PINOCHLE.(life story of nonagenarian who immigrated from Poland)

Publication: The New Yorker

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

My father and I have convened on the West Coast to videotape the oral history of my ninety-four-year-old grandmother, Rose Leyner, who was born in Stralisk, Poland (where as a girl she rode around in a horse-drawn hay wagon), emigrated to the United States in 1914 and lived on the Lower East Side, graduated to New Jersey, and now resides in Studio City, California, in what my father vehemently describes as not a nursing home but an assisted-living facility. (For my father, a trial attorney, a rigorous taxonomy is both a tactic and an ethos.) To fortify ourselves, we have taken my grandmother to a highly touted sushi joint on Ventura Boulevard.

Rose has just dumped an unspeakable amount of wasabi into her little ceramic dish of soy sauce. In a robin's-egg-blue cashmere cardigan, a yellow scarf knotted jauntily at her neck, her white hair a wispy meringue--her elegance not vitiated in the least by the slight kyphotic curvature of her spine--she stirs up the wasabi (now brackish and clotted and looking like something brewed in gurgling vats during the Gulf War) and, trembling, precariously dips an enormous piece of yellowtail into it. At her age, the esophageal lining is like tissue paper. That caustic shit could eat through it like hydrochloric acid. A woman this age, this frail, could die from that, right?...

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