Saving Elijah

mother had told me to say.
    "Very nice, Charlotte," her father said, as if my mother had said it. "But you don't have to wind the child up like she's meeting the big, bad wolf."
    My mother took off her sunglasses. "I know, Daddy." That was what she called him to his face, Daddy. She looked around. "Where's Mother^"
    Grandmother Elizabeth. I knew she existed, but my mother hadn't talked about her at all, the way she had about her three brothers, Bernard, Marshall, and Lee.
    Grandpa Eli's nostrils flared as he puffed on his cigar. "Your mother is having a headache."
    "Naturally," Mora said, with a look at her father that I didn't understand.
    "Your mother's fine, Charlotte," Grandpa Eli said.
    She just gave him that mysterious look again.
    I realized that he had an even odder accent than the stewardesses who'd served the soda and peanuts on the plane. Looked like E.G. Marshall, talked like Khrushchev.
    "You sound funny," I said.
    My mother put her hand on my shoulder. "We don't tell people any old thought just because it happens to jump into our head, Dinah."
    "Don't reprimand her, Charlotte," Grandpa Eli said. "She's a spirited little thing. Takes after her mother."
    She didn't smile at that. "Your grandfather is from a place called Russia," she said. "Very far away. That's why he talks like that."
    "Farther than New York?"
    Grandpa Eli put his whole body into his laugh, and flashed big yellow teeth. "Oh, much farther. But my mama and papa brought me and my sister on a big ocean ship. It took days and days, and I was just a little boy and I was sick the whole time."
    I tried to picture this ancient, balding man who already looked like an infant as a little boy, throwing up over the side of a boat.
    "Is Lee here yet?" my father asked.
    "Bernard and Marshall arrived this morning. Lee phoned to say he wasn't coming, after all. Of course, you'd already know that, wouldn't you, Charlotte?"
    What was going on here? I loved Uncle Lee. He was the only uncle of the three who visited us, a slightly built man who laughed a lot and had a high-pitched voice. We shared a love of books and sometimes played a game where he'd start a story and I'd have to continue it, then he'd pick it up, then me. Usually by the end it was so silly that we both collapsed with laughter.
    My mother took a step backward. "Daddy, how can you resent that I keep in touch with Lee?"
    He put his hand on her shoulder. "You're right, Charlotte. What do you say we start again?"
    My mother stared at him, again. Wait a minute. Those were tears in her eyes, something I'd seen only when she was furious and hysterical. She had in fact gotten furious at me just a few days ago. She'd been telling me how, when she was growing up, her father had sent her to a place called Miss Funk's where such things as wearing white gloves, curtseying, and the proper selection of silverware were drilled into her head. "I hated it," she said. I agreed it sounded awful, and asked why she bothered to teach me to use the right fork. She said she wanted her father to know she'd raised a good girl.
    "Why do you care if a bull thinks I'm a good girl?" I asked her.
    Charlotte stared. "You listened to my private conversations with your father. How dare you!" Her face had flushed, a mottled purple. She was shaking with rage, and I had the idea that her head would explode. She'd never hit me before, and it was only a push, but it was the first time. She called me a sneak and a liar, and spilled venom: "Do you know what happens to little girls who listen to other people's private conversations? They grow great big ears so they look like Dumbo the elephant. And that's what you're going to look like, Dinah. Great big fat Dumbo the elephant."
    Sometimes my mother seemed like two different people. On the airplane, she'd reprimanded me quietly. "I reckon there's no need to tell everyone you meet what you got for Hanukkah."
    "Why not?" Well, I hadn't informed every passenger that I'd gotten three new Barbie dolls, just those sitting near us.
    She glanced at my father, who was reading the paper, then looked back at me. I wondered if she was going to start screaming, then decided she wouldn't in front of all these strangers whisking through the sky.
    "Oh, Dinah," she said with a sigh. "You are just such an exasperating girl. We don't tell people we celebrate Hanukkah, honey. It's nobody's business but ours."
    I was exasperating? Grown-ups, especially my mother, were so impossible and full of