On summer mornings I like to wake up early and drink orange juice in my kitchen. I trace the veiny marble island with my finger as I sit on a stool, watching the people jogging on the boardwalk. On one particular morning, a day in my sixteenth summer, I get a call from Poppy.
“Molly Polly!” he says. He talks from his lower lip. “Come over for breakfast today. I’m making waffles.” It’s noon.
I’m not surprised that Poppy wants to have a late breakfast. He wakes up late, for an old person, and stretches for an hour before beginning his daily beauty routine. He shuffles to his bathroom. He brushes his teeth (brand new veneers, an unnatural blue-white). He rubs tanning oil into his skin, flimsy like Saran-Wrap, every day of the year, before he blows his hair dry. He’s eighty-eight years old, and he’s bald, except for a few hairs flipped over his shiny brown head. He takes care of those few hairs; he frowns if I try to touch them, and he gels and combs them every once in a while during the day.
I ride my bike along the boardwalk over to Poppy’s house, counting the boats on the water. It’s choppy today, and the sun ricochets off the angles of the sea. Poppy grew up in the Bronx. He calls it “the neighborhood,” and he did all of the things you’d think that an old Italian grandfather did when he was a boy in the Bronx, playing stick-ball, being a paper boy, and going to school (“through six feet of snow! I walked a mile! You kids today you get a ride to your mailbox!”). I know his school was only a block from his apartment, but I never say anything.
My whole family spends the summer in a small beach town in Connecticut, far from “the neighborhood.” I like it because I can swim and pick blackberries and do a host of other summer things, and Poppy likes it because he can sleep on the beach, his head tilted back and his mouth wide open, wearing a netted safari hat that gives him checkered tan-lines on his head. When I was little, I used to put it on and let it fall over my eyes so I could look at everyone without them seeing.
Poppy’s beach house is weird looking. He designed it himself, but he printed the plans wrong, so the side of the house is facing the street, and the front of the house is facing a tall shrub on the side of the yard. The back has an outdoor shower that smells like salad. There is only one very small window out front, and a monstrous air-conditioner. A crusty sign that says SPANO hangs precariously from a short white pole.
Breakfast is the biggest meal for Poppy. I made the mistake once of saying no to his breakfast, and he went up to his room for the whole day, refusing to come to the beach; he just sat in his room, stretching, or blowing out his hair, or something.
My mom calls Poppy’s room “the café.” He sleeps on this stiff, grainy mattress, but then there’s a really nice wooden cocktail table, deep, polished mahogany, and these tiny little chairs. The chairs are nice; they’re wicker or something, but my five-year-old cousin is the only one who can sit comfortably on one of those chairs. Poppy spends the whole day in the café if you refuse his breakfast.
I park my bike in front of the dilapidated SPANO sign and walk up the stairs and into the kitchen. He’s hard at work, scooping cupfuls of waffle mix into his ancient mixer. He uses this brand of mix called “Krusteaz” that I’ve never seen anywhere but in his house.
“Hi Pop,” I say. He doesn’t hear me. I call him again, “Poppy.” No answer. He’s nearly deaf, and he wears a conspicuous bean-shaped hearing aid that he doesn’t turn on. He’s in his favorite shirt, a bright green number from Wal-Mart with a surfer and a palm tree on the front, and his Tommy Bahama shorts.
My grandpa ordered corduroy shorts from Tommy Bahama over the phone. He ordered forty pairs. Forty pairs! He got four pairs of each color. He says they’re a good fit, he trusts the brand, they’ll last a lifetime. Quality, he says. He gave my dad a pair, this sickly yellow color, like a barely ripe banana.
I walk over to my grandpa as he scoops small mountains of Krusteaz waffle mix into his mixer, and I put my hand on his shoulder. He turns around and puts his knobby hand on the side of my face, giving me a dry kiss, touching one cheek with one hand, because two hands make it the Mafia’s kiss of death. “I made soft eggs!” he exclaims. His s’s sound wide and cheeky.
Poppy and my great uncle Joe had a contest once to see who made the best soft eggs. Soft eggs are scrambled eggs with too much milk. I hate soft eggs. They remind me of soggy dish rags. Uncle Joe won the soft eggs contest, and Poppy spent the whole day in the café.
I suffer through an appetizer of soft eggs, feeling them dribble down my throat, wiping their milky residue off my lips. “You like your soft eggs,” Poppy demands, his eyes bright. I nod.
While I wait for the waffles, I stand next to Poppy at the kitchen sink. “How much money are they gonna give you to play ball at school?” Every sport is “ball.”
“I don’t know yet Pop. I haven’t gotten in yet.”
“BC. You should play ball for them. Great academic reputation. You can’t beat that Jesuit education.”
Poppy went to Syracuse, but all of his children went to Boston College.
“I’ll see what happens if I get in.”
“If you get in, you should go. Great ball there. That Jesuit education. You can’t beat it, you just can’t.” He looks at me in earnest, and exposes his square teeth.
