Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (5 page)

As it turned out, the one thing we both hated was me. Rather, I hated me. Thad couldn’t even summon up the enthusiasm. The day after the meeting, I approached him in the lunchroom, where he sat at his regular table, surrounded by his regular friends. “Listen,” I said, “I’m really sorry about that stuff with my dad.” I’d worked up a whole long speech, complete with imitations, but by the time I finished my mission statement, he’d turned to resume his conversation with Doug Middleton. Our perjured testimony, my father’s behavior, even the rock throwing: I was so far beneath him that it hadn’t even registered.

Poof.

The socialites of E. C. Brooks shone even brighter in junior high, but come tenth grade, things began to change. Desegregation drove a lot of the popular people into private schools, and those who remained seemed silly and archaic, deposed royalty from a country the average citizen had ceased to care about.

Early in our junior year, Thad was jumped by a group of the new black kids, who yanked off his shoes and threw them in the toilet. I knew I was supposed to be happy, but part of me felt personally assaulted. True, he’d been a negligent prince, yet still I believed in the monarchy. When his name was called at graduation, it was I who clapped the longest, outlasting even his parents, who politely stopped once he’d left the stage.

I thought about Thad a lot over the coming years, wondering where he went to college and if he joined a fraternity. The era of the Big Man on Campus had ended, but the rowdy houses with their pool tables and fake moms continued to serve as reunion points for the once popular, who were now viewed as date rapists and budding alcoholics. I tell myself that while his brothers drifted toward a confused and bitter adulthood, Thad stumbled into the class that changed his life. He’s the poet laureate of Liechtenstein, the surgeon who cures cancer with love, the ninth-grade teacher who insists that the world is big enough for everyone. When moving to another city, I’m always hoping to find him living in the apartment next door. We’ll meet in the hallway and he’ll stick out his hand, saying, “Excuse me, but don’t I — shouldn’t I know you?” It doesn’t have to happen today, but it does have to happen. I’ve kept a space waiting for him, and if he doesn’t show up, I’m going to have to forgive my father.

The root canal that was supposed to last for ten years has now lasted for over thirty, though it’s nothing to be proud of. Having progressively dulled and weakened, the tooth is now a brownish gray color the Conran’s catalog refers to as “Kabuki.” It’s hanging in there, but just barely. While Dr. Povlitch worked out of a converted brick house beside the Colony Shopping Center, my current dentist, Docteur Guig, has an office near the Madeleine, in Paris. On a recent visit, he gripped my dead tooth between his fingertips and gently jiggled it back and forth. I hate to unnecessarily exhaust his patience, so when he asked me what had happened, it took me a moment to think of the clearest possible answer. The past was far too complicated to put into French, so instead I envisioned a perfect future, and attributed the root canal to a little misunderstanding between friends.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Monie Changes Everything

M Y MOTHER HAD A GREAT-AUNT who lived outside of Cleveland and visited us once in Binghamton, New York. I was six years old but can clearly remember her car moving up the newly paved driveway. It was a silver Cadillac driven by a man in a flattopped cap, the kind worn by policemen. He opened the back door with great ceremony, as if this were a coach, and we caught sight of the great-aunt’s shoes, which were orthopedic yet fancy, elaborately tooled leather with little heels the size of spools. The shoes were followed by the hem of a mink coat, the tip of a cane, and then, finally the great-aunt herself, who was great because she was rich and childless.

“Oh, Aunt Mildred,” my mother said, and we looked at her strangely. In private she referred to her as “Aunt Monie.” a cross between moaning and money, and the proper name was new to us.

“Sharon!” Aunt Monie said. She looked at our father, and then at us.

“This is my husband, Lou,” my mother said. “And these are our children.”

“How nice. Your children.”

The driver handed my father several shopping bags and then returned to the car as the rest of us stepped inside.

“Would he like to use the bathroom or something?” my mother whispered. “I mean, he’s more than welcome to. . . .”

Aunt Monie laughed, as if my mother had asked if the car itself would like to come indoors. “Oh, no, dear. He’ll stay outside.”

I don’t believe my father gave her a tour, the way he did with most visitors. He had designed parts of the house himself, and enjoyed describing what they might have looked like had he not intervened. “What I’ve done,” he’d say, “is put the barbecue pit right here in the kitchen, where it’ll be closer to the refrigerator.” The guests would congratulate him on his ingenuity, and then he would lead them into the breakfast nook. I hadn’t been in too many houses but understood that ours was very nice. The living-room window overlooked the backyard and, beyond that, a deep forest. In the winter deer came and tiptoed around the bird feeder, ignoring the meat scraps my sisters and I had neatly arranged for their dining pleasure. Even without the snow, the view was impressive, but Aunt Monie seemed not to notice it. The only thing she commented on was the living-room sofa, which was gold and seemed to amuse her. “My goodness,” she said to my four-year-old sister, Gretchen. “Did you choose this yourself?” Her smile was brief and amateurish, like something she was studying but had not yet mastered. The mouth turned up at the corners, but her eyes failed to follow. Rather than sparkling, they remained flat and impassive, like old dimes.

