Baba's House

My Baba’s kitchen smells of baking bread. The scent hints of vanilla, rum, and orange peel. The loaves are braided and filled with poppy seeds or shaped like large muffins topped by a cross formed in the dough. The breads line the counter, cooling on wire racks.

"Baba" is Ukrainian for grandmother. My Baba has recently stopped dying her hair blond and lets it curl gray around her head. She looks like her mother now, when she got older, she says. The cane she uses she calls “Schmirko,” or little rascal, and since the surgery on her leg she is getting stronger and relying on Schmirko less.

“Don’t tell anyone I baked; I wasn’t supposed to,” she says. She blesses each loaf by making the sign of the cross with a knife.

Dried mushrooms tied together hang on the wall by the door. She brought them back from her last visit to the old country, where her cousins took her and my mother hiking in the Carpathian Mountains. Pictures of my own cousins and their babies decorate the refrigerator, kept in place by flower magnets. In the window, between two lace curtains, a prism bounces refracted light across the room onto a reproduction of da Vinci’s Last Supper. A ceramic frog sits by the sink, holding a wet sponge in its open mouth. The frog and a set of ceramic jars were made by my aunt who died the year before I was born; some fluke of the flu stopped her heart. If she were still here, she would be a Baba, too.

Next to the ceramic jars is a porcelain cottage; the roof comes off, and inside is a flask of vodka.

When I discover this, Baba pours us each a “jigger” and tells me to toss it back. The liquor burns as it goes down my throat. She decides we need two. It’s only three in the afternoon.

The clock on the wall ticks the seconds, and the wind rustles through the neighbor’s trees, rattling the slightly open windows. Outside by the shed is a round grill. Baba burns any trash related to religion in it. Withered palms and old pussy willows from Palm Sunday, papers with icons, old church bulletins, and flowers from last week’s service all go into the grill. They can’t be thrown away like regular trash; they might be desecrated, Baba tells me. She keeps a book of matches in her raincoat pocket for when she has enough trash to set a fire.

The inside of the shed smells of gasoline for the lawn mower and moist soil and also of plastic—the beach ball and kiddie pool my cousins and I used to play with are still there. Garlic bulbs, braided together by their leaves, hang in a bunch above the shelves of tools. The garden outside is filled with marigolds, and in the center sits a statue of the Virgin Mary. Once on a late summer evening, I saw my grandfather pray by it on his knees. It was when his kidneys were failing him, and my grandmother pleaded with him to go on dialysis.

The trees we used to climb are gone and so is the vegetable and herb garden where I used to pick dill for potato salad. Only a row of evergreens lining one side of the yard remains. Now I sometimes rake up the sap-sticky pinecones so the grass can be mown.

In the kitchen, I put a kettle on for tea.

“The train is arriving,” Baba says when it whistles.

I pour the steaming water over tea bags in two large mugs and take them into the sitting room. In the closet are afghans and pillows and old hat boxes that no longer contain hats but hold whatever trinkets and clothing my grandmother has decided to save. She still has my mother’s Girl Scout uniform and prom dress. There’s also the Styrofoam mannequin head with a wig. My cousins and I colored in her eyes and lips and used to stuff clothing with pillows to make her a body.

Once, we set her in a chair and my great-grandmother covered the life-size figure with a blanket.

“Your friend is cold,” she told us.

We decide to put on Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. I lean back in the armchair rocker where my grandfather used to sit when he rested in the afternoons and watched Bonanza reruns. Next to the chair, on a long chest with a record player inside, is a picture of him. In it, he is twenty-two. It is just after the end of World War II, and he is at the displaced-persons camp in Germany where he met my grandmother. He is leaning against a tree, wearing a white scarf over a dark sweater. He holds a cigarette between two fingers as his arm hangs down alongside his leg.

“That’s my favorite picture of him,” Baba says.

—C.