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Shopping with Grandma
Her first step from the curb to the bus always worried me. I would stick close to my grandmother’s back, ready to catch her if she fell, as ludicrous as that now seems. Grandma was a sturdy Hungarian woman, while I was a waif-like adolescent. Yet I would carefully watch her solid back and shimmering support- hose-clad legs as she negotiated that first high step onto the bus. For those trips to downtown Pittsburgh, Grandma would trade her everyday size 11 Keds sneakers for equally practical, but slightly more formal, tan leather orthopedic shoes, while one of her interchangeable neutral double-knit dresses replaced her customary housedress. Grandma’s calves and ankles, one indistinguishable column, would today be called “cankles,” a term I prefer not to associate with my grandmother. My grandma looked like a grandmother, with tightly curled white hair, shapeless cardigans with a tissue stuffed up the sleeve, and the occasional babushka. Once we were safely on board, then and only then would Grandma begin searching her black patent leather pocketbook, which she pronounced “pocketboof,” for her wallet, and once that was found, start rummaging for her Port Authority Transit pass, identifying her as a senior citizen who could ride free. This scene was reenacted trip after trip, with the bus driver always insisting, “That’s okay, ma’am,” and Grandma ignoring him while she continued to forage for her senior citizen pass. Grandma looked every one of her eighty-plus years and no driver ever questioned her eligibility for free ridership. Finally, once the bus driver had unwillingly begun driving, watching my standing grandmother lurch and sway with the bus’s movements, she would triumphantly produce her pass, and ask how much my fare was. And then she would start the process again, digging through her change purse for the exact amount. Fearful of her falling, I wouldn’t relax until Grandma was seated safely beside me. In my youth, before being ethnic was cool, my grandmother occasionally embarrassed me, but most of the time, I delighted in her eccentricity. We were two kindred spirits, feeling at odds with our surroundings. Grandma was constantly forced to regroup, finding new friends when she moved or when they died as she grew older. My sense of isolation was harder to define. Growing up in Ingomar, I felt unique being second generation American on my father’s side, but even in upper middle-class Pittsburgh suburbs in the seventies, having traceable ties to the old country was not such an oddity. My father’s immigrant parents lived in Lawrenceville, where they took in boarders and my grandfather worked (and died) in a steel mill. My mother’s family represented a much earlier period of Pittsburgh’s history; her Scots-Irish ancestors settled two hundred years ago in the outskirts of the city and became prosperous farmers. My mother didn’t grow up in the suburbs so much as the suburbs grew up around her. Although my father Americanized his name, married a WASP, and moved out of Lawrenceville, he proudly retained his self-identification as a “hunky,” which in the race-conscious 1970s, people often believed a mispronunciation of “honky.” Nonetheless, I often wish that my father had stayed closer to his roots. Despite following her son to the suburbs, Grandma maintained her belief that serious shopping needed to be done downtown, so every few months, she and I would set off on the bus, Grandma clutching her inscrutable list, written in Hungarian. As a parent, I’m surprised that my parents sanctioned these trips. How much easier would it have been for my mother to insist on taking us to the mall? But I’m glad she didn’t. My special bond with my grandmother was not based solely on those shopping trips, but the shared adventures enhanced our relationship.
We boarded the bus at the old trolley stop near West View Park. Unlike the small Plexiglas shelters of today, it was a long, wooden structure covered with thick layers of peeling paint and very educational graffiti. Our first landmark, St. Benedict’s Academy on Perrysville Avenue, always elicited the same comment from Grandma, “That’s where Bunny went to school.” Grandma adored Bunny, a former girlfriend of my uncle’s. As a child, I couldn’t imagine my intellectual uncle ever having a girlfriend with such a frivolous name. At least Bunny was Catholic, unlike my Presbyterian mother, who told the probably apocryphal story of my grandmother informing her neighbors that her older son was marrying a prostitute, confusing the word for Protestant. Such deliberate misunderstandings on Grandma’s part frustrated some of her family, but usually they amused me. Grandma insisted that a first child “could come any time…five, six months after the wedding, perfectly normal,” while second babies adhered to the normal gestation period. Our first stop was always G. C. Murphy’s, on Fifth Avenue. Only Murphy’s carried the exact brand and style of “gachas,” or underwear, that Grandma wore. Not until I studied Serbo-Croatian did I learn gaće was an actual word and not one of Grandma's linguistic creations. After growing up in Hungary, near the Croatian border, then spending her young adulthood in Budapest, Vienna, and finally Pittsburgh, Grandma’s Hungarian was bastardized by a potpourri of Slavic languages, as well as German and English. Growing up, my father spoke the bizarre amalgam of languages shared by his mother and Serbian father; he taught them English after learning it in kindergarten. Grandma’s linguistic facility helped curb her loneliness during the summer. She crashed any number of Nationality Days at West View Park, speaking a few words in the appropriate language, or merely sticking to her heavily accented English to gain admission. She even had an official West View Park housedress: fuchsia and royal blue geometric print, perfect for hot summer evenings. At the park, she played skeeball and socialized with her friends. Some friends she met annually at their Nationality Day, while a few, like her, scammed their way