I’d given up candy for Lent and was trying to help my mother around the house which is why, one afternoon, I hung around the kitchen while my she scrubbed potatoes in the deep cast iron sink, carving their eyes out with a peeler and dropping them in a pot of cold water.  Her belly pressed against her apron, a girl this time so everyone said.  My two-year-old brother clung to her ankle, four slimy fingers wedged in his mouth.  That’s all he ever did, so she told me to take him out in his carriage until supper.  She’d kicked my other two brothers downstairs into the backyard with tarnished soup spoons to chip at the frozen dirt. 

            “They won’t be happy until one of them loses an eye,” she’d said. “Tell Nana to keep them out come hell or high water.”

            My mother’s mother lived alone in the downstairs apartment.  Most of the day she sat smoking by the kitchen window and scraped dried bits of food off the tablecloth with her thumbnail.  A few times a week she sent me to Marchetti’s for a pack of  Kools and a bag of hard butterscotch candy and let me keep the change.  Everyone I knew had fat grandmothers.  Mine was as thin as a broomstick, in what my mother called her “drying-out stage”.  That reminded me of  bed sheets billowing and snapping on our clothesline.  For years Nana had been, according to my mother, “absolutely legless”, and why, I figured, she never climbed the back stairs to eat with us. 

            I towed my brother down the stairs, stopping at her open door.  Nana stood at the stove, in the same sunflower house dress she wore everyday, rubbing a stick of butter over a tin of sourdough biscuits.  Her legs were skinny with patches of tiny blue veins, and bowlegged like mine, but looked fine otherwise. 

            “They’re driving her crazy,” I called to her.

            “Indians on the warpath,” she said.

            At the bottom of the cellar stairs I tipped my brother into the carriage my father had found in the trash on his way home from work.  It was an old-fashioned rig with big rubber wheels, wire spokes, thick springs, high plywood sides he repainted silver, a navy blue canvas top, and a handle like a safety bar on a carnival ride.  I could run behind it full speed, smash it over curbs, plow stuff over, bounce my brother half out of it.

            In the alley beside Saint Brendan’s Church, I sprinted behind the carriage in my orthopedic shoes, the ugly black oxfords meant to correct my flat feet.  The faster I wore them out, the faster my mother would go broke paying the cobbler for new soles and heels, and the faster I could wear sneakers like everybody else.

            I let go of the handle.  The carriage shot up an incline.  My brother screamed and clapped his hands.  When the carriage came back I grabbed the handle where palm sweat had eaten through the metallic paint.  I pushed it again, harder this time, with my eyes closed because lately  I’d been pretending I was blind, doing things by feel, like crossing the street or riding my bike between telephone poles.  I could hear the rusty squeak of the carriage springs, the singing of spongy rubber tires on the cement apron as the carriage returned to me.  In anticipation I  kicked the stone foundation behind me, making sure the church was still where I thought it was.