The Dust Pan

I wrote this essay in 1997.

The Dust Pan

My husband and I spent a Saturday afternoon clearing out the clutter from our tiny house.  We collected a truckful of junk and dumped it into a corner of our yard.  What a pile of garbage we had collected:  a lamp without a fixture, a dangerously broken floor heater, a half dozen terra cotta pots, several trashbags full of clothing, and other goodies.  Well, one man’s junk is another’s merchandise.  Gint suggested that we pile our stuff into our pickup and take it to his grandmother’s house.

The dreaded Lithuanian grandmother:  four feet tall, crusty, hollow, crackly, white, and crevaced.  She is always ready to tell you what you’re doing wrong with your life.  The first time I met Grandma Pat was a week before our trip to Lithuania.  Gint and I had just met two months before, and being in one of those in-between times of my life, I invited myself along on a trip to Lithuania he had been planning for quite a while.  I felt spontaneous and free and fearless.  Then I met Grandma Pat.  As we sat in the parlor of her modest and hot apartment, she waggled a bony finger at us.  “Don’t you trust anybody while you are in Lithuania,” she said in a dusty voice.  “They’ll rob you and take you for everything you have.  Everybody in Lithuania is hungry.”

I soon learned why when she presented us with lunch: tasteless tuna sandwiches on Kaunas black bread.  I politely nibbled mine and wished I hadn’t purchased my airplane ticket the day before.

My second encounter with Grandma Pat was at Thanksgiving.  The holiday tradition in my husband’s family is for everyone to gather at her apartment.  As we entered her home I realized it was extremely hot again, and not because she had been baking turkey and pumpkin pie all day.  No, it was hot because she never opens the windows, and even on an autumn day in Los Angeles this can prove to be deadly in her second story apartment. Everyone eyed the digital thermometer on the wall as it climbed into the high 80s. 

Thanksgiving dinner was imported by Gint’s mother Jo, who prepared the meal at her own house in Mount Washington and then transported it in plastic crates to West Hollywood.  After dinner, we retired to the living room, and Grandma Pat showed us a bottle of liquor she had won in a raffle at a Lithuanian festival:  Goldschläger, an expensive spirit with flakes of gold floating in the bottle.  Grandma revealed that she was saving it for a special occasion.  Gint’s father Gene took the bottle from her and eyed the gold flakes inside.  He smile broadly and nodded, “Yes, this is a special occasion.”

           

Grandma Pat tore the bottle from his hands and said, “I didn’t mean today!”

Gene hiccupped and said, “But why?”

“It’s not an after dinner drink,” she said.  A month later at Christmas we asked about the bottle, and she shrugged and said she had given it away to someone, she couldn’t remember who.

Over the last five years, episodes like the Goldschläger incident happened infrequently, only on those days when the family gathered for the holidays.  And here it was, a bright Saturday afternoon—nothing special—and my husband wanted to drag me to Grandma Pat’s.  There was a perfectly good reason why, too.  She keeps her garage stocked with a large assortment of yard sale nuggets. Every afternoon she opens her garage door that faces the alley and sells the items to everyone and anyone interested.  She makes pennies.  I know where she gets the stuff—she wanders through the streets of West Hollywood and rummages through trashbins and cardboard boxes.  I wonder if anyone has ever bought something from her that they had thrown out years before.

And now we had more treasures to add to the garage.  Grandma’s garage is full of decapitated dolls, 8-track cassettes, velevet dog paintings, dusty books about outdoor survival, rusty toasters, someone else’s red taffeta dress, boxes of buttons, Dean Martin record albums, termite-eaten bookshelves, dozens of wicker baskets, dirty used tennis balls, an even a corroded kitchen sink.  Turn off the lights and you’re in a haunted house, cobwebs included.

Reluctantly I agreed to go to Grandma Pat’s to drop off our junk.  I recalled the last time we visited, which had been exceptionally tedious.  It started with a perusal of the family pictures.  Hours later she decided to serve lunch: boiled chicken and boiled potatoes and a boiled conversation—basic Lithuanian fare.  After the meal she patted my stomach and asked if I was pregnant—I wasn’t.  She asked, “Well, what’s wrong with you then?”

I stammered.

“Well?”  The word hung thickly in the stuffy air.  I wanted to pluck out that word and stick it in my pocket.  “What’s wrong with you?”  she asked again.

I shot my husband the please-make-her-shut-up glare.  “We have to go,” he said.  That was my last non-holiday outing to Grandma’s place.

I pleaded with my husband to let me off the hook on this one.  He didn’t need me there, I’m weak and can’t lift things, and after all I have to clean the house.  He said it would be good for me to go, we haven’t seen her in a while, and she’s getting old.  “Fine.  I’ll go.”

Grandma greeted us at her door and asked if we had eaten.  Thankfully we had.  My husband suggested that we start moving things right away since the truck was open.  So, we exited Baba Yaga’s oven upstairs and headed to the ninth level of the inferno downstairs.  As the garage door careened into its cradle on the ceiling, a cloud of dust billowed out.  I choked but decided to tough it out. This is, after all, a visit to Grandma’s.  I chanted my mantra: be nice, be nice, be nice.

Grandma Pat floated through the garage, picking up and caressing items in a way that she would never caress a human being.  With Zen focus she picked up a vase, she was in the moment, and she asked me if I wanted to take it home.  If only she could hug her grandson with the same tenderness.   “No thank you, we have plenty of vases.  But this one is lovely.”  Be nice, be nice, be nice.

She continued to offer up all sorts of items: that size 2 dress, this painting of someone I didn’t know, those measuring cups, these coffee mugs.  For some reason she didn’t remember that we had just dumped a truckload of stuff in her garage in an attempt to create some walking space on the poor cluttered floors of our cottage.  Wasn’t she paying attention?

I had thought she was finished with the inventory when she picked up one more object.  “How about this dust pan,” she said.  The bright orange dustpan gleamed as she held it up. I flashed back to our cleanup of the morning—no dustpan in sight, it would have been nice to sweep the floors.  Finally something we needed.

“Oh, we really need a dust pan,” I said.

Her eyes lit up in stark blue excitement.  “You do!” she said.  Her Parkinson’s hand shook the dust pan in my direction.  Our fingers touched.  Her skin was cold and smooth, funny but I don’t remember touching her hands before.  Her knuckles whitened as she gripped my hand.  This old lady was strong, probably from sorting through garbage.  She exposed her gappy teeth in a crusty smile.  I had become the perfect wife for her grandson.  I had accepted her dust pan.

The dust pan had become our peace pipe, and I clutched it tightly as we exchanged a rare embrace.  I lingered a moment as I held her tiny, shallow body.  Maybe she’s not so bad.  So what if she’s not warm and affectionate like my effusive Italian family.  She expressed her love differently.  She gives from her heart and her soul: she gives from her garage.