The Key (1946), Jackson Pollock
Weighing In
On our way across the amusement park to get funnel cakes with strawberries and whipped cream on top, Grandma and I walk down the row of games.
I know better than to waste the dollars in my fanny pack on the hardest booths. Even if I spent all my allowance at the Pitching Post, I’d never win a big stuffed bear like the boys in eighth grade get for their girlfriends or land a ping-pong ball in the floating cup at the next stall for a Sony boombox. The only prize I’ve ever won is at the Fishing Pond, where the magnet hanging from your pole attaches to the fake minnows swimming by and you get a Dum-Dums or bouncy ball just for standing still for ten seconds.
“Will you look at that.” Grandma peers through her huge glasses at the group in front of us, eating blue tufts of cotton candy. They’re cheering on a teenager with a patchy mustache who keeps trying to throw a lasso around an electronic bull. Each time he misses, he plucks another dollar from his wallet and asks to go again.
“Pissing their money away,” Grandma adds, loud enough for the people near us to hear.
The park is extra crowded because it’s school picnic day in several Pittsburgh districts. It’s the kind of summer afternoon that can’t decide whether it wants to be screaming-sun hot or spritz-bottle sweaty. Grandma pulls a map out of her big purse, folds it in half, and fans herself. My pink Hypercolor T-shirt has turned purple and my Umbros are still wet from the final dip on the Log Jammer, but that’s OK because at least I cooled off. Poor Grandma, though. Even in the middle of summer, when she’s pulling weeds from the hard soil in her front yard or waiting for the minibus to take her grocery shopping, she never wears shorts. Today she has on white polyester slacks with a crease she irons in from thigh to ankle. White slacks are her summer slacks, she says, but if my legs had on pants that heavy, they’d be as grumpy as she is.
The smell of frying cake makes my stomach rumble. Sure, Grandma and I already had rainbow Dippin’ Dots, a boatload of cheese fries from the Potato Patch, and fresh-squeezed lemonade with a floating half-puckered lemon, but I always have room for funnel cake. Grandma calls me the Bottomless Pit. When I go to her house across town to visit, she cooks for me all day and I still have room for a midnight snack.
Grandma takes my hand so I don’t get lost. I hope I don’t run into anyone from third grade.
“We’re almost there,” I say because she doesn’t know Kennywood Park as well as I do. While Grandma sits in the pavilion with the cooler and our bags, smoking Carlton 100s and fanning herself, I can go anywhere in the park and ride what I want. Which is fine with her. Grandma likes staying still as much as I like running around. That’s why when I visit her, I crawl under her sink and into her cabinets to clean the hard-to-reach back corners and she rewards me with triple-decker sandwiches and apricot pastries.
Now that we’re past the popular games, it’s less busy. All that’s left is the one at the end of the row, with its own stage and spotlight. The Guess Your Age or Weight booth is the only game that never has a crowd. I check it out each time I head from The Whip to The Thunderbolt, but nobody ever seems to be playing.
A short man stands in front. He has on a black coat and a tall black hat, like a long pipe with a lid. It must be hot on stage under the daytime spotlight.
“Come one, come all. For just a dollar, I’ll guess your age or your weight!” he shouts through a megaphone. He’s talking to everyone, but he’s looking right at Grandma.
Grandma doesn’t like to go on big rides and never plays games except for solitaire. All day when she’s not sitting with our bags, she’s been in Kiddie Land with my brother and sister, moving between the same four dumb rides that loop in slow circles that Lizzie likes, or the boring train Max loves that crawls around the park and comes back seven minutes later. But there’s a chance she’ll try something different for once. “Please, please, please will you do it, Grandma?”
Her face is stuck on the white scale on the left side of the stage. It’s ten times bigger than the one in her bathroom she stands on each morning before breakfast, the one with the little needle she’s always mad at because it never shows her the number she thinks it should. The scale’s arrow points to the top of the booth. Grandma shakes her head, but I can tell it’s a maybe kind of headshake instead of a definitely not one.
Grandma’s been an old person all the time I’ve known her. Even when Pap was alive and I was little like Lizzie is, she liked doing old people things. Each week Grandma volunteers at Meals on Wheels so she can be in charge of yelling at other old people when they call in a special request for an extra banana with their lunch. She goes to the salon every ten days so they can wash her hair and make her perm fluffy, then spray it with Aqua Net so it’s blue and hard and stays that way for nine more days. Grandma wears girdles, Easy Spirit walking shoes, and rouge. She gets angry at Joe DeNardo on the Channel 4 News when there’s more rain than he forecasts and the bus driver when he’s three minutes behind schedule. Grandma has strong opinions about 20/20 and quotes Reader’s Digest. She carries a pocketbook with a smaller pocketbook inside and always has something stuck between her front teeth that she has to pick out with a folded piece of paper.
