Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (6 page)

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 a uniform.”

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 dust this,” my mother said, and I shuddered at her lack of sophistication. The whole point of finery was that someone else 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 she had been remembered — and fondly, too — but nothing would persuade her to reveal the exact amount.

“I’ll give you a figure and you just point up or down,” I said. “Was it a million dollars?”

“I’m not telling you.”

“A million and a half?”

I gently prodded her in the middle of the night, hoping she might talk in her sleep. “Was it two million dollars? Seven hundred thousand?”

“I’m not telling you.”

A friend phoned, pretending to be an IRS agent, but my mother saw right through it. Tax officials rarely had Jethro Tull records playing in the background. They also, apparently, never called saying, “I just have one quick question.”

“But I have to know so that I can tell people.”

“That’s why I’m not telling you,” my mother said.

I was working in a cafeteria then but still honored a once-a-week babysitting job I’d held since junior high. The children despised me, but there was a familiarity, almost a comfort, in their hatred, and so their parents kept me on. The family always had expensive food in their refrigerator: deli-sliced meats and cheeses. Bottles of artichoke hearts. One night as I was being paid, I told the wife that my great-aunt had died and that we now had a Cadillac and a fur lap blanket. “There’s money, too,” I said. “A lot of it.” I thought the woman might welcome me into the fine-refrigerator club, but instead she rolled her eyes. “A Cadillac,” she said. “My God, how nouveau riche can you get.”

I wasn’t sure what nouveau riche meant, but it didn’t sound good. “That little bitch,” my mother said when I repeated the story, and then she turned on me for having told the woman in the first place. A week later the Cadillac was gone, sold. I blamed myself, but it turned out my parents had been planning to get rid of it anyway. My mother bought herself a few nice suits. She stocked the refrigerator with cold cuts from the deli counter, but she did not buy a diamond or a beach house or any of the other things we expected of her. For a while the money was used as a bargaining chip. She and my father would argue over some little thing, and when he laughed and walked out of the room — which was how he always ended an argument, behaving as though you were crazy and nothing more could be said — my mother would shout, “You think I can’t afford to leave? Just try me, buddy.” If a neighbor treated her badly or someone in a shop acted as though she didn’t exist, she’d return home and pound on the countertop, hissing, “I could buy and sell that son of a bitch.” She had often imagined saying these words, and now that she could, I sensed she was disappointed by how little pleasure they brought.

I think it was Aunt Monie’s money that paid my rent when I moved to Chicago to attend the Art Institute. I think it was her money that sent my sister Gretchen to the Rhode Island School of Design and sent my sister Tiffany to a horrible but very expensive reform school in Maine. It went toward getting my mother’s children out of the South, which, for her, spelled improvement. The rest of the money was managed by my father, a financial alchemist who turned gold into a mailbox of annual reports that only he could enjoy.

As for the taxidermy, the Canadian museum declined my great-uncle’s collection. It seemed too morose to auction off, and so the animals, along with the knickknacks made of their parts, were given to Hank.

“You what?” I said to my mother. “Let me get this straight. You what?” A phone call was made and I was sent a bearskin rug, which for several years sprawled on the floor of my too-small bedroom. It was a crazy thing to make a rug out of, really. Walk one way and you tripped over the head. Walk the other and you caught your foot in the open mouth.

Alone with my bear on the very first night, I double-locked the door and lay upon it naked, the way people sometimes did in magazines. I’d hoped this might be the best feeling in the world, the conquered fur against my bare flesh, but my only sensation was a creeping uneasiness. Someone was watching me, not a neighbor or one of my sisters, but Aunt Monie’s second husband, the one I had seen in the portrait. From the neck up he closely resembled Teddy Roosevelt, the wire-rimmed glasses glinting above a disfiguring walrus mustache. The man had stalked wildebeest across the sizzling veldt and now his predatory eye fell upon me: an out-of-shape seventeen-year-old with oversize glasses and a turquoise-studded bracelet, cheapening the name of big-game hunting with his scrawny, pimpled butt. It was an unpleasant image, and so it stayed with me for a long, long time.

In her sophomore year of college Lisa took the rug to Virginia, where it loafed on the floor of her dorm room. It was, we’d agreed, a loan, but at the end of the spring term she gave it to her roommate, who died in a car accident while driving home to Pennsylvania. On hearing the news, I imagined her parents, this couple in their mind-boggling grief, coming upon the bear in the trunk of their daughter’s car and wondering what it had to do with her, or anybody’s, life.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

The Change in Me

Y OU KNOW YOU’RE YOUNG when someone asks you for money and you take it as a compliment.

“You look pretty cool, can I ask you a question?”

The beggar was a girl in her late teens, a hippie standing outside the convenience store at the North Hills shopping center. She wore a peasant blouse and long, elephant-belled jeans that made it appear as though she had no feet. Granny glasses, amulets, a beaded headband: I couldn’t believe that someone so sophisticated was actually talking to me.

I was thirteen that summer and had ridden to the Kwik Pik with my mother, who handed me a ten-dollar bill and asked me to run in for a carton of cigarettes. She watched the hippie ask me a question, watched me run into the store, and watched me stop on the way out to hand the girl a dollar.