“All right then,” she said. “Let’s see what we’ve got.” She received my sisters and me, each in turn, and handed us an unwrapped present from an exotic shopping bag at her feet. The bag was from a Cleveland department store, a store that for many years had been hers, or at least partially. Her first husband had owned it, and when he died she had married a tool-and-die manufacturer who eventually sold his business to Black and Decker. He, too, had passed away, and she had inherited everything.

My gift was a marionette. Not the cheap kind with a blurred plastic face, but a wooden one, each fine joint attached by hook to a black string. “This is Pinocchio,” Aunt Monie said. “His nose is long from telling lies. Is that something you like to do from time to time, tell little lies?” I started to answer, and she turned to my sister Lisa. “And who have we here?” It was like visiting Santa, or rather, like having him visit you. She gave us each an expensive gift, and then she went to the bathroom to powder her nose. With most people this was just an expression, but when she returned, her face was matted, as if with flour, and she smelled strongly of roses. My mother asked her to stay for lunch, and Aunt Monie explained that it was impossible. “What with Hank,” she said, “the long drive, I just couldn’t.” Hank, we figured, was the chauffeur, who raced to open the car door the moment we stepped out of the house. Our great-aunt settled into the backseat and covered her lap with a fur blanket. “You can close the door now,” she said, and we stood in the driveway, my marionette waving a tangled good-bye.

I hoped Aunt Monie might become a fixture, but she never visited again. A few times a year, most often on a Sunday afternoon, she would phone the house and ask for my mother. The two of them would talk for fifteen minutes or so, but it never seemed joyful, the way it did when my regular aunt called. Rather than laughing and using her free hand to roll her hair, my mother would compress a length of phone cord, holding it in her fist like a stack of coins. “Aunt Mildred!” she’d say. “How perfectly nice to hear from you.” Lean in to listen and she’d use her bare foot to push you away. “Nothing. I was just sitting here, looking out at the bird feeder. You like birds, don’t you? . . . No? Well, to tell you the truth, neither do I. Lou thinks they’re interesting but . . . exactly. Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile.”

It was like seeing her naked.

When I went to camp in Greece it was Aunt Monie who bought my ticket. It seems unlikely that she would have called specifically asking how she might brighten my life, so I imagine that my mother must have mentioned it, the way you do when you’re hoping the other person might offer a hand. “Lisa’s going but what with the cost, I’m afraid that David will just have to wait a few years. You what? Oh, Aunt Mildred, I couldn’t.”

But she could.

We learned that every night Aunt Monie ate a lamb chop for dinner. Every year she bought a new Cadillac. “Can you beat that?” my father said. “Puts maybe two thousand miles on it and then she runs out and gets another one. Probably pays full sticker price, if I know her.” It struck him as insane, but to the rest of us it was the very definition of class. This was what money bought: the freedom to shop without dicking for discounts and low-interest payment plans. My father replaced the station wagon and it took him months, hectoring the salesmen until they’d do anything to get rid of him. He demanded and received an extended lifetime warranty on the refrigerator, meaning, I guessed, that should it leak in the year 2020, he’d return from the grave and trade it in. Money to him meant individual dollars, slowly accumulating like drips from a spigot. To Aunt Monie it seemed more like an ocean. Spend a wave and before they could draw up a receipt, there was another one crashing onto the shore. This was the beauty of dividends.

In return for my trip to Greek camp, my mother demanded that I write her aunt a thank-you letter. It wasn’t much to ask, but try as I might, I could never get beyond the first sentence. I wanted to convince Aunt Monie that I was better than the rest of my family, that I understood a sticker-price Cadillac and a diet of lamb chops, but how to begin? I thought of my mother, flip-flopping on the topic of birds. On the phone you could backpedal and twist yourself to suit the other person’s opinions, but it was much harder in a letter, where your words were set in stone.

“Dear Aunt Mildred.” “My Dearest Aunt Mildred.” I wrote that Greece was great, and then I erased it, announcing that Greece was okay. This, I worried, might make me seem ungrateful, and so I started over. “Greece is ancient” seemed all right until I realized that, at the age of eighty-six, she was not much younger than the Temple of Delphi. “Greece is poor,” I wrote. “Greece is hot.” “Greece is interesting but probably not as interesting as Switzerland.” After ten tries I gave up. On returning to Raleigh, my mother took one of my souvenirs, a salt sculpture of a naked discus thrower, and mailed it off with a note she’d forced me to write at the kitchen table. “Dear Aunt Mildred. Thanks a lot!” It hardly established me as a diamond in the rough, but I told myself I’d send a proper letter the following week. The following week I put it off again, and on and on until it was too late.

