Object No. 94 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Victor LaValle, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $51.99.]

Who the hell goes to Portugal? In my family?

The question arose as my sister and I were going through my grandmother’s things—her effects. She’d died of old age at Queens General Hospital and she’d been longing for it. Some people never want to go, but not her. She’d lived long (96 years), seen her grandkids and great grandkids.

The old lady didn’t own the apartment she’d lived in, alone, for 22 years. After she died my grandmother’s landlord (New York City Housing Authority) sent a letter: two weeks to clear her things. Then they would be bagged and bussed to a dump. So my sister and I spent evenings taking the 7 train to Jackson Heights, climbing nine flights to grandma’s apartment (her elevator was about as reliable as our older sister). We decided what to keep, what to sell, what to donate, and what to leave for the City.

Let’s be blunt: the mitt’s not pretty. Okay, it’s ugly as an unwashed butt. I didn’t find it in my grandmother’s kitchen. Or in the living room, where she’d sit and have tea in the afternoons. It was in her bedroom, slipped between the mattress and box spring. Some old ladies stow bags of cash, my grandmother hid a Portuguese cooking glove. I showed it to my sister, but she’d found my grandmother’s small Bible. Was leafing through, marveling at the notes our grandmother left in the margins. She got the good book; I kept the mitt.

Then, I brought the thing home and forgot about it! My sister and me, we helped our mother through the next few months. Eventually I found myself getting back into life. Like I started going on dates again. My head clear, my heart ready, my bed cold. So one night I’ve got this lovely woman at my place. She comes over to split a bottle of wine while we prepared a meal. My part consisted of uncorking the bottle. Meanwhile she made squash soup. The second or third step is to bake the two halves of a split squash, hot enough until you can peel back the rough outer skin with a butter knife. She opens the oven door and asks for a mitt to pull out the tray and what do I reach for? That’s right. Had it in a cupboard over the sink.

My friend slides the glove on, reaches into the oven, but as she’s pulling the tray she loses her grip and the squash goes to the ground. I just laughed. I was drunk, and this pretty lady had already let me kiss her. What could I be upset about?

But she wore another expression. Not anger.  Not pain. Bewilderment. She slipped the oven mitt off and turned it inside out. I thought she was going to rip it so I shouted, but then I saw the inside of the oven mitt. It was covered in words.

Not writing. Letters stitched into the fabric! We read the words, starting at the top, where the middle finger would reach. It read: My dearest Grace (that’s my grandmother) I hold your memory like I held your form. I feel sunlight across my body and the warmth of you. The warmth of being inside you…

And it went on like that.

A lot.

Turns outs my grandmother was kind of a slut!

My friend and I poured wine. Toasted the old woman. Good for her.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Doug Dorst, has ended. Original price: $3. Final price: $193.50.]

Figurine of St. Vralkomir (glass cover not included)

This is an icon of the fourteenth-century saint Vralkomir of Dnobst, the patron saint of extremely fast dancing. Handcrafted in a snowbound convent by the nimble-footed Sisters of the Vralkomirian Order, it was given to my grandmother—then a nine-year-old girl—as she boarded the ship that would take her to America from Dnobst, a narrow pie-wedge of land bounded by the Dnobst River, the Grkgåt Mountains, and the Great Western Fence of Count Pyør the Litigious.

Vralkomir was a competent cobbler, but he was brusque and taciturn, conversing only to the extent he was required to for business. His fellow citizens found him odd, and they would hurry back out into the year-round cold as quickly as they could. Some said his towering jet-black hat, which he’d knitted of his own hair, would trigger vertigo in those who stared up at it for too long. Many were annoyed by his incessant tuneless humming.

In the autumn of 1347, in response to a perceived slight from a Dnobstian maiden, the recently enthroned Tsar Nÿrdrag the Irascible (also known as “The Cowbird Tsar,” a Scandinavian foundling whom the previous Tsar and Tsarina unknowingly raised as their own) issued an edict banning fire in Dnobst. His armies confiscated every piece of flint and all the available kindling. When winter blew in, it was as cruel as Nÿrdrag himself. Icy gusts sent massive musk-elk rolling out of the forest like tumbleweeds. It snowed for weeks on end. Desperate and frostbitten, the townspeople (minus Vralkomir) huddled in the mayor’s house, which at least still had a roof. The temperature kept dropping. Death was coming, and they could do nothing but wait.

From a high window, someone saw Vralkomir leave his shop, glance around the empty village square, then trudge into the forest. He returned hauling a freshly cut tree. In the square, he sawed the wood into discs like the one you see on the icon. Vralkomir then hopped onto one of the discs and began dancing, dancing, dancing to the tuneless music in his head. He danced faster and faster. The villagers watched as he wheeled and spun and tappatapped, his legs and feet a blur in the subarctic gloom. A plume of smoke rose from under his feet, and he kept dancing, and then there was more smoke, and he danced on, and soon the wooden disc was ablaze. Vralkomir leapt to the next disc and set it alight, and the next, and the next, and the Dnobstians came out and gathered round the fires, drinking in the precious warmth, happy to be alive. The bearded man danced all winter, they say, as no one else in the village could duplicate his feat of terpsichorean ignition, and he died of exhaustion in mid-April, a beloved martyr. Some say he had stitched contraband flints into his soles; others claim he lit the fire with dance alone. My grandmother preferred the latter, and so do I.

My grandmother said that on frigid and moonless winter nights, effigies of St. Vralkomir may come to life and begin dancing, throwing sparks from their wooden pedestals. This was why she always kept the icon under a glass cover (which stylishly followed the contours of the saint’s mighty hair-hat). Unfortunately, I am a clumsy person, and I broke the glass last weekend while dusting. My wife now insists that I sell it, calling it “at best, a tacky, dust-collecting tchotchke, and at worst, a tacky, dust-collecting fire hazard.” There is no reasoning with her; she is descended from an unimaginative people who know nothing of heroes.

I hope someone will give St. Vralkomir the home he deserves. The icon is probably not a fire hazard, although for obvious reasons I can make no express guarantee.

[Bidding on this Significant Object, with story by Lucinda Rosenfeld, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $26.]

My grandmother, Zippy Friedman, was an administrator at Austen Riggs Psychiatric Hospital in Stockbridge, MA, for several decades beginning in the 1950’s. She was also a close friend of artist Norman Rockwell and was instrumental in having him admitted there during a particularly gruesome bout of depression. (Yes, the acclaimed illustrator of those aggressively cheerful Saturday Evening Post covers suffered from chronic depression.)

Anyway, for whatever reason, Norman brought this golden cow creamer with him to Riggs—and then failed to bring it home. Which is how it ended up in my grandmother’s kitchen in nearby Pittsfield, where it sat on the windowsill next to a Provencal rooster (also made of porcelain) until her death in 1983. What’s more, according to my mother, at some point my grandmother started referring to the creamer as “Norman,” as in, “Let’s all have tea—someone grab Norman.”

Which makes me wonder if something bad happened between them. Why? If you can’t tell from the pictures, the cow’s got a pretty angry and unforgiving look on her face. And, depressed though he frequently was, the real Norman Rockwell was apparently a delightful, kind man. (Mysteries never cease.) So anyway, my young daughter told me she finds “Norm” scary. And we get our hot beverages to go — at Starbucks. But he really is a piece of history. No chips. Lovely glaze intact. Pours well.