Her House Becomes Relic

By Emma Kushnirsky

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I go to my grandma’s suburban New Jersey house for the first time in a while. She doesn’t live there anymore; she’s dead.

It’s дедушка’s (grandpa’s) house now, with a live-in home aide and god DAMN is it empty without her in it, I realize more than ever before, four years after she’s died. I bring my partner. He is sweet and caring and helps more than I do to get the Stairmaster™ working and my grandpa up the stairs. Моя дедушка is out of it these days. I’m happy if he smiles or giggles a little, or responds with more than a word or two when we talk to him. I attempt to introduce my partner to him in Russian, but I do a bad job, and am not understandable. My brother’s here the whole time being the sharp and responsible one, the standing-up one who is still sweet as sugar, and his partner is ever-helpful, too. I feel incompetent, always, the little kid, always, and that is at least partially my fault. 

This house does not stand as a reminder of happy memories, though I’d be sad to see it go because it is the last concrete creation of a bygone era, something I’ll someday say of something else when that begins to fade, too. It smells almost the same in here. I remember that I always was catching it on its way out, when my dad and his sister had long self-bleached away their otherness, with hardly a mark or a Russian-speaking friend remaining. 

As I give my partner the house tour, I see the place through his eyes and I call it a relic. Wow. So 70’s. So Soviet. Museum-like, and he says it looks like a place that once contained a whole lotta love. I went to the Ukrainian Museum the other day and I wish there was an exhibit: Typical Soviet Apartment circa 1970’s. There is a particular decor style and smell of dill to all of them I’ve been in. I say I don’t know, because I never wanted to come here, and me and my dad would say it wasn’t a happy place. My aunt got married at 17 to get out of here. Of course there were happy bits, but being together was always an obligation. So my partner says that maybe it’s a place one person put a whole lotta love into. I don’t know where else she would’ve stashed it than in these walls, in the food cooked and served within them, advice/criticism given here, outgoing phone calls, mustard powder in our socks to cure our colds, etcetera, etcetera.

In the finished basement of her house, I start crying. Next to the wood-paneled room my grandpa did his carving in, post-retirement, where the unfinished carvings are still in their proper drawer, there’s a big room where the shelves are filled with his weird wood carvings. Some naked women with big boobs, a fake grenade, a wooden menorah. Plus family art — a clamshell I made glitter glue patterns on as a little kid, paintings and drawings by my aunt and dad.

There’s also a little bar area down here, and I sit on a high stool crying more and more while my partner tries to comfort me. Then we lie on the carpeted floor while I sob and look at the ceiling and talk about how it hurts and who she was and how do you grieve someone who was a little bit awful who you wish you could’ve known more fully. And you’re not allowed to admit directly that she was a little bit awful. I’m a little bit untouchable. I think it’s the pattern of my family to think no one understands me because my reaction to grief is to wish I could be in a white sterile room, to wish I had a great wind surrounding me that could push everything else away. To be clean and unknowable. To be clean. To be unknowable. The mushy comfort of a hug is unbearable, something about the liquid of it. 

When she died I didn’t want to be around the people who most understood, and the inevitable showing of real emotion around one another was deeply uncomfortable. The black long-sleeved dress in the summer heat wasn’t what made me itch. It was unfamiliar authenticity that still felt a little false. I’d come to this house without my parents to stay during some school vacations when I was little, and I was always violently homesick at first. I’d start crying when my parents dropped me off and I’d start crying at night without my mom to sing to me. I’d get her to sing to me over the phone. At least once during a crying episode, my бабушка (grandmother) told me that we cry when someone dies. I wonder if I hurt her feelings. What a woman. I never believed her about the right times to cry. All the times she must’ve said that to her kids. We are still hurt and damaged and so was she, and wow! To never confront it. 

I tell my partner I don’t want to go upstairs until I’m done crying and no one can tell I have been. He asks me why, since my brother would be the one to most understand, and I guess I don’t want to be seen messy and I know he can only tell me about his feelings when he intellectualizes them and I don’t want to be comforted. I want it to be mutual like it never is. He believes in the positive side of my grandma’s harshness. That it wasn’t a stab (a making-worse) for her last words to him to be “Don’t disappoint me.”

I’m in a snooping mood today (it’s such an incongruous day) and I look through the upstairs cabinets until I find something that interests me. I feel grown-up now, in this place’s new alienness. Before the Box of Controversy, I find old Soviet passports and documents, newer proof of my grandpa’s loyalty to the Republican party, photos of me and my cousins and brother. The Box of Controversy is mostly letters addressed to my grandma. One genre of the letters are ones my dad sent her from studying abroad at twenty in Israel. My partner reads over my shoulder and looks away, feeling that they’re private as they get more interesting. My brother is in the next room, but I don’t tell him because I’m afraid he’d tell me I shouldn’t be snooping like this. My partner is more upset and surprised at the content than me. I am distant and entertained. Somehow, I always feel like a slight outsider. 

One of them is particularly angry. Begins with “Mommy Dearest,” and includes “The fear of failure had been instilled in my soul since childhood. Why then must you deepen the wound that bleeds daily (You’ll never get into college said you, you’ll never finish says you) instead of trying to repair the damage you have done. I’ve met some people both happy and not but with all of them their family tries to be supportive instead of saying меня это не интересует (I’m not interested).” 

I wonder if I’ll ever show these to my dad, I don’t like that idea, and I wonder how much he remembers of this. When I ask him questions (Did you ever confront grandma? Tell me about ___) he is vague and distant and there is a lot he “doesn’t remember.” He is easily put on the offense. He does not apologize for things properly. He says he is good and happy these days. 

I think I’d like to make a simple and unoriginal list of what we are grieving when we are thinking of Бабушка Рая (Grandma Raya): The healing she never did, the healing we never gifted her, though it may not have been possible, the love she never gave or knew how to give, the worry always blooming in her, the art school she got into and never went to, the things she never told me, that I never knew, that she took to her grave, the culture that we lost and the fact we have no idea what we lost, and we are all at a loss because somehow we are still hurting each other and claiming we’re not.

And the list goes on.