Without her thick and fabulous animal, my grandmother was rail thin. “Starved down” was how she put it when she’d counseled me at age eleven. “You need to get yourself starved down, honey, before you keep fat on for too long. Baby fat is just another way to say ugly.” She and my mother had fought about whether I was old enough for benzedrine – her own personal savior, she called it, as in, “I am offering your daughter my own personal savior and you deny her?”
When I was alive, everything my grandmother did was bad. But an odd thing happened when she arrived in her rented limo that day, opened up our house, and barged in. She was, in all her obnoxious finery, dragging the light back in.
“You need help, Abigail,” my grandmother said after having eaten the first real meal my mother had cooked since my disappearance. My mother was stunned. She had donned her blue dishwashing gloves, filled the sink with sudsy water, and was preparing to do every dish. Lindsey would dry. Her mother, she assumed, would call upon Jack to pour her an after-dinner drink.
“Mother, that is so nice of you.”
“Don’t mention it,” she said. “I’ll just run out to the front hall and get my bag o’ magic.”
“Oh no,” I heard my mother say under her breath.
“Ah, yes, the bag o’ magic,” said Lindsey, who had not spoken the whole meal.
“Please, Mother!” my mother protested when Grandma Lynn came back.
“Okay, kids, clear off the table and get your mother over here. I’m doing a makeover.”
“Mother, that’s crazy. I have all these dishes to do.”
“Abigail,” my father said.
“Oh no. She may get you to drink, but she’s not getting those instruments of torture near me.”
“I’m not drunk,” he said.
“You’re smiling,” my mother said.
“So sue him,” Grandma Lynn said. “Buckley, grab your mother’s hand and drag her over here.” My brother obliged. It was fun to see his mother be bossed and prodded.
“Grandma Lynn?” Lindsey asked shyly.
My mother was being led by Buckley to a kitchen chair my grandmother had turned to face her.
“What?”
“Could you teach me about makeup?”
“My God in heaven, praise the Lord, yes!”
My mother sat down and Buckley climbed up into her lap. “What’s wrong, Mommy?”
“Are you laughing, Abbie?” My father smiled.
And she was. She was laughing and she was crying too.
“Susie was a good girl, honey,” Grandma Lynn said. “Just like you.” There was no pause. “Now lift up your chin and let me have a look at those bags under your eyes.”
Buckley got down and moved onto a chair. “This is an eyelash curler, Lindsey,” my grandmother instructed. “I taught your mother all of these things.”
“Clarissa uses those,” Lindsey said.
My grandmother set the rubber curler pads on either side of my mother’s eyelashes, and my mother, knowing the ropes, looked upward.
“Have you talked to Clarissa?” my father asked.
“Not really,” said Lindsey. “She’s hanging out a lot with Brian Nelson. They cut class enough times to get a three-day suspension.”
“I don’t expect that of Clarissa,” my father said. “She may not have been the brightest apple in the bunch, but she was never a troublemaker.”
“When I ran into her she reeked of pot.”
“I hope you’re not getting into that,” Grandma Lynn said. She finished the last of her seven and seven and slammed the highball glass down on the table. “Now, see this, Lindsey, see how when the lashes are curled it opens up your mother’s eyes?”
Lindsey tried to imagine her own eyelashes, but instead saw the star-clumped lashes of Samuel Heckler as his face neared hers for a kiss. Her pupils dilated, pulsing in and out like small, ferocious olives.
“I stand amazed,” Grandma Lynn said, and put her hands, one still twisted into the awkward handles of the eyelash curler, on her hips.
“What?”
“Lindsey Salmon, you have a boyfriend,” my grandmother announced to the room.
My father smiled. He was liking Grandma Lynn suddenly. I was too.
“Do not,” Lindsey said.
My grandmother was about to speak when my mother whispered, “Do too.”
“Bless you, honey,” my grandmother said, “you should have a boyfriend. As soon as I’m done with your mother, I’m giving you the grand Grandma Lynn treatment. Jack, make me an aperitif.”
