A Room With One Door

I hope that my life never becomes a room with only one door, as it has become for my grandmother, Delphine.

A few weeks ago, my parents and I made the drive to Troy, MI, to the house where my mother grew up, to visit my Grandma Del and Grandpa Bill. We were to have dinner and celebrate my grandmother’s 86^th birthday, and we also planned to help out around the house: dad and I carried the leaf-blower up the rickety basement steps, because Grandpa, at 91 years old, still insists on doing all of his own yard work; mom and I helped cook, set the table, and clean up the kitchen. 

My family has always been small, and it is even smaller now. Yet there was pierogi, gołąbki, kapusta, ham, and kielbasa—no Polish soirée could be complete without them. There was a cake and at least two pies. And of course fruit jello, all the rage as a status symbol in the 50s, is ever-present, since in many ways my grandparents have never left that golden era.

There is so much food that even after it is divided up among family members, it can be lived off of for a week (unless I am involved, in which case, it lasts more like two days). All the fine china and silver was out on display, set just right, and fresh candles were placed at the center of the table. The rest of us wouldn’t care if we were eating off of paper plates, but this is the way it has always been done. My grandmother was a Depression baby, growing up in poverty with three siblings and a single immigrant mother in a broken home in Hamtramck, Detroit; she worked hard for what she has, and she is proud of it. She still lives in fear of those days of having nothing. Wasting food before her eyes is the greatest sin, and in her basement is a stockpile of cans, ready for the taking should disaster strike.

She and her sister Pauline never knew their own father, although my mother has done extensive research and thinks that she has located his pauper's grave in Sandusky Cemetery. She did know her stepfather, the sire of her other two siblings, Billy and Wanda, but he died of a heart attack when they were still quite young. 

I don't know much about the third father, but the fourth was an abusive, chauvinistic man, who their Polish-speaking mother married more out of necessity than out of love. In a world where immigrants were looked down upon and women were shunted from the workforce, a woman with four children had few options. So men came and went, and when the house was empty of them, my great-grandmother sent Delphine and her other three children door to door, selling hand-made items so that they could eat dinner that night.

They did receive some welfare. Once, my great-grandmother was accused of fraud, for a neighbor had claimed that they were spending the money on luxury items instead of on food. In some respects, this was true. The social worker came to my great grandmother, demanding justification. My great-grandmother pointed to Pauline’s violin and my grandmother’s piano, and explained that they weren’t a luxury. To my great-grandmother, music was food, and an avenue through which her children could rise up out of poverty. Her home would starve without it. Seeing the conditions they were living in, the social worker was so touched by her story that she let the matter rest. Shortly after, my grandmother began taking piano lessons from a woman nearby in exchange for completing chores for her every day of the week after school.

My grandmother was a brilliant student, and she even got into Cass Technical, which at the time was the most prestigious high school in Detroit. Her dream was to go to college. She wanted to teach and play her music. Her stepfather, husband number four, did not approve of this dream.

There’s a much-told story in our family about how Delphine got to go to college. Babka and her fourth husband were walking down the street, coming back from the butcher's with their meat. They were arguing passionately about whether or not my grandma Del would continue going to school. Babka's husband was demanding that Delphine drop out of high school and go to work instead in order to provide for the family.

“It’s ridiculous for a woman to go to college,” he snarled. “I forbid it!”

My great-grandmother turned then, looked straight at her husband, threw the pork chops into the gutter in a fit of rage, and screamed, “My Delphine will go to school, and you can go to hell!”

Despite the tenuous position it left the family in, my great-grandmother packed her husband’s things in a suitcase and threw it on the porch that very day. That was the end of that. I often think about how brave that was, knowing how financially hard it would be without that terrible man in their lives.

My grandmother did go to college. Fulltime, too. She paid her own way, working three jobs, singing in the choir, and playing the organ for her church. And when she was done, she continued to work hard; she scrimped and she saved. It is thanks to her that I do not have 45,000 dollars of debt right now. She worked her way up from poverty so that I didn’t have to, and provided over 10,000 dollars a year towards my bachelor’s degree. Without her, I would certainly not be where I am.

She still works hard. She refuses to hire a maid, and despite being nigh on deaf, blind in one eye, and hunched from severe osteoporosis, she works endlessly to keep the big colonial house up to par with her expectations.

