Baby Names
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Boop
Hearing the toast come from my father’s lips, feeling the cold vodka between my raised fingers, I stood my ground. I’ve never craved vodka or oysters more. I vaguely wondered if this was what it was going to be like to be pregnant and have sudden urgent desires for some food or another. But then vodka and oysters were Boop’s food. She was classic and decadent in most things. She decorated in black and white and crimson and gold; she ate chocolate mouse and caviar and drank Champaign and martinis with the perfect cocktail olive. She indulged her very good tastes against the advise of doctors and family and personal trainers. She smoked handcrafted cigarettes until the day she died.
“To Boop.”
The grand Piano she played until arthritis prohibited was covered in condolence cards and bouquets and pictures of her at various events or family dinners or sunny days. She looks stylish and elegant in them all regardless of what she’s wearing or doing.
“To Boop.” We all echo and drink our vodka.
It didn’t hit me until later that night that no one, even Boop’s sister, Laila, toasted her by her actual name. There were no “To Beata”s. She was always Boop. I even have a vague memory of being told Boop was my grandmother, and that was years before I ever learned her name was not in fact Boop. She was always “Boop” to me. “Beata” seemed to belong to other people, to her parents, to her childhood, to times I had no access to. Even Dad and Leslie called her Boop as often as they called her “Mom.”
“Beata” was a girl in a photo. “Boop” was a force of nature made of so many little contrasts and contrarinesses as to make a sort of manic logic. For example, Boop believed no woman should be controlled and so out of principle she would fuss and whine and change her make five time just to make the point that she was a big girl and you couldn’t make her do anything she didn’t want to. When she did want to do something, she got this mischievous, wondrous glow in her blue eyes and no power on earth could stop or scare her. She and I traveled to Amsterdam together after I graduated from Reed. We got hopelessly lost trying to find a restaurant my father, who flies to Amsterdam monthly for Northwest Airlines had found on one of his rambles through the city. We stopped by a canal to consult the directions Dad had texted me for the fourteenth time and I heard Boop sigh beside me. But it wasn’t an annoyed sign or a resigned sigh; it was a contented sigh.
“This is life, baby. Traveling, moving, searching, but always aware and enjoying the moment. Be glad you have so many roads to choose from and if you can take them all. And be every bit of you you can. Ok, baby?” Then she took may hand humming “Stranger in Paradise” from Kismet in that sweet-but-graveled-by-cigarettes voice of hers and we wondered through the slowly darkening streets of a foreign city, smelling the canal water and the pavement and watching all the people we passed. Her hand was soft and frail, her steps a little wobbly, but her head was high, bright blue eyes taking everything in and sending some luminous part of her back into the air. We had no idea where we were or how we’d find our hotel, but we were in Amsterdam, discussing life and what could be better than that? We finally found the restaurant and Boop charmed them into serving us late with a quick smile and half-chuckle and a regal tilt of her head. Boop originally became Boop because Beata shortened to Betty and she did have a certain resemblance to Betty Boop, had the cartoon character been blond. Men still pinched Boop well into her sixties. But then my aunt, Leslie married my uncle, Tom and Tom’s mother, Annette, was called Netty. Netty and Betty seemed a bit much so Betty became Boop. And really, Boop suited her better, if you ask me. Betty could be anyone. There was only one Boop and she embraced it.
The name “Boop always conjured elegance and independence and “I’ll do what I want damn it!” Boop taught me to listen to myself. “Be all the bits of you you can,” she said. There had been an implied “no matter what anybody else says – including yourself.”
Her death came at a time when I was finally taking her advise to heart. I have, like many of us, found reasons to deny what I want and what I need from life again and again. It hurts to know that she will never see the bits of me I have since found the courage to be. Feeling that cold vodka slip down my throat I heard “Stranger in Paradise” croon through my head. I hope she knew how much it meant to me that a woman of such classic good taste had such ironclad confidence in me.
Author: Hillary Crane
