My grandmother, Rosemary, is 90 years old. She is also one hot chiquita. Well, she is.
Just ask her; she’ll tell you.
She was just 18 years old when she married my grandfather, Thomas, who was then five years her senior. Being Italian and Catholic (i.e., a card-carrying babymachine), she immediately became pregnant with their first and only child, my father, Thomas, Jr.
My grandfather was young and beautiful and kind and funny — and according to family folklore, quite talented. He was a dancer and nightclub entertainer in New York City, who dabbled in a bit of vaudeville and a bit of off-Broadway work, as well. My grandmother says that he was the most handsome and dashing man she had ever met — and that he even came from a relatively good family, while she herself had had a difficult upbringing. Both she and her two brothers had been abandoned on and off by their mother, my great-grandmother, Mary, who was quite literally a gangster’s moll who had chosen an assortment of dangerous and exciting men and locales over the domestic mundanity of caring for her children. So, after surviving a hardscrabble childhood in and out of orphanages, she was truly happy for the very first time in her young life. She had peace, security, stability, and love.
Unfortunately, her happiness was to be short-lived; within three years, my grandfather tragically died from complications of pneumonia at the age of 25. The night he died, horrified neighbors found my despondent granny — then a young and beautiful woman — staggering outside in the snow in a white cotton nightgown, her feet bare and her tiny body scarcely able to stand upright under the weight of the unimaginable grief bearing down on her.
She tried her best to take care of him on her own, but being a young single mother is a daunting task under any circumstance — much less given the times in which she lived and how she herself had been raised…and so, she handed over the responsibility of raising my father to her mother-in-law, Mary (Gentle Reader, when are you just going to accept the fact that all O.G. Italian Catholic women are named Mary in some form or another?). This Mary was a rollicking, bawdy woman with a delightful belly laugh and huge tits who, because she had just lost her youngest son, enthusiastically took my father in and fed him and hugged him and smothered him in smooth, buttery love until the day she died many years later, at the age of 87. I am often told that of all her descendants, I am the most like her — even though I eventually went and had the tits whittled. But the rollicking, bawdy humor? I proudly own it.
So, still in her early 20’s and now free from the responsibilities of raising a hungry and energetic toddler, my grandmother, Rose, set off on a life of fun, adventure, and travel. She was dainty and lovely — but with a husky voice and a devastating wit. Even now, almost 70 years later, she is the same — except her voice has now deepened from a lifetime of Chesterfield cigarettes…so much so that she sounds (and, incidentally, acts) exactly like Bea Arthur. She dated interesting men from all walks of life, and let them buy her dinner and drinks at glamorous nightclubs all over the city. She was wild and free and she loved every minute of it.
This past January, my family gathered in Fresno to celebrate her 90th birthday. She showed up — looking impossibly tiny and impossibly spry. Her second husband, Tony (my beloved Grandpa T) died about 10 years ago. She has outlived both of her husbands — and now lives for gambling, game shows, and grandchildren. After Grandpa T’s death, she moved for a time to Las Vegas — to a retirement community just outside the city. Even though she was already in her early 80’s, she loved loved loved the attention paid to her by all the adorable shriveled old men who were her neighbors. One of them, a wealthy old bloke named Walter, fell madly in love with her — and would oftentimes send her extravagant gifts of trinkets, treats, and cash. When I would ask her about him, she would always answer, with a husky belly laugh, “Oh, honey, he’s just a horny old man after my Mary Jane” — Mary Jane, of course, being her euphemism for her cooter. I would scream with belly laughter — and this delighted her no end.
So, after the birthday cake, she told further scandalous stories of her youth (including the night she lost her virginity to my grandfather, but that shocking tale is for another time) to all those present around the immense wooden table — even the little children, who sat rapt and enchanted listening to this wonderful, beguiling old witch reach back into the past. The merrymaking ran late into the evening, and when she eventually showed signs of getting a little tired, my brother and his wife packed her up so she could be trundled off home to bed. Propped up by her walker and her size 4 1/2 ankle boots, she shuffled towards the door, all of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren swarming around her in adoration.
But before they whisked her out the door, she insisted on stopping to tell one last story about how the old guy in the retirement community back in Vegas was still in love with her — and that when some other old broad had tried to move in on him, my grandmother had gotten in her face and told her to go fuck herself — literally scooted her walker over to this woman one night at bingo and told her to go fuck herself. We were all howling with belly laughter. I then asked, “Hey, Grandma — what would you do if ol’ Walter asked you to marry him? What would you say?”
She paused for a moment…and in Bea Arthur’s voice, my 90 year old grandmother smirked, raised her eyebrows, rubbed her fingers together in the international sign for money, and answered:
“Honey, I’d tell him that Mary Jane is open for business!”
In the book of essays on which I am currently working, I open what is essentially a memoir with the sentence, “I come from a long line of loose women.”
And I do. Loose, marvelous, scandalous women — who really knew how to live. And I feel privileged to count myself among them.
muffy bolding 
