Molly’s Dogs

Molly Greenblatt met Harry Smith, Sr. in the army some time during WWII. Enlisting at war time was a really brave move, which always confused me because I never considered Grandmom Smith to be a particularly brave person. According to my father, she was trying to escape her tyrannical older sisters and the strict confines of their Orthodox Jewish home.

I’m also confused about why she fell in love with Harry in the first place, because a Jewish girl from New York doesn’t typically fall for a Christian hillbilly straight off a farm in southern Ohio. Actually, I don’t think Molly would have given him the time of day if her best friend, Ruth, had not developed a crush on him. Molly and Ruth were very competitive. As the story goes, they were working as secretaries on an army base in South Carolina where Harry was serving as a policeman. One day, he strutted into the office in his fatigues and drawled, “If either of you girls has a dime you can take me to a movie.”

“I’ve got a dime,” said Molly, smirking at Ruth.

After Harry left, Ruth turned to my grandmother and said, “If you try to steal that man from me, I’ll throw you down the stairs!” which turned out to be an empty threat, I think, because ultimately Ruth married a college graduate and lived quite comfortably. Her only child, Lilly, became a veterinarian. Molly and Harry struggled to feed their three children and barely made a dime all of their working lives.

By the time I came into the world, my grandparents were semi-retired and had been long-settled in a house somewhere in the piney woods of South Jersey. I have tiny, flickering memories of my grandfather sitting in a Lazy Boy wearing a blue leisure suit and smoking a cigarette. There are a few more vivid memories of my grandmother.

Her front porch was screened in and that’s where she kept her plants, one of which had a red flower that rarely bloomed. The back porch was just a landing from which her schnauzer, Max, would launch himself after you hitched him to the dog run and let him outside. I loved that dog. Whenever I sang “Only You” he would start barking, hop on the couch, and lick my face. But, the Max that I sang to was actually the second Max. When her first dog died, my grandmother simply replaced it with an identical dog and gave it the same name. This was also her method of grieving the loss of her pet parrots, all three of which were named Butch.

Anyway, whenever Max (versions I or II) was ready to come inside, I unhitched the leash and he scurried across the linoleum into her dark kitchen, desperate for food. I still remember the sound of his claws on the floor, and that depressing, yellow kitchen – such a stark contrast to Grandmom Giovanitti’s, which was always warm and scented with meatballs. Grandmom Smith’s kitchen was completely devoid of cooking smells. It was saturated with tobacco and the pungent scent of Butch (versions I, II and III). The room was just a passageway, really. A rest stop, where grandmom would top off her jelly glass with Pepsi or take a bite off the half-eaten Butterfinger that she kept hidden away in the utensil drawer.

However, what I remember most about the kitchen was her blue, glass butter dish. It was shaped like a chicken and it sat on the window sill for many years, devotedly hatching the dust. When I was very little I mistook it for a dog. Grandmom thought my ignorance was simply adorable, and she told that story over and over again. “Your mother would carry you through the kitchen, and you would point your chubby little finger at that butter dish and say, ‘dog?’ It was just so sweet.’”

Thinking about Grandmom Smith makes me kind of sullen, mostly because I never really knew her. I only interacted with her when I was a preoccupied child and a self-obsessed teenager. I never asked her about growing up Jewish, or our ancestors in Romania, or the war, or the Holocaust and the family that we lost. I never asked her about living with a husband who drank away their money, or about why she loved books. These are all things that interest me now but are forever lost. For me, all that remains of my grandmother are these little, memorial idiosyncrasies – her pink towels, the seashell next to her bathtub, and the way she smiled whenever I sang to Max (the sequel).

After my grandfather died, Grandmom moved into a tiny apartment where she put flowery slip covers over all the furniture. The last time we visited her she got out a pad and pen and said excitedly, “Let’s make a list of what you guys want after I die!”

I looked at my mother’s face. I could sort of tell what she was thinking – it was some combination of “how morbid” and “this woman is crazy.” My father and brother sat there silently, shifting in their seats. After a couple minutes I spoke up.

“I want the blue butter dish,” I told her. “You know – the one in the shape of a dog.”