But despite her efforts to stop her world from changing, pieces of her heart have been chipped away over the years. Pauline, her sister, was first, although the incident is hardly mentioned now. It is one of the skeletons in our family's closet. I never knew Pauline, but from what I gather, she fell into a deep depression after her young son died, and so she attempted to commit suicide. She was “treated” by electroshock therapy. Not the modern kind, but the kind in horror films that does more damage than good. It drove her deeper into madness and depression, until she died of premature senility. My grandmother says that Pauline died of cancer, and we don’t correct her; the truth is too painful. And, in sooth, manic-depressive thoughts are a kind of cancer, one that eats until nothing is left.

Then Billy, who also struggled with madness. It is a darkness that seems to run rampant in my family. He was a child of the Depression, and a hoarder. But he did not just hoard cans in the basement. I never met him, although he didn’t pass away from colon cancer until I was well into my teens. He stayed in Hamtramck, holed up in a tiny house piled with newspapers, and never went outside. When he could no longer work because of this, my Great Aunt Wanda and Grandma Del sent him money, and went to visit him from time to time. But not too often, I think. They loved Billy, but it was hard to see what he had become. My grandma always tells me that he was such a happy child, a mischief maker, a comedian. But life can turn comedy into tragedy with a flick of its wrist.

Wanda and Grandma Del were the ones who lasted, who kept their sanity through the hardships. I loved Aunt Wanda. She always gave me books for Christmas, some of which I appreciated right away, and others that I did not rediscover until much later: The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland, and even my first Harry Potter. She was never angry, always kind and giving. I haven’t a single negative memory of her. We always went to her house for New Years, and sometimes on Thanksgiving, and she would show off her button collection. She loved her button club, and she loved to travel with her daughter, my cousin Carol. Even as she got older, they went places together: Alaska, the Sequoia National Park.

She and my grandmother were incredibly close-knit, the last ones remaining in a family that had struggled to survive from day one. Best friends. They visited, and when they couldn’t visit, they wrote. They went to Polish lessons together, trying to regain the ancestral language they had lost over the years. Wanda swam almost every day, too, and was in wonderful health. Until the cancer. She wasted away as the mesothelioma spread and the chemotherapy made her sick. In the end, she began refusing it. I didn’t blame her. The last time I saw her, I almost started crying immediately, because she looked like a skeleton. Barely recognizable. 

And near the very end, she refused to see anyone except Carol, not even my grandmother. My grandmother was heartbroken by this, but I don’t think she understood that Wanda wanted to spare her that memory. She didn’t want anyone to see what death’s door looked like, not even her sister.

My grandmother misses her terribly. She is the last, now, staring forward at a future that has a single door. She has watched other people walk through it, people that she loves. Her eyes are fixed on that door now, waiting until the time when she too must pass through it, and she has given up looking for others.

That is why a few weeks ago, on her 86^th birthday, I made my grandmother cry. I walked up behind her and put my arm around her, drawing a loving circle on her back with my hand. To me, the gesture was innocent. I had no idea the reaction it would trigger.

“That feels so good, Abby,” she said, putting her arm around me. She gripped me fiercely, almost desperately. Her hands are still strong, despite everything. “I have such a wonderful family.”

Her voice broke completely then as she started to cry, leaning against me for support. She was once as tall as me, but the osteoporosis and her back forces her head to my stomach now. “I miss my family. It’s such a terrible thing, Abby. When one thing can come and take everything.” But then her words were choked by grief.

I had never seen my grandmother cry like that before; I held her tightly, not saying anything for a time but matching her strength and feeling hot tears of sympathy form in my own eyes. All I could think to murmur was “I love you,” again and again, kissing the top of her head and resting my cheek against her ear. And even now, that’s all I can think to say.

What else can we say? In the end, it’s more about what we do. We carry snow-blowers up the stairs. We clean dishes, hang Christmas lights, and take them down again. We sing Stolat, “Happy Birthday,” in Polish. We never let those we love forget that they are not alone. And we try to make the room beautiful, so that the long walk to the door is a spectacular one.

Three generations.

Grandma Del chastising Grandpa Bill for one of his many goofy comments.

Delphine  Luksza-Whitmer