into a variety of ethnic celebrations. At the end of the evening, she would take the bus up the steep hill to her apartment, undoubtedly putting the driver through the same drill I so often witnessed. Other than gachas and greeting cards, I can’t recall what we bought at Murphy’s during our shopping trips, but I do remember the grand, curving staircase leading to Murphy’s downstairs housewares department, harkening back to a time when even discount department stores had architectural features. Luckily, we weren’t forced to use an elevator. Decades before my birth, Grandma had some sort of frightening experience on an elevator at Rosenbaum’s Department Store on the North Side. I never learned the details, but she found the episode so terrifying that until she was well into her eighties, Grandma could shuffle with astonishing speed when entering or exiting an elevator. The first time we visited the Diamond Market in Market Square, I was greatly disappointed to learn there were no precious gemstones involved, but instead blood pudding or some repulsive organ meat, bought for my father whose wife would never prepare such a delicacy. My disgust with her purchase probably matched the embarrassment of my uncle, when years earlier, on his way home from school, he spied two women walking down Penn Avenue from the Strip District. One woman, overburdened with packages, was trying to control a live chicken, its wings flapping and feathers flying. To his dismay, the chicken-wielding woman began calling, “Bobby! Bobby!” and my uncle recognized his mother, who was almost as irrepressible as the chicken. My sister remembers lunching at McCrory’s when shopping with our grandmother, but I recall the trip to McDonald’s or the newly-opened Wendy’s on Fifth Avenue as being a highlight of my day. We didn’t often eat fast food, and looking back, I’m surprised my grandmother ate it at all. She’d worked as a chef in Budapest and was an excellent cook, regularly preparing such Hungarian specialties as chicken paprikash, beef stroganoff, gomboti, or everyone’s favorite strudel. But with an understanding that belied the generation gap, she clipped coupons from Sunday's Pittsburgh Press and indulged my adolescent appetite for junk food. After lunch, our serious shopping for the day done, we visited a few other stores, my grandmother, with her orthopedic shoes, shapeless coat, and “pocketboof,” looking incongruous as I dragged her into the stores favored by a teenager. But if it bothered her, she never complained. When I was younger, I remember Grandma trying to buy me an outfit at Kaufmann’s budget store. Certain that she couldn’t afford it, and fearing my parents’ disapproval if I permitted her to squander her limited resources, I finally lied and said I didn’t like it. Nearly thirty years later, I can still see the brief hurt look that crossed Grandma’s face. In retrospect, I’m not sure who was responsible for whom on our outings, although each certainly felt responsible for the other. Before crossing a street, Grandma would remind me of her advanced age, ask for my support, then grasp my elbow firmly and dash across the street so quickly that I struggled to keep up. In later years, worried about her living alone, I called her every night before I went to bed. Only my departure for college brought these nightly phone calls to an end. As Grandma approached ninety, the trips downtown became too arduous, but Grandma made any expedition an adventure, even our weekly grocery shopping trips to the Ingomar Shop’n’Save. There, Grandma tormented the teenaged deli clerks. After taking her number, she would leave to do her other shopping. On her return, finding that the clerk had moved far beyond the number she held, she would plead deafness, and if challenged, mention her age, widowhood, immigrant status, “arthuritis” in her knees, and even my father’s service in World War II in order to get her way. Although my mother certainly loved my grandmother, she didn’t always appreciate her idiosyncrasies, and Grandma’s garrulousness always particularly annoyed her. Grandma constantly struck up conversations with strangers, and on one of our grocery shopping trips, she introduced my mother to some new friends, who were distant, estranged cousins of my mother’s whose acquaintance she preferred to forget. Now, I realize
that Grandma’s gregariousness probably resulted from her fear of being
alone. After her brief residences in
Budapest and Vienna as a young adult, she came to Pittsburgh, where her only
acquaintance was her kumma (or godmother). After a brief stint as a maid in the home of a Squirrel Hill doctor, she
married my grandfather, but the union of a Serb and a Magyar in the aftermath
of World War I was not popular with either family. Other than the births of my father and uncle, I don’t think her
marriage brought her much happiness. My
grandfather’s death in a steel mill accident left her a poor widow; Jones &
Laughlin awarded her the princely sum of $200. Moving her to West View, and later an assisted living facility in
Brighton Heights, simplified matters for my parents but compounded her
loneliness as she left friends behind.
Grandma died a few months before her eighty-ninth birthday. I left Pittsburgh over a decade ago, and my visits are not frequent enough to dispel my homesickness. I can’t imagine how my grandmother left Hungary and her family at the age of twenty-five, knowing she would probably never see any of them again. Many of the places Grandma and I visited together have disappeared. West View Park and its “Big Dips” are a distant memory, replaced with an unremarkable shopping center with the ubiquitous fast food restaurants, Giant Eagle, and K-Mart. Budget stores within department stores are a thing of the past, as are Horne’s, Gimbel’s, and now even Kaufmann's, although it still exists as Macy’s. The absence of these landmarks is not as haunting as the loss of my grandmother, but these places persist in my memory, just as they were in the 1970s, nearly as vividly as does my grandmother.
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