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Grandma was feeling that way or not, my mother tasted everything conspicuously before she served it. And she did that with everyone, even me. She sipped from my glass of milk and set it down before me, a practice I came to regard as normal.
    Sometimes, when everything was all right, Grandma helped my mother with the cooking. In fact, she was a good cook, and knew things my mother didn’t know. “Oh Mama,” my mother said, “why don’t you make your wonderful cabbage soup.” I could tell my mother loved Grandma—she lost her self-assurance when Grandma was not well. She worried about the old woman terribly. She could not get her to go to a doctor. My father was kind to Grandma, but was not around her enough to worry about her. Donald, I suspected, was as shy of her as I was, though he tried not to show it. He sometimes gave Grandma his arm so that she could descend the front steps more easily when, the weather being mild, she was persuaded to get some air. Grandma negotiated steps the baby way, bringing both feet together on each level.
    She spoke mostly in the other language, the one I didn’t understand. When she felt all right she blessed me and kissed me on the forehead and produced pennies from her change purse and pressed them into my hand. “For a good boy,” shesaid. “So he should buy something.” She pulled me to her, and with my face lodged in her skeletal shoulder she muttered an instruction to God as to the good health He must always assure me. Since these love words were in the other language, as her curses were on her bad days, they made me similarly uneasy.
    I knew the name of the other language: Jewish. It was for old people.
    Grandma’s room I regarded as a dark den of primitive rites and practices. On Friday evenings whoever was home gathered at her door while she lit her Sabbath candles. She had two wobbly old brass candlesticks that she kept well polished. She had brought them many years ago from the old country, which I later found out was Russia. She covered her head with a shawl, and with my mother standing beside her to keep the house from burning down, Grandma lit the white candles and waved her hands over the flames and then covered her eyes with her wrinkled hands and prayed. The sight of my own grandma performing what was, after all, only a ritual blessing seemed to me something else—her enacted submission to the errant and malign forces of life. That an adult secretly gave way to this sentiment I found truly frightening. It confirmed my suspicion that what grown-ups told me in my life of instruction was not the whole truth.
    Grandma kept her room clean and tidy. She had a very impressive cedar hope chest covered with a lace shawl, and on her dresser a silver hairbrush, and comb. There was a plain slat-back rocking chair under a standing lamp so she could read her prayer book, or Siddur. And on an end table beside the chair was a flat tin box packed with a medicinal leaf that was shredded like tobacco. This was the centerpiece of her most consistent and mysterious ritual. She removed the lid from this blue tin box and turned it on its back and used it to burn a pinch of the leaf. She applied a match and blew on the leaf as my brother blew on punk, to get it started. It made tiny sputtering pops and hisses as it burned. She turned her chair toward it and sat inhaling the thin wisps of smoke—it was a treatment for her asthma. I knewit helped her breathing, and that it was scientific, having been purchased from Rosoff’s Drugstore on 174th Street. But the smell was pungent, as if from the underworld. I didn’t know, nor did any of my family seem to know, that this medicinal leaf my Grandma burned was marijuana. Even had they known, it would have held no significance, since it was readily and legally available without prescription. But to this day the smoke of grass produces in me memories of the choking harsh bitter rage of an exile from the shtetl, a backfired life full of fume and