She Feeds
Disclaimer: When I was a kid, Hollywood had me believing that The Typical Grandmother was, among other things, soft-spoken, petite, and cute, with an old-lady name like Alice, Betty, Dottie, or Mildred—Millie for short. She played Bingo or canasta, spoke of the days when a soda cost a nickel, and baked cookies better than Betty Crocker.
Mine was not like that.
My grandma was squishy and gassy. She had short hair the color of TV static, and when you touched it, it felt rough, like a wool scrub pad. Like other grandmas, she had butterscotch suckers in her cavernous purse, but when she handed you one, it was half unwrapped with a used tissue stuck to it. She got the giggles at funerals, bit into onions like an apple, said ‘bitch’ and ‘fuck’ when necessary, and yelled ‘kids, I swear to God’ whenever she had a migraine and you or your cousins were making too much noise. She allowed you to ‘style’ her hair with wooden clothes pins and only kind of minded when you laughed while reminiscing about that time a grocery cart fell on top of her at the supermarket. And while most called her Wendy, her actual name was Widad, as in “What’s up Widad?” (my father’s favorite pun).
She was atypical, I guess. A grandma as salty as her chocolate chip cookies. And I wouldn’t want her—or her cookies—any other way. Yet the one thing that made her typical was her love of stuffing us with homemade meals until our skin bloated and glistened with the sheen of ‘the food sweats,’ as my husband calls it.
These are the tales of a grandma and her piggies.
*
Grandma plops a brick of cream cheese and a can of tuna into a bowl, blends them together, and calls it tuna dip. Our family eats it with pretzels, carrots, and celery, but if we could, we’d eat it with a spoon. We shovel it into our mouths with little concern for the creamy chunks of tuna that fall onto our shirts or chins. When we finish the first batch, Grandma approaches with a ladle and plastic salad serving bowl. Inside: more tuna dip. She scrapes the sides of the serving bowl, refills the crystal dip bowl, and steps back to watch the animals feed.
*
Every year at Christmas, the grandchildren help Grandma bake cookies. Her chocolate chip cookies are crisp and salty, but I don’t notice the salt until one day in high school, when my twin, Kirsten, makes me compare a store-bought chocolate chip cookie to Grandma’s. After this, I cannot eat Grandma’s chocolate chip cookies without thinking about the salt.
*
Dad loves Grandma’s chocolate chip cookies. It’s her shortbread cookies he can’t stand.
This is another thing I don’t notice until high school, when Dad refuses a cookie from the tin cookie can we pass around Grandma’s living room.
“I only eat them if I can dunk them in coffee,” Dad says.
I offer him coffee, but he declines. I get the hint.
Regardless of Dad’s feelings, Grandma’s shortbread cookies are special to me because Kirsten and I are the only two grandchildren who help bake them. Our cousins think that pricking rows of holes into each cookie is a tedious task, but I find it calming.
Shortbread Cookie Day becomes an unofficial holiday at Grandma’s, and like any holiday, it has its traditions: listening to Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” play on the record player, the sound of vinyl crackling like a fire. Grandma rolling up our sleeves for us while we squeeze buttery cookie batter between our fingers. Licking cookie dough off a spoon behind Grandma’s back. Grandma’s speech on the dangers of raw egg consumption.
One year, Grandma’s brother, Uncle Jim, joins us. We sit at the dining room table, which is covered in old newspapers, flour, and a turkey pan full of dough.
Uncle Jim’s overgrown, grey mustache covers part of his mouth and muffles his speech, but Kirsten and I can still understand him when he says that we are rolling the dough too thin, poking the rows too close together, and letting the dough dry out.
“Grand-ma, help” Kirsten yells into the kitchen.
Seconds later, Grandma banishes Uncle Jim to the living room, because no one talks shit on her bakers.
*
Grandma bakes a third cookie called a snowball, which is an almond cookie tossed in powdered sugar. Only my mom eats them.
Before Mom and Dad divorce, Grandma is like a mother to my mom. After, their relationship suffers turbulence. Snowballs only get made based on the status of Grandma and Mom’s relationship.
The following rules dictate snowball cookie making:
a.) If, on the day of baking, the Baker (Grandma) has positive feelings for the Consumer (Mom), the Consumer can have all the snowballs she wants.
b.) If, on the day of baking, the Baker (Grandma) has negative feelings for the Consumer (Mom), the Consumer can starve in hell.
Sometimes Grandma likes Mom, but Dad does not. When this happens, Grandma hides a tin of snowballs in Kirsten’s or my overnight bag and whispers, “Don’t tell Daddy.”
*
Grandma serves store-bought cookies during off-peak cookie baking season. Entenmann’s are her brand of choice. One day in high school, I am sitting in gym class telling my girlfriends that my grandmother pronounces Entenmann’s as “Unt-ta-mons.”
“She tries so hard to sound fancy,” I say. Then, without thinking it through, I say, “That’s like me calling Tastykakes* ‘tastycocks.’”
My friends cover their mouths to stifle their squeals. I am mortified. When I tell my grandmother this story, she says, “That’ll teach you to pick on me.”
