Rockettes

This morning when I came downstairs there was a centipede in the sink on the black lid of my thermos mug. I screamed. This will encourage me to do the dishes before bed. Centipedes, I have discovered, love water as much as I do, but this is about all we have in common. If Radio City Music Hall had a centipede perform they wouldn’t have to hire the Rockettes. But they’d have to give out very powerful binoculars to the members of the audience. My grandmother took me to the Radio City Christmas show when I was five. I was fascinated by the infinity of legs. I wanted to grow up to be a Rockette! My mother had other plans for me.

Grandmother Sophie had a vanity covered completely with mirrors. The most fascinating part was the box of mirror that was located where the chair would fit into the desk. My sister and I would kneel down on the carpet and squish ourselves into the mirrored box together and play for hours, clapping and turning our heads, looking at the infinitely repeated reflections of ourselves. The vanity drawers were made of mirror too. I would open them and find combs, hair nets, pink foam curlers, hard plastic curlers, bobby pins, heavy bejeweled pinch-on earrings, screw-on earrings, a million lipsticks, nail polish of all shades, eyebrow pencils, emery boards, more lipsticks, more bobby pins. I was fascinated by the earrings. The pinch ones hurt and the screw-on ones had to be so tight to stay on my six-year-old earlobes that they hurt too. Forget that! The infinity mirror box really was the best part. We’d be in there clapping and moving, watch our synchronized reflection, just like the Rockettes.

Grandpa Nat would open the window, even in mid-January, and lay down on the floor in the three-foot-square of sun while holding a reflector under his chin. He’d wear white plastic eye cups over his eyes. He was sunbathing. He loved how his blue eyes would pop when he was suntanned. He’d always accentuate his bright-eyed look by wearing a blue dress shirt. When Grandma would take us down in the elevator and out under the boardwalk to the beach, Grandpa would either nosh or sunbathe or stay at the window with his binoculars and watch the millions of bikini-clad girls from the sixth floor.