About Flossie by Claire Glass

I grew up one house down from my grandparents and they were my babysitters. Like so many kids who grow up with grandparents at home, mine were a constant, one house removed. Hesh and Flossie were my only baby sitters save for one, who I liked all right. She told me stories about alien invasions with the lights off and a flashlight by her chin, something Flossie—giver of impromptu diction lessons—would never consider. She told me to pronounce mature like ma-tor, picture like pic-tor, and that dogs get mad but people get angry.

Flossie often declared “I’m doomed.” She frequently spouted, “we’re doomed,” “you’re doomed,” as well as he or she is doomed. Appropriate application of the term ranged from heavy traffic, long lines, severe weather conditions, and sometimes, more intensely, the general condition of women, or Jewish people (demographics to which she belonged). But the pervading theme, the theory by which her life was defined, the source of the only modicum of self acceptance she could ever grasp hold of was that “fat” people were doomed. And so her life was spent not only to love me, Hesh, my mother, and a constantly shrinking group of friends, but also to be thin. And not just thin. The kind of thin that protrudes from pencil skirts and silk blouses in boney, jagged, discomfort. The kind of thin that requires an extra hole be pierced through most watchbands. The kind of thin that makes hugs, though welcomed, a cause for trepidation.

She passed away during my junior year of college, but I find it’s always best to call the cause of her death what it is- self-starvation. All death is complicated, no matter the circumstances, but hers engaged all of us. We all had a hand, like doctors, in trying to make her well, in trying to save her life.  Back pain put Flossie in bed, and after a few days she informed us, quite frankly, that she wouldn’t be getting out again. She was a lady who kept her promises and always told the truth as she saw it. By my birthday that fall, she was gone. But not without a great fight with all of us who tried to make her eat, pointed out that she was hurting the others, sat on her bed and watched House with her in silence. I could hardly bring myself to suggest she shove chicken noodle soup, or ice cream, or anything else Hesh bought with hopes of moving her, down her throat. It was like interrupting a focused artist on the brink of finishing a career-defining piece. We were no use.

I know how sad this sounds. And it is. It’s one of the saddest things in my life, but this was the culmination of her dream, the culmination of a lesson plan she inadvertently delivered everyday of her life to my mom, Hesh, and me. Like us, she grew up with it, and I know those stories.

When the fire alarm went off in my great grandmother Pauline’s apartment building she refused to evacuate. Though my 8-year-old mother and her cousins were standing scared at the door—all three dressed in a-line party dresses in the middle of playing—she refused to leave because she had Vaseline on her face and curlers in her hair. The girls stomped their feet and whined her name, “Pauline,” over the honking beat of the alarm. She’d rather die with her granddaughters than be seen like that in public. I imagine her sitting calmly filing her nails or reading a magazine, swiveling her chair around and looking up only to adjust her hairnet and tell the girls to settle down.

Before she tucked herself in forever, Flossie stopped going to the beauty parlor in slow and steady increments. We celebrated on the days she went, wishing to believe it meant she was coming back. In her later years that beauty parlor set the scene for the entirety of her social life, which she preferred in the short spans of controlled interaction the salon routine afforded. I spent my fair share of time there when I was little, and even got my haircut by Pilar, the woman who did Flossie’s hair for most of my life. She would whisper in my ear. “Your grandmother is so beautiful and thin! How does she do it? You are so lucky.” I suppose a woman who spent her day with pleasantly plump older women might appreciate the change of scenery Flossie and I offered. Flossie was uncommonly elegant like a movie star and I was merely youthful, eating from the candy dish and wiggling my feet, which took many years to touch the floor from the chair’s height.

Hesh met Flossie while she was standing on a ladder, cleaning with vigor a patch of crown molding on the ceiling.  He was with his buddy who was planning to ask Flossie’s big bosomed sister, Janet, out on a date. Janet was tall and curvaceous. She laughed with her entire body, pinched tushes and cheeks, and made a mess like it was her job. She also cooked poorly and ate whatever she wanted. The sisters were nothing alike, but they were inseparable. At times, Janet and her husband split a duplex with Flossie and Hesh. They were roommates or neighbors for most of their lives. Back on the ladder Flossie made small circular motions on and around a stain, non-existent to everyone but her. Hesh walked in the room with his friend looking for Janet, but instead found Flossie. When she turned around to investigate he thought he was looking at Katherine Hepburn. He fell in love with her right there. I’ve never heard him speak romantically or seen his eyes become hazy like they did when he told this story before or since. Most of his stories are about the criminal justice system and he’s never brought this one up again. It told me of another life they shared, before any of us existed. It’s a secret, and put into words it becomes a story floating stagnant in the air. Unspoken, they aren’t stories, they’re real somewhere, still happening.

