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The Klubhaus

Sophie once gave me a necklace, a gold chain with an amethyst gem that she says she bought from the jeweler on Myrtle Avenue for $100. But since first presenting it to me, she’s asked for it back about a dozen times, to borrow and wear for her various special occasions. She recently needed it for a dinner at the Klubhaus that a “nice German man” invited her to.

The Klubhaus, as it’s known to Sophie and Olga, who’ve been going there for years, is known to the rest of the Ridgewood community as The Gottscheer Hall. It’s an old European banquet hall where on any given Sunday evening you can hear polka music and see a crowd of older folks in fancy dress. The front area, which is open to the public as a bar, is a fake wood-paneled room with carpet flooring, low ceilings, and White Russian drink specials.

Sophie, clearly, still attends events at the Klubhaus (whether or not she gets asked on dates to them), as being right around the corner from Granny Mansion it is easy enough for her to walk there. She loves having these events as reasons to get dressed up in her clip-on earrings, necklaces, and glittery blazers.

At these events, I don’t know exactly what she does, but she’s told me many stories of all the “vondaful” people she’s met by joining them at their dinner tables (or more likely, crashing their private parties). She’s also told me stories of how every now and again she goes to the Klubhaus bar to sip a beer and “talk mit doze men.” So I get the feeling she’s established herself there as the lurking, local granny who’s always a bit overdressed and out of touch.

Lately I’ve spotted a few hipsters hanging around there, as there’s a lot of hooplah about Ridgewood being the new Williamsburg. I’ve only been to the Klubhaus twice though– once a few weeks ago when my boyf Steve and I followed some hipsters in there in something of a turf war, and once when my friend Ryan and I crashed in at 2am on Elvis night a random summer ago.

Hello!

Garbage Night

You probably hate garbage night. I do. But Olga loves garbage night. Taking out le garbaj, to her, doesn’t mean going outside, hauling cans to the curb and tying up bags. It means going outside and ringing my doorbell to tell me that I need to do it. And then supervising, or more like coaching, me from the front stoop.

It’s a weekly ritual– after she’s rung the bell, down in the hallway I’ll usually find her shaking a big black bag while hollering in her quaking, half delirious state, “you do de gaaabidge??” She’ll often do this the moment the sun sets the night before pickup, but if I’m not home, she’ll tuck the bag between handrail rungs in the staircase, and then do it all over again with the doorbell at 6am the next morning.

Olga is amazingly diligent with the garbage, despite the fact that she has trouble remembering my name or other simple things like where the grape jelly belongs (I once found it on her bedside table). Alzheimer’s is a really curious condition–it’s wiped out the majority of her life’s memories but also causes her to get stuck in certain memory loops and routines. She’s got her garbage ritual, she’s got a cauliflower ritual, and she also has a ritual of waking up at 10 o’clock every single night, and basically sleepwalking out into the hallway with her walker and nightie to make sure the hallway light is off and the front doors are locked.

She’s lived in Granny Mansion the longest– 50+ years– so I think she still has a deeply ingrained sense of duty to household responsibilities. Because she’s too frail to work in the garden and too forgetful to cook now (she’s almost burned the house down one too many times), her responsibilities come down to garbage reminders and the locks on the doors. Fair enough for an 89-year-old.

Unfinished Business

Before Sophie moved to Ridgewood, she spent about 30 years in upstate New York making a living by owning and operating a Dairy Queen. That was the family trade at the time– for many years, my aunts, uncles, grandparents, and even my mother and father had a monopoly on the Dairy Queens in the Hudson Valley area.

Throughout that time, Sophie did a fair amount of traveling between her house in Dutchess County and Olga’s apartment in Granny Mansion. She used to spend months split between the two places until about a decade ago, when she took up permanent residency in the Mansion as well. These days the 2.5-hour-long car ride prevents her from being able to visit upstate anymore, but she still believes she’s got some unfinished business up there. Despite what we tell her, she insists that she’s got a huge sum of money waiting for her in her old bank account.

So, three times, she’s tried to take a taxi from Ridgewood to the Rhinebeck Savings Bank to withdraw her money from the bank account that’s actually been closed for over ten years.