I don’t know why he’s all about that Jesuit education. He’s not even religious. We tried to go to church one Christmas and we couldn’t find it. My uncle got him a boom box for Christmas last year, along with some Michael Jackson CDs. Poppy loves Michael Jackson, and he really loves to dance. He takes lessons weekly at this dance studio in Mamaroneck, and you’re supposed to bring a partner, but he goes alone. He waits for one of the young, blond dance instructors to dance with him in class. Whenever Michael Jackson comes on, he gets up from his chair and makes his hands into weak fists and drags his feet along the floor. He points his bumpy fingers around and shows his fluorescent teeth, and then he gets tired and says he can’t dance too long without proper dancing shoes.
We eat waffles together eventually, and I ask him what he did this week. He is suspiciously vague. He says, “Who knows? I’m busy.” I know what he’s been doing.
Poppy has a secret girlfriend. She is debatably the worst kept secret in New York. He takes her out to the most public Italian restaurants in our small town, to the country club, and to IHOP with me, asking me, embarrassed, not to tell my mom. Her name is Anne, and he calls her “Annie Dannie.” They’ve been dating since the ‘70s, and all they ever do is go out to get food and talk about it. When I went with them to IHOP, we spent a good hour talking about whether IHOP’s egg substitute was better than Poppy’s soft eggs. My family hates Anne because she’s never invited us over and they call her the gumada, literally “godmother,” but it means she’s his mistress. I think she’s fine. Boring, but fine. We don’t have much in common, so she just asks me about electronics. Annie Dannie doesn’t understand the difference between an iPod and a Walkman, even though I explain it to her every time we’re together. She wears chalky lipstick, and calls Poppy “Tony.”
His real name is Anthony Spano. He introduces himself as Tony, but everyone calls him Chuck, or variations on that theme like “Chookie,” “Chussie,” and “Sukiyaki.” I asked him why once, and he said it was a funny story, but I cried.
He was in the Air Force during World War Two, and he spent most of his service in England. He won’t eat Brussels sprouts now, because he “had enough of that garbage during the war!” When he was in England, he and his war buddies had a night off. He says that a young woman ran up to him and jumped into his arms and said, “Chuck! Oh my god, Chuck, you’re alive!” and she wept on his uniform, and he told her that he was sorry, that he wasn’t Chuck. She apologized, very embarrassed, and began to walk away, but she suddenly turned back and begged him to come meet her mother, because apparently he looked exactly like her brother who went missing in the war. Poppy agreed. He says he rang the doorbell with the young woman. They waited, and when the mother opened the door, she sobbed and said “Chuck! Oh, Chuck!” and hugged him, and once again, Poppy had to explain that he wasn’t Chuck. He said that they fed him and gave him anything he could ever want, and thanked him a thousand times for coming to meet them. They were both hysterical when they said goodbye to Poppy, their Chuck, and when he got back to the base, his friends called him Chuck for the rest of the war, and everybody else called him Chuck for the rest of his life.
Poppy works as an insurance salesman. He always tells me not to get emotionally attached to real estate. His advice came to me one night when I woke from my sleep because I was so hot, my hair glued to my neck and head with sweat. I stood in my bathroom and I cut my hair in strips, watching it fall on my bathroom tile in slow motion, curling gently as it reached the floor. I was caught between sleep and wake, trying not to get emotionally attached to real estate, as I thought about how my my hair looked like thick dark vines on my bathroom floor.
After we finish our waffles, Poppy drinks his coffee and I drink orange juice. His mouth melts into a frown as he swallows, and he blinks often. He always looks surprised, because his eyebrows are high and translucent gray, like fog.
He drinks decaf after every single meal. The waiter will say “anything else?” and Poppy will say “one coffee.” The waiter will say “okay, one cof--” and Poppy will cut him off: “decaf.” I don’t know why he doesn’t just say “decaf coffee.” He also has fried calamari every time we go out to dinner. It makes my mom insane. She wants to share an appetizer, but we always have to get fried calamari. He’ll raise his cellophane eyebrows and say “Mhm. That’s tender” or shake his head and close his lips and grimace and say, “Overcooked. They’re chewy.” Once my mom gave a disclaimer before we even got the menus. She said that we weren’t getting fried calamari, Dad, because we had it last night. When the waiter came, we ordered our appetizer, and Poppy said, “and one fried calamari.”
Poppy never pays the bill at the end of the night. He’s got lots of money from being an insurance salesman, but when the check comes, he sticks his hand in his pocket and moves his wallet around without taking it out, looking around and waiting for someone to say “don’t worry about it.” My uncles love to cheer him on. “Come on! You got it Pop! You’re so close!” I ask them to leave him alone, but my mom hisses, “Why is he saving all this money? Does he think he’s gonna take it with him?” When my family tells him he’s cheap, he says he’s a Depression baby, even though he was born after the Depression. He buys everything at Costco. He loves their deli meats. One time, I asked him for the Jack LaLane Juicer for Christmas, and he bought me a blender from Costco. It was unwrapped; my sister and I cracked up when we saw it sitting under the tree, this cheap, naked blender.
We finish our coffee and orange juice, and he says he’ll see me at the beach later. I sink into his chest and I smell his tanning oil, and I remember when I was little and I’d grab onto his shoulders when we swam together in the ocean. He doesn’t swim now, but it feels the same when I hold his shoulders and dance with him to Michael Jackson.