Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy

Author:Maile Meloy [Meloy, Maile]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction, Short Stories (Single Author), General Fiction
ISBN: 9781101104989
Google: PqfwdGi0jBsC
Amazon: B004P5OOCQ
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2009-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

ON A HAZY SUMMER AFTERNOON in Los Angeles, while my wife was at work and our children were napping, I answered the ringing doorbell to find my grandmother, two months dead, standing on the stoop. She gave me a happy smile of self-welcome, then turned and waved to a black car with dark windows that purred at the curb. The car pulled away.

“Liliana,” I said.

“Darling!” she said.

She reached for my face, so I bent to be kissed, thinking that the woman I was kissing should be dead, her ashes sealed in an expensive vault. But her lips on my cheek were warm, and she smelled like her old perfume and new wool.

“Are you going to ask me in?” she asked.

I stepped back from the door, and she clicked past me on high heels, carrying a small black handbag. She looked great for eighty-seven, let alone for being dead. Her blond hair still seemed plausible, and she held her face in the alert, wide-eyed attitude in which it looked youngest. Under her coat she wore a black cocktail dress, as if she had come from her own funeral. But there had been no service, yet.

She stopped in the living room. “So this is how you live,” she said, surveying the piles of half-read newspapers, the children’s small jackets hanging on doorknobs, the stain from a wet glass on the leather couch. She spun to face me, then dropped into the big yellow chair.

“I’m very tired,” she said. “They lost my bags.”

“Do you know what they’re saying?”

“It’s all a mistake,” she said.

I nodded, and thought about what that might mean. “But,” I finally said, “there was an autopsy.” I didn’t want to offend, and here she was, but there had been an autopsy.

“Some lemonade would be nice,” my grandmother said.

I went to the kitchen for a glass of cranberry juice, which was what I had besides the kids’ boxes of Juicy Juice, and when I returned, Liliana had slipped off her shoes. The way she took the glass and drained it seemed very corporeal.

“The obituaries are here somewhere,” I said, before realizing that they might embarrass her. They were from English papers and they described her impoverished London childhood with a German mother and an English father, and her flight at sixteen to become a cabaret girl in Berlin. She had appeared in two movies under the Nazi studio system, and left for Switzerland in 1939. The articles ran briskly through her marriage to a Swiss industrialist, her brief move to the United States, and the five additional husbands she outlived or discarded. They described her famous parties and her expensive houses, and ended with her death as an aged socialite at her remote house in Spain. Men loved her, and she made efficient use of them. With the only American husband, she had a child—my father—and variously unsuitable nurses and nannies had raised him. My father loathed her, but that wasn’t in the obituaries. They mentioned his early death of a brain tumor.

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