David Sedaris: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

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?"

We did.

A maid named Dorothy stepped out to greet us, and as if my sister were blind and unable to take in such wonders on her own, I turned and whispered, "She's white. And she's wearing auniform."

The maids in Raleigh might wear pantsuits or cast-off nursing smocks, but this was the real thing: the starched black dress trimmed in white at the cuffs and collar. She wore an apron as well, and an unflattering cap, which sat on her head like a tiny cushion.

While regular maids mumbled, Dorothy announced. "Mrs. Brown is resting." "Mrs. Brown will be down presently." Like a talking doll, her side of the conversation seemed limited to a handful of prerecorded statements. "Yes, ma'am," "No, ma'am," "I'll have the car brought round to the door." While waiting, we ate sandwiches of smoked salmon served with potato salad. I suggested that we nose around, or at least move beyond the kitchen, but the idea proved unpopular. "Mrs. Brown is resting," Dorothy said. "Mrs. Brown will be down presently." It was nearly dusk when Aunt Monie telephoned the kitchen, and we were allowed to enter the main parlor.

"How'd you like to dustthis," my mother said, and I shuddered at her lack of sophistication. The whole point of finery was that someoneelse handled the upkeep, polishing the end tables and reaming crud from between the toes of lion-paw easy chairs. That said, I'd have hated to dust it. A lampshade or two would have been all right, but this resembled one of those period rooms cordoned off at the museum, the furniture gathered in tight little cliques like guests at a party. Walls were papered in satin stripes, and curtains fell from floor to ceiling, bordered by what were later identified as swags. The potty-chair and folding card table didn't quite fit in, but those we pretended not to notice.

"Mrs. Brown," Dorothy announced, and we followed the noise of the grinding gears, gathering before the newel post to stare up at the approaching chair. The Aunt Monie I'd met ten years earlier had been rickety but substantial enough to leave a dent in the sofa cushion. The one that now droned down the staircase seemed to weigh no more than a puppy. She was still elegantly dressed, but withered, her balding head drooping from her shoulders like an old onion. My mother identified herself, and once the chair had settled onto firm ground, Aunt Monie stared at her for a few moments.

"It's Sharon," my mother repeated. "And these are two of my children. My daughter Lisa and my son David."

"Your children?"

"Well, some of my children," my mother said. "The oldest two."

"And you are?"

"Sharon."

"Sharon, right."

"You sent me to Greece a few years ago," I said. "Remember that? You paid for my trip and I sent you all those letters."

"Yes," she said. "Letters."

"Very long letters."

"Very long."

The guilt I'd stored was suddenly gone, replaced by the fear that she'd forgotten to mention us in her will. What was going on in that wispy head of hers? "Mom," I whispered. "Make her remember who we are."

As it turned out, Aunt Monie was a lot sharper than she appeared. Names weren't her strong suit, but she was incredibly perceptive, at least as far as I was concerned.

"Where's that boy," she'd ask my mother whenever I left the room. "Call him back here. I don't like people snooping through my things."

"Oh, I'm sure he's not snooping," my mother would say. "Lisa, go find your brother."

Aunt Monie's second husband had been a big-game hunter, and off the main parlor he'd built a grand trophy room, a virtual ark of taxidermy. The big-cat corner included snow leopards, white tigers, a lion, and a pair of panthers mounted in mid-leap. Mountain goats butted horns before the coffee table. A wolverine stalked a doe from behind the sofa, while beside the gun case a grizzly bear raised her Bunyanesque paw, protecting the cub that cowered between her knees. There were the animals, and there were the objects made from animals: an elephant-foot stool, cloven ashtrays, the leg of a giraffe turned into a standing lamp.How'd you like to dust this!

I first entered the room during one of Aunt Monie's baths, taking a seat on a zebra-skin ottoman and experiencing the dual sensations of envy and paranoia: a thousand eyes watching, and I wanted every one of them. If forced to choose, I'd have taken the gorilla, but according to my mother, the entire collection had been willed to a small natural history museum somewhere in Canada. I asked what Canada needed with another moose, but she just shrugged and told me I was morbid.

When expelled from the trophy room, I'd go outside and stare at it through the windows. "Where is he?" Aunt Monie would ask. "What's he up to?"

Early one evening, after staring through the trophy-room window, I moved among the shrubs and watched as Mrs. Brightleaf, the part-time nurse, dissected Aunt Monie's lamb chop. The two of them were seated at the folding card table, overlooked by a portrait of husband number two, who knelt on a felled rhinoceros. My mother entered from the kitchen, and I was startled by how out of place she looked, how wrong amid the hired help and scalloped end tables. I'd always assumed that given a full set of teeth, a person could step from one class to another, moving effortlessly from the ranch house to the manor, but it now seemed that I was wrong. A life like Aunt Monie's required not just study but a certain proclivity for pretension, something not all of us were blessed with. My mother waved her highball glass, and when she jokingly took a seat on the old woman's potty stool, I saw that we were doomed.

On Sunday afternoon Hank drove us back to the airport. Aunt Monie continued her downward spiral and died at home on the first day of spring. My parents attended the funeral and returned to Cleveland a few months later. There was, they said, the estate to settle, lawyers to meet, loose ends. They left Raleigh on a plane and returned a week later in the silver Cadillac, the fur blanket raising heat welts on my mother's knees. It seemed that shehad been remembered — and fondly, too — but nothing would persuade her to reveal the exact amount.