Vegetable Dreams
Little 7 walked into my bedroom this morning, rubbing his right eye. I scrutinized his swollen lid, decided it might be a bug bite, and groaned out of bed and into the kitchen to get a cucumber. Everyone knows that cukes reduce puffiness and pull toxins out of your eyes. I've seen countless magazine ads of icy beauties with long red hair resting on satin pillows, perfect shimmering green slices on flawless skin. But I first learned this trick from my paternal grandma.
Gramma died three years ago. She lived in the middle apartment of a triple tenement house with my Grampa for all of her married life. She worked all those years, too, in a beat-up shoe factory she called the "coop." When I was a kid, I thought she meant it like a chicken coop, a place of barbed wire and rows of feathered ladies like hens producing shiny patent leather inventory. Later I learned it was really short for The Cooperative. Gramma spent long days drilling the tiny holes into men's wing tips. She was an artist.
Gramma wore oversized vests she called housecoats. She sewed them out of patterned sheets she bought at the Salvation Army. She taught me how to hold the material together and let it run under the dragon fly of her ancient black metal sewing machine. When she died and my Grampa let me walk through the house to choose something as a momento, I walked past my sisters at the costume jewelry box and into to the cedar closet and took those faded housecoats. Nothing else seemed like Gramma.
She loved cooking squash tortellini, which she called "belly buttons," and pork meatballs. I lived with her for a few years, and we drank percolated coffee and milk out of striped bowls and wondered what the painted hussy across the street was doing behind those closed velvet curtains. Sometimes Gramma cried. The ladies at the coop didn't like her. They made fun of her housecoats, her weight, and her sack lunches.
"They're just jealous because you're so good at skiving," I told her, but she shook her short blue curls. She didn't believe it.
Every Christmas Gramma ate too much rum cake. She sang dirty Italian songs and taught me and my sisters how to swear when my parents were out of ear shot. One year she brought a huge plastic trash bag and placed it on the floor beside her while we opened the presents beneath the tree. Instead of giving anyone a wrapped box, we each had to reach into the grab bag and pull out our present. One of my sisters pulled out a dented can of tuna fish. Another hooked an orange. The room was silent, and I saw my mom give my dad a worried glance. Gramma smiled and nodded with each grab - a banana, a can of beans, a clothespin - and at my turn I reached in to the bottom and landed a tiny plastic Elvis. Gramma lost it. She laughed and laughed and I started laughing, too, I couldn't help it, couldn't stop.
I learned the cucumber trick when I was thirteen years old and covered in poison ivy. Gramma painted calamine lotion on my wounds and let me lay down on her television couch and watch Lawrence Welk. Bubbles and dancers and a beautiful Spanish singer kept me from scratching, while Gramma cooked cabbage soup for dinner. I heard her slicing vegetables, a rythmic thump thump thump on the wooden cutting board, and then she danced into the den, in time to the music, and placed two cucumber slices on my eyes.
"Oh Gramma that feels good. Will these make me beautiful?" I remembered seeing a rich lady on TV having a facial.
"Beauty my ass!" Gramma snorted and danced back into the kitchen. I heard a spoon against the pan and the sound of running water. Gramma's voice mixed with the bubble lady on the screen and the symphony of dinner surrounding her.
"Don't be beautiful, Birdie. Be smart."
7:22:36 PM 
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