The first time, she strategically planned her trip for when I was out of town and unable to stop her. So she actually did make it up there and back in the cab—I have no idea what kind of hell she raised in the bank and honestly I’m surprised I didn’t get a call from the Rhinebeck police regarding a wild granny on the loose. When she did end up back in Ridgewood with no withdrawn savings, she paid the taxi driver the fee he asked– $600 cash.

The second time, about a month ago, Steve found Sophie on the front stoop waiting to be picked up by the cab she’d arranged to drive her upstate for another try at the bank. When I went downstairs to see what she was doing, she said that it was a nice day for a ride and that she needed her money. I asked her what price she’d arranged for the trip, and she said they gave her a good deal this time—only $400 for the roundtrip taxi. When I tried to talk her out of going, she got that manic laughter and those glossy eyes that come over her in moments of sheer mental frailty. Like the stubborn old German lady she is, she refused to give up on the trip and go back inside even when I had my dad on the phone trying to talk her down. When the cab driver finally arrived, Sophie eagerly hopped in while I tried to explain to the man, who seemed to only have a few words of English, that he couldn’t take my grandma on a $400 trip to a town 100 miles away because 1) she couldn’t sit in the car that long , and 2) the whole idea was f***ing crazy! After I paid him off $20 to cancel the trip, I had to literally pull Sophie out of the cab by her arms and legs, and then deal with her angry huff for the rest of the day.

The third time, a couple of weeks ago, as I was leaving for work I found her again outside on the stoop waiting nervously with her kerchief, sneakers, cane, and bank book in hand. I asked her what she was doing, and she, as a suspicious teenager lying to her parents, answered, “Nothing. I’m not doing anything.” With that, I stared blankly at her for a half-second, turned toward the subway station, and reached for my phone to call the cab company and tell them that they should definitely not ever pick up my senile grandmother for joyrides out of the city, thank you very much.

Chit Chat

Watermelon

Eating has always been a ceremonious affair around here. I have many vivid memories of visiting the grannies at this house as a kid, and being bullied into eating way more portions of German food than I could ever ask for. Sophie and Olga’s mother, who died a few years ago when she was 103, used to serve wursts and krauts and kartoffels and streudels in piles that were higher than my head, while yelling at me and my sisters to “Essen! Essen! Essen!” All the while I couldn’t wait to fly out of there and play my Gameboy on the car ride home.

Back then I never dreamed that one day I’d be living here as an adult, being the one responsible for buying all the food. The massive feasts don’t really happen anymore though, as Olga’s not really able to use the stove or oven unsupervised now. Sophie is still able to cook for herself a bit– she mainly subsists on Sprite, Chips Ahoy, fried chicken, boiled potatoes, and the occasional can of Budweiser or cake from the bakery around the corner. I know Mrs Fruehauf is still at it in her kitchen because I can always smell something like cabbage or some kind of roast coming from her apartment, but she never invites anyone in to join her. She stopped being friendly with Sophie and Olga about twenty years ago.

At any rate, the moments when I walk in Olga’s door with grocery bags in my hands are glorious ones for her. She loves going through all the bags as if she was uncovering treasure– when she finds a loaf of bread or a half gallon of orange juice her eyes light up, and she’ll oooooh and aaaah at a bag of grapes or apples. She’s thrilled at the sight of her sugar free cookies and deeply pleased at a jar of instant coffee.

But the real treasure to her, the one that makes her cry out in joy and head straight for a knife and cutting board– watermelon.

The other day I was dropping some groceries off to her at around 8pm, which was right about when she was nodding off to sleep for the night. So she was very very grumpy when she heard me letting myself into her apartment and making a bit of a commotion with keys and plastic bags. She hobbled out of her bedroom half asleep and grumbling with the sourest of sour looks on her face. I tried dangling the loaf of bread in front of her to cheer her up, but she was too grumpy to care, and she didn’t even take a second look when I was waving around the cookies.

