I MET GRACE Paley before I'd ever read anything by her. Leonard Michaels invited her to participate in his initial Berkeley Writers Conference, in the summer of 1979, and that was the first time I'd heard of— much less heard—this diminutive, appealing, somewhat grandmotherly soul. She was less than sixty at the time, so she probably wasn't actually a grandmother by then, but something about her felt grandmotherly to me. Perhaps it was her intense New York Jewish accent, the same accent I had heard from my own Flushing-based grandmother (though my grandmother was a harsh, mean, tough-as-nails woman, the very opposite of Grace). Or maybe it's that her delicate, inimitable short stories seemed often to invoke the world of the foreign-born grandmothers.
In the story she allowed me to publish in a 1983 issue of Threepenny, humorously called “In This Country But In Another Language My Aunt Refuses To Marry The Man Everybody Wants Her To,” the rebellious aunt gets the titular role, but the first lines of the story are
My grandmother sat in her chair. She said, When I lie down at night I can't rest, my bones push each other. When I wake up in the morning I say to myself, What? Did I sleep? My God I'm still here. I'll be in this world forever.
The title is humorous in part because it so overwhelms the text with which it appears: three lines of double-columned 24-point Goudy Bold type for a story that takes up less than a quarter of a Threepenny page. But in its thirty-four lines (some of which are very short lines, like “My aunt said, Ach what she saw?” and “What? I asked, What did she see?”), the story manages to convey a full portrait of an immigrant household's daily life, complete with the Yiddish whose rhythms we can hear even though the characters are not actually speaking it.
Grace's stories, all told, filled just three slim volumes: , , and . She always said, when asked, that she wrote very short stories because she could fit them into days that were consumed with other tasks—being a wife and mother, engaging in a lot of community protests and other kinds of political activism, talking on the phone or in person with her friends, becoming a teacher and mentor to young writers, visiting literary conferences… I suppose she must have visited a lot of them, because that is the way I mainly saw her, between the time I met her in 1979 and her death in 2007. I was always delighted to see her, even more so to hear her (she was often giving the keynote speech, in those later years), and she always greeted me with a hug. But
