cracklaugh
archives
newest
email
profile
notes
diaryland
2003-03-13
Mae

In the 1920s, Mae wore beaded dresses, as she shimmied in speakeasies to the perfect black and white beat.

When I met her 50 years later, at age seven, she was my Aunt Mamie, her body shaped into a comma, lipstick on her teeth.

She lived on the third floor of our grandparent�s house. �In the attic, like a witch,� my older sister, Ginnie, used to say. We hardly ever saw her. A string was tied to a pull light by Aunt Mamie�s rooms. It hung like a balloon string all the way down past our grandparents� apartment on the second floor to our great aunt and uncle�s first floor apartment, so she could light her way up the stairs. Ginnie dared me to pull the string a thousand times a visit.

It was dark up there. We were sure the tiny noise from our turning on the light and the light shining under her doorway would bring her out of her cove.

Ginnie dared me just enough until once I tiptoed up to the third floor landing and saw, for the first time, her shadowy door looming above me. A sudden fear that I would be sucked into the keyhole froze me and I backed down, eyes peeled. I lost my balance, reached for the banister, grabbed for something � anything � pulled � it was the light string! A deafening click, a wash of light. I ran halfway down to the first floor, hands to my chest holding my heart in.

My mother came out of Nana�s kitchen, drying a glass. �What�s the matter?� she asked. She leaned over, pulled the string, twisted the towel in the glass. The light was out, my heart stayed put. Aunt Mamie never came out.

***

Come say hello to Aunt Mamie,� my father said. I remember a stranger coming from the city with my grandparents to visit us. I was five. There was a certain quiet to the house, a settling I did not care for. I felt bristly with unknowing.

I stood immobile, until after a magical combination of parental coaxing and vague promises of a present, I finally walked, stiff as a doll, to her pursed lips.

"Hi darling!� she said. A dry peck, a bony hand clutching my shoulder. Then she smiled with her red teeth. She had a mustache.

She put something in my hand. I looked down: a nickel. �Say thank you,� my father said. I did, but I was disappointed. There was nothing I knew even then, I could buy for a nickel. My grandparents gave me dollars.

***

I was sure she yelled at me one time. It was the one time I remember visiting her at her summer house down the Cape. There was a gravel road I walked back and forth across, testing each stone for smoothness, roundness and warmth until I could find the best path for my bare feet. Around the back of the house was an outdoor shower, just a shower head bare to the world, no curtain or door, naked. This image, coupled with the thought of showering, which was always done (to my knowledge) naked, gave me many moments of pleasant shock. We didn�t use the shower though. We didn�t even go to the beach right down the road. I don�t know why.

Hers was a little house with shelves of glass knick-knacks. Cramped and hot, we sat on a narrow couch. I have a vivid memory of breaking a cranberry pitcher and Aunt Mamie�s mustached face close to mine, tongue clicking and eyes nearly crossed in scolding.

�You�re making that up,� my mother said. �You were always her favorite, and you were always so good on those visits. You stayed right with me.�

Her favorite? I was afraid that meant I�d be like her.

I could not believe then that Aunt Mamie could ever have been different, never mind younger or doing the Charleston. I couldn�t quite believe she was my grandfather�s sister. She didn�t seem like she could be a sister at all. I couldn�t even picture her without the mustache which seemed such a shock, then a novelty. This was before I learned that growing a mustache in old age was a fairly predictable event in the lives of Italian women. She wants it, I thought, she grew it on purpose to be scary.

***

She had a fall some time later. Then a stroke. My parents went to visit her in the hospital. My sister and I did not go. �You�re too young,� our mother told Ginnie and and me. Ginnie wanted to go; she had never been to a hospital either, but she often spoke out of the older sister side of her mouth, the side that left me behind.

Our mother told us about the stroke. It meant a dragging down on one side, numbness. �She looks different,� Mom said. I tried to imagine her, looking at myself in the mirror. I pulled my mouth and eye down on the left, the right, the left again. No one could look like that, I thought. But I was glad I did not have to go and see her in any case.

When she died, I didn�t go to the funeral either. It would have been my first one. My parents came back, quiet, wearing dark heavy clothing. Ginnie and I sat on their bed while they changed back. �It was a blessing,� Mom said, something I did not understand. I was only fleetingly, guiltily relieved that I would never have to kiss that mustache again.

Years later, Dad told me about Aunt Mamie�s glittery youth. �She was considered a real sketch, a flapper, always wore her hair in a black bob. Of course, it was a wig when you knew her, the poor thing.� She loved to dance, he said. She loved my father, and my mother, when she came along. �She picked out your mother�s wedding dress for her and paid for it,� he said. It didn�t matter that it only cost five dollars; it was a beautiful dress, a treasure. Dad pointed to a figure, Aunt Mamie�s figure in a photo, thin, blurred in motion. For a long time, though, she held a special seat in that section of my memory where I am the only changing, moving object and all else is fixed in time.

___

Thanks to Margie Davis.

last - next