Then I pulled out the big red and green kahuna, and suddenly she was smiling as if she’d just been given hundreds of thousands of dollars. Seconds after seeing it, she was fishing around for a knife and cutting board, and before I could finish taking the plastic wrap off the voluptous half -melon, she was slicing in with laughter and shrieks of happiness.

The next morning, only a third of the thing was left.

Have a Seat

The Washing Machine

On the list of Granny Mansion’s most cherished appliances, a close runner up to Sophie’s 1970′s home perm hair bowl would be our old Maytag washing machine. Set up where a dishwasher might typically be in a kitchen, the washing machine is rigged to drain into Olga’s sink and is about as loud as a helicopter.

“Oyyyy she shakes,” as Sophie observes.

It once shook so much that it tipped over in a flood of water and suds, I’ve heard, so Olga’s taken up a habit of clutching the machine on both sides during the spin cycle with the intention of suppressing the vibration. When she does this, she naturally begins shaking as well, and seeing her wrinkly, flabby body jiggling to the tune of the spin cycle is something I will remember and love always.

Throughout the entire rest of the cycle, she sits about 3 feet away from the machine, watching it with very intense eyes, just waiting for her cue.

Olga’s also one of those old country folk who believe in more bleach always. Several times she’s decided to pour a little splash into my loads when I’m not looking, and as a result, I’ve ended up with a number of shirts having that splotchy tie-dyed look that I was going for in 7th grade. Pretty much all of her sheets, mumus, and underwear are paper thin and snow white from years of continual bleaching.

And though the washing machine has been well-used for decades, we’ve never had a dryer in the house. There hasn’t really been a need. The grannies are content to string up their undies on clotheslines out the back windows to wave in the wind like flags of old eastern European pride.

Shrines

Though the grannies and I spend our days in different ways—I commute to Manhattan every day, Sophie takes daily trips to the cornerstore to buy Sprite and Chips Ahoy, Olga hasn’t left the house in about 5 years except to go to the emergency room, and Mrs Fruehauf takes daily trips to the neighborhood senior center to play Bingo except on the days she takes her senior bus trips to the casino in Yonkers—we are also one in the same. We’ve all got very German last names, and likewise we’ve all got a certain fondness for pilly cardigans, big eyeglasses, a good kraut.

And lately it seems I’ve picked up a habit of making shrines throughout my apartment, as is very characteristic for a grandmother. A shrine of candles and dried flowers here, a shrine of an old typewriter and photos there, a shrine of bamboo plants and mini books on top of the toilet. I assume it won’t be long until I’m taking inspiration from Sophie and shrinemaking with baby Jesuses, rosary beads, Christmas ornaments, pieces of mail from a decade ago.

One of Sophie’s proudest shrines is the row of a dozen fake roosters lining the top edge of her refrigerator, in size order. I think she’s proud of how, over the years, she’s managed to collect 12 different sized rooster figurines, some even with real chicken feathers. Another notable shrine in the house is Olga’s neatly ordered collection of pill bottles and photo frames atop her kitchen hutch—the wonder of which is that the photos in the frames change on the reg. This isn’t because they’re digital photo frames, but because Olga switches out photos two or even three times a day depending on her mood.

So in any given frame, in the morning there might be an old photo of her sister Sophie, but if in the afternoon she gets into an argument with Sophie over something like a carton of milk, she might change the photo to an old portrait of their mother. If seeing her mother makes Olga too emotional in the evening, she might change it to a photo of her old garden or even back to a photo of Sophie.

And at the end of the day, whether I’ve learned by example or whether it’s in our family blood to cling to relics from the past and collect them in piles around our apartments, this habit of shrinemaking doesn’t seem to be one I’ll kick anytime soon.

Old Memories

Remembrance

As a matriarch who took no crap from nobody and basically lived until the end of time, my great grandmother was an admirable lady. In her 90′s she was walking a distance of almost two miles from her 3rd floor apartment on Seneca Avenue to Granny Mansion each day, at 99 she underwent open heart surgery, and until her very last days she was very much still a providing mother to Sophie and Olga.

