Believe It or Not

“What have you got that’s good to tell me?” asks my grandmother. This is the way she has begun every conversation with me in recent years. It makes me feel like I can’t ring her unless I have something exciting to share, and in recent months, I haven’t. It’s hard to make positive stories out of fighting with banana republic web sites for overdue checks and dealing with unresponsive editors when once upon a time I regaled her with tales of George Clooney and Gwyneth Paltrow; of assignments to Indonesia and Afghanistan (though to be fair, she never liked the latter).

I tell her I’ve been to the Burberry show and afterparty. She likes to hear about parties – my grandma, once upon a time the most popular girl in school, puts huge value on social life. The only thing better than a party I can tell her about is a date, preferably with a nice Jewish boy who will require me to move back to the US, pronto.

“Did you buy anything?” she asks.

I nearly burst out laughing. “Grandma, I haven’t bought anything for months,” I say. I refrain from adding that I think twice about buying a KitKat if it’s at a newsagent where it costs more than 60 pence, because there are a lot of places where you can buy it for 45p.

I can hear her grow breathless with excitement.

“Are you sitting down?” she asks me.

“Yes,” I say, wondering if her lifelong addiction to lottery tickets using family birthdates and anniversaries has finally paid off.

“You’re never going to guess what I found.”

Hmmm. So not a lottery ticket. “Probably not,” I say cheerfully.

In going through some papers, my grandmother found some government bonds I’d received for my bat mitzvah. They were buried in some things that had ended up at my grandmother’s when my mother died.

“Four thousand dollars,” she says in awed tones. My grandmother is 91, a product of the Depression, and she refers to my sister’s six-figure (but just barely) salary as “a telephone number.”

“What are you going to buy?” My grandmother loves to see me dressed well. She doesn’t wait for me to answer – she just says, with obvious delight: “Can you believe? Four thousand dollars! What are you going to do with all that money?”

I’m thinking with the (crappy) dollar to pound exchange rate I might be able to pay all of my expenses for two months. But my grandmother doesn’t want to hear about that, so I don’t say anything.

“Wow, Grandma. I don’t know – that’s pretty amazing,” I say. “It’ll be fun to think about.”

She sounds happy with this answer, and I don’t want to spoil her fun. I have an image of myself on my bat mitzvah, a 12-year-old in a ghastly pink bridesmaid dress, which was the only sort of appropriate dress that came in my size then. I was twice the size of my sister at the time, and I’d hated the idea of an entire day where people would be looking at us both and noticing that. I remembered drowning my sorrows in the rugelach I’d baked with my mother for the Sunday brunch we were having for out of town guests – covertly unsnapping one corner of the lid on the Tupperware boxes where we’d stashed them and making an opening just wide enough to stick my hand in and grab pastry after pastry, one at a time, all the while telling myself to stop before I got caught. Yeah, there’s a helpful way to fit into your dress, I mentally told my 12-year-old self.

I don’t think at that age I had a plan for the bat mitzvah money. I remember thinking then that I’d be in my 20s – ancient, it seemed -- before I could cash it in. I’m sure I never imagined I’d use it for rent money at age 34 in a far away city in a country not my own, but what about my current life could I have predicted?

“Wow,” I said to my grandmother. “I can’t believe it.”