Safe Passage

My grandparents’ house was big. As a toddler, I sometimes got lost in it. The house smelled of gumwood and kilim rugs and smoke-stained ceilings. And some days, boiled lamb’s tongue, earthy and sharp. My grandmother loved tongue.

We lived there together, my parents, my mother’s parents, my older sister, and I.

So many rooms in that house, they needed names. Names beyond Dining Room and Guest Room. The slope-ceilinged Luggage Room smelled of mothballs and curtained train compartments. Leather suitcases lined in satin, clasps shut tight, lay in piles, dreaming of the Queen Mary.

The Candy Closet smelled like peanut brittle: burned sugar and slightly stale. Its shelves must have held things besides candy, but that’s all I remember. Often I’d open a box of chocolates and find just a few little brown fluted paper cups inside. I would swipe my finger in each one, searching for stray flakes.

I shared a room with my sister called the Sewing Room. My grandmother didn’t sew, and neither did my mother.

My parents slept in the attic in a room called Ted and Dan’s Room. Ted and Dan were my mother’s older brothers. They were very close. They worked at the same company. Married two sisters. Died of the same kind of cancer, Ted at 45, then Dan at 53. When Dan died, my grandmother told me she hoped I never had children so I never had to lose them.

The Workshop, in the basement, was the domain of my grandfather, an engineer. Tools hung neatly from the wall. Hardware was organized in drawers and bins. He built bookshelves and a birdhouse.

My father didn’t build things. He tore things down.

When I was three, my younger sister was born, and our family moved out of my grandparents’ house, across the street to a rented flat with unnamed rooms. The flat smelled like nothing.

After we moved, I crossed the street almost daily. First with a parent, then by myself. From the Bedroom (my grandparents’, it needed no modifier), my grandmother looked out the window to make sure I made it home safely. She couldn’t see our door from her window. When I got inside I would pull back the curtain in our dining room and wave. She waved back, then dropped her blind. Signals between a steady ship and my small, wind-tossed dinghy.

My grandfather sang to me: My Bonnie lies over the ocean. Darling Clementine, lost and gone forever. Songs, I thought, about other little girls who had moved away.

My grandfather helped me plant carrots and radishes in the Garden. My grandmother watched from the Back Deck, surrounded by her orchids. My grandfather taught me the names of all the plants. Inside the house, he handed me objects and told me what they were made of: pewter, teak, brass, ivory. He called me Jilliss. He knew the significance of naming.

The yard behind our flat was barren. High fences thick with ivy loomed over concrete paving. We lost balls in the neighbor’s yard. We scraped our knees on the merciless cement.

My grandmother spent her afternoons in the Back Room playing Scrabble with She. She was her imaginary opponent. They took turns. My grandmother let out little sighs between her teeth: tsssuh, tsssuh, especially when She played a high-point word. Sometimes She won, and my grandmother would light a Carlton and sulk, ashes falling onto the nubby brown sofa, smoke shimmering above her like a silver turban in the sunlight.

Our flat shared a basement with the rest of the building. The basement had damp walls. Cobwebs. One hanging light bulb. An old refrigerator that, when we dared each other to open it, smelled like rotted teeth. A large tombstone leaned against the wall. No one knew where it came from.

Every Sunday evening, my grandparents came to our flat for dinner. Along with the roast and green beans, I swallowed my father’s insults and accusations. He raged at us for a dropped fork, a perceived scowl, hair in our eyes, a...