my grandmother’s particular deck, the “Fortune-telling Cards for Witches,” or “The Witch’s Fortune-telling Cards,” or however the name was translated. It may be that things I heard afterward about my grandmother’s brief television career as a witch corrupted my recollection of the deck’s name—maybe they were called “Cards of a Gypsy Fortune-teller,” or “The Sibyl’s Fortune-telling Cards.” But I remember enough about the cards to conclude that it must have been a German variant on the standard “Lenormand” deck.
The first time I saw a classic Mexican Lotería deck with its iconic imagery (El Sol, El Arbol, La Luna), after moving to Southern California in the mid-’80s, I recognized its kinship to my grandmother’s. Her deck had a card called the Ship that showed an old-fashioned argosy under full sail beneath a sky filled with stars. The House was white stucco with a red tile roof and a pretty green garden. The Rider in his red tailcoat rode a prancing white horse through yellow and green woods. The Child in its neutering nightdress clutched a doll and looked afraid. As on the faces of most Lenormand decks, a small oblong panel, inset at the top of each card above the Scythe or the Birds or the Bouquet, depicted a pip or court card with the German suits of hearts, leaves, acorns, and bells.*
I don’t remember the first story she told me with her fortune-telling deck, or which set of three cards she drew it from. But after that first time, “playing with the story cards” became an occasional feature of our time together. There was no way to predict when the urge would come over her, though it came over her only when we were alone. In my memory of those occasions the day outside the windows of the apartment would be gray, cold, and wet; the weather may have played a part in putting her in the mood. Anyone who has spent time in the company of small children knows that a crushing boredom can unlock great powers of invention. My grandmother would be drifting gray and unfocused through an October afternoon, unsettled in the kitchen, wearying of my prattle. And then the cards would come out of their hiding place in the empty can of almond kisses, and she would say: “Do you want me to tell you a story?”
At this point I always faced a dilemma. I liked the way my grandmother told a story, but the characters who emerged from her witch’s deck unsettled and frightened me, and the fates that befell them were dark. From the three cards I turned faceup on the kitchen table my grandmother’s imagination would wind a cryptic path to the narrative she unfolded. The Lilies, the Ring, and the Birds, say, would not necessarily produce a story that had anything to do with either lilies, rings, or birds, and if it did, then it would reveal something terrible about them, some latent capability for malice or liability to perdition.
In my grandmother’s stories wicked children received grim punishments, hard-earned success was forfeited in one instant of weakness, infants were abandoned, wolves prevailed. A clown who liked to scare children woke up one morning and found that his skin had turned paper-white and his mouth had twisted into a permanent grin. A widowed rabbi unraveled his tallis and used the thread and some of his dead wife’s clothes to sew their child a new mother, a soft golem silent as a raincoat. The stories gave me nightmares, but while she was telling them I found myself in the company of the grandmother I loved best: playful, exuberant, childlike, fey. In later years, whenever I recalled my grandmother to a close friend or a therapist, I would say that when she told a story, the actress in her came out. Her storytelling was a performance undertaken with ardor and panache. She did the different voices of animals, children, and men; if a male character disguised himself as a female, my grandmother would put on the funny, fluting voice that men affect in drag. Her foxes were suave, her dogs wheedling, her cows moronic.
If I hesitated before assenting to a story, my grandmother would rescind the offer, and weeks might pass before she offered again. So most of the time I simply nodded, unable to resolve the question of whether the company of the teller was worth the toll in bad dreams.
Almost fifty years later I still remember some of her stories. Bits of them have consciously and unconsciously found their way into my work. The stories I remember tend to be the ones I re-encountered in the plot of a film or in a book of folktales.* A few survived because some incident or sense impression of mine got tangled with or trapped inside the telling.
That happened with a story she told me about an encounter between King Solomon and a djinn. Afterward I remembered her introducing it as “from the Hebrew Bible,” but that turned out to be nonsense. Eventually I did find some Jewish folktales about Solomon matching wits with djinn but nothing like my grandmother’s story. She told me that one day Solomon, the wisest king who ever lived, was captured by a djinn. On pain of death, the djinn demanded that Solomon grant him three wishes. Solomon agreed to try. He set a condition: Granting the wishes must cause no harm to any living person. The djinn therefore wished for an end to war; Solomon reminded him that if there were no war, the swordsmith’s children would starve to death. Solomon helped the djinn to envision the disastrous outcomes of two more apparently benign wishes, and in the end the djinn was obliged to set King Solomon free. Typically the story did not quite have a happy ending, since afterward King Solomon himself could never again bring himself to wish for anything.*
I remember this story because after she was done telling it, my grandmother sent me to fetch something—a magazine, her glasses—in her bedroom. Maybe I was just snooping around. When I walked into the bedroom, I saw a shaft of afternoon sunlight, slanting in through a window, strike the eternal bottle of Chanel No. 5 on my grandmother’s vanity. A djinn kindled in the bottle. It was the very color of the way my grandmother smelled; the color of the warmth of her lap and enfolding arms; the color of her husky voice resounding in her rib cage when she pulled me close. I stared at the flickering fire imprisoned in the bottle. Sometimes I found pleasure, warmth, and comfort in that fragrance, and sometimes when she dragged me onto her lap, her perfume dizzied me and brought on a headache. Sometimes her arms would be iron bands encircling my neck, and the scrape of her laughter sounded embittered and hungry, the laughter of a wolf in a cartoon.
* * *
My five earliest memories of my grandmother:
1 The tattoo on her left forearm. Five digits encoding nothing but the unspoken prohibition on my asking her about them. The jaunty 7 with its continental slash.
2 A song about a horse, sung in French. She bounces me on her knees. Holding my hands in hers, clapping them together. Faster and faster with each line, from a walk to a trot to a gallop. Most of the time when the song ends, she folds me in her arms and kisses me. But sometimes when she gets to the last word of the song, her lap opens like a trapdoor and she tumbles me onto the carpet. While she sings me the horse song, I watch her face, looking for a clue to her intentions.
3 The crimson blur of a Jaguar. A Matchbox, a 3.4 Litre, the same color as her lipstick. She has bought it to console me after taking me to an ophthalmologist who dilated my pupils with drops of belladonna. When I panicked about the loss of vision she kept her cool, but now that I am happy again she gives way to worry. She tells me to put away the toy or I will lose it. If I play with it on the subway, one of the other boys riding on our train will envy it and steal it. The world is a blur to me, but my grandmother sees it clearly. Any of the shadows populating the 1 train might be a covetous boy bent on thievery. So I put the Jaguar in my pocket. I feel the Jaguar cool against my palm, the elegant taper of its lines, the words jaguar and belladonna that she will own forever afterward in my memory.
4 The seams of her stockings. Running true as plumb lines from the hem of her skirt to the backs of her I. Miller pumps as she feeds bones to a soup pot on the stove. Golden bangles stacked for safekeeping beside a floured marble pastry board on a countertop patterned with asterisks and boomerangs. The knob on the dial of her kitchen timer, finned and streamlined like a rocket.
5 The luminous part in her hair. Seen from above as she crouches in front of me, buttoning my pants. A ladies’ room, maybe Bonwit or Henri Bendel, a periphery of foliage and gilt. I am—in English and French—her little prince, her little gentleman, her little professor. Her coat has a fur ruff that smells of Chanel No. 5. I have never seen anything as white as her scalp. My mother would have sent me into the men’s room to do my own urinating and zip my own fly, but I am aware of no insult to my dignity. I understand that with my grandmother a different law obtains. A phrase I have heard comes to mind and along