even greater. And then, there’s something humiliating about carrying an inhaler with you wherever you go. I can’t explain why, but ask any asthmatic, and they’ll confess the whole thing embarrasses them. Oh, not in a huge way, but just enough to place a niggling doubt about yourself just behind your forehead. Nobody likes to admit their imperfections, so when yours hangs out there, puffing away, it just eats away the first layer of varnish. And, of course, there’s always that big question—“Will I ever get a bad attack and not be in reach of medication?”—and you picture yourself suffocating to death and it’s horrible, horrible, horrible.
My aunts kiss me just like Mom did, a tradition Grandma Erzsèbet started in Hungary after my grandfather was murdered by the communists.
Aunts Babi and Luca were only six when they left Hungary, so they’ve assimilated completely into American culture. Sometimes it feels odd to be so Hungarian and yet so American at the same time. But this is Baltimore, where people hold on to their nationalities like the metal bar on a roller coaster, the only thing that seems to stay put on the wild ride up and down the hills of a changing society. Out-of-towners call us provincial in these parts. They’re right.
Cousins and spouses mingle through my two floors at the row house. Babi’s youngest hooks up his GameCube to my TV down in the clubroom, and Luca’s oldest daughter, twenty-five-year-old Terri, styles hair and manicures nails in my bedroom. Girly squeals of delight whistle from my young female cousins and second cousins, and I decide maybe Terri can do something interesting with my braid.
Dinner, eaten all over the house by men and boys in crew cuts and girls and women in braids, begins in silence. The sister and I done good. Long live paprika. And halfway through, the volume soars as conversations heat up and appetites quiet down—conversations about Mayor O’Malley, the Ravens, or what to do about terrorism. I hear Cristoff sneak up the hall steps to his small upstairs apartment. He won’t come in. Our family gatherings pain him, reminding him how insufficient his own family was. His dad, military to the core, didn’t realize sons needed affection too, and his mother? Good heavens! The woman could have intimidated Barbra Streisand! They’re dead now and I’m not sorry.
Well, I’m not!
Somewhere in the midst of the outside group, a water gun rears its soppy head and my uncles Stu and Jimmy yell in unison, “Knock it off!”
But finally, after the Strong Hungarian Women return the kitchen to the pristine condition in which they had left it the year before, I light some cheap bamboo torches and stick them in sand-filled buckets all around the tiny cement yard. Mom and the aunts pour the wine while I blend milk shakes for me and the kids, and we all congregate around Grandma Erzsèbet’s Nightmare, a ten-foot-tall, gangly rhododendron that grows by the back fence. Though she died four years ago of diabetes, it’s her legacy to all of us. And I suspect she willed the house to me, her eldest granddaughter, because she may have considered me the least likely to sell the place and leave that bush, her first purchase after disembarking the boat from Ellis Island.
And unfortunately she was right.
It’s a strong American bush watered and fertilized by a Strong Hungarian Woman. Grandma Erzsèbet never learned English, but she never regretted the night she followed in my mother’s footsteps, tore off those Soviet chains, and fled to freedom.
My uncles yank open lawn chairs from my yard, from car trunks, from any willing neighbor’s porch, and we wait in quiet expectation around the Nightmare, torchlight sharpening our Strong Hungarian Features, ready to hear my mother tell the tale of her ride to freedom.
She smiles into my eyes and begins. My gosh, I love that woman. I don’t feel the same kindred spirit with her as I do with Daddy, but, truthfully, if I thought
My aunts kiss me just like Mom did, a tradition Grandma Erzsèbet started in Hungary after my grandfather was murdered by the communists.
Aunts Babi and Luca were only six when they left Hungary, so they’ve assimilated completely into American culture. Sometimes it feels odd to be so Hungarian and yet so American at the same time. But this is Baltimore, where people hold on to their nationalities like the metal bar on a roller coaster, the only thing that seems to stay put on the wild ride up and down the hills of a changing society. Out-of-towners call us provincial in these parts. They’re right.
Cousins and spouses mingle through my two floors at the row house. Babi’s youngest hooks up his GameCube to my TV down in the clubroom, and Luca’s oldest daughter, twenty-five-year-old Terri, styles hair and manicures nails in my bedroom. Girly squeals of delight whistle from my young female cousins and second cousins, and I decide maybe Terri can do something interesting with my braid.
Dinner, eaten all over the house by men and boys in crew cuts and girls and women in braids, begins in silence. The sister and I done good. Long live paprika. And halfway through, the volume soars as conversations heat up and appetites quiet down—conversations about Mayor O’Malley, the Ravens, or what to do about terrorism. I hear Cristoff sneak up the hall steps to his small upstairs apartment. He won’t come in. Our family gatherings pain him, reminding him how insufficient his own family was. His dad, military to the core, didn’t realize sons needed affection too, and his mother? Good heavens! The woman could have intimidated Barbra Streisand! They’re dead now and I’m not sorry.
Well, I’m not!
Somewhere in the midst of the outside group, a water gun rears its soppy head and my uncles Stu and Jimmy yell in unison, “Knock it off!”
But finally, after the Strong Hungarian Women return the kitchen to the pristine condition in which they had left it the year before, I light some cheap bamboo torches and stick them in sand-filled buckets all around the tiny cement yard. Mom and the aunts pour the wine while I blend milk shakes for me and the kids, and we all congregate around Grandma Erzsèbet’s Nightmare, a ten-foot-tall, gangly rhododendron that grows by the back fence. Though she died four years ago of diabetes, it’s her legacy to all of us. And I suspect she willed the house to me, her eldest granddaughter, because she may have considered me the least likely to sell the place and leave that bush, her first purchase after disembarking the boat from Ellis Island.
And unfortunately she was right.
It’s a strong American bush watered and fertilized by a Strong Hungarian Woman. Grandma Erzsèbet never learned English, but she never regretted the night she followed in my mother’s footsteps, tore off those Soviet chains, and fled to freedom.
My uncles yank open lawn chairs from my yard, from car trunks, from any willing neighbor’s porch, and we wait in quiet expectation around the Nightmare, torchlight sharpening our Strong Hungarian Features, ready to hear my mother tell the tale of her ride to freedom.
She smiles into my eyes and begins. My gosh, I love that woman. I don’t feel the same kindred spirit with her as I do with Daddy, but, truthfully, if I thought
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