Glass

My two best friends passed away last year. I called them Mimi and Oopie, because when I was learning to talk, I could never quite pronounce “grandma” and “grandpa” correctly. They didn’t mind. They loved me more than anybody in my whole family, more than my screaming, divorcing parents, more than my sullen stepbrothers who came along a few years later when my mother remarried. Mimi and Oopie were my whole life.

I’ll never see their house again after today, but I have it memorized from when I was growing up. Their blue carpet never seemed strange or outdated. Mimi and Oopie were artists, and their taste in furniture and decorations reflected this. Modeling portraits of my mother hung above their off-white stripe-patterned couch. The walls were wooden, giving off the appearance of a cabin-y, artsy home. On the right wall of their kitchen hung an old 1950’s radio. It was built into the house when they first moved in, a few years after my mom was born.

Artifacts were delicately placed on nearly every surface of the house. Little wooden animals hand-carved by children in South Africa from the safari they took before I was born marched up and down the side table near the entrance of the proper living room. Nobody was allowed in there, unless they were very special, fancy company, but Mimi and I used to sit on the floor in there for hours, looking at the little painted orbs she brought back from China.

“The man who painted this went blind after he finished it,” she told me, pointing out the tiny little details. “He painted the whole thing backwards on the inside of the ball with a single hair on a paintbrush.”

At age eight, the man himself didn’t impress me, but the time my grandmother took to get to know him before buying his piece of artwork did. Next, she showed me the little balls of Venetian glass that she had taken back from her trip to Italy with my grandfather in the early 1970’s.

My grandfather entered the room at this point, crouching down near the arm of the couch where I was curled up, inspecting the colorful little glass balls an inch away from the tip of my nose.

“Mimi and I nearly got taken out by the Italian police,” he says, and I jump at the sound of his voice, my concentration breaking for a moment. I rest the glass in my lap, looking up at him.

“What happened?” I ask, and Oopie laughs.

“Why don’t you tell her this one, hon?” He glances over at my grandmother, who has a far-away look in her eyes. Oopie always called her “hon.” He only really referred to her as Ruth when he was talking about her to other people in conversation.

Mimi smiles, and begins telling their story.

“I was very, very sick in the hospital when your mom was about twenty-five. The doctors didn’t think that I was going to make it. When I was finally told that I was being released from the hospital, Oopie was so happy that he showed up early to take me home. The doctors were helping me pack up and get dressed, when he showed up in my hospital room with an envelope. Your grandfather was always trying to surprise me. I opened the envelope and inside was two tickets to Germany. The airplane was to leave the next day. I looked up at Dr. Wallace for support, to get him to back me up on the fact that I was sick; I needed to go home and rest, but the doctor just told Harv what a marvelous idea it was. Adventure was just what I needed. Your grandfather didn’t let me think about being sick even for a moment. We packed our bags when we got home from the hospital and left for Germany the next day.”

“When we arrived in Germany, we decided to buy a car, so we bought a beautiful new Mercedes. Harv’s next surprise was to take me to Italy, so we got in the car and began driving to Venice. At this time, Germany and Italy weren’t getting along. Several Italian policemen with big machine guns stopped us at the Italian border. I have never been so scared in all my life.”

Mimi reaches over and grabs her husband’s hand, and the two of them look at each other for just a moment. In their eyes are all the memories of a fifty-five year marriage that began when my grandfather was fresh out of the marines and my grandmother was only nineteen. She continues to speak.

“Harv got out of the car and ran towards the policemen, waving his arms. I thought for sure that they were going to shoot him. I tried to open the car door to stop him, but he shouted at me over his shoulder to stay put. I watched in horror as he got closer to those big, black guns, and I remember thinking, I was so close to dying three days ago. I can’t lose my husband after all of this. Luckily, the little Italian dialogue that Harv knew saved our skins. He explained that we were Americans on vacation and that we meant no harm. The Italian police allowed us to return to Germany, and we drove the long way to Venice across the French border instead. We brought the car home with us to remember our adventure, along with those little balls of Venetian glass, sold to us by a merchant along the canals.”

Today, I am twenty, and saying goodbye to their lovely home. The women who are going to be in charge of their estate sale are arriving. I try to be strong with my mother as they place price tags on the flowered couches, the big, glass cabinet that held all of Mimi’s Lladro figurines, and even my grandfather’s enormous blue armchair. Nobody was allowed to sit in his chair, not even me, and the thought of some strangers coming over to buy it and take it away from him to let their sticky-fingered children climb all over makes me feel dizzy and weak.

“Excuse me?” I say, tugging on the fat, olive sleeve of one of the estate sale ladies. “Can I keep that?”

She is putting a price tag on the collection of little Venetian glass balls, a meager fifty dollars apiece.

“Of course, sweetheart,” she says, and without warning, pulls me into a smothering hug against her giant bosom.

When she lets go, I realize that I have been crying. Fat, sloppy tears are speckling the front of my dress, and the soggy tissue that had held them back when Oopie’s blue chair was being priced is now in shreds stuck to my palm.

This is all I have left of my dear, sweet grandparents. These little balls filled with swirling colors and patterns and designs. I am only allowed to take two, and I choose the one with blue and pink flowers, and the one with multicolored hexagons. I study them closely, two little worlds in my hands, all that is left of my two best friends.

I sit on the arm of the couch, gazing at the delicate orbs, and they flash rainbow patterns onto the living room walls in the fading Los Angeles sunlight. I slowly come to the realization that Mimi and Oopie aren’t gone, not really. These two little glass balls provide me with a perfect example of their love for one another, a love they extended to their favorite granddaughter, me. Everything that my grandparents stood for has been ingrained in my memory with every story they told. My grandfather, a brave navy corpsman and marine, who married my grandmother just a little after World War II ended taught me the value of aging adventurously rather than gracefully. I imagine him leaping out of their little German car and running with his arms flailing towards the Italian police, and I laugh. He sacrificed himself to keep my grandmother safe.

Balancing my grandfather’s energy was my adorable Mimi. She was beautiful, even in the unflattering, greenish light of her hospital room at age eighty-four. From her I learned to laugh and smile and take in life’s hardships with grace and humor. With Mimi, everything was fun and happy and bright. There were always cookies to be baked and paintings to be created and stories to be told. I’ll miss them everyday, but they aren’t really gone.

I wrap the Venetian glass in newspaper, and walk the landscape of their house one last time. I stand in each room for a moment, remembering, and then turn off each light as I leave.

“Take care, sweetheart. We’ll take it from here,” the estate sale ladies tell me. I walk out Mimi and Oopie’s front door for the last time, the balls of glass safe in my pocket, and their stories safe in my heart.

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.