*
Grape leaves are a Middle Eastern cuisine that Grandma cooks for Christmas Eve and Easter. Kirsten and I smuggle these home to Mom, too. They are actual leaves (similar to the maple leaf) stuffed with rice, tomato sauce, and ground meat. I obsess over making my friends try one. “It’s like spaghetti sauce wrapped in a leaf,” I tell them.
I am not a good salesperson.
*
Before Dad marries our stepmom, Kirsten and I spend our weekends with Dad at Grandma’s house, where Dad lives. Every-other-Friday, the three of us walk in to find Wheel of Fortune on the TV, tuna dip on the coffee table, and spaghetti on the stove. Grandma’s spaghetti sticks together, and her red sauce always has one limp slice of green pepper floating in it.
One Friday night, Kirsten and I discover that Grandma isn’t home.
“Where is she?” Kirsten asks. “Did someone steal her?”
“She has to work late*,” Dad says.
But who will feed us? How will we survive? Because the last time Dad cooked for us, he stuck a spoon inside a jar of peanut butter and called it a peanut butter lollipop.
Dad solves the dinner dilemma by ordering hoagies from the local sub shop. Kirsten eats half a hoagie and feels full, because she is thin. I, however, am curvier, and with Dad’s permission, I eat an entire tuna hoagie by myself. When everyone is finished eating, Dad falls asleep on the couch. Kirsten and I take this opportunity to do the one thing Grandma would never let us do: jump up-and-down on Dad’s bed.
Minutes later, my stomach does a somersault and my mouth starts to water. I yell for my dad as I run down the stairs. Dad meets me at the bottom step, but before I can answer his “What?” I vomit on top of his shoes.
This is what happens without Grandma.
*
Grandma doesn’t always get it right.
When I am in second grade, New Jersey suffers a blizzard and ice storm that keeps Kirsten and me out of school for two weeks. Because of the amount of snow days, spring break is cut short by one day. For some reason, our school district decides that we will have off all week, except for Tuesday.
Dad has us for spring break because Mom is in San Francisco with her sister, so he’s responsible for taking us to school that Tuesday. Kirsten and I have never gone to school from Grandma’s house, which is in Pennsylvania. It feels strange to have Dad wake us up and tell us to get ready for school.
After Dad attempts to do my hair, which he ties into a low ponytail with a rubber band he found in the junk drawer, Kirsten and I join Grandma in the kitchen, where she is preparing our lunches. But instead of two brown paper lunch bags, Grandma hands us two full-sized paper grocery bags.
Kirsten and I do an inventory of items inside the heavy bags while Grandma cleans up breakfast. Each bag contains a foot-long turkey hoagie, a banana, an orange, a party-sized bag of potato chips, a chocolate cupcake, and a half-liter of Pepsi. I’m afraid that if I eat all of this, I will die.
“Uh, Grams,” Kirsten says. “We are eight.”
“I know, baby,” she says.
Grandma doesn’t understand. She thinks that this meal is what two growing girls need to make it through a day of multiplication problems and reading lessons, so we let her think it is the greatest bagged lunch ever, thank her, and go to school determined to eat as much as we can without exploding.
*
The cousins have weekend sleepovers once a month at Grandma’s house. We love to watch movies and play hide-and-seek, but most of all we love waking up in the morning to Grandma’s breakfasts. Grandma’s breakfast is ninety percent of the reason we’re there.
These breakfasts are epic: French toast—which is soggy in the middle—bacon, scrambled eggs, spicy home fries, and scrapple. That’s right—scrapple. We think scrapple is pork, but we don’t know for sure. I don’t think we want to know. All we want is for Grandma to serve it thinly sliced and slightly burnt.
But it doesn’t stop at breakfast. For lunch, dinner, dessert, and an after-midnight snack, Grandma lets us eat pizza, creamed chicken on rice, chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, tuna dip, Doritos, Fruity Pebbles, and Mary Jane peanut taffy, although I only eat the taffy when I am bored. By Sunday afternoon, I am desperate for an apple.
*
Grandma has been gone for 19 years. I rely on a microwave to feed my two young daughters, but I know how to cook the essentials: sticky spaghetti, tuna dip, grape leaves, and scrapple.
On the other side of the thin veil separating our world from hers, Grandma greets loved ones with a giant ladle held between her two ghost hands, something sloppy and delicious oozing over the mammoth spoon’s plastic sides.
She is ready to feed.
She is ready to love.
Part of me can’t wait to find her, to get me a big fat Grandma hug, to taste her food again, and to end my first heavenly meal with a piece of hard candy half-wrapped and stuck to a used tissue at the bottom of her purse.
*Tastykake is a Philadelphia-based baking company famous for its Peanut Butter Kandy Kake. If you want to try one, break into my home and look in the bottom right drawer of the black dresser in the bedroom closest to the bathroom.
*Grandma is a secretary at Sunoco, not a professional grandmother. This is something I often forget.
-Lindsey Kemp
Lindsey Kemp writes from her lumpy couch in New Jersey. Her hobbies include watching trash TV, spending time with her two daughters and husband, and looking at pictures of corgis online. Her writing has appeared in multiple anthologies and publications such as Chortle, Metropolis: Philly, 5x5, and Parks and Recreation, and Literally Literary (forthcoming). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine.