Few of the residents pay much attention to the sign. Their bodies, which have grown old and unpredictable, may be located in early spring in New Jersey, but their minds have become more flexible with regard to time and space.

My brother cannot find my grandmother's room. He walks us around a circular hallway several times, past an ancient man caved into his wheelchair who keeps shouting, "Meh! Meh!" at my brother, as if he recognizes him. My 4-year-old son, Alex, sticks close to my legs, and I worry he will be afraid of these old people who look at him so covetously.

When we find her, my grandmother is lying on a bed, her body barely asserting its shape on her housedress. I think that if we'd come much later all we would have found would be the dress flat on the bed. Coarse gray hairs grow from her upper lip and her nose is bent to one side, as if the bone has gone back to cartilage. I have to remind my grandmother several times who I am, and at first I think it's because it's been more than a year since I've traveled across the country to see her. But 10 minutes later, she refers to me as her dear Polish friend and I understand that her lack of recognition has nothing to do with absence.

"Did you see my mother?" she asks me, and I have to tell her that the small Italian lady I remember as a gray head leaning out of a second-floor window has been dead for 40 years. In fact, everyone my grandmother asks about is dead; her brother, her sister, her daughter (my mother). She becomes so accustomed to this response that when she inquires about my other brother, George, she doesn't wait for us to tell her that he is home with his new baby. "He's dead, isn't he?" she shouts, pleased with having figured it out for herself.

My grandmother's voice has changed, grown old and sexless. I used to love to listen to her talk. When she was a child, her mother took her to Italy, to show her off to the family that had remained behind. While they stayed in a small town outside of Naples, the rest of the world began a war, and my grandmother was not allowed to return to America for seven years. Ever since, her English has been idiosyncratic, as if the Italian had somehow slipped itself between the English words and their meaning. "He'd take his pants off for you," my grandmother would say when she wanted you to know how generous someone was. "My foot got loose," she explained one, when we asked her how she could hit another car while stopped at a red light.

"Do you love your mother?" she now asks my son in the voice I don't recognize. And Alex hides behind my shoulder and nods his head.

From the time I was Alex's age, I would spend every Saturday night with my grandmother. She'd open her sofa bed for us, the one that was called a Castro Convertible, and we'd watch the Million Dollar Movie on television together. During the commercials, she'd make tea for me, sweet and pale with milk. Afterward, I'd fall asleep with the metal bar of the Castro Convertible pressing into my hip, the sound of her thunderous snoring in my ears.

A large woman carrying a tray comes into my grandmother's room and shouts at her. "Lunch time, Mary," she says, and lifts the plastic dome with burnt edges that covers my grandmother's meal. The food is brown and white, soft and steamy.

"I don't like the food here," my grandmother tells me. "I don't like the way it smells."

"I don't blame you, Nana," I say. "It smells awful." And my grandmother narrows her eyes at me and laughs, thrilled by our scandalous behavior. I look to see if Alex is watching, but he's busy turning over the tissue-thin pages of my grandmother's Bible.

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