Read Online Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris - Free Book Online
Authors: David Sedaris
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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
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
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