Read Online Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris - Free Book Online Page A

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