“Grandma Nadine”

“The sight of his grandmother always delighted Skylar. She combined characteristics that, taken together, made her an unusual but appealing person. She had survived a nightmarish mother and abandonment by a Lothario and had raised a child single-handedly in the Great Depression. Skillful as an artist and interior decorator, fashionable in dress (her present negligee represented her “at home” mode), sociable with powerful functionaries, she could, until recently, manage to drain a shot glass of whiskey in a single swallow. It had been through the efforts of Nadine that Skylar had attended dancing school as a child and been exposed to a social milieu he would never otherwise have imagined (at least until he began to read European novels). Only because of his grandmother’s prompting did her husband invite Skylar and his siblings to Florida when they were children: allowing them for the first time to fly on an airplane, giving them their first experience of a vacation, and opening up the magic ambience of the tropics to their amenable cognition.”