Jocelyn Bartkevicius it fast enough, my mother would never know that “Ets-lay Ip-skay ool-schay” meant Joan and I would be AWOL from high school that day. Listen to my father tell you where he was born and raised—Gel-vohnay, Man-chew-shay-nay—and it might as well have been that pig-Latin code. For years, I believed he had the names all wrong.
VII. “Those peasants,” my mother’s mother used to say, when referring to my father’s and stepfather’s mothers. She claimed to mean it as a compliment, but was betrayed by what she called The Black Irish Tongue. When she was frail and failing in a nursing home, and I visited from college, she asked how my other grandmothers were doing. Before considering that extolling the health and vitality of two women more than a decade older might increase her despair at her current state of decrepitude, I told her how my Sicilian grandmother walked two miles after supper each night, and how my Lithuanian grandmother had recently climbed a towering pine tree to trim the top branches. She looked thoughtful for a moment, then sighed. “Those peasants,” she said, as was her habit, this time with more longing than irony in her voice. The younger, healthier version of this grandmother had applied The Black Irish Tongue with alacrity. Take that annoying advertising jingle for a couch that could be pulled out and transformed into a bed: “Who’s the first to conquer living space / it’s Castro Convertible.” If there was a witness nearby, my grandmother used to say, “Christ, you don’t know if they’re talking about Cuba or an automobile.” Other times, she’d sit pensive with a cigarette and coffee, lamenting how she’d studied to be a concert pianist, but her alcoholic husband had left her and their six children destitute in a run-down rented bungalow off East Broadway, a boulevard of broken dreams lined with abandoned homes and several flourishing bars. She’d take a drag of her L&M, sigh, and say, “He said he’d put me on Broadway. Yeah, East Broadway.” She said it often enough that I thought of it as the punch line of the joke that was her life. All the women on her side of the family inherited my grandmother’s Black Irish Tongue. My mother used to say, “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.” Listen carefully or you’d miss her ironic dismantling of sugary clichés. She used to pick me up from school in my stepfather’s Buick, shake her head at the other mothers’ muumuus and thick thighs, then stop to pick up something for supper at the butcher’s, where she’d peer into the display case, point to a hefty leg of beef, and say, “Put a high heel on that.” My second grade teacher, an unmarried middleaged woman in dowdy dresses and cats-eye glasses, required each of us to
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Crab Orchard Review