A few months after my trip to Greece my mother, her sister, and their homosexual cousin visited Aunt Monie at her home in Gates Mills. I had heard about this cousin, favorably from my mother and despairingly from my father, who liked to relate the following story. “A group of us went to South Carolina. It was me, your mother, Joyce and Dick, and this cousin, this Philip, right. So we go for a swim in the ocean and . . .” At this point he would start to laugh. “We go for a swim and when we get back to the hotel Philip knocks on the door, asking if he can borrow, get this, asking if he can borrow your mother’s hair dryer.” That was it. End of story. He didn’t stick it up his ass or anything, just used it in the traditional manner, but still my father found it incredible. “I mean, a hair dryer! Can you beat that!”

I was obsessed with Philip, who managed a college library somewhere in the Midwest. “He’s a lot like you,” my mother would say. “A big reader. Loves books.” I was not a big reader but had managed to convince her otherwise. When asked what I’d been up to all afternoon, I never said, “Oh, masturbating,” or, “Imagining what my room might look like painted scarlet.” I’d say that I’d been reading, and she fell for it every time. Never asked the name of the book, never asked where I’d gotten it, just, “Oh, that’s nice.”

Because they lived in the same part of the country, Philip saw a lot of Aunt Monie. The two of them went on occasional vacations, sometimes alone and sometimes in the company of Philip’s friend, a word my mother said in italics, not in a bad way, but like a wink, suggesting that the term had more than one meaning and that this second meaning was a lot more interesting than the first. “They have a lovely house,” my mother said. “It’s on a lake and they’re thinking of getting a boat.”

“I bet they are,” my father said, and then he repeated the story of the hair dryer. “Can you beat that! A man wanting to use a hair dryer.”

Philip and Aunt Monie shared a taste for the finer things: the symphony, the opera, clear soups. Theirs was a relationship enjoyed by the childless, sophisticated adults who could finish a sentence without being hounded for a ride to the Kwik Pik or an advance on next year’s allowance. Resenting my mother for having children put me in a difficult position, and so I wished she had just had one, me, and that we lived outside of Cleveland. We needed to ingratiate ourselves and be close at hand when Aunt Monie took to her death bed, which could, I figured, happen any day. Aunt Joyce was now flying to Ohio three times a year and would phone my mother with updates. She reported that walking had become difficult, that Hank had installed one of those contraptions that slowly hoisted a chair up and down the stairs, that Mildred had become “I guess the best word is paranoid,” she said.

When Aunt Monie could no longer finish an entire lamb chop, my mother made plans for a visit of her own. I thought she’d go with her sister or homosexual Philip, but instead she took Lisa and me. We went for a three-day weekend in mid-October. Aunt Monie’s driver met us at the baggage carousel and led us outside to the waiting Cadillac. “Oh, please,” my mother said as he ushered her toward the backseat. “I’m sitting up front and I don’t want to hear another word about it.”

Hank moved to open the door but she beat him to it. “And don’t give me that 'Mrs. Sedaris' business, either. The name’s Sharon, got it?” She was the sort of person who could talk to anyone, not in the pointed, investigative manner that the situation called for, but generally, casually. Had she been sent to interview Charles Manson, she might have come away saying, “I never knew he liked bamboo!” It was maddening.

We left the airport and passed into a wasteland. Men stood on rusty bridges, watching as filthy trains coupled on the tracks below. Black clouds issued from smokestacks as Hank detailed his method for curing hams. I’d wanted to hear what it was like working for Aunt Monie, but my mother never led him in that direction. “Hams!” she said. “Now you’re talking my language.”

The landscape gradually softened, and by the time we reached Gates Mills the world was beautiful. Here were brilliant thick-trunked trees surrounding homes made of stone and painted brick. A couple dressed in bright red jackets rode a pair of horses down the middle of the street, and Hank passed slowly to avoid spooking them. This was, he explained, a suburb, and I thought he must be using the wrong word. Suburbs meant wooden houses, the streets named after the wives and girlfriends of the developer: Laura Drive, Kimberly Circle, Nancy Ann Cul-de-Sac. Where were the boats and campers, the mailboxes done up to look like caves or bank vaults or igloos?

“Stop . . . now,” I whispered as the car passed a slightly smaller version of Windsor Castle. “Stop . . . now.” The fear was that we’d drive beyond the ostentation and wind up in a plain neighborhood resembling our own. Hank kept going and I worried that Aunt Monie was one of those guilt-ridden rich people you sometimes read about, the kind who volunleered in burn units and tried not to draw too much attention to themselves. The conversation had moved from hams to sausages and was testing the waters of barbecue when the Cadillac turned toward what was unquestionably the finest home of all. It was the sort of place you’d see on the cover of a college catalog: the Deanery, the Hall of Great Fellows. Ivy hugged the stone walls, and windowpanes the size of playing cards glinted in the sun. Even the air smelled rich, the scent of decaying leaves tinged with what I imagined to be myrrh. There was no maze or pond-size fountain, but the lawn was well tended and included a second, smaller house Hank referred to as “the outbuilding.” He gathered our bags from the trunk, and as we waited, the equestrians passed the front of the house, tipping their velvet hats in salute. “Do you hear that?” my mother asked. She clasped her collar tight against her throat. “Don’t you just love the sound of hooves?”