The State We're In

AUNT SOPHIE RENALDO BROWN

Years ago, I saw two people at a summer party who arrived in grand style and departed to everyone’s protestations that they shouldn’t drive. The driver of the little MG was called Walrus, which I thought was the funniest name I’d ever heard, and his ladyfriend was called Star. She’d been an extra in a few movies but never managed to have a career in Hollywood. Someone at the party said she was a secretary at a recording studio, and someone else said she’d eloped with a much older man and never had the marriage annulled, and that he looked out for her. These people had hardly turned their backs when the gossip began. Someone said to me that it was like everyone lying and conjecturing at Gatsby’s parties, but I had not at that point read the book.

Aunt Sophie Renaldo Brown was wearing red sling-back high heels and khaki shorts (hardly Gatsby attire, as I’d later learn) and a tight lavender blouse, under which she wore a push-up bra and, inside the bra, carefully placed, two metal wire champagne cork baskets to suggest hugely protruding nipples. As Sophie Renaldo, she’d been a teetotaler, but after getting her life together, divorcing Roy Renaldo, and eventually a subsequent marriage that lasted six months but gave her the name Brown, matriculating at NYU, she’d developed a taste for icy cold rosé. You know how it is: you get a cat; the cat needs toys; you get a bell so the cat won’t kill birds and also a cushion so the cat can rest comfortably somewhere other than on the sofa. A cat becomes a whole big deal. She did have such a cat, named Methuselah by her first ex-husband, who’d believed that the cat was eight or nine years old when they got it from the shelter (this is what they’d been told), and then it had lived another nineteen years and was still going strong except for a recent bout of hypergrooming in the tail area.

Roy was happy to leave the animal behind with Sophie when he moved to York, Maine, to work at an accounting firm with an old Navy friend. He was not so happy to have to continue to pay his soon-to-be-ex-wife’s tuition, but the following year she graduated with a degree in sociology. She was currently a hostess at a busy, successful Upper West Side restaurant. She got up early in the morning to walk the cat on a leash (people stared), to buy a small bottle of freshly squeezed orange juice, then return home to sip it as she took her daily vitamins and wrote lengthy passages in her diary. Bryce, the new waiter, often stopped by to round her up for the three-block walk to Café Anywhere. He was the one who’d introduced her to rosé.

My father called her a lush and would have nothing to do with her once she was divorced from his brother — when she became more of an exhibitionist than ever. At her first wedding, she’d constantly raised her wedding gown to show the garter with its thinly braided white ribbons whose little satin pigtail points were dusted with blue sparkles and tiny, dangling heart-shaped crystals. She told me they were edible! She had quite a sense of humor. I was seven years old, and absolutely mesmerized. Who could believe Uncle Roy would find such a prize? His other girlfriends had been heavier, and none had had such luxurious hair, and certainly none had giggled or offered to take me to Central Park. One had asthma.

I was seventeen when Roy and Sophie separated and eighteen when they divorced. They’d never had children, but I always knew she wished I was hers. Sometimes when I was growing up, she’d point to little boys on the street and say she was glad she wasn’t stuck with one of them. I usually agreed, because they always seemed wound up and they tended to breathe through their mouths and to have dirt or food on their faces.

I was eighteen when I saw her with the champagne baskets protruding beneath her blouse. She was absolutely straight-faced, because she was good at pulling a joke. She’d taught me not to pop my eyes like my mother and then immediately look down if we saw somebody strange or outlandish. She explained that their appearance might be intentionally funny, and we wouldn’t want to appear unsophisticated and react negatively to the joke. Of course the majority of people just passed us by, but I tended to take her word for which of those people intended to be funny with their attire and which didn’t.

She could tell instantly whether someone was aware she was dressed ludicrously or was just a loser. Even weird, old-fashioned hats didn’t confuse Aunt Sophie. To me, the length of the feather or the amount of swirled netting or the rhinestone clips were indecipherable, but she could tell if a man dressed as a woman in line at the drugstore was kidding or serious. She explained that it would be rude to laugh at a man who thought he looked nice. Little old ladies — the ones that came out of certain apartment buildings — she discounted as being in a time warp. Age was a big factor in whether someone was putting on the audience, but I didn’t see clearly, as she did, whether someone was fifty or seventy; they just looked old.

