If anyone other than my mother was driving, we cut through the shopping center with the Farmingdale public library, C-Town (until it went under and reopened as a different chain grocery), the corner card store, where Grandpa would buy a one-dollar lottery tickets for us, his young granddaughters, the jewelry store, and the bakery owned by my grandparents’ neighbor, a lady who always greeted them with, “How’s Amy? How’s your mother?” (it sounded like she said, “How-Zamy, howzya mutha?”) despite the fact that my grandparents had lost their mothers long, long ago.  

This shopping center also featured Taormina, a wonderful New York pizza place, which I used to raid for Gino’s chocolate Italian ices, served in the dental cups, so you could squeeze the ices up after licking the top like an ice cream cone. There was a dance/karate studio as well as a bar next to Taormina, and a bank or two. And I almost forgot, Carvel--the ice cream place that I tossed aside in my adoration of Gino’s Italian ices, which were a Brooklyn-made wonder not served at Carvel.  

When we drove to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, this center was the ultimate sign that we were there. We cut through it, driving between the card store and the grocery to connect to Sullivan Avenue.  First on our right was the dingy yellow house owned by the bakery lady and her family. About five houses down was the house with two disfigured horse-head sculptures guarding the driveway, looking as though they had melted in rain--like relatives of the Wicked Witch of the West. This house was right next to our destination: the home of Betty and Lenny Seiden.  

We saw Grandpa’s gray boat of a car parked just past the tall shrub that separated the melted horses from my grandparents’ lawn. Then we turned into the driveway, parking under the massive ‘diseased’ tree that was a haven for birds.  Tiny bricks, almost as small as dominoes, divided the driveway such that the middle half was their pale red, while the surrounding quarters of it were cement. Exiting the car, my sister and I stretched our scrawny legs, telling Mom, “We’ll get the suitcases later, after we see Nana and Pop-Pop!”  

During certain summers, we walked gingerly and tried to see if cicadas were nearby--I dreaded the crunching sound of stepping on them. Grandma and Grandpa greeted us at the door, immediately bombarding us with offers of grapefruit, cantaloupe or honeydew while saying, “Where’s your coat?! You’ll catch cold!”  In we went to their home, my childhood retreat, where my mother had grown up. 

Kara and I hugged and kissed them, and then someone who had made the trip would dart for the upstairs bathroom. That bathroom had the shower, a pink toilet, which required that the user jiggle the handle at exactly the right post-flushing moment, and a pink sink bowl which--I discovered to my delight--was above a very unique feature: the pull-out door hamper. The knob appeared to be in the middle at the top of a cabinet door, but when I tried to open the door by pulling outward to one side, as you would with a kitchen cabinet, nothing happened. Finally, I pulled the knob toward me, in a downward motion.  

This pull-out hamper, which was part of the door’s interior, was on par with the equally intriguing linen closet. Now, their linen closet was not your run-of-the-mill floor-to-ceiling job. It started maybe four feet above the floor, with double doors that went to the ceiling. The doors were slatted like shutters.  Once we were tall enough, we realized we could climb into this wonderland of light bulbs, soap bars (my grandparents never saw why deodorant soap was not the best choice for washing one’s hands), towels, sheets, tools, shoeboxes labeled in Grandpa’s capital letters, flashlights, and more. It was expansive to our eyes: Kara and I could fit in it together without difficulty.  

The linen closet was across from the room we shared. The room, the smallest of the three bedrooms, was painted a powdery blue and had a ceiling fan light fixture. There was a small chest of four drawers with wood-print contact paper on its top surface and peeled blue painted drawer knobs the size of our fists when we were four. Grandma told us that the chest had served as a changing table for our mother when the room was her nursery.  Kara and I used to fight over who got which drawers, so eventually Grandma devised a system for alternating pairs of drawers from visit to visit.  

The chest almost completely blocked the closet door when Kara and I were there, since the day bed had to be opened. I got the bed that was to the left if you were standing in the doorway, and Kara’s bed, which folded down to be stored under mine, was against the opposite wall, maybe sixteen inches from mine. Each bed had a rust-red bolster against the narrow wall (the one opposite the door), and Kara and I used to have “bolster fights” where we would knock each other with them, try to take each other’s bolster, and giggle with the sheer delight we found in that fun.   

I used to lay my bolster across the river of hardwood floor that was our walkway between beds.  Near where our pillows rested, we had a foldable tray that served as our night table. I used to have coins, a tissue box, and a book on it, aside Kara’s earrings and the random things she found in her pockets.  

Later in life, this room, which had been my mother’s room when she was a baby, served as my grandma’s office, with her word processor, heavy desk, and tall green filing cabinet. The walls were decorated with the following: a bulletin board complete with a note from Millie (“Betty knows all… LIES LIES LIES”) and a newspaper clipping of my town spelling bee win, a black-and-white tennis poster that I had memorized since it was near my head at night (it said things like “An effective lob. An ineffective lob.  Cover yourself with scraps of net, bruises, anything to indicate to your opponent that you mean business.”), and a coin counter.  

My grandpa’s room had about forty identically sized carpet scraps, of varying colors, taped together. He had a large closet, where he kept the videos of the family, old treasures, and more. He had two large dressers and a headboard unit that I admired. It had drawers on both sides, bookshelves, and the two shiny onyx jaguar sculptures that were a staple to their home.  

Grandma’s room had her hospital-style bed, which I loved to play on because I could push remote buttons to raise and lower different parts of the mattress. I never asked why she needed a special bed since I was preoccupied with the mesmerizing bed remote control. She had a striped rug between her bed and her dresser, and on the inside panel of her door was a mirror. My mother’s graduation tassels hung from the inner doorknob, a silent sign that she had occupied that room for awhile. A poster of a teddy bear in tennis attire, holding a racquet on the court, displayed Grandma’s prime hobby.   

Downstairs was the living room, as well as the kitchen and dining room. The living room had salmon furniture with a textured tan print, and it was from sometime before 1966. The super-cool piece of furniture, a corner table nestled between the loveseat and sofa and below their hanging lamp, had multiple leveled surfaces for displaying lots of photographs. The secret was that each level’s top surface opened upward to hide family heirlooms, important documents, jewelry, the works--which came in handy when my grandparents’ house was burglarized in the late 1980s.  

The dining room held the buffet, a dark wooden piece with yellow interior visible through delicate glass door panels. The china, fancy glassware, old spherical shot glasses, and other special pieces were kept here. Atop the piece sat the menorah, sculptures, and the bean pot, where my grandpa kept money and important things. A ledge that was always full of things mostly divided the dining room and kitchen, offering a place to deposit car keys and mail after a long day of work. Cookbooks, cassette tapes, a diet scale and assorted items covered the ledge.  

In the kitchen sat a stout little table, where Grandpa kept bakery boxes of flatcakes (black and white cookies, to non-New Yorkers) ready for us. Whenever our visit approached, he reported to the bakery to stock up on flatcakes and onion rolls, which my sister and mother ate. Aside from the bakery errands were his grocery store trips.  Grandpa’s fascination with coupons, bargains, and eventually, double coupons was unparalleled.  He had always managed the household in this and most other ways, so Granma never went grocery shopping.  Packed up like a little boy with a lunchbox, off he would go, toting his small shoebox containing the treasured coupons, filed by item. He was content to drive to three grocery stores in a single day, scooping up the best deal on chocolate syrup at Pathmark, since he knew my mother needed her chocolate milk every morning; then heading to C-Town for an extraordinary bargain on paper products of some sort; and often succumbing to his thrifty temptations with a trip to National Wholesale Liquidators, provider of many a tube of French-labeled Colgate.  Clipping coupons was his primary hobby for decades, amplifying with more available time in retirement.   

Box bottoms used to contain his many pill bottles sat on the table, next to the toaster and blender, the latter of which we loved to see in use since it meant Grandpa was preparing iced coffee for us. The countertops had a boomerang print (orange and brown ones, on a yellow background) which seemed appropriate only for a diner, and even then, only with better color selections.  An aluminum dispenser on the yellow paneled wall held paper towels, foil, and plastic wrap with embossed letters indicating which would come out of a particular slot. The old fridge was brown, the shade of a brown M&M candy left in the car for a month. It was divided vertically, which fascinated Kara and me since at home we could not reach the freezer.    

Downstairs, reached by the door off the dining room, was the playroom. A Linoleum floor of green and gray squares offered visions of our mom at ten, twelve, fourteen years of age, having parties and dancing there with friends. A twin bed sat near two of the windows offering a glimpse of the backyard; that bed was only used near the end of their time in the house, when my Grandpa slept there on our visits so that Mom could have his bed.  From the playroom was a door to the cellar (musty with old televisions, boxes of records, suitcases, and an old Chinese furniture cabinet), a door to the sea-foam green (yes, even the sink and toilet) bathroom, and a door to the laundry room, otherwise known as Lenny’s superstore. Every time we packed the car to leave their home for ours, Grandpa would send us out with hoards of cans of food, packages of paper products, soap, detergent, pasta, Brillo pads, and condiments, all fruits of his favorite labor: grocery bargain-hunting.   

From the laundry room, we could use a back door to go to the backyard--lush with green grass that itched my feet when I was little, so much so that my family had to put paper plates under my feet. The lawn was expansive, fenced only with tall, flowering shrubs. A path of hard mustard and rust squares led us to their shed, home to rusted bicycles, garden tools, and pool toys and accessories from before the above-ground pool’s collapse.  (When my mother was a child, she would ask to go on vacation, always receiving the response, “We have one--the pool out back.”)  The backyard haven was the venue for many a game of badminton, most of which were rather wretched since my odds of achieving racquet contact were very slim.   

Whether we were in the yard, using the playroom treadmill (under adult supervision until age fourteen, since Grandma insisted, “You’ll fall off!”), watching television in the living room, sipping iced coffee at the sun-colored boomerang kitchen counter, groaning about no water pressure in the pink bathroom shower, or reading in our powdery blue guest room, my grandparents’ home was a haven of respite.

Author's Biography

Kathryn Bransford, a student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, has majors in English Education and Spanish Education. 

She lives outside Washington, DC, and enjoys traveling anywhere she can.

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