How do Annemarie and Magda influence Leon?

Magda is Annemarie’s mother. She is artistic, for instance, she “paints landscapes on her teakettles” and “makes necklaces from the lacquered vertebrae of non-endangered species”. Leon, on the other hand, is Annemarie’s nine-year-old son. The text says that Annemarie influences her son by telling him all kind of stories which he readily accepts as true. She tells him stories about how she grew up “with a mother like Magda”—for Annemarie, her mother is quite eccentric as she chooses to live a life that is out of the ordinary. She tells him how Magda would design her own winter solstice cards on paper made out of boiled tea barks and weeds, and how the card recipients would sometimes smell these gifts, even once reporting Magda to the authorities for being a nuisance.
Leon has acquired a taste for old-fashioned things, which he collects; these include all sorts of items, from old Coke bottles to license plate slogans. He even collects string, just like his grandmother Magda. Annemarie thinks that it is as if “some whole piece of Magda has come through to Leon, without even touching her”.
At the beginning of the story, Annemarie and Magda are not in talking terms. Magda breaks the silence between them by sending her daughter a card to say that she is expecting a baby. Unknown to her, Magda too is pregnant. Towards the end of the story, the two women are able to discuss and even resolve some of the thorny issues in their relationship.