchen. Bags of garbage hang on the door knob. I'm too sick to waddle down the hallway and throw them out. The most I can do day after day is to climb out of bed and make a cup of tea and climb back in with my laptop. I play scrabble online with strangers and lose badly but there again, it is because I am so dizzy and unfunctional that I cannot think of words that contain the letters D V A C O A and O.
My granddaughter takes a handful of large vitamin C disks out of the bottle and holds them out to me. "Here," she says. "Take some."
"Have you ever had one of these?" I ask. "They are so good. But I already had 2 thousand milligrams today so I better wait."
"No I never had any before," she says, and her face lights up with the good idea.
"Wait," I say. She is about to put one in her mouth. "Maybe you should ask your mommy first... Actually they look like checkers," I tell her. "We could play checkers with them..."
She looks around my small room for the checker board. Toys are still scrambled around on the floor from last week when we set up a tiny pizza shop for the little people we play with... We have a whole village of small characters and the town they live in is called Chester-Land. Chester is the main character, a farmer made of resin that I bought at a farm supply store in Vermont, along with a woman we named Maria and another bag-lady sort of woman we named Mrs McConkle. Mrs McConkle is their neighbor and she babysits for their children. Maria and Chester are married but their marriage is shakey, Chester who is exclusively worked by my granddaughter, is always running off and living somewhere under my bed or in my mystical-books-bookshelf. He also has a habit of flying, which at first I tried to discourage in favor of realism, but my granddaughter insists that Chester can fly and so it became part of the towns history, Chester the magical resident of Chester Land. Maria does a lot of screaming for him. I work Maria, and she is always shouting "Chester! Chester where are you? Dinner's ready!" And he hides from her. They have a son named Jimmy who I also speak. He is a blue plastic guy who is perpetually in a sitting position. He used to ride the tractor when they owned the farm, but now that they run a restaurant, an ice cream parlor, an amusement park, and a pizza take out place, Jimmy often is sitting in one kitchen or another or riding atop an elephant or carousel horse. But here I am rattling on about an imaginary village when I meant to explain the secrets of the universe.
My apartment, a one room studio in a grim enormous project-like building, is the setting for the imaginary school my granddaughter and I invented. There is a sign hanging on the wall that says the name of the institution, "Teshuvah Academy". I named it that as an inside joke, as I live on Returner Avenue and To Return in Hebrew is Teshuvah, although it really means to return to God, to repent. I named it that because I had moved here to repair my parenting mistakes by being a good grandparent. I moved here to be forgiven, but in truth I am not forgiven. Yet my granddaughter loves me and I love her, so it has been a good experience. At Teshuvah Academy (on the days her mother is at work), we study art and math and reading and religion. I have taught her about many religions and she tells me her favorite one is Hassidism because she loves the stories of the Baal Shem Tov and the flaming sword that points the way to the Garden of Eden and the Promised Land. "I like the story of Jesus too," she says, as we ponder together while eating peanut butter sandwiches on the bed. "I'm Jewish but I believe in everything."
"Me too," I say. "It all seems right, except Buddha. I don't believe in Buddha."
"Why not, Nonna?" she asks me. She looks worried.
"Well," I say, "Buddha doesn't like anyone to have an ego. And I like my ego."
"What is an Egor?," she wonders. I laugh and explain as best I can to her. "But I like Buddha because I believe in reincarnation," she says when I finish.
"Oh yeah, I forgot about that," I agree. "Wow you have quite a good memory."
"I remember everything," she agrees. "Even this. I remember this already happened."
My granddaughter is going to be five in a week and I am so sick I cannot climb out of my shell long enough to buy her a present. My illness sweeps over me and I shake and sweat and want to sleep but am too sick to sleep. After my daughter and my granddaughter leave, (they were off to a french lesson) I eat the soup and the rolls and the candy bar and some chips and an avocado and just when I am about to pass out from breathlessness and stuffing myself, I rise up in bed like a spirit detaching itself from a useless body and stagger to the laptop where I quickly type in my word on the Scrabble board.... AVOCADO, a 7 letter 100 points word. I can't claim to know how these things come to me. I give all the credit to this crushing illness.
