I glanced at the calendar yesterday and with a shock I realized that my favorite aunt would have been 100 this weekend. She never made it to 100 but she came darn close, and remarkably, her liver and lungs were functioning to the end.
Auntie, my mother’s much older sister, was a hard drinking chain smoker. She had a husband whom she disliked and three children who bored her. She lived in Cleveland but came to visit several times per year, often for weeks at a time. Her visits totally upended our normally placid household: My brother and I were displaced from our bedroom onto various couches. My father went to work early, stayed late and picked up overtime on the weekends. My teenaged sister became more sullen, the dog was banished to the back porch and my mother was more stressed and high-strung than usual.
Personally I loved Auntie’s visits, which were major money-making opportunities for me. She didn’t like her husband but she loved his money, and she loved to spend it. My uncle owned a body shop; this embarrassed Auntie because he came home with dirty fingernails, but he made money hand over grubby fist. “Marry for money, not for love,” she told me in third grade.
When Auntie came to town she started with bloody Marys at breakfast, had switched to martinis by early afternoon, had wine with dinner and was comatose by 10. She would tip me a dollar a day to make sure her glass was never empty. This seemed a princely sum, even though my “tip” averaged about 10 cents per drink. Thanks to Auntie, I was the only fourth grader in my class who could make a perfect martini. “Remember, Honey,” she would say, “not too much vermouth.”
If it is possible, Auntie smoked more than she drank: She smoked in bed, she smoked in the bathroom, and she smoked at the table during dinner. Several times a day Auntie would give me a dollar to walk to SuperX Drugs to buy cigarettes and she let me keep the change. Since cigarettes were about 35 cent a pack, this added up. She paid me another dollar a day to empty her ashtrays. “Ashes are disgusting,” she would say.
I learned a lot about life from Auntie. In fifth grade she handed me a copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover and Bayview Elementary is still reeling from my subsequent book report. In eighth grade, at the wedding reception of my middle sister I saw that she and Uncle Carl rented a hotel room, even though Auntie was married to Uncle Dick and Uncle Carl, my father’s brother, was married to Aunt Marge.
No one ever had the nerve to argue with Auntie, so when she told Mom that if my brother and I went in the pool every day we did not need a bath, Mom agreed. She also told Mom that washing bath towels was a waste of time; “You’re already clean, for God’s sake,” she would say, folding the damp towels and putting them back in the linen closet where they would mildew. She taught Mom that if dishes “looked clean” there was no point in washing them.
I thought Auntie was great, but her kids felt differently. She died alone and ornery in a Cleveland nursing home and it was months before we even knew. Her kids had her cremated the same day with no mass, no service, no funeral, and they never even claimed her ashes. “Ashes are disgusting,” said my cousin, and on that point Auntie would have agreed.