Character Analysis
We meet Grandma for about a minute, and that means we don't learn much about her. But here are the few factoids we do get:
- She's Manny's mom's mom.
- She was married to Manny's hardworking grandpa before he died.
- Now that she's old, she wears loads of makeup and perfume.
- She dies, and it makes Manny sad.
Okay, that last one isn't so much a factoid about Grandma as something that happens to her, but you catch our drift, right? But just because we learn very little about Grandma doesn't mean she's not important—after all, the fact that Manny gets so sad when she dies tells us just how much she means to him. And this makes her important in his tale.
One of the things that makes Grandma a bit of a mystery is that she's kind of in her own little world. And it's a world that exists in the past:
She gazed dreamily over the yard. It was beautiful back then, she said. It was a garden, and every house had one so bright a person's eye-sight blurred. She remembered browsing among the flowers, smelling odors that even people in heaven would envy. My brother and I scanned around, trying to imagine the same wonder, but what we saw wasn't as sweet as Grandma remembered. (5.47)
It sounds to us like Grandma has some stories she could tell about her neighborhood back in the day—in fact, since she says "people in heaven" would be jealous, we're thinking her experiences back in her old neighborhood were pretty incredible. But we only get a teeny tiny glimpse of what life was like for Manny's grandma. For the most part, she stays inside her own world, and even Manny and Nardo don't get to go inside and join her there, so we don't either.