Architectural Digest

A non-fiction short story written humorously about life's "messy-ness."

If you know my mother, you know she likes to save things. Every possession has the possibility of coming with her to the afterlife. The most prized: Architectural Digest Magazine. You don't understand how much space this can take up and how much symbolic meaning it has that I absolutely cannot understand. I worry about my mother. One day I will walk in the house and I will not be able to find her. I'll be sorting through odd discount food items,99 cent soap and magazines from 1999. I'll worry my mom will be buried by the time I get to her. Her last words, "It was on sale!" The thing is, this isn't an unreasonable nightmare if you've met my grandmother.

My grandmother, Mary Pauline, lives in a small yellow home in Long Beach, a city about 30 minutes from downtown Los Angeles. The stoop is green and Guillermo keeps the roses looking nice. The block that used to house the nuclear family of the 1950's now has mostly immigrant and lower income families. I used to dread visiting, not because of my grandmother, but because it was so dark. Unlike my mother who keeps the windows open and the A/C set to artic, my grandmother is frugal in every aspect except gift-giving (which I find admirable) and likes to keep her place hospitable for bats.

When we stepped into the cave we called grandma's house, I had to squint to see her. But eventually your eyes got used to it. Her television volume was stuck on MAX and you basically lost hearing temporarily if you decided to watch Rick Steves with her.

On the phone it was even better, the fact that she didn't wear hearing aids while watching TV was admissible. Only the television was being disadvantaged and it's just made out of plastic and weird metal fuses. It lacks human sensitivity and complex thoughts or feelings. But the phone... well. I really want to invent something that just hums and makes agreeable comments for you. It would attach to your phone box or something. So you can go to the bathroom mid-conversation or tidy up the spice rack, and not have to say a word. When grandma would call it would be a 45-minute story (no breaks) about our Czech ancestors, the importance of higher education or some story about my mother having friends as a child (which I find implausible). She didn't pause because she knew she wouldn't hear me. If I had to talk she usually repeated the wrong word and was set on it.

   Hello.
   Hello!
   Hi Grandma, It's Joanna.
   Who is this? I want to speak to my daughter, Mary Jo.
   It's Joanna, your granddaughter.
   JUANA? I don't know a Juana. I think I have the wrong number.
   JOANNA.
   Okay, thanks for your help. I'll try again.
   It's Mary Jo.
   Oh hello!

I remember we went to visit a few years ago and I found a young Julia Roberts gracing a 1988 cover of Vanity Fair, THE NEXT BIG STAR it read. "Tell Joanna that she can have it!" I heard her tell my mother. It was as if it was gold. I can have it? Really? Oh I can't... Really...I can't accept. I put it back on its oddly organized mess and walked away.

However, I remember walking into my grandmother's house that last time, after putting Julia next to a dusty Reader's Digest that there was something about her home that drew me in. I'd never noticed it before.

   -Mom, did grandma get new wood floors?
   "No! Those she put in years ago when I was in high school."
   -Wow, they look brand new.

My mom likes to put emphasis on high school to remind me how ancient she is. I think she thinks this will make me appreciate her more or remind me that someday she will be old and bedridden. However it just makes me think, great I'm inheriting a 99 cent store.

Staring at the stacks of magazines, I suddenly understood why everything looks so polished. As the children moved out, stuff moved in and stayed. You'd move a stool or a chest and find that the carpet was absolutely untouched. Grandma never cooked, so the kitchen's daisy covered linoleum, which my mom bought in 1970, was good as new.

"All her furniture...expensive stuff! Ethan Allen!" my Mom would exclaim every time we'd sit in her living room.

There was something about my grandmother's house. Maybe it was her love of the past and conservation. Like her television set for example. My uncle Kevin bought her a new one in the 90's that she placed above her first television that was built into a table. They are actually quite pretty, almost a piece of art,certainly furniture. But the sight of two stacked upon each other always confused me in my youth.It was like two big reflective eyes staring at you.

In with the new, out with the old is not a phrase my mother's family has heard. It's more like "eh just put that new thing on top of my old thing". That pretty much goes for every aspect of their lives. I think my mom understands my anxiety to an extent. When I was studying abroad in Spain she would call to say,

   "Joanna! I threw out FIVE Architectural Digests today!"
   -That's just great Mom.
   "Yeah I try to throw out a few a day. It's working!"

I often compare my mom's plight to drug addiction. Whereas I would just throw all the magazines in the garbage (or give them to the library if feeling charitable), my Mom needs to be weaned off coffee table literature very slowly. Similar to nicfits, she has lit-fits and misses those days when AD covered every clean space in our house. It's funny because when I buy her books or she borrows mine, she just leaves them places. She has absolutely no connection to them. She would throw my first copy of Catcher in the Rye in a gutter and not flutter an eyelash. But for some reason Angelica Houston's Mediterranean home really should be scanned and put into an AD database, which my mom desperately wants to create.

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