There’s a photo of the two of them on vacation before my mother was born. Hesh has his arm around Flossie’s waist and they’re leaning on a wrought iron fence. The picture is faded, but the yellow hint of old age looks like sunlight. Florida is an educated guess. It must have been warm because they’re both in collared polo shirts, almost matching, in off white. I hardly ever saw Flossie’s arms past the wrists until she got sick and forgot to care, letting her empty skin hang off of her bones without shame like popped balloons. She is smiling in the picture, looking halfway at the camera and off to something outside the frame. Hesh is staring right at the lens, fixed and certain as ever. She hated having her picture taken, but she’s smiling here. It tells me there’s a Flossie I never met who showed her slender arms and smiled in photos and let herself be touched. Someone between the lady who helped raise me and the one who receded from us in size and intensity like a puddle in the sun.

I had two kinds of meal times growing up—meal times with Flossie and meal times with my parents. Dinner at my grandparents’ house, which had white marble floors—buffed by Flossie on her hands and knees daily—and modern furniture in black leather, was at once something to look forward to all week and something to cringe at. On Saturday nights when I went over to their house I learned to play poker and beat Hesh sometimes. We played mock trial and I learned how to be a star defense attorney, like Hesh. I also learned that no one is better than anyone else, no matter how much money or power they have. Flossie advised me not to rise for the “judge” for this reason precisely. Available snacks included; Diet Coke sipped exclusively through a straw, Melba Toasts, and pre-portioned cups of water ice. Then dinner came and it made me nervous. When would my dish be taken from me? At what level of fullness would I lose my eating privilege? Hesh and I faced the same fate, but by then it was normal to him. Eventually I began to wonder if maybe I was one of the doomed. And by 8, I reasoned that I must be “fat.” I wondered if the way Flossie said that word, with disdain, the way some people talk about criminals while they watching the news, had to do with me. I remember studying my short legs in the mirror wondering whether the black clogs I’d been dying for and finally owned were accentuating my kankles even before I knew what that word meant.

Eating with my dad is the opposite. Family vacations are planned around tantalizing restaurants. We no longer sightsee. We eat. We no longer take photographs to prove to friends that we’ve visited the necessary landmarks. We eat. For some perspective- while on vacation in Spain my dad set his mind to eating at a particular restaurant perched on the top of what I would have then, and now, considered a mountain. Said mountain’s road was unpaved and without guardrails. Neither deterred my dad. Not until my mom cried (it should be noted that my dad drives an automatic like a kid learning to drive on a stick for the first time) and pleaded that a good meal was not worth our lives, did he waver. This is a guy who orders one of everything and whose butcher stopped speaking to him when he cut back for his cholesterol’s sake and had fish a few nights a week. He also wears speedos without abandon, owns and frequently wears orange jeans, turquoise Jack Purcells, and wears beautiful tailored suits with suspenders. This is appearance consciousness, sure, but it’s full of freedom, and uniqueness, and deserved self-indulgence. Needless to say, Flossie did not like to watch my dad eat, or to be near him and food either as the subject of conversation or in reality. “Your father can eat and that’s no lie.” That’s no lie.

So as an adult, once a body-conscious 8-year-old comparing myself to friends’ and strangers’ bodies, I am stuck not knowing where food fits. I have always wanted to be like my dad and for a time played that part like making other people believe I wasn’t constantly on the loosing end of beauty pageants taking place in my head. Now I don’t try very often because it’s too exhausting. It’s easy to try all of the time in high school because everyone is trying a hand at something.

Flossie taught me lots of wonderful things, too. She made me want to be the type of person who isn’t intimidated by anyone, and she made me want to feel like a strong woman, always. I felt the great importance in these things even as a little girl. I haven’t said much about my mom, because it’s an entirely different story. She’s always tried her very hardest to keep me from the strain of food guilt that I know she feels, too. She’s never once told me what not to eat, and given her upbringing, that’s a more amazing thing than I can say.

When my mom called to tell me Flossie died I didn’t feel surprised or confused. I was disappointed, and felt a kind of homesickness for the tough lady who seldom laughed, and listened to my little girl stories. I miss that lady, and my longing for her is bound to lots of regret, too. As a senior in high school I had little time for Hesh and Flossie. I dreaded when she would come to see my performances because I didn’t want to field questions about her thinness later. That was the time when I decided to admit that the term, the diagnosis, anorexic applied to her. I was happy when Hesh and Flossie ducked out early enough, before the auditorium lights went on. I was happy and guilty all at once. She died two days before my 21^st birthday. Hesh called to wish me a happy birthday but couldn’t say the words. We cried on the phone together and that was it. When I got home the next day she was already buried. Hesh and my mother went to the cemetery together the day before I could get home. My mom told me that she drove because he was crying. I have never seen him concede to riding as passenger. He insists on driving everywhere even now at 86. He has never driven to the cemetery where she is surrounded by Janet and Pauline. Flossie didn’t want a funeral—she preferred to disappear. Hesh cannot bring himself to mark her grave, and to this day a little picture frame in the ground with her name suffices. He can’t choose a gravestone because nothing could ever be right enough for her. When my mom brings it up he can’t stand it.

I keep her old drivers license in my wallet. The picture was taken when she is exactly the age I choose to remember her. In her picture she’s not smiling, not even one bit. All of the tendons in her neck are visible. Her facial expression tells me sitting for the picture was an absolutely abominable chore. This is my loving grandmother. In a black shoulder padded wool blazer and big black pearl earrings she is a dark mystery, far too refined for the DMV.