Back to Beelzebubbe

For a moment I want to get back to my grandmother, Budie a.k.a. Beelzebubbe.

On the record, hand on Koran or whatever: My feelings about her are not negative, not in the least, even as I recognize her limitations. I should be appalled, I know that, and I am, but I'm also not.

I tell stories about her and am gleeful when listeners at the dinner table gasp, eyes popping at the extent of her outrageous behaviors. But when I am a child she has the gift of making me feel like she is letting me into the most exclusive club in the world, since it is a world basically defined by making fun of everyone who is not us. Heady stuff to a preteen. With her I believe I can be omnipotent, I will always be able to strike first before someone has the chance to attack. Without having any depth of character she becomes the largest character of my youth and early adulthood. I always take her side and she usually takes mine, except when it comes to spending money. I am a chemist. I make shit out of money. She also decides later, in my very late teens, to tell everyone I am an alcoholic for no particular reason, though I am not now nor have I ever been a habitual great big drunk - which is not the same as saying I haven't even been a great big drunk on the odd occasion.

Saying I am an alcoholic is a lie but everyone believes her. Later, by her eighties, her convolutions with truth get out of control. She accuses a houseguest she doesn't particularly like of having taken a crap in her bed, ruining the expensive bedspread. An astonishingly audacious lie. She bends the universe to her world, to her truth, believing her lies the minute they come out of her mouth.

I want to bend the universe too, see it through the jaundiced glasses of righteous rage like she does. She becomes my talisman when she starts confiding in me; reliving the gruesome blood when my half-brother's natural mother, Helen, tries to kill herself, opening her eyes wide as she tells me how my older half-brother Aaron, Helen's youngest, beats his head against the side of the crib when he is an infant, giving himself cuts, bruises, and once, a black eye; accusing Adam of being a wife beater, melding stories I tell her of life with him and my step-mother with stories she tells from when Adam and Helen live at home with her and my grandfather Zadie after Gary is born. The stories usually come to some conclusion where she is proven right, or where she gives someone his or her comeuppance.

Yet there is magic and transformation in her back-story. She isn't particularly pretty, but with money, grooming, and flair, she makes herself into a high class dame. Her guileful skills will rub off on me. I will transform from a lumpy child into a swan. I can will it into existence. She is powerful as I will be, willful as I will be, feared as I will be, funny as I will be, and deeply unhappy. That is okay. Unhappiness is also inherited. Pour a scotch. Tell a joke at someone else's expense. Go for the jugular and when they cry snort in their face: "Come on! I'm kidding! Can't you tell?!"

There is a picture taken at the bar mitzvah of her younger son, my uncle. Every other woman there is dowdy by modern standards. Their undefined bosoms sag down to their waists in shapeless dresses that give their waists and hips the impression of being the same size. They are respectable. Dutiful. The mother of the bar mitzvah, only later to be called Buddie and Beelzebubbe, sits apart from the others. She wears a strapless yellow silk dress, her firm breasts pointing out, creating a right angle beneath them down to her tiny waist. She is blonde, her hair is artfully arranged, and a cigarette is casually draped between two of her long red nails.

She stares blankly out at nothing in particular, looking like she has no idea how she ended up in this room, with these people, in this life.