“What was that?” she asked when I got back into the car. “Who was that girl?” Had I been with my father, I would have lied, saying she was a friend, but my mother knew I had no interesting friends, and so I told the truth.

“You didn’t give her a dollar,” she said. “You gave her my dollar.”

“But she needed it.”

“What for?” my mother said. “Shampoo? A needle and thread?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.” Being mocked by the untalented was easy to brush off, but my mother was really good at imitating people. Coming from her, I sounded spoiled and vacant, like a Persian cat, only human. “If you want to give her a dollar, that’s your own business,” she said. “But that dollar was mine, and I want it back.”

I offered to pay her when we got home, but that wasn’t good enough. “I don’t want just any old dollar,” she said, “I want that one.”

It was ridiculous to claim an attachment to a particular dollar bill, but for my mother this had become a matter of principle. “It’s my dollar and I want it back.”

When I told her it was too late, she got out and opened my car door. “Well, we’ll just see about that,” she said.

The hippie looked over in our direction, and I lowered myself in the seat. “Mom, please. You can’t do this.” It was touch-and-go for a moment, but I knew she’d stop short of actually dragging me from the station wagon. “Can’t we put this behind us? I’ll pay you back when we get home. Really, I swear.”

She watched me cower and then she got back into the driver’s seat. “You think everyone who asks for money actually needs it? God, are you gullible.”

The spare-change girl seemed to have started a trend. On my next trip to the Kwik Pik I was hit up by another hippie — this one a guy — who squatted on the ground in front of the ice machine. He saw me approach and held out his leather hat. “Greetings, brother,” he said. “Think you could manage to help a friend?”

I handed over the fifty cents I’d planned to spend on Coke and potato chips, and then I leaned against a post, watching this hippie and studying his ways. Some people, the cool people who had no extra money, made it a point to say, “Sorry, man,” or “You know how it is.” The hippie would nod, as if to familiar music, and the cool person would do the same. The uncool people passed without stopping, but still you could see that the hippie held a strange power over them. “Spare change? A dime? A quarter?” It was a small amount that asked a big question: “Care ye not about your fellow man?” It helped, I thought, that he bore such a striking resemblance to Jesus, who was rumored to be returning any day now.

I watched for half an hour, and then the cashier came out, fluttering his hands as if they were whisk brooms. “We can’t have you hassling the customers,” he said. “Go on, now. Scoot.”

Hassle was a young person’s word, and coming from a full-grown man, it sounded goofy, reminding me of the way movie cowboys used the word amigo. I wanted the hippie to stand up for himself, to say, “Cool it, Baldie,” or “Who’s hassling who?” but instead he just shrugged. It was almost elegant, the way he picked himself up off the ground and crossed the parking lot to what was most likely his parents’ car. It didn’t matter that he probably lived at home, criticizing the system during the day and sleeping each night in a comfortable bed. He’d maybe put my quarters toward some luxury — incense maybe, or guitar strings — but that was no big deal, either. He was a grown-up’s worst nightmare, and, minus the hat, I wanted to be just like him.

At that point in my life I was still receiving an allowance, three dollars a week, which I supplemented with babysitting and an occasional job at the Dorton Arena, a concert and exhibit hall located on the state fairgrounds. When we were lucky, my friend Dan and I wore white jackets and folding paper hats and worked the concessions counter. When, far more frequently, we were unlucky, we wore the same dopey outfits, hung heavy trays around our necks, and marched up and down the aisles, selling popcorn, peanuts, and the watered-down Cokes we were instructed to refer to as “ice-cold drinks.”

In real life nobody said things like “ice-cold drinks,” but our boss, Jerry, insisted on it. Worse than simply saying it, we had to shout it, which made me feel like a peddler or an old-time paperboy. During heavy-metal concerts we went unnoticed, but at the country-music shows — jamborees, they were called — people tended to complain when we barked through their favorite songs. “Stand by Your POPCORN, PEANUTS, ICE-COLD DRINKS,” “My Woman, My Woman, My POPCORN, PEANUTS, ICE-COLD DRINKS!” “Folsom Prison POPCORN, PEANUTS, ICE-COLD DRINKS.” The angrier fans stormed downstairs to take it up with Jerry, who said, “Tough tittie. I got a business to run.” He dismissed the complainers as “a bunch of tightwadded rednecks,” which surprised me, as he was something of a redneck himself. The expression tightwadded was a pretty good indicator, as was his crew cut and the asthma inhaler he’d decorated with a tiny American flag.

“Maybe he means 'redneck' in an affectionate way,” my mother said, but I didn’t buy it. Far more likely he saw a difference between himself and the people who looked and acted just like him. I did this as well, and listening to Jerry made me realize how pathetic it sounded. Who was I to call someone uncool — me with the braces and thick black-framed glasses. “Oh, you look fine,” my mother would say. She meant to reassure me, but looking fine to your mother meant that something was definitely wrong. I wanted to turn her stomach, but for the time being my hands were tied. According to the rules, I wasn’t allowed to grow my hair out until I turned sixteen, the same age at which my sisters could finally pierce their ears. To my parents this made sense, but ears were pierced in a matter of minutes, while it took years to cultivate a decent ponytail. As it was, it would take me a good nine months just to catch up with Dan, whose mother was reasonable and did not hamper his style with senseless age restrictions. His hair was thick and straight and parted in the middle, the honey-colored hanks pushed behind his ears and falling to his shoulders like a set of well-hung curtains.

