David Sedaris: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

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 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 isparanoid," 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."