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     had her own way of doing things and couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. What was wrong with kneading bread dough
     on the kitchen floor? Who says a newborn baby shouldn’t sleep with a colossal wooden cross wedged inside the crib? Why not
     treat your waist-length hair with olive oil? What stains on the sofa? I don’t know what you’re talking about.
    “That might play back on Mount Olympus,” my mother would say. “But in
my
house we don’t wash our stockings in the toilet.”
    Ya Ya accepted the women in my family as another of life’s little disappointments. Girls were to be tolerated, but every boy
     was a king, meant to be pampered and stuffed full of sour balls. She was overcome with joy when my mother gave birth to her
     final child, a boy Ya Ya wanted to name Hercules.
    “Poulaki mu,”
she would say, pressing a fifty-cent piece in my hand.
“Poulaki mu krisom.”
This was her standard pet name, which roughly translates to “my dearest little golden bird in a nest.” “You go get the baby
     now and we feed him some candy.”
    My brother and I came to view our Ya Ya as a primitive version of an ATM machine. She was always good for a dollar or two,
     and because we were boys, all we had to do was open her car door or inform her the incense had just set fire to one of her
     embroidered cushions. I’d learned never to accompany her in public, but aside from that, Ya Ya and I had no problem. I saw
     her as a benign ghost, silent and invisible until you needed a little spending money. One could always change the channel
     while Ya Ya was watching TV; there was no need to even ask. She could go from the State of the Union Address to a Bullwinkle
     cartoon without ever noticing the difference. You might sit with her in the living room, but never were you forced to fetch
     her snacks or acknowledge her in any way. That was our mother’s job, not ours. Every now and then she’d leave the yard and
     the neighbors would call saying, “Did you know your grandmother is over here picking things out of our front lawn?”
    We’d hand the phone to our mother. “They’re probably just dandelions,” she’d sigh, drying her hands on her skirt. “Don’t worry,
     we won’t charge you for the labor.”
    “You’d think we never fed her,” my mother would complain once my father returned from work. “She’s out there gathering nuts
     and eating sunflower seeds out of the Shirks’ bird feeder. It’s embarrassing.”
    Ya Ya would wander off and return with an apronful of greens, which she would boil to a paste. “That’s all right,” we’d say,
     covering our plates at the sight of her advancing kettle. “I’m sure they’re delicious but I’m saving room for those toadstools
     you found beneath the Steigerwalds’ dog-house.”
    The longer she lived with us, the more distant my mother became. As children we had worshiped her as a great beauty, but the
     strain of six children and a mother-in-law had begun to take its toll. The glass of wine with dinner was now preceded and
     followed by a series of cocktails that tended to fortify her rage. Rather than joining us at the table, she took to eating
     perched on a stool in the breakfast nook, wearing dark glasses and grinding out her cigarettes on the edge of her plate. Ya
     Ya had been diagnosed with diabetes, and it was my mother’s thankless job to prepare a special diet and cart her around town
     for her numerous doctor’s appointments. It was my mother who practiced injecting insulin into oranges and doled out the pills.
     She was the one forced to hide the peanut butter and confiscate the candy hidden in Ya Ya’s dresser drawers — all this for
     a woman who still refused to call her by name. My father would return home at the end of the day and listen to bitter complaints
     delivered in two harsh languages. My mother offered to sell the baby, to take a part-time job picking tobacco — anything to
     raise enough money for a