The Family Silver: Essays on Relationships among Women

Three. The Family Silver

Three the family silver I have just come back from a trip to Florida to settle the affairs of my lover’s aunt, who died suddenly at the age of seventy. She was carrying her groceries up the stairs to her apartment when she dropped dead of a heart attack. A neighbor found her. When we arrived several weeks later, we found her grocery list and the cash register receipt itemizing what she had bought—lettuce, tomatoes, salad dressing, breakfast cereal, milk, tuna ¤sh. It was an otherworldly experience: going to Florida, where I had not been before, to clean out the house of a woman I did not know—sorting through her clothes and jewelry, ¤nding snapshots she recently took, using her bathroom, meeting her friends, literally stepping into her life, not the life of someone still with us, but a vacated life. We were there for a week, closing out the small business Aunt Maxine ran out of her home, disposing of her possessions, and looking for vital documents, like the title to her car—a long white Cadillac with a red carriage roof and matching deep-red leather seats. Maxine was a short, buxom woman with bleached blond hair. She had dropped ten years from her age when she moved to Florida. Her closest friends knew her as sixty at her death. She dressed dramatically in bright colors and bold 6 5 prints and wore her best jewelry daily, her gold chains and diamonds. Herapartmenthadnotbeencleanedin¤veyears.Thelivinganddining rooms, full of cartons and paper goods, were devoted to her small business . She sold rubber self-inking stamps of the kind that says “Jane O’Hara, 48 Front Street,” or “First Class,” or the date. She played golf and was a supporter of the local theater group, and the best way I can put it is that she collected clothes. I emptied her closets, putting her clothes in large plastic bags to give away to charity, counting, as I bagged them, for tax purposes. There were 419 shirts, including gold lamé and sequinned shirts and golf shirts, 275 pairs of pants, 7 leather jackets, 162 pairs of shoes, 16 jumpsuits, 83 handbags. Stacked beside her bathroom sink were hundreds of old lipstick tubes that she never was able to throw out. Maxine was acquisitive and materialistic. When she felt in need, she bought something, usually clothes, preferably on sale. She liked large earrings and large beaded necklaces and had forty pounds of costume jewelry in, and on, her dresser in the end. She had married three times and received a signi¤cant diamond ring from each husband. The husbands , however, did not amount to much and she divorced them, preferring the life of a bachelor girl. She liked going out with others, and having a good time, and making money, although she only began making money on her own after she gave up on husbands and the myth that they would take care of her. She worked long hours, both to have the money to buy things she wanted and because she was constantly afraid her money would run out. When younger, she had gone to art school. The paintings we found in her apartment showed that she had talent. Shealsocouldsewandhadafullyequippedsewingmachineinherbedroom , but she preferred playing golf and being taken to dinner. She did not believe in doctors and saw them as a self-indulgence, which is one reason she had not been aware of her heart condition. She was a big talker and could ¤ll up a room with talk. Her friends said she lit up any room she entered. They also said she was always an “up person,” which to me meant she had no tolerance for depression and that she would not have understood or liked me. She was a woman whose values I have little respect for in the abstract, but there I was sorting through her clothes and the odds and ends on 6 6 pe r s o n a l s e t t i n g s herbedsidetable,becomingintimatewithher.Afterafewdaysof doing this, I knew exactly how she dressed and that her style of dressing was not mine. However, occasionally I would still take a shirt of hers that seemed tailored in cut and large enough to ¤t me, and carry it over to the bathroom mirror to try it on. One look would reveal it was a shade of pink...