Grandma's House

She stepped into the house for the first time since her grandmother had passed. She breathed in the familiar scent: mothballs with a hint of those peppermint LifeSavers her grandmother couldn’t be caught without. She had been in this house countless times over the years, but she realized she always took the same path: through the side door, across the kitchen, and into the living room where she sat on the couch and read the Ten Commandments out loud, while her grandmother sat nodding along in her chair. This house, built in the late 1800s, was full of relics she had never stopped to appreciate. Now, taking stock of the things around her, she was sure her grandmother would have had captivating stories to tell about why she had so many pig figurines, or who the people were in the painting done by her grandfather that hung in the dining room. She walked around room to room, surveying each one’s contents, and figuring out where to start clearing out first. She paused at the door to the basement, giving it a hard tug—the wood often swelled in the humidity and was difficult to open. Making her way down the steps, she remembered the story her dad used to tell her about the Boogey Man who lived in the crawl space down there. She was older now, and she knew there was no Boogey Man, which was why she laughed to herself when she felt a nostalgic twinge of fear as she passed the crawlspace door. She waved her arm in the air, searching for the string that would illuminate the one dim bulb that hung in the center of the room. She wasn’t afraid of the dark, but she also didn’t like being in the 200-year-old basement of her dead grandmother without any light. Finally, her fingers closed around the frayed end. She let out a shriek as the dusty bulb flickered on and shed light on a skeleton propped up on the old workbench next to her. She bent over with her hands on her knees and let her heavy breathing morph into a laugh as she recalled the haunted house they had set up down there for the neighborhood the previous year. She made a mental note to make sure she got rid of it—the realtor probably wouldn’t find it as funny.

She went back upstairs, continuing on past the main level and up to the second floor. The guest rooms weren’t very interesting—just some old photographs and jewelry that the woman had seen many times. She stepped into her grandmother’s bedroom—well, it had been her bedroom years ago, but for awhile now she had been sleeping in a bed that they put in the dining room for her because she could no longer do the stairs. The bedroom was adorned with the same décor the woman could only imagine had been purchased decades ago. She opened up the closet, absentmindedly flicking through the floral frocks that hung from the sagging wooden bar. When she had pushed them all to one side, she saw a box sitting in the back right corner. She pulled it out into the room and began exploring its contents. Stacked on top were journals from the past thirty-or-so years. She leafed through them, but saw nothing terribly exciting. She reached down and pulled out the last item. This intrigued her because it wasn’t like the big hardcover notebooks her grandmother had journaled in. It was a small, black, leather-bound notebook. The pages were yellowed and brittle, so she flipped through carefully, not wanting to rip any.

She saw a heading: Hustler’s Club. Under it, there were days of the week, and various dollar amounts written. She flipped further: Ringer’s Room, again followed by days of the week and amounts of money. She looked through the book puzzled, thinking about her grandmother. What had she been up to? She pictured that unsmiling, unenthused face that the old woman wore day in and day out. The woman connected the dots in her head, concluding that her grandmother must have been gambling in her youth—poker, maybe. The idea of her grandmother gambling took her a bit by surprise, but then again, everyone has their secrets. The woman eventually rose to her feet and walked across the room to the door that led to the attic. She had always liked when her grandmother asked her to retrieve something from up there—it was unfinished and had a small window that never shut all the way, so it always smelled like wood and fresh air. She made her way up the rickety steps breathing in that familiar scent. As her head rose above floor-level, she began surveying the scene. Rooms never seem that cluttered until you’re the one who has to clean them out, she thought. It was a warm summer day, so she decided to start with the items over by the window to try and get somewhat of a breeze. She opened an old wardrobe and found that it housed her grandpa’s old Navy uniform. She knelt down and opened one of the shoeboxes that sat at the bottom of the wardrobe, wondering what kind of shoes completed the ensemble back in the day. But, instead of footwear, she found the box contained old Polaroids. Her eyes widened as she leafed through the pictures, each one of her grandma and her friends in what appeared to be their 20s. What struck the woman was the promiscuous clothing they were all wearing, especially given that this would’ve been the 50s. They appeared to be in clubs and on stages. She quickly slapped the top back on the shoebox exclaiming, “Oh my god… was Grandma… a stripper?”

She sat back on her heels digesting the information. The black notebook… Grandma wasn’t a gambler; Grandma was a stripper. After about a minute, her curiosity took over and she opened the box back up. She removed the top layer of photographs, and once again, her eyes widened. Beneath the pictures were stacks of dollar bills. She pulled out the second and third shoeboxes that resided on the wardrobe floor. Removing the lids, she found those, too, full of dollar bills.

The woman stayed up in the attic for the next two hours, counting the stacks of singles found in various shoeboxes. When she finished, she let her shoulders relax as she shook her head and let out a low chuckle. “$20,000. From the 50s. Who would’ve thought? Grandma was a good stripper.”