Ever since the fourth grade we had been mutual outcasts — the nature lovers, the spazzes — but with his new look Dan was pulling ahead, meeting cool people at his private school and going to their homes to listen to records. Now when I called somebody an L7 he looked at me the way that I had looked at Jerry — cuckoo cuckoo — and I understood that our friendship was coming to an end. Guys weren’t supposed to be hurt by things like that, and so instead I settled into a quiet jealousy, which grew increasingly difficult to hide.

The state fair arrived in mid-September, and the concessions crew moved back and forth between concerts at the arena and smaller events held at the speedway. Dan and I were setting up for the first stock-car race when Jerry announced that instead of Coke, we’d be selling cans of something called Near Beer.

What separated near beer from the real thing was alcohol content. Beer had one, and Near Beer didn’t. It tasted like carbonated oatmeal, but Jerry hoped the customers might be deceived by the label, which was robust and boozy-looking. “The mind can play tricks,” he said.

Maybe he was right, but the minds that mistook a sugar tablet for an aspirin were not the minds that gathered to witness a North Carolina stock-car race. Our first load sold instantly, but come our second time out, people had begun to catch on. “Beer, my ass,” they shouted. “Ya’lls is deceivers.”

“It’ll pick up when the heat kicks in,” Jerry said, but no one believed him.

There was an hourlong break between the first and second stock-car event, and as Dan and I walked along the midway I thought about a suede vest I’d seen the previous week at J. C. Penney’s. It was what the saleswoman described as “a masculine cherry red,” with lines of fringe swaying like bangs from the yoke. Eighteen dollars was a lot of money, but a vest like that would not go unnoticed. Couple it with a turtleneck or the right button-down shirt and it announced that you were sensitive and no stranger to peace. Wear it bare-chested and it suggested that, long hair or not, yours was a life lived in that devil-may-care region best described as “out there.” I’d hoped that by working all weekend, I might earn enough to buy it, but what with the Near Beer, that was pretty much out of the question. Now I’d have to put it on my Christmas list, which definitely neutered the allure. What had seemed hip and dangerous would appear just the opposite when wrapped in a box marked “From Santa.”

The bleachers were filling up for the second race, and as we headed back to the speedway I noticed a pair of squarely dressed boys staring up at the Ferris wheel. They looked like me, but a bit younger, brothers probably, wearing identical black-framed glasses secured to their heads with tight elastic bands. I saw them looking upward with their mouths open, and in that instant I saw my red suede vest.

“Spare change?”

The brothers looked at each other, and then back at me. “Okay, sure,” the older one said. “Gene, give this guy some money.”

“Why do I have to?” Gene asked.

“Because I said so, that’s why.” The older brother unstrapped his glasses and rubbed a raw spot on the bridge of his nose. “You’re a hippie, right?” He spoke as if, like Canadians or Methodists, hippies walked quietly among us, indistinguishable to the naked eye.

“Well, course he’s a hippie,” Gene said. “Otherwise, he wouldn’t be bothering people.” He sorted through his change and handed me a dime.

“Right on,” I said.

It was the easiest thing in the world. Dan worked one side of the Ferris wheel, and I took the other. We asked for money the way you might ask for the time, and when someone gave it we blessed them with a peace sign or the squinty nod that translated to “I’m glad you know where I’m coming from.” Adults were cheap, and too judgmental, so we stuck to people our own age, concentrating on the obvious out-of-towners who had heard about hippies but had never seen one in real life. People either gave or they didn’t, but no one asked what we needed the money for or why two seemingly healthy teenagers would trouble complete strangers for change.

This was freedom, and to make it taste just that much sweeter, we worked our way back to the speedway, where Jerry was setting up for the third stock-car race. “I ought to kick ya’ll’s asses,” he said. “Walking out on me the way you done, that’s no way to treat a friend.” He handed us our uniforms, and we tossed them on the counter, announcing that we’d found an easier way to make money.

“Then get on out of here,” he said. “And don’t come crawling back, neither. I don’t have no use for backstabbers.”

We had a high time with that one. Reminded of just how stupid a person looked in a paper hat, Dan and I returned to our panhandling, pausing every so often to tap each other on the shoulder. “Backstabber, you might think I’ve got some use for you, but think again.” As the afternoon moved on, we replaced the word backstabber with the word hippie, allowing ourselves to believe that Jerry had fired us not because we had walked out on him but because we were free and of the moment. It didn’t matter that we’d never work for him again, as those days were behind us now. Work was behind us.

By five o’clock I had begged enough money to pay for my vest, but Dan and I were greedy and not ready to stop. Plans were made for stereo systems and minibikes, anything we wanted, paid for in dimes. Dusk approached and the midway brightened with colored bulbs. The early evening was lucrative, but then a different crowd swept through and the mood became rowdy.