“Do you want to play?” Grandma asks. She has a way of doing that, offering me the better thing than taking what’s left for herself. All year, Grandma saves the Omaha steaks Uncle Nick sends her for when I visit—the fancy little circle steaks that come in a box with ice that’s smoke but no cubes. When she cooks them for our special dinner, she gives me a whole steak and most of hers too. And, she makes sure to take the tiny baked potato so I can have the puffy one to stuff full of cheese.
I shake my head because this is different; Grandma doesn’t know how the game works. The closer the man comes to guessing someone’s age or weight, the smaller the prize they get. I’m little and Grandma is big, and I’m young and Grandma is old, which means there would be a lot more chances to guess wrong if she got up there. If the man in the black hat picked my exact age, I wouldn’t even get a prize.
At ten years old, I’m too young to be self-conscious about being weighed in public and too old to go another school picnic without winning a prize. It won’t be until my teenage curves and adolescent, internal actuary establishes herself that it’ll occur to me that paying a stranger to guess one’s weight while a crowd forms to see the numbers on the scale could be unappealing.
“Step right up!” he calls to Grandma. It’s like he has X-ray vision and can see through her purse and knows she’s got a crisp dollar waiting in her pocketbook for this exact moment. He sets down the megaphone and signals for us to come closer.
An ornery flash ignites behind Grandma’s glasses. “Oh, what the hell.” She walks up to the stage and hands the money over.
I can’t believe Grandma’s in front of the shelf of prizes—everything from Tootsie Rolls on the left to head-shaped lollipops and music posters in the middle, all the way to CD players and body-size gorillas on the right side.
“Folks, we have a contestant,” he announces to me and the two people walking by.
Grandma stays put and lets the man orbit. As he moves in a slow circle, he stops in front of her belly, which clings to the tucked-in shirt at the top of her slacks like silly putty on a newspaper. He looks at her pale, fleshy arms, then the contours of her back. The man studies Grandma like she’s a tricky long division equation on a chalkboard, and even though he thinks he knows the answer he has to make sure to consider the remainder. He strokes his chin with his index finger and thumb as he takes her in from the left side, then the right. “Hmm,” he mutters. He stands there so long that sweat creeps down my neck. The more he stares at her, the bigger Grandma’s eyes get.
By now, a few people have gathered. They glance up from their loaded corndogs and waffle cones puddling with soft serve ice cream. Suddenly, Grandma’s the most interesting game in this row.
The man finally retrieves his megaphone. He turns to the forming crowd. “Folks, I’m ready to make my guess!” He takes a step back, pauses, and then announces: “Two hundred and thirty-three pounds.”
Grandma’s normally hunched shoulders shoot straight back, as if she’s gotten a shock from a frayed wire. The ornery face she had minutes ago vanishes. It’s been replaced by a stand-in, the blank kind you put on so the real one doesn’t have to be in charge. I have no clue how much Grandma weighs but know better than to clap along with everyone.
“Time to confirm.” The man reaches out to take Grandma’s arm so he can guide her toward the scale, but she doesn’t want his help. She shoves her hands behind her back and leads herself to the weigh-in point.
We all watch her step up to the white-faced clock that goes from skinny nothingness to half-past heavy everythingness. The needle jumps right over a hundred and slows down after it hits two hundred. It teeters for a moment before stopping.
“Two hundred. . .and. . .twelve pounds.” The man does some quick math on a piece of paper. “I was twenty-one pounds off, which means we have a winner!” He gestures to Grandma. “This beautiful woman gets to pick any prize from the middle of the shelf.”
The word “prize” registers in my brain, but before I can celebrate, I glance at Grandma. She backs away from the scale and glares at the man, who’s too busy writing notes to notice. She shakes her head and mutters, “Jebem ti kurac.” This is a Serbian phrase Grandma has reserved for when she’s too upset to talk in English, like when my mom suggests she get some exercise or when Maury Povich comes on TV. It won’t be for another twenty-five years that I learn it translates to “Fuck your dick.”
Grandma swats her hand—a single, unequivocal sign of disgust—then stomps off stage. “Go pick what you want,” she adds as she storms past me.
There are no big prizes on the middle shelf, but I see stuffed animals that would be perfect on my bed with my Pound Puppies. I choose the dog with floppy black ears and Dalmatian spots, the kind that’s soft on the outside but whose inside is full of little white Styrofoam balls that will start to spill out in a week or so. I tuck the dog under my arm so I can run to catch up with Grandma.
She’s nearly to the end of the row when I reach her. The sides of her Easy Spirits grate on the ground.
“You’re going the wrong way, Grandma,” I say. Maybe she doesn’t realize the funnel cake stand is behind us.
“Piss on that shit,” she shouts over her shoulder. This time she makes sure her outside voice is loud enough for everyone around to hear.
