The Alien and the Biscotti
It all began with a biscotti. A fat, triple chocolate biscotti dusted in powdered sugar to be precise.
On December 25th, on the precipice of my thirtieth birthday, I was surrounded by my boisterous family, quietly musing on the fact that it required seven Jews to properly celebrate Christmas in my house. As I gazed around our table, deep in thought about what had gone into preparing our very large non-kosher meal and the vast amounts of good will and love that had made this moment possible for my goyisha husband, I was suddenly distracted by my Jewish grandmother who was lifting a biscotti towards her mouth while simultaneously sighing with pleasure. It wasn’t so much the fact that she was on her third biscotti that snapped me out of my head and into the present moment as the fact that I suddenly felt the most overwhelming sense of déjà vu.
Wiping her hands on her napkin with very precise and dainty movements that belied the ferocity with which she had devoured her cookie, she asked, “Did you make these?” When I replied in the affirmative, she asked “Are they made with butter?” As I again replied in the affirmative, she stated “Do you know how many calories are in these? They’re lethal. These shouldn’t be allowed,” as she reached for another. She then repeated verbatim this exact conversation and pattern of cookie decimation two more times within the span of ten minutes.
At first, I laughed it off, pleased that my grandmother, a self-avowed connoisseur of the finer things in life, loved my biscotti enough to eat a quantity that was beyond even my husband’s capacity. And yet, in my slow replaying of the story, something niggled at me. At first, I thought it was the repetitiveness of our conversation and my grandmother’s insatiable cookie eating. Although unusual, remembering the hundreds of times my maternal grandfather would routinely call me with a request only to repeat the same or a similar request in short order, I quickly dismissed her repetitiveness as the source of my discomfort.
As I continued to ponder on what I found so unnerving about our interaction, I realized that it wasn’t so much the repetitiveness of the scene as my grandmother’s apparent complete obliviousness to the fact that she had already tasted my biscotti, already knew the associated pleasure, and had already heard the answer to each question she posed. Each inhaled biscotti and each series of questions had elicited a response that indicated it was the first time she was tasting the exquisiteness of the chocolate encountering her taste buds as the cookie crumbled and melted into her mouth thus justifying her surprise at learning that I had indeed created these rapturous confections.
After pinpointing what was worrying me, I raised my concern to my father. Despite my father’s prompt dismissal of my fears with the pithy statement of “Don’t be ridiculous, there’s nothing wrong with my mother. She’s just a narcissist who loves to eat. She’s so self-absorbed, she doesn’t even listen to herself,” there was something wrong with my grandmother. It slowly became apparent over the coming months as she lost the plot at the bridge table, more and more frequently forgetting signals she and her partner had developed over decades and could stealthily convey with slight of hand to one another in their sleep, as the weekly meal plan she had developed and implemented thirty years before in response to my grandfather’s diagnosed diabetes was often skewed, wrongly implemented, or inappropriately seasoned, and conversations became more and more dreary and pedestrian.
As her faculties diminished and her social circle became circumscribed, her waistline enlarged, and her corporeal body gained girth. Her physical body expanded inch by inch and the beautiful, smart, complex, and sharp woman disappeared in proportionate measure. Slowly and imperceptibly at first, and then more quickly and almost without warning, the woman who used to swim a mile every day, the woman who took immense pride in wearing stylish clothes and turning men’s heads well into her eighties, the woman who raised four boys into accomplished men while undergoing the death of her eldest with dignity and aplomb, the woman who educated herself about art and created a credible business discovering and brokering emerging and soon to be well known artists, and the woman who was a revered and feared card shark at bridge clubs spanning the Montreal network, was gone.
The last time I saw my grandmother, my six-year-old son was with me. Walking into the apartment building that I had visited countless times before, I was flooded with memories: memories of the doorman who never failed to greet me by name since I was a young girl, memories of learning how to dive in the outdoor swimming pool days before taking a swimming test I was sure I would fail, memories of noticing that the elevator panel omitted the number thirteen and learning about developers’ proclivities for omitting that cursed number in the floor count to appease people’s superstitious beliefs, and memories of standing on my tippy toes as I gazed with fascination down the floor’s trash chute while wondering what it would feel like to slide down twenty one floors. All of these smaller memories were encapsulated within the larger landscape of family dinners and events attended by a regular, albeit eccentric cast of characters.
As my son and I walked down the hall, shuffling along the deliriously patterned carpet that hadn’t changed since the early 1980s, I was hit by the fact that although it had been more than a year since I had last seen my grandmother, it felt as if time was frozen in place. Stepping into her building was like stepping into a time capsule containing the last forty years of my life.
This feeling was further reinforced as I entered my grandmother’s apartment, moving beyond the foyer and into her spacious living room. Everything was precisely the same as the last hundred times I had visited over the preceding decades. Familiar art hung around the spacious room; solid, hand-crafted wooden furniture stood silently, evoking memories of visits to my grandfather in his furniture store; and the glossy black grand piano adorned with pictures of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren was in exactly the same position as when I had been there last .
Overcome by a powerful sense of being at home, I looked at Abie, one of my grandmother’s caretakers who had been with her for the better part of a decade, and asked, “Where’s Baba?” He gazed at me in confusion, paused, and with empathy painted all over his face, gently pointed to the chair next to me and said, “She’s right there.” Startled, I tried to gain my composure and sat down next to her. After attempting to make small talk for awhile with no response, my son and I left.
As we walked through the bitterly cold East coast air, I was lost in thought and barely heard my son as he asked me in a small voice, “Was she alive or dead?” It was in that moment that I realized that not only was the woman I knew as my grandmother gone, but in her place was an alien. An alien composed of flesh and bones without soul or energy. Three weeks later, she was dead.
In the decade since, I’ve long thought about our final visit, my son’s confusion, and how easily I understood his question. Although I’ve often pondered on how a body could be simultaneously alive and devoid of life, it was only as I approached my 50th year, that clarity emerged.
In attempts to cope with the ever-present demands of single motherhood, managing a company, and meeting my son’s needs, the veneer that presented my well put together life began to crack. Whereas I appeared to be effortlessly gliding through water, like a duck, I was paddling furiously below the surface, slowly drowning on drops of water I invisibly and continuously inhaled with each pressure surge. Stresses that previously seemed manageable slowly rose to a tsunami level that, in its final tidal wave, engulfed me. My veneer cracked, my carefully curated life fell apart, and I was broken open.
At first, it felt catastrophic. Having quietly closed so many doors inside myself to achieve what I thought I needed to, I had, like my grandmother, become an alien to myself, simultaneously alive and yet not. And, just like my grandmother, my frenetic and full life fell away, leaving inertia and a quiet void in its place.
As I sat in my newly found space and quiet, a sense of relief, soon followed by curiosity, gradually inundated me. As I roamed my inner landscape, exploring nooks and crannies within me that I had either long forgotten existed or ignored, I began to find out who I really was, the real me that lay beneath the layers of expectations and shoulds I had spent my life trying to fulfill. And, it was through this exploration that I found who I wanted to be, eventually shoring up the patience and strength to take steps towards becoming a woman who was true to herself and eviscerate the alien that had replaced me. The woman my strong, complex, and smart grandmother had always inspired me to be.
