I had decided to allow my grandmother to take me shopping. Her campaign to go shopping with me had been unrelenting since I was two, around the time I announced I was finished going in my pants and wanted to learn about what happened in the toilet. Her desire to march me around department stores was so strong that she ended most phone calls with a reminder that I was a teenager with a body like a clothes hanger and that it was cruel and unusual not to let her, a short busty woman with a love of fashion and a waistline like a soda can, dress me.

I rarely let her take me shopping for two reasons. One: if I did, I had to take the train from New York to the suburbs of Philadelphia so I could spend the weekend browsing at a department store called Boscov’s, which sounded more like a type of chocolate-milk syrup than a store, and sold things made out of synthetic materials that looked like clothes for a suicidal-depression-themed Barbie. The other, much more important reason, was that she always managed to turn these shopping sessions into weekend-long summits on my hair, my relationships, my grammar and my future life prospects. Even if I did go, it was never just the shopping. Entreaties would be made: I needed to stay longer so she could take me to see the sculpture garden, the symphony orchestra. It would be expensive, but it would be worth it to teach her nail-biting heathen of a granddaughter something about life.

Planning my life was one of her life’s great joys. For a period she thought I should be a lawyer, like her husband, my Pop-Pop, but then sometimes she would get annoyed with him, and by extension the entire legal profession, and so she would decide I was too good to be a lawyer. Whenever that happened she remembered that everyone in her mother’s family had been a doctor, except her mother who was forced to be a nurse because of sexism, so I should be a doctor to right the wrongs against my great-grandma. The evidence was incontrovertible. I was in AP Biology. I was becoming a doctor. Then one day when I was in tenth grade she saw a science ethicist with fantastic hair on one of the cable morning TV shows. Of course, science ethics was my calling because it married the two passions she’d decided I had, law and biology.

Oh! Sweetheart! You’ve got to see this woman. She was so ELEGANT! she said after I finally picked up the landline at my parents’ house.

My brother and I usually screened her with caller ID because we knew that if we answered and it was Grandmom we’d never be able to do even a third of our homework before dinner. She mandated at least forty-five minutes on the phone, not as an official rule, just in practice. If you had to hang up she would say just hold on a minute in a way that was something between a command and a plea and so completely disarming that it never failed to get you across the forty-five-minute mark.

Once I actually answered, it was easy for me to spend hours talking to her on the phone, and clearly other people felt this way; her conversation was in high demand. Every once in a while she’d say hold on, don’t go away and put you on hold to tell Lorna or Edith or whoever had called her for some entertainment or advice that she was on the phone with her granddaughter and absolutely not to be disturbed. I’d hear the click of the phone line switching back to me and she’d say something like, anyway, her mother wasn’t as dumb as everyone thought she was. And boy was she built. But she had a horrible death. She was decapitated in a car accident. I can’t believe I can’t remember her name. This was always much better than my homework.

Even though I saw my grandma nine or ten times a year for the Jewish, American, and made-up holidays that we celebrated, apparently I never saw her. All my friends’ granddaughters come over every day after school, she would tell me as I was trying to write my lab report about the Krebs cycle. They bake cookies together and listen to classical music. I told her this was such an obviously fake thing for grandmothers to do with their grandchildren that I knew it was a lie. And even if it weren’t, I’d say, would you really want to have a granddaughter in high school who goes and bakes cookies with her grandmother every weekend? Appeals to normalcy always worked. She was all for anything we could do to be on the high end of normal. Her main aspiration was fitting in, but with a little extra.

Her own mother had bought her the nicest clothes they could afford in the hope she would stand out in the right way at the very best public girls’ school in Philadelphia. She was always remembered at reunions, she said, as the girl with incredible, tailor-made outfits, even though she grew up in a ramshackly multifamily in South Philadelphia, not on the Main Line like the rest of her cohort. Which was why, as an adult, she tormented my mother in the 1970s by making her wear pink cat-eye glasses and mustard-yellow, coordinated bell-bottom sets straight out of Mademoiselle magazine. My mother’s outfits didn’t have a similar effect on her classmates.

