From the time I was an infant, I could turn on a lightbulb by shifting my head from the top drawer of my grandmother’s dresser where I’d slept. She’d found an extra refrigerator shelf from a junk shop and put it over the drawer like a lid because to prevent me from falling out. Grandmother practiced magic in her kitchen. When I got big enough and the shelf was not needed, she moved it to the kitchen where she stacked cans of soup. What I loved most of all was music.
I stared at that refrigerator shelf from the time I was around six months old after my mother, Hilda, had dropped me off at Grandmother’s apartment. Hilda drifted in and out of our lives. She showed up unannounced, frequently stayed for dinner and then waved goodbye saying I’ll see you soon. I remember crying until I realized her soon could also mean never. Throughout the years of my growing up, I longed to see her, to feel her arms around me. Then there was my father who I never knew.
But from the beginning, the shelf had yellow bits of dried goop that dripped toward me like so many stalactites, crusted over with ancient dropping from another place and time. I assembled stuff from things—a dress hanging from the closet door was like a piece of sky, blue and white. I turned off a lamp in the shape of an ostrich by moving my head. The floor moved up toward me with its magic carpet of colors. And when my grandmother bent above me, I saw her face in the same way, lips moved independently of her eyes, but after a while, her features merged—her hazel-gray eyes washed over me like a warm light. Grandmother combed my hair with one finger and whispered shayna madela.
In the drawers below my bed, she stored her underwear, and below that, grandmother kept her sweaters, heavy cardigans with large shiny buttons.
But once strong enough to sit up, I recognized her bed on the other side of the room, with a strangely shaped bag attached to a long-nosed tail that draped across her headboard. Her blanket was green hemmed in by a darker moss green satin and had a coolness I liked to rub against my gums. The room consisted of her bed, a lamp table, and of course, the chest of drawers. The floor was covered in brown tile faded around the edges and covered with a decorative throw rug.
The goop on the refrigerator shelf, as I thought about it later, might have been freeze-dried orange juice, a shape that moved whenever I blinked my eyes, whereas the plaster cracks in my grandmother’s bedroom ceiling continued in a straight line. There was the white moon of her washbasin, always on the floor, and the lace doilies that hung over the chest of drawers. I studied the crocheted pattern that wrapped around itself into several petals, but it was the refrigerator shelf that captured my attention mostly because it shared my existence the way nothing else in my grandmother’s room did or could. I clutched the blanket to my side and reached out with my fingers, trying to touch the bars.
Back then, I didn’t have words for these things—they were sensations, feelings, a conviction about stripes which is how everything appeared from the standpoint of my back. But from somewhere outside my bed, I heard a lovely sound twirl around my ears. I longed to know what it was.