By Erika Erhart
“Oh, they found it right away. When they opened her up, it was right there. A tumor the size of a grapefruit. You get to be my age and these things happen all the time,” she says, handing me a spoon.
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“Horrible? You think that’s horrible? Listen, she had an aneurysm as big as a kalamata olive. The doctor found it during the autopsy. He said she didn’t have a chance. He also found a tumor on her pancreas. Yep, a tumor the size of…”–I wince as Nouna searches for the word–“a blood orange.”
My grandmother loves to tell stories, especially during breakfast. While snapping snow peas I hear about cousin Dimitri’s pea-size prostate tumor. They operate. He lives. Visiting the farmer’s market I hear about Theoni Korderis’s gallstones. “It’s amazing she lived. She had tons of them; the size of swollen kumquats.”
Zoe and her new husband Willy are happy living a few hours from their parents. Willy works the night shift at the plant, makes decent money, and has good benefits. According to Nouna, it’s a good thing because “where else could a guy with a lemon head like his find work?” Apparently Zoe and Willy are very content together, “two fruit-shaped heads in love.”
On Saturdays in July, Nouna and I go to outdoor concerts. Nouna always buys me a box of salty popcorn, the kind DeDe Davolis choked to death on in ’83, and we listen to the music from a ways back. There was a time when we sat closer to all the action–until Nouna’s nephew Christo lost his hearing. Apparently Christo was trying to rush the stage to get a free bumper sticker. In his earnest attempt he accidentally knocked over a very large drunk, belligerent biker, who was in no mood to be bothered. In less than three minutes Christo had a black eye, a broken arm, and an extra-spicy hot wing lodged in his ear. “Never been the same since,” Nouna claims. “He’s deaf in one ear and abnormally terrified of chicken.”