One afternoon in January, when I was sixteen, I was on the phone with my grandma and we were discussing the differences between Martha Stewart and the Barefoot Contessa’s recipe styles – the Contessa has a heavier hand with the oil, which explains the obvious difference in their appearances. My defenses were weak because it was winter break and I was bored and everyone from school had gone on various vacations while I was stuck at home watching my brother play video games, and so, without thinking too much about it, I agreed to take the train down and go shopping with her.

When I got to her house I remembered why this was something I didn’t do. I was presented with a three-ring binder full of photographs of female celebrities torn from magazines that I was forced to peruse as a sort of vision board of doom. The binder had separate tabs for me, my mother and my aunt. In my tab were J. Crew ads, pictures of Gwyneth Paltrow, and women with Republicanly thick blonde blowouts wearing cable-knit Ralph Lauren sweaters. Your hair looks like it’s been caught in a Mixmaster, she said the moment I arrived, grabbing my tangles and assaulting me with a brush.

I had agreed to come on the condition that we skipped Boscov’s. I had a suspicion dating back to early childhood that the gray-brown carpet was a sort of primordial soup from which the hideous gray-brown clothing on offer emerged. It used to give me visions of mottled wool rising up from the floor and racks and ensconcing me in a scratchy full-body tube sock. Instead we were going to a consignment store where the rich ladies like her friend Marlene Silverberg – who had great taste – sold their designer-brand clothing.

We were whipping around in my grandma’s massive silver Toyota, traversing her neighborhood made of near-identical houses, all constructed in the late sixties from a set of four plans that differed only in window, door and garage placement. We passed a few that looked exactly like hers, which she said was Plan B, the most elegant plan. Even I had to concede hers looked the best, with her elaborate landscaping of the standard suburban front yard, which she referred to unironically as the grounds. We were sipping our chocolate-flavored water ice, when she rolled her sleeve up and showed me a Band-Aid on her right forearm.

Remember how I had a disgusting brown spot here?

I didn’t.

Well I went to the dermatologist and he said it was nothing.

I was glad.

No, wait.

She swerved slightly into the shoulder of the road whenever she spoke because of her need to make eye contact with me.

So then I went to another dermatologist and she said I shouldn’t worry about it.

I was glad.

And then I still had a funny feeling about it because it was a raised brown spot, so I told her she should biopsy it, and she said she wouldn’t. So I went back to the normal dermatologist and said he should biopsy it and he did it.

So you won?

Hold on hold on – guess what?

She looked at me with her enormous, almost bulging blue eyes.

Thank God it was cancer!

She turned to me and smiled her big, winning smile. People always say that old people begin to look like children, but there was something so girlish about my grandma that I’d never noticed before. Her strawberry-blonde bob framed her full cheeks and her front two teeth were slightly longer than the rest, which gave her the appearance of a cartoon bunny. She wasn’t really looking at the road, and people were honking at us because she was drifting into the right lane whenever she turned to look at me. I estimated a 30 percent chance we were going to die in the car, but I didn’t mind because I was laughing uncontrollably. I repeated thank God it was cancer back to her as a question.

Yes, thank God I was right it was cancer and I made them check so that they got it off.

So you’re happy you have cancer?

Well I don’t have it anymore, they burned it off. And now I have an unsightly wound.

We got out at a strip mall with a kosher deli and a nail salon and a dollar store with a piece of printer paper that said or more in Comic Sans taped up next to the dollar. Next door was the consignment store with a jaunty sign written in loopy cursive and a mannequin with a fusty pink tweed skirt-suit in the window. I followed my grandma in and resigned myself to the suffering to come, which I knew was a part of life on Earth.

Shopping was generally a not fun thing for me. The girls at my school wore a uniform of riding boots, down puffer vests and a specific brand of black yoga leggings. At one point I considered adopting this uniform, but my mom said she would not pay the 100-dollar price of the yoga leggings. She said I clearly lived in a different tax bracket than she did and that I could get normal yoga leggings at one-tenth the cost. Obviously the point of those specific yoga leggings was that they were 100 dollars, so that left me nowhere. I didn’t even like how they looked, or much else about the girls in my school, but I still desired their approval for obvious reasons documented in all films and media about teenagers.