For a long period after she passed away, Olga wore black clothing in mourning. Even now, on three or four Sundays throughout the year, I’ll still find Olga dressed in black for the memory of her mother. Before she became unable to take car rides, she very often used to ask me to drive her to the cemetery on Woodward Avenue to visit her mother’s grave.

On one occasion, several years back, we all piled into my car and headed over on a chilly spring morning. That was one of Olga’s last recreational car rides– the very last was a disastrously messy trip to Martin’s Beauty Salon, but that’s another story for another day.

The cemetery is only a short drive away from the house, but going there always ended up being a half-day affair between the time it took to get everyone out the door and into the car, and then from the car to the edge of the cemetery where my great grandmother is buried. In this process, all sorts of problems and questions arose—whether to wear velcro sneakers or boots, whether to bring the cane or walker, how many times to check if the door is locked, who needs more legroom in the front seat, whether we should put the heat or the air conditioner on, and so on.

When we finally arrived at the headstone on that spring morning, we stood encircling it in silence for a few moments. Then Sophie began shuffling around in her purse. I thought she might be going in for a tissue or a kerchief, but nonchalantly, she pulled out a bouquet of dusty plastic flowers plucked freshly from one of her apartment shrines. I was happy to just lay the flowers down in front of the grave and say a little prayer, but she insisted on propping up the bouquet in the ground.

So as I was kneeling down discovering that the ground was still too frozen to stake them in the dirt, Olga was offering up her cane up as a tool to dig a little hole. When we made no progress with that, as the rubber base was making no dent in the ground at all, Sophie reached back into her purse and began fishing around once more. I was thinking about how miraculous it would have been if she was carrying around a trowel, but the item she pulled out was instead a fork.

And then seconds later I had one of those moments when you float outside of your body and observe yourself from a distance– there I was, crouched on the ground in this cemetery in the shadow of the Manhattan skyline, clawing at the icy earth with a dinner fork, planting a bouquet of plastic flowers.

Boyfriends

While Granny Mansion is something of a sorority house, a few men do hang around every so often. Aside from the occasional doctor or plumber, my dad, and Mrs Fruehauf’s sons, our other male visitors are mostly just boyfriends—mine, my sister’s, and Sophie’s.

My guy, Steve, is the bee’s knees. Heidi’s boyf Ben is also great, but Sophie’s boyfriend is a bit of a loser and we’re trying to get her to break it off with him. He’s a short, hunched over, greasy Romanian man who must be about 30 years younger than she is, and I don’t think their relationship is romantic. I see him come over on some Saturday afternoons, and Sophie tells me they sit at her kitchen table drinking cans of Budwieser. I have no idea what else they do, as she locks her door every time he’s here.

Once when I was gardening, I was after a trowel and knew she had one in her apartment. So I knocked on her door asking for it, but she refused to let me in—she actually started yelling at me to go away and leave her and her boyfriend alone. I tried explaining through the closed door that I just needed her to hand me the trowel, but she still refused to unlock the door. So I gave up and returned to the garden, only to see her, minutes later, quickly crack open her back window, chuck the trowel on the ground, and then slam the window shut.

Sophie may just enjoy the company of this man as a friend, or maybe she has feelings of affection toward him, but she does still go on dates at the Klubhaus with other men. And every time she meets one of my male friends she gets all vaclempt and giggly like a teenage girl. She’ll always be curious about them in the days after, and ask me questions like “Is dat fat boy mit dat nice hair gonna come over tomorrow?”

From all I’ve seen and heard, she’s always enjoyed spending time around men. But I get the feeling Mrs Fruehauf hates all men ever—many years ago she left her husband to raise her boys on her own because the man had trouble with a bottle, and she had no time for that. Olga is indifferent to men I think—her only real concerns about them are whether they speak German and whether they have beards. She loves German speakers, and she’s got a real problem with beards. My great grandmother did as well—I’ll never forget her constantly encouraging my mother to cut off my father’s beard in the middle of the night while he was sleeping.

Whenever Olga has an interaction with Steve, she always stares up at him with eyes intensely fixed on his beard. Often without words, she’ll start swiping the side of her face with her hand in a gesture to indicate that he needs to have a shave. Also, when the three of us are having conversations about other topics like groceries, the news, or the garden, she’ll interject to rattle off names and directions to old Ridgewood barbershops that she thinks he should visit, proving that through the whole chat she’s been dwelling on his beard.

But she’s been warming up to him quite a bit lately, as she’s now learning something that makes her very happy—he’s another person she can bully into doing the garbage.

Plastic Bags

Sophie has plenty of storage space throughout her apartment, with her several closets and dressers and cabinets, but she seems to like stashing things in unsuspecting places.

I once asked to borrow a frying pan, and to retrieve it she had to dig underneath her kitchen sink, behind a box of laundry detergent, some old towels, and a miniature bottle of Schnapps. When she eventually pulled it out, she had to spend some time untying the knots she’d made with the handles of each of the three plastic shopping bags encasing the frying pan. For safekeeping.

On another occasion, after I had just brought her some groceries, she was insisting on giving me a tip. I always tell her I don’t need a tip when I go grocery shopping, but she always insists. This time, she said she had it all ready in an envelope for me, but she was having trouble remembering where she put it. So I watched her pull out about six stuffed and knotted plastic bags from behind her armchair, and once she laid them all out on her couch, she started unknotting and going through one at a time. One bag had a purse in it, which actually had another smaller purse inside of it, one bag was full of sweaters, one had a pair of sneakers, and one was full of more plastic bags. She did end up finding the envelope with my tip, and I was thrilled to see that it was $5.50 all in coins.

I was recently chatting with my sister Heidi, who’s also living in Granny Mansion for the summer, and she told me how she had just found a plastic bag full of bras and underwear under a pillow on Sophie’s couch. When she asked Sophie what it was, Sophie replied, “My junk.” And when Heidi asked her why she needed it there, she didn’t have an answer.

Maybe to change into when needed?

Advice on Sleeping Well

For years, there’s been an unspoken open-door policy in this house. Meaning that most of the time, the doors to each of our apartments are kept unlocked (unless of course Sophie’s boyfriend is over or Olga is feeling moody). So naturally, barge-ins happen frequently.

Rarely are they hostile barge-ins; mostly they are just friendly check-ins for questions or to simply pass the time with someone else’s company. Although, Sophie has been known to hobble into Olga’s apartment enraged and hollering about a bowl Olga has been borrowing too long or how she’s still mad at Olga for always making Sophie chauffeur her around in her car twenty years ago, or something of the like.

Being on the top floor, Mrs Fruehauf and I are more or less safe from barge-ins from Sophie and Olga, as the trip up the stairs is too much of a biblical trek for the arthritic grannies below. But I feel no shame in barging in on Sophie or Olga whenever I please. When I barge in on them, I usually find them sitting in their respective armchairs, either watching tv, listening to the radio, nodding off to sleep, or staring blankly into space. Sometimes they will be up and about, futzing around their apartment, but usually I can count on them being parked in their armchairs.

My very favorite barge-in happened one afternoon last summer, when I needed to ask Sophie some important question about something or other. I could have just called her to ask, but it’s much faster for me to just fly down the stairs and right into her apartment than it is for her to get up and answer her phone. So as I barged in, I found her in her usual spot. But this time with something very strange going on.

She was sitting in her armchair with a towel over her head.

For a moment I was frightened, thinking she kicked the bucket and in her last few living moments attempted to cover her face with a veil, but when I asked her what she was doing, she grunted and said she was taking a nap. When I asked her why she needed a towel over her head for a nap, she answered, “I sleep better mit dat towel.”

Well I’ve never tried it, but maybe the lady’s onto something?

Granny Mansion Moments

As part of a summer project with some friends, I posted a Granny Mansion moment each day through the month of July on the CollaboratElaborate blog. The project was hugely successful and so much fun-- it was amazing to be involved in a project along with immensely talented writers and artists. I'll be gradually migrating some of the stories and photos over to this blog, so keep your eyes peeled!

Issue #6

Turf wars at the Klubhaus, beards, shauffeling, Kanye West, marinated cockles, ponderings on Sophie's oversized nose, another taxi ride upstate, the Shoedini, and generous helpings of birthday cake