My Grandmother Is Normal

C'est une une jeune Italienne qui explique a sa grand-mere pourquoi elle ne s'est pas encore mariee. La grand-mere elle, a ete mariee deux fois, une fois par amour, une autre fois a cause de son veuvage. La jeune fille lui repond qu'a son epoque, on s'attendait a ce que la vie pour les femmes etait dans le manage. Ma, why you no get marry, you such a nice girla, nobody wants marry to you? That's the standard greeting I get from my grandmother every time I appear at her front door, steel gray and decorated with an assortment of sticker-type pictures of angels and saints courtesy of her local church, and a Canadian flag, courtesy of the neighbourhood city councillor. They are all carefully pasted to the solid, impenetrable, intruder-proof door of her modest semi-detached, two-storey house on a one-way street in Toronto, just east of Ossington Avenue, south of Dupont. My grandmother had always wanted a new crimson door with a bright and shiny gold knob, but my mother insisted that it would make an unflattering statement about those who lived in the house and the neighbours would never stop talking. Red is my grandmothers favourite colour, gold her favourite mineral or metal, Saint Teresa her favourite saint and I am, without a doubt, her most cherished female grandchild. My mother, her only daughter, is the official Swiss guard on regular duty now that my grandmother has reached her mid-80s, spending most afternoons taking care of her needs, shopping, housecleaning, banking and performing other domestic routines while my grandmother spends more and more time reconnecting to her catholic identity listening to Radio Maria, reading religious magazines, and baking her amaretto cookies for the rosary group every first Friday of the month. Grandma's internal clock is set for the daily viewing of the Eucharist on Vision tv, which is often broadcast either in French or Latin and she is now comfortably bilingual in the responses, preferring the Latin because it takes her back to the days in Italy when all her prayers were learned in Latin. When the mass is over she switches to RAI international television to reconnect with her original language. This phenomenon of spiritual re-birth has happened in the last ten years or so and I imagine it is a preparation and a type of indemnity for the inevitable realities to come. She has on occasion tried to lead me toward her spiritual inspiration, wanting me to join in her appreciation of the holy, but as much as she tries I resist it with a sincere politeness that seems to appease her. Her delight in the utterly mindless programming of RAI International Television is a little more disturbing. Before I take off my coat or hang up my purse or remove my shoes or even put my arms around her to say hello, grandmother asks me the same question, which is really less of a question than it is a sad, painful affirmation of my unfortunate state of spinsterhood. My unexploited and unappreciated feminine charms going to waste, as the clock ticks away, are a constant concern for my grandmother and a very real reason to devote a decade of prayers to my needs every time she says the rosary. That is the reason 1 visit only on absolutely necessary occasions or on the feast day of Saint Teresa and bring her a dozen red roses. Yes, roses are my grandmother's favourite flowers. My grandmother's name is Teresa. I love my grandmother and would never entertain the thought of a mockingly smart response to any of her questions, of which there are laundry bags full, each with an undercurrent of my unrealized state of womanhood, but there have been moments when visions of grand-matricide have flashed appetizingly in my head. I don't know why she keeps asking me the same thing over and over when I am almost optimistic she really knows the answer but somehow she needs to play this game that allows a certain pretence into the assumed normality of our totally peculiar family. …

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