Getting to know Gelta

Here is a photograph of me with my mother, Eve, and my grandmother, Gelta. It was taken by my mom’s friend Gay in 1977, while she was working on a project about Houston’s Jewish community, and now it is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts there. It’s obviously a fantastic portrait, but I’ve never been entirely comfortable being one of the subjects of it—looking so bored and spoiled, in my ridiculous shirt with the Rolls Royce logo on it, sitting in the living room at my grandparents’ house—a museum-like room that I had never entered before that day and would never enter again. Gelta has been on my mind lately, though, and looking at her here brings her right back to me.

She wasn’t the easiest person. Housekeepers despised her, as did most wait staff—she sent everything back—and she would do things like return a bra to Saks that she’d actually bought at Neiman’s, a year earlier, just to see if she could get away with it, I guess.

One of my great horrors as a teenager was going with her to the Loehmann’s in Houston. For those who don’t know, Loehmann’s was the original designer discounter, like T.J. Max but better, due to the existence of The Back Room—an actual room, apart from the rest of the store, where bargain hunters could find the highest-end designer clothes at a fraction of their original prices. All the labels were cut out of the garments, though, as though the dresses themselves were ashamed of where they’d ended up.