I wasn’t against fashion; I wasn’t one of those people who need to make it into a whole statement about their intellect. On Thursdays I swiped the Styles section from the newspaper on my way to school. But of course I didn’t really have the occasion to wear runway fashion in the tenth grade. Also those clothes cost much more than the yoga leggings.

Instead, shopping meant meandering with my mom around big stores in SoHo full of millions of random things, both of us feeling lost and frightened. I hadn’t even learned about hating my body yet and I still felt that way. We watched other mother-daughter duos in the store move about as if they had a purpose, fawning over tunics and accessories and selecting items decisively for one another as if this were an arena guided by logic and order rather than weariness and confusion. It could sometimes get very bad, like when my mom held up some item as a suggestion for me to try on and I said, Do you expect me to take advice from someone wearing a dress that ugly? Her dress wasn’t even that ugly. It would take a good half-hour of not speaking to each other from across the store to recover. We usually left with tops with big personalities and skirts I was convinced could be the secret to my new life, and then I continued wearing jeans and my dad’s overlarge sweaters to school.

My grandmother held up a navy pinstripe suit with big shoulder pads and said, Oh that is beauuuutiful in the grave and rapturous tone she used indiscriminately to refer to an oil painting or a particularly good tuna sandwich.

Where am I wearing that?

To school.

I’m not wearing a suit to school.

Why not?

I’ll look insane.

No you’ll look beauuuutiful. Like Katharine Hepburn. You should wear these things now before your breasts get too big.

I looked down at my chest and couldn’t understand what she was talking about. I had been waiting to grow this thing for years.

We could give it to Mommy, I said. She’d have more use for it than me.

Than I –

Than you what?

She was now using her fancy-diction transatlantic voice. No. The proper grammar is – she has more use for it than I. Don’t they teach you anything at that school?

You want me to speak like I’m in some kind of Shakespeare thing?

Her thin, strawberry-blonde eyebrows scurried up her face.

Shakespeare thing? What’s wrong with you pussycat? You should always speak the correct way even if other people don’t. You’re better than other people.

She thrust the suit at me and I stumbled through the synthetic satin curtain into the fitting room.

Most girls, I felt, had some guidance about shopping from their mothers, but mine had no interest in it. She had a lot of black clothing that made her look like a Left Bank intellectual who works on an organic farm. I mean this in a nice way – she looked like she didn’t care too much about her appearance, but was still attractive and strong. Aside from the Theory suit she bought with much fanfare to testify at a congressional hearing for work, every garment simply entered her life. They just appeared in her drawers and then on her body for all time. She wore sweaters her sister left at our house, a few tops her friend didn’t want anymore, and because I was taller than her by the time I left elementary school, most of the jeans I’d worn since the age of ten.

The girls at my school had mothers that gave them hand-me-down designer clothing – my friend’s mom took pity on me once and gave me an Agnès B bateau-neck top. With my mother I was always doing hand-me-ups. I understood why she hated shopping so much. It wasn’t that she thought it was frivolous, or judged women who spent lots of money and time on their clothes. She was scared of shopping. Even in a downtown boutique full of asymmetrical tunics or whatever, the kind of place my grandma would never go, my mom still felt her mother’s shadow following her around and saying on you, that blouse would have nothing to recommend it.

But grandparents don’t loom quite as large in the psyche as parents. Parents are your jailers, your tormenters and your superegos; they control your access to food and shelter and a curfew after 11 p.m. Grandparents are kindly benefactors who ply you with candy and presents in exchange for attention and kisses. They’ve already exhausted their energy trying to perfect your parents, it’s not your problem.

There was no mirror in the dressing room so I had to emerge for inspection. When I pushed through the silky curtains there were four women huddled around my grandma expectantly, one who had accidentally dyed her hair purple with the shampoo that removes yellow from white hair. My great-grandmom used to do that when I was little and I thought it was natural, like it was a hair color people were born with in the olden times that didn’t exist anymore.

UGH! You look GORGEOUS! Didn’t I tell you she was the full package? Come here just a sec let me fix you. THAT BODY!

My grandma, who was more or less a foot shorter than me, straightened the waist on the trousers, which were just above her eye level. She spent a long time preening around the lapels and smoothing my hair down. She was always petting me and my brother as if we were her pets but I never realized the extent to which she herself was like a tabby cat – her reddish hair, her mercurial temper, and of course her desire to clean her offspring. I looked at myself in the mirror. I resembled a 1980s talk-show host, but I didn’t mind. I felt like two little boys inside a suit to make an adult, though not exactly the kind of adult I imagined myself becoming. I guess I made some kind of negative face.

You don’t like it?

I like it but I don’t want it.

Oh you’re a fool.

No really, I don’t want it.

When you’re my age you’ll wish you could go back and never take that off! You look like Grace Kelly but even TALLER!

The chorus of old ladies came to fawn over me, and while I managed to escape back into the dressing room, my grandma basked in the compliments about her tall blonde granddaughter. Yes she gets her height from her father! We drove home empty-handed, my grandma lamenting our suitlessness the whole way home.

When we arrived at her house, the only Plan B on the street, my Pop-Pop was outside using a leaf blower to clear out the grounds. He was standing under the oak tree next to a koi pond that my grandma had begged my Pop-Pop to dig into the grass, but which only ever held fish for one spring in the early 2000s. I turned to approach him, expecting to be grilled about my performance in history class or about his two great loves, Winston Churchill and the US Civil War, but my grandma dragged me away as usual because as we all knew I belonged to her.

We went through the kitchen to the den, which she had transformed, over the course of her fifty years in the house, into a Louis Quinze-style salon, and down into the basement. The dankness of the basement made me uneasy – there are certain smells one doesn’t experience growing up in the city – and my eyes began to itch. I had already spent six hours as my grandmother’s captive, and I knew that after whatever she needed me to do in the basement there would be a mandatory screening of the film Gigi in what was once my mother’s room and was now an all-white mausoleum for cherub statuettes.

I paused at the bottom of the staircase. For some reason I had thought coming to my grandmother’s would afford me more personal space, but now I longed to be locked in my tiny bedroom as my brother and his friends consumed an entire ice-cream cake while playing video games about murdering people and my mom talked on the phone so loudly one wondered if she wouldn’t be better served just yelling out to whoever she was trying to contact. I could say I was too tired to watch the film, go upstairs after my tuna hoagie, and savor sleep’s respite until it was time to go home – but I knew that would mean my entire visit didn’t count, and my grandma would call demanding the completion of our date for the next few months. She seemed to sense I was thinking of ways to escape because she suddenly gripped my wrist, digging into me with her long painted fingernails.

Just hold on a minute, I just want to see something –

She fished around on a rolling rack full of clothes with dividers marked with my mom’s name, my aunt’s, my uncle’s, until she reached the marker that said mine, pulled out a gray garment bag and unzipped it. Inside was a black dress, made from a sort of swishy suiting material. It was short, sleeveless and simple.

Here, you little brat – in reality she used her special name for people she loves, but I won’t tell it.

I changed out of my clothes, careful to remain standing on top of my sneakers so I didn’t touch the cold basement floor. My grandma carefully put the dress over my head and zipped me into it slowly. It closed exactly over my waist, then the zipper snaked up my back until the dress fastened perfectly over my bust. The rigid material fit every contour of my body, as if it were spandex that had stretched to cover me, but it was inflexible and secure. I looked in the mirror and saw her small form behind me. The dress would have been knee-length on her but it ended in the middle of my thigh. I followed her directive to spin around. I let my feet touch the cold basement floor and the hem of the dress fluttered. I suppressed a smile. She grinned.

Just as I suspected. 

 

Photograph © Sophie Gladstone, Kathleen, 2022