vanilla ice cream from a deep-bottom dish with a silver-black spoon. The wool-wrapped legs barely showed but bulged beneath uncountable layers of arctic skirts safety-pinned each day against the imaginary freeze. There were always cookies in the pickle crock and Pepsi in jelly jars during those hours together in that fear-fed neighborhood on the fringe of Lake Erie. I remember her padding blindly about, in her frayed maroon slippers, pressing dustballs and giant hairpins into the silent carpet; a copper-colored gas heater pumped itself year 'round, and the temperature held to its constant eighty-five, having leapt there once many years before. The sun would sear its way through two paper shades that were drawn and tacked against the eternal glare, as I'd read to her from the accumulated mail, a slim stack forever staling in open envelopes. And then the men came -- they tapped at the windows, took the tacks from the shades, broke the ice cream bowls, hid her slippers, unpinned her skirts, stole her mail, and sat on the table-top to taunt her. Only finger-tip tall, they were never seen, but she assaulted them daily, fiercely. In the end, they went away, leaving her alone with the fear that they might return. She died in her sleep without them. Those eyes refused to stay indoors; instead, they rode their own cataracts and washed ashore at the foot of San Juan Hill in time to watch eighteen hundred men lace their boots in Grandma's darkened sunporch. From my