As the sun sets I tire of sitting with my grandparents and leave the porch to walk up the old staircase to my mother’s bedroom. My chest is tight; I don’t want her to go, don’t want to be left with my grandparents for the night. My parents are running late—they’re always running late—and my father stands in the hallway outside the bedroom in his white briefs, selecting a tie from the closet rack. In the bedroom my middle sister, Nicola, lies facedown on my parents’ bed, watching my mother dress. She shimmies control-top pantyhose up her legs. Never a bra—my mother, flat-chested like I will be, hates bras. Her hair still has rollers in it from the white plastic case on the dresser. Though my mother spent her teenage years taking the train out to Coney Island with a bag containing baby oil she slathered on her skin and a homemade aluminum foil sun reflector to sit behind, and she and Andy both turn nugget-brown as soon as summer begins, my mother’s face is unlined. By the time I’m twenty-five I’ll have more wrinkles than she will in her fifties. This is the gift of her Italian genes, she says. The gift, she says, that came with the curse of her hair.
Every morning of my childhood she hot-rollers her dark brown hair into the Jackie O. bouffant she adopted as a teenager, the only hairstyle, she swears, that suits her hair’s texture. My father is in charge of packing the roller set for trips. My mother claims she ruined her hair with lye as a teenager, trying to get the kink out. Once, on a family trip to Jamaica, I’ll sit with her in a beauty shop and see two women laughing to themselves under dryers, looking at us. One of them will come over. “Your mama must’ve slept with a black man,” she’ll say to my mother, nodding her head for emphasis.
My mother will laugh. “My father’s Italian,” she’ll say. “Vincent Jimmy Marzano from Astoria, Queens.” How much more Italian could you get than that?
The woman will raise her eyebrows and look pointedly at my dark curls. “Well, then you must’ve slept with a black man!” Again my mother will laugh.
Now she stands in front of the chest my father had custom-made for her, its drawers still mostly empty but its size a kind of promise, and selects a necklace he gave her, strings of ebony-black and quartz-pink beads that meet in a large flower at the knot of her throat. She beckons to me, and I come stand behind her. She lifts her hair from her neck and I reach up to hook the necklace’s clasp. I am almost as tall as she is. I have her hair, her love of books, her smile. I will grow into her hips, her nose, her determination, her height. When I finish securing the necklace, she turns to me, her eyes shining.
This is a rare night, a magic night. Other nights she dresses alone, without my father in the hall, and my father is off somewhere in the dark, having taken the car and sped squealing out of our gravel driveway. On one of those nights my brother will come into the room and watch her silently while my sister and I lie on the bed. “Who do you love more?” he’ll suddenly say. “Daddy or us?” His words will come perilously close to acknowledging what never can be: that there is a choice to be made.
But not tonight. Tonight is beautiful. My mother blots her lipstick. My father knots his tie and smooths his jacket up over his shoulders, then takes her hand. The two of them leave in one breath, a cloud of perfume and aftershave trailing them like a memory.
*
Later that night now, perhaps ten o’clock. The dark as dark as it will become, the world outside hushed, only the flash of an occasional car’s headlights as it passes by the playroom window on its way to a far, unknowable somewhere. My grandmother lies a few feet from the window, on a nubby green sofa bed. At the other side of the doorway to the playroom is the staircase she has just climbed down, after she and my grandfather tucked us into our beds. Now the house is quiet, only the box attic fan whirring in the air and the faint yellow glow of nightlights that line the hallways. The fan must stay on—my father’s rule—but in the long wooden room with buckets of our wooden blocks and shelves of comic books, my grandmother shivers. She pulls an afghan around her, pink wool she crocheted for my birth. She and my grandfather went to bed together. But now she’s alone.
The stairs groan, the sound of a single step.
The afghan is knitted loosely, the cold air coming through the spaces between its knots and the wool scratchy against her skin. She turns and pulls it tighter. She cannot get warm without my grandfather’s body beside her. Every night since they married, they have lain together. Six years from now, my parents will throw them a fiftieth-anniversary party at a restaurant in the city and we will gather to celebrate the sheer accomplishment of the days, of all those accumulated nights. Now she reaches for the Virgin Mary prayer card she keeps tucked near her pillow. The card shows the Blessed Mother’s eyes half-closed in peace, her hands pressed together in constancy. On the back of the card is my grandmother’s mother’s name. Every night since her mother died, decades ago, she has kept this card next to her head. She touches its cool, laminated surface, tells her mother good night. My grandmother knows where she’ll go when she dies. She calls that place her truest home.
The stairs groan again, the sound of a body climbing them.
My grandfather wears the hearing aid, not my grandmother. She must hear the stairs, must hear my grandfather’s heavy pant as he stands on the step. Does she know where he is going? Does she know what he will do there?
*
The staircase is still my father’s pride. He tells every visitor of its history and keeps the banister at a hard shine. On the wall opposite the banister hang framed photographs of our family, arranged in reverse so that a climb up the stairs is also a climb backward through time: First we smile for the school-day camera in stiff collars and too-tight braids, then we coo on our backs as babies. Then comes my mother, young in pearls and her bouffant, and my father as a little blond-haired boy with his nose pressed to a fence, gazing hungrily beyond the camera’s frame. Beneath the pictures, stapled to the steps, is a slice of burgundy carpet that serves as a runner, but it slips perilously while the old wood protests.
The staircase was so loud I could hear its creaks from the back of the house, in the room I shared with Nicola. Listening I pictured my grandfather as he climbed: the way he had to turn his back to the wall of photographs, grip the banister with both hands, and side-shuffle up. How his thick fingers gripped the wood, then the angina that pressed his mouth into a grim line of surprise, his fingers tightening and his arms locked as he breathed into the pain. If he could just bear this one attack, it might be the last. He endures the fact of his old age the same way: by bracing against time’s press, always seeming to half-hope that someday he will be returned to himself as a young man with all possibilities ahead.
My grandmother wears housedresses and each night coils her short gray curls onto tight foam rollers she sometimes doesn’t bother to remove in the morning. But my grandfather still irons his trousers into a sharp front crease and dons a tweed newsboy cap to match. He keeps his cane polished and ready by the front door for his daily constitutionals. Another year or two from now, still a year before I will walk out of a room whenever my grandfather comes into it, I will wait until they are alone together in my parents’ kitchen. Then I will ask them if, old as they are, they have gotten used to the idea of dying.