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 betweenmoaning andmoney, 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 Iunderstood 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'shair 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'sfriend, 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.'
'Ibet they are,' my father said, and then he repeated the story of the hair dryer. 'Can you beat that! A man