From the side, it appears that Grandma’s face has transformed once more. The stand-in expression is gone and what’s below looks like a ghost that’s been spotted and doesn’t want to be seen again. Beneath the angry sweat-scowl, her cheeks are redder than they were this morning after she put on rouge. They’re darker than they were last August when I helped her yank out the stubborn forsythia bush in her backyard as she belted off every Serbian swear word she could muster at that parched, unforgiving patch of earth. Today, her cheeks are so red I wonder what it will take for them fade back into their normal Pittsburgh pallor, or if they’ll stay ignited till we reach the anonymous shade of the pavilion.
§
That day at Kennywood, as I trail behind Grandma with my prize tucked under my arm, I don’t know that this will be the last time she’ll come to the park with us. On school picnic day next year and the year after, Grandma will stay at her house while the rest of us pile into the Ford Taurus. She’ll sip sweet tea on her AstroTurf-covered porch as we wait in line for roller coasters and candied nuts and waste our dollars on games we don’t have a shot at winning.
As I go from elementary to middle school, I still come to Grandma’s house for visits but can’t stay for dinner because of softball and swimming practice. Weekends are bookmarked with still-dark Saturday morning trips to the pool and Sunday double-header softball tournaments. The Omaha steaks sit boxed in her freezer, vacuum-packed and ready. By ninth grade, the backs of Grandma’s cabinets grow dirty while I’m out at the mall with my friends. Eventually, she cooks the last two steaks and eats them alone at her kitchen table. I don’t know if she has baked potatoes on the side.
My sophomore year, Grandma starts to complain of shortness of breath. The doctor prescribes asthma medicine, but the albuterol doesn’t touch her wheezing. Just before Christmas, my mom takes her to a specialist who diagnoses it as lung cancer.
The first rounds of chemo leave Grandma’s appetite erratic and her cravings unpredictable. The pounds that had plagued her most of her life begin to come off like an ice sculpture sweating through a cocktail party. Instead of pork chops with applesauce or lasagna and garlic bread, when she’s feeling well enough to eat, all Grandma wants is Burger King Whoppers and pickled herring from a jar. The week after she moves in, my mom spends the afternoon preparing a pot of lentil arame soup from her macrobiotic cookbook. Grandma takes one sniff then makes a gagging face and pretends to vomit it back into the bowl. The next day she gets large fries with her burger on the way back from the hospital.
The chemo helps for a few months. Combined with the radiation, the cocktail buys her another year before the cancer spreads to her liver and brain.
One day, just after her eightieth birthday, Grandma’s up and about, a reprieve from the nausea and joint pain. As I sit in the kitchen eating a bowl of spaghetti and reading pamphlets for colleges I’ve applied to, I hear her slippers shuffle down the long upstairs hall. Then, the individual moan of each stair as she edges her way down.
The kitchen door creaks when Grandma peeks in. She’s not wearing her wig or turban, so her pale head reflects the recessed lights over the counter.
Grandma walks up to me. She isn’t interested in what I’m reading but sneaks a bite of parmesan-dredged pasta. She stands behind me and rubs my shoulders for a moment—my swimmer’s posture, as she likes to call it—then heads across the room.
I feel her eyes hanging on me, as if she’s waiting for me to say something. I glance up.
“I look like one of those starving people on the Sally Struthers commercial,” she says, placing her hands on the mistletoe adorning her plaid Christmas sweatshirt.
Even though Grandma’s nowhere close to that elusive, once-upon-a-time twenty-two-inch waistline she often reminisces about, the amount of weight she’s lost is striking. At the Weight Watchers meetings she used to frequent, they quantified weight loss with sticks of butter; one pound equals four sticks. Grandma must be down dozens of pound cakes by now. In places where flesh had once filled her frame, her skin hangs loose like a balloon that already had its party and isn’t sure where to go to finish deflating.
Grandma lifts her shirt until the bottom is up far enough to reveal her midriff. She grabs her skin fold to show me proof of dwindle. Despite the cold air and the row of windows framing her side profile in orange, midday sunset, she seems OK with being on display.
When I don’t respond, she takes a step closer. Grandma wiggles her hips and raises her sweatshirt further over her head, so far that it’s just hanging on at the elbows, in case I hadn’t taken in her ribcage and sagging D-cup. “All skin and bones,” she adds.
Grandma wants me to say something—I can tell how big her wanting is.
I set down my fork and turn around in the chair. Grandma watches as I slowly take her in, starting with the toes of her blue fuzzy slippers, up to the elastic band of her high-waisted sweatpants, and finally stopping at her gray-rimmed glasses. “You really do look skinny,” I confirm, my eyes locked with hers.
When Grandma lowers her shirt, I notice a hint of a smile hanging on the edges of her lips. Her hand gently swats away my words, but I can tell she’s blushing.
COREY GINSBERG is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Bowling in the Bumper Lane and The Cold Side of the Pillow. Her prose and poetry have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and her nonfiction has been listed as a Notable in the Best American Essays series. Corey currently lives in Pittsburgh with two old dachshunds.
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