All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky

Author:Ruth Madievsky [Madievsky, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2023-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

21.

I hadn’t seen my grandmother in months and was surprised when she invited my mother and me over to celebrate her birthday. She used to host birthday lunches every year, before my mother kicked Debbie out and the dynamics got too complicated. I called Sasha in a panic.

“What are you afraid of?” Sasha asked.

“That I won’t be able to handle being around her and my mom at the same time.”

“What else?” She was chewing something. A pita chip or a pretzel. The crunch and the wet sound of her licking crumbs out of her teeth lowered my blood pressure.

“I feel guilty that I don’t make much effort to see her. She’s not an easy person. The last time I saw her, she wanted me to dye her hair. They didn’t have her shade at CVS, and I had to schlep to two other drugstores. Turns out, she called Valley College pretending to be me and learned I’d never registered for classes. The whole time I’m dyeing her hair, she’s telling me how thankful she is her parents didn’t live to see their great-granddaughter squander the opportunity to get a college education. How I’m wasting the gift they paid for with their lives. As if her father woke up one morning and thought, Maybe I should get murdered by the state so that, sixty years from now, my great-grandchild will feel a moral obligation to get a bachelor’s degree.”

Sasha laughed. “I’ve heard this song before.”

“I feel bad for her—her daughter lives on another planet, half her friends are dead, and she lives in a country that has no use for her—but that doesn’t make it any easier to be around her. She’s never asked what I want out of life.”

“What’s stopping you from telling her?”

“Not worth the drama.” How could I articulate my desires to such a difficult person when I couldn’t articulate them to myself?

When I arrived at her apartment, absolutely snowed on Ativan and Oxy, my grandmother greeted me with a tsk for not wearing a jacket. “It’s like you want to get pneumonia,” she said, draping a woven cardigan that had immigrated with her from Saint Petersburg over my shoulders.

“It’s eighty-five degrees out,” I said. “I literally got sunburned on the walk from the bus stop.”

“My cousin Basya died of hypothermia in the summer,” she said. “All the girls crying into her coffin were jealous of her tan.”

My mother was already there, drinking sour cherry juice on the couch.

“Hi, Mom,” I said, kissing her cheek.

“Hi, honey.” She squeezed my shoulder. And then she got up to relock the door I’d already locked behind me. She stood watch at the peephole until it was time to eat.

The meal went as expected. My grandmother gloated about being on her feet all day to cook for us and shoved chicken soup, gefilte fish, and eggplant salad in our faces with no reprieve. Each time I protested, “That’s enough,” she dolloped another portion onto my plate, daring me with cataracted eyes to fight back.

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