Clementine

Grandma Beatrice was my father’s mother, a widow, and on Sundays my family would drive out to visit her. She lived in a big white house in South Orange, New Jersey. My aunt and uncle and cousins would visit, too; the adults would gather in the kitchen, where they ate cashews and drank screwdrivers, and my brother and my cousins and I would go to the den. In the den was a shiny roll-top desk with brass handles. We called it the candy desk. It had been my grandfather’s, the epicenter of his storied asceticism, but then he died and my grandmother threw out his papers and filled the drawers with candy.

We weren’t supposed to touch the desk—my grandmother would dole out its contents, stingily, at the end of the night—but, because we were bored, we would break the rule and roll back the top and take fistfuls of whatever was inside. The sight of those glittering foils and clear plastic wrappers gave rise to a feeling I later came to associate with the promise of sex. But there wasn’t much to be excited about. They were hard candies, off-brand, the kind only an old woman would buy. I remember the deep amber of a molasses log; I remember a white oval with a flowery tang, like dish soap.

Because the closest garbage was in the kitchen (where the adults were, with their cashews and screwdrivers), we would ball up the wrappers and flick them into the shadowy slot between the desk and the wall. Many wrappers must have piled up there over the years. Then we would sprawl across the overstuffed couch cushions, and my little brother and I would listen in amazement as our cousins spoke of the many outrages of their school, especially the music teacher who had been taken to prison for trying to kiss a child.

After dinner, if it was summer, which often it was, my cousins and brother would go to the TV room to watch a Turner Classic Movie, and I went out to the rock. The rock was in the front yard. It was a big rock, a wide hump of gray stone with quartz marbling, the size and shape of a breaching whale. It was doleful and ungiving, yet also possessed an extraterrestrial