MY OMA (In Case You Don't Know "Oma" is German for Grandma)

The last time I saw Oma was the worst. Approaching on tiptoe, half not wanting to see, I saw her lying in her coffin, face unnaturally smooth. Oma never wore much makeup. Now her face was covered with some kind of light powder. Her lips were dusty rose.

She didn't smile at me, didn't nod, didn't even take a puff of her cigarette. Oma always smoked True, the kind with the little blue Mercedes symbol on them. I can still picture the small, plastic-wrapped packages lined up neatly by the check-out counter at DeMoulas supermarket. At the end of the counter are Oma's net shopping bags, filled with, among other things, sour cream, pickles, and oranges.

Afterwards we would walk the third of a mile back to her apartment in Shawsheen. Luckily it was all downhill and we were both strong, Oma especially. Often she walked all the way downtown, scaling the enormous hill with uncommon ease.

At the bottom of the hill was Shawsheen Square. The village had been built as a planned factory community sometime early in the century. Now the factory buildings had been transformed to corporate offices, offices buildings to apartments. In the southeast corner of the square was a park, surrounded by a chest-high iron fence and bisected by the Shawsheen River.

As we passed the corner of the park, Oma and I would pause before our dream house. Standing meekly below a gnarled oak tree, the small stone cottage was one of the oldest in Andover. The door and windows were crisscrossed with metal bars. A sign on the street marked the site of an Indian attack. "I promise, Oma, when I get older, I will buy you that house," I told her.

As it was, Oma lived in the Aberdeen, a seven-story behemoth of brick and mortar. The building had a slightly musty odor and seemed a bit dour. The lobby greeted us with a wide expanse of black and white checkered floor and an antique chandelier. At the far end, a wall of wrought iron stood between us and the elevator.

When my parents first told me that Oma would be moving, I was four or five years old and more excited about avoiding long trips to the Bronx than seeing this old woman. It wasn't for a couple of years that I finally realized that Oma meant grandmother in German.

Oma had left Germany when she was about twenty, escaping the ravages of the First World War. After first taking up work as a domestic servant, she married a German man from the same area at home. Afterward they lived in the Bronx for sixty years. He supported them through building maintenance, keeping the furnaces running, painting apartments, shoveling the sidewalks. So long as he worked, their apartment was rent-free.

My grandfather died the month I was born. Having lived by herself for three or four years, Oma's life was becoming lonely. The Bronx was not the same anymore, the Germans long gone, the well-kept rowhouses and tenements falling into disrepair. Finally one of her own True cigarettes had set her apartment on fire. She lost half her furniture. Her photographs were burnt around the edges. My parents moved her to Andover.

The apartment was small and neat, smelling faintly of varnished wood, strongly of cigarettes. A living room, a small kitchen, a bedroom, and a bathroom made up the entire layout. The windows were tall, the wide sills heavy with pots of geraniums.

Oma's prize possessions stood along the living room wall: two heavy, upholstered chairs and an ornately carved, octagonal table. They had been given to her as wedding presents by the people she had worked for as a servant. I liked to sit under the table, setting myself in the middle of the eight-legged spider formed by the cross-supports. Often Oma and I would play at being king and queen, seating ourselves on the mighty thrones. Afterward we danced around the ballroom, Oma humming "The Blue Danube," telling me I was a beautiful little queen.

When my mother was over to visit, she and Oma would sit on the chairs and talk. I never understood what was said; it was all a rush of German, smiles, the waving of Oma's hand, grasping the cigarette. I sometimes felt excluded, but a song or dance could stop the two of them in a minute.

Usually I had Oma to myself. My own house was crowded with three older sisters and a brother. My mother was going to school for an associate's degree. I demanded a lot of attention. I was sent to Oma's every Wednesday after school and every other weekend. I slept in a daybed in the living room, tucked under a white quilted blanket.

While I was at Oma's, I lived like a princess. As I stood naked in the bathtub, Oma would pour pots of hot water over me in lieu of a shower. At night she would put curlers in my hair. This made it difficult to sleep, but in the morning, Oma said I looked like Shirley Temple.

Oma herself always curled her hair, still dark brown even then, only a few traces of gray. After combing it with Dippity Doo, she wrapped it on curlers and tied it up with long, green scarves. Sometimes she would keep the scarves on all day, walking around with a green turban on her head. Once she took the scarves off, they were mine to play with. I wrapped them around my naked chest and danced with one in each hand, playing at being an exotic dancer.

Oma kept her beauty products in the bedroom on a long, mahogany dresser. Her hair nets were nestled in a small bowl next to a table mirror and the ever-present bottle of Oil of Olay. Sometimes I didn't like to kiss Oma, she put so much of this oil on her cheeks. Nevertheless, occasionally I would put it on my own cheeks, even though Oma told me I didn't have to worry about wrinkles.

The rest of the bedroom was taken up by Oma's enormous bed. A closet behind the high, carved headboard held dozens of Oma's heavy housedresses. Her favorite was blue polyester with large white polka dots. A zipper ran up the front to a wide collar. She always wore open-toed shoes. In her jewelry box lay several pearl necklaces.

In the kitchen stood a small table with white vinyl-padded chairs. Oma and I would sit together and eat sugar cubes. Sometimes I would take out oranges and made Oma a glass of juice. Oma had an old, glass orange juicer and a beat-up metal strainer. She had everything there was for cooking: bundt pans, cookie sheets, and hungry little girl.

When other people from my family came over, Oma would drag the table into the living room, pushing it up to another table she kept against the wall. Out would come the tintype porcelain plates, the heavy silverware, and the heaping bowls of rouladen, sheets of butter cake, pans of fried potatoes. She was always running back and forth from the kitchen to the table. Finally we would made her stop and eat.

As we were leaving, Oma would stop my brother and me at the door. After searching through her purse, Oma would take out a dollar and offer it to my brother. Sensing that his grandmother didn't have the money to afford such gifts, my brother invariably deferred. I accepted a quarter.

I never felt guilty about the gifts I received. Up at New England Stores, by DeMoulas, Oma would buy me little toys all the time -- puzzles, rubber snakes, crayons, Shrinky Dinks, paper dolls. We walked past the railroad bridge so I could have ice cream and went up to old Shawsheen School so I could play in the playground. On the way back Oma would take me to the pond behind her building. Pressing ourselves up to the chain link fence, we watched the little waterfall created by the tiny dam at one end.

After two years in the Aberdeen, Oma moved to a new apartment up the hill and closer to downtown. The Aberdeen was converted to condominiums. The Andover Commons was a large brick apartment complex. In a past life, it had been a rubber factory. Now, while not technically a retirement home, many of its residents were elderly and low income.

Oma's apartment at the Commons was quite a step up. The floors were fully carpeted and there was a gas stove. The shower over the tub actually worked. Every apartment came with a close-caption TV system to monitor guests. Oma and I would spend hours watching people come in and out the front door. Sometimes I would go down to the lobby by myself and we would talk to one another over the intercom.

Oma and I started to spent more and more time together. When my mother would call to say she was coming to pick me up, Oma would laugh. "Your mother will forget and we will have two or three more hours together," she'd tell me as we left for a walk to the local convenience store or maybe even DeMoulas. Often we would use this time to climb up the old factory towers and get a view of town.

At night Oma and I would read and watch television. I read my Weekly Reader club books while she paged through dog-eared biographies of the Kennedys and the Rockefellers. Our favorite shows were "Dallas," "Dynasty," and "Fantasy Island." I had the idea Oma found Ricardo Montelbon very attractive. Sometimes, after Oma had gone into her bedroom to read, I would be allowed to stay up and watch scary movies my mother wouldn't have let me see.

One of the safety features of the apartment was an emergency cord that hung down from the bathroom ceiling. There was another cord in the bedroom. If Oma felt she about to have a heart attack or if someone broke in, she could pull the cord and a loud alarm would sound. I heard the alarm go off several times before.

Who knows why Oma couldn't reach the cord. My mother found her lying on the floor next the bed. Her face was blue. I imagine she was wearing her green turban. The doctors said she'd had a stroke, probably brought on by a recent bladder operation. After a few days, Oma died in a local hospital. A day or to after the funeral, I went to the Bronx with my family and watched her coffin sink below the green grass of Woodlawn Cemetery.

When we got back to Andover, it was time to go through Oma's things. My parents took the chairs, the table, three dressers, two mirrors, photographs, paintings, and all the little things. My older sisters managed to take a roll-top desk, blankets, the kitchen table, the old clock. My brother didn't take anything. My parents threw Oma's bed into the dumpster. Oma had always told me I could have it.

Many years later, while rummaging in the basement at home, I found a blue box full of tissue paper. Inside was a beautiful brass wall lamp that had hung in Oma's apartment. The shade looked like it had been fashioned from giant seashells, and all around the edge hung large, teardrop crystals. I took it upstairs and hung it in my bedroom, where it hangs even now, in memory of Oma.