YOU OLD BAT!

My grandmother’s apartment in the Ansonia Hotel was a wild place but in the worst way. The fights between my mother and grandmother were as volatile as the fights my mother had with my father before he left. When my mother came home from work, I’d feel her rage outside the door. Here it comes, I thought, as I listened to her jangling keys and readied myself while drawing female figures at the formica-topped table. It was 1951. I was seven years old.

Disappearing into the bedroom, she couldn’t wait to take off her little, black-feathered hat and the pricey hand-me-down, a golden yellow gabardine suit, with tortoise shell buttons, from rich Cousin Hortense, so she could slip into a schmatta with a fading floral print. Even from the bedroom I could hear her silent thoughts. Why is everyone in the family rich but me? I don’t deserve a life like this! Her thoughts weren’t always silent.

My grandmother, cooking in the kitchenette, knew what was coming. “I’m so tired!” my mother said, right on schedule, as she padded into the living room. Shoulders hunched to look old, she wore ratty slippers that were once a color but only god knows which one. She didn’t even look at me. This show was strictly for her mother.

My grandmother “fanned the fire” as my mother would’ve said. “If you’d married a rich man like Uncle Harold’s girls, Ilene and Joyce did, you wouldn’t have to work!”

“What are you talking about?” my mother yelled, her body suddenly rigid. “Your brother Harold and his wife are rich! If Ilene and Joyce were Old Maids, they would still be rich. You old fool!”

“I may be an old fool, but I know they married decent men who take care of them!” She looked off in the distance and sighed. “My dear sweet husband William Lee. What a wonderful man he was! He would’ve done anything for me.”

“Who asked about you!” my mother snarled.

My grandmother seemed to forget I existed as she hissed in a low voice, “I told you to wait! I told you two months wasn’t long enough! But noooo! You couldn’t wait! You had to marry that low-down, low class, dirty bum! You see him throw money around and right away you think he’s rich! Ha! If you’d listened to me, you would’ve known he was a liar and a gambler and a ladies man before you married him!”

“He never cheated on me!” my mother hissed back. 

“How do you know?”

“I know!”

  My mother turned back towards the bedroom. “I’m going to take a nap if you don’t mind!”

“I do mind. We’re going to eat in a few minutes!” my grandmother said, hands on hips.

“You can’t stand seeing me rest!” my mother said.

Trying to control herself, my grandmother muttered something in German, then in English, she shouted, “Just remember, I do everything around here. If I dropped dead, what would you do? You can’t take care of a house or a kid!”

“I can do whatever I have to do!” my mother yelled. “Now shut up, you old bat!”

She dragged herself to the formica-topped table. “Get your drawing stuff outa here so we can eat!” she said, as if noticing me for the first time. After dinner, if she’d finished reading the Journal American, I’d occasionally see her reading the book, Your Child Is an Artist. While she was at work, I’d look at the pictures made by children, especially the drawing of a lone figure standing on a single horizontal line across the page on which the figure stood. The author said that drawing was made by a lonely child.

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GHOSTS

My grandmother often talked excitedly about her beloved dead husband, William Lee, to someone invisible—at least to me. In her shrill, high- pitched voice, she’d say, “He should never have listened to his mother! He had a law degree! She had no business telling him what to do! It’s her fault he went into sales!”

At those times, she forgot about me even if I were drawing a few feet away. When I had the nerve to tap her on the shoulder, or just say, “Nana,” she stopped instantly and looked at me for a moment, as though wondering who I was.

Looking back, the wide empty halls and high ceilings of the Ansonia remind me of the hotel in The Shining. I easily understand why the creepy thriller, Single White Female, was filmed in the Ansonia as well.

My grandmother wasn’t the only one who saw ghosts. Sightings had been reported in elevators. On the top floor, ghosts were supposedly partying. 

But the only ghosts I knew about then were the ones my grandmother talked to frequently. At times, I doubted her psychic abilities, but it made sense to my seven-year-old mind that a psychic would see ghosts though it made me more afraid of her than ever.

“My dear sweet William Lee is often here with us,” she’d say to me in the kitchenette, as she opened a can of Delmonte peas and carrots or one of the other canned vegetables she’d pour into a pot. “I hear his footsteps in the hall often.”

What scared me even more than William Lee roaming the halls were the times she and my mother swore he turned the knob on the bedroom door at night.

My grandmother never told me who she was talking to about her husband. But I never asked.

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A Tennessee Williams Fellow in Fiction, Roberta Allen is the author of nine books, including three story collections, a novel, a novella and a memoir. Her stories have appeared in such magazines as Conjunctions, Epoch, recently in New World Writing and upcoming in the Evergreen Review. Also a conceptual artist, her work is in the collections of The Met and MoMA. Most of her art has been acquired by The Smithsonian Archives. Her writing papers have been acquired by the Fales Archive of NYU. See robertaallen.com