She coached me, but it seemed like almost every case was different and I would never have an eye for nuance. She dressed a lot of different ways herself, though I never saw her wear a hat. Sophie wore high heels, kitten heels, ballet flats in wild colors, tennis shoes, and espadrilles. When she went to work, she favored platform slings, though she sometimes wore red Keds and put on stiletto heels when she got to work. In her opinion, shoes were something people did not kid about. They might buy a dress because they knew it was ridiculously girlie, or wear a color such as bright orange that was meant to shock. But whatever shoes they had on, they weren’t joking: ugly shoes they knew to be ugly shoes, though thank heavens it had become as fashionable to wear ugly shoes as attractive ones — or really any kind of shoe you wanted. Many kinds of shoes cut across class lines, such as clogs with closed backs. Nurses wore them, waitresses wore them, but so did college students and rich ladies walking their little dogs on the Upper West Side (East Side shoes were totally different). I pretty much understood Sophie’s point, but I still found certain distinctions hard to make. Boots? She explained that because they always cost so much, boots automatically conveyed wealth. Sophie granted my point that if we were somewhere else, there might be some confusion about boots, but the bottom line was that they were not working-class footwear in New York City. Also, you had to invest a lot of time in breaking them in, so however strange they looked — reptilian or gold-cap-toed, bright purple with stacked heels — they were never a joke joke.

I kept it in the back of my mind that if I married Bryce Seward (I had such a crush on him), I’d just ask Sophie to pick out absolutely everything I’d wear on my wedding day. I had previously thought I might marry McGann O’Marra and Jerry Underwood — in fifth and sixth grade, respectively. Then came the long stretch of believing that I would never marry anyone. That no one would ever want to marry me. All Jerry Underwood really wanted to do, it was clear to me, was to draw concentric circles around my budding breasts with Magic Marker. It took forever to fade, and I had to make sure my mother never saw me naked. My father would have killed him, and that’s not an exaggeration. Anyway — this gets me back to where I began, more or less: Aunt Sophie and the little wire champagne baskets.

She did this at the garden party, which was held at a big house in Maine nearly five hours from New York, on a river. She told us she’d called ahead to make absolutely sure that Roy, her first ex-husband, wouldn’t be there, but I thought that, secretly, she would have liked running into him. The couple giving the party had told her that she was “fun” and that they hadn’t kept up with Roy, let alone invited him to the party. She remembered these people only slightly, from a dinner she’d had with them at a restaurant when they’d all been offered a room at the hotel across the street if they’d leave. She loved to tell people how scandalously she and her friends acted, though you could never press her and get details.

Inside, I saw something I thought was a piece of sculpture. Closer inspection revealed it to be a great quantity of cooked lobsters stacked on the shelves of a tall metal stand surrounded not by devotional candles but by open jars of mayonnaise. At that point, I don’t think I even knew lobsters existed; I was fascinated by their bright red shells. Wasn’t this more of an adventure than going on another pointless coffee date with Les Allan? Sure — everything I did with Aunt Sophie was exciting and new, though getting up at six in the morning in order to set out before seven had made me feel a little faint. I rode in the back of the car with Bryce’s boyfriend, Nathaniel, and the cat, who was stretched out in a cage with one of Sophie’s old bed pillows for a cushion and a cone around its head so it couldn’t overgroom its tail. Aunt Sophie rode in the passenger seat, map in hand, her eyes shadowed in silvery green powder, the lashes thick with mascara, even though you could see dark raccoon circles under her eyes. She turned around often to talk to us. I was so excited to be going to a garden party — whatever that was. For one thing, they were rich people who had a big lawn — this much I figured out from what Sophie said about them. The Boyfriend kept saying that so much driving wasn’t his idea of a good Sunday, and Bryce and Sophie both said, almost in unison, that the words good and Sunday were an oxymoron. Sundays were boring; they signified the last-minute desperation of having a good weekend. The two of them were united in their scorn of Sunday. To them, the day meant nothing but newsprint on their fingertips and eggs prepared with glutinous, highly caloric sauces. Sundays were always straining after fun, like a horse being whipped to win the race, when fun came naturally during the rest of the week. Sundays carried a burden too heavy to bear.

Bryce was wearing a white shirt and tight jeans with a few little slashes on the thighs (and this was way before anyone did such a thing). He wore sandals a friend had brought him from Morocco. The Boyfriend had on madras Bermuda shorts and a navy blue Lacoste shirt and leather sneakers with tan colored laces and tan socks folded over at the ankle. He had very hairy legs. He worked at another restaurant — more like a bar — in Chelsea. He’d graduated from Juilliard but had some sort of breakdown and couldn’t play music or listen to any female vocalists. No one dared to turn on the car radio. Methuselah kept trying to stand in the cage, although all the turns in the road kept knocking him down, making his bell ring, and sometimes provoking long, weak cries of protest. I was wearing a wrap dress in a nice shade of gray that I’d bought at a flea market on Amsterdam Avenue for next to nothing and black patent-leather ankle-strap inch-high heels. It seemed pretty radical not to wear any jewelry, so I didn’t. The rumor was that Leo Lerman (who apparently wrote about the arts) was going to be at the party, and also a famous painter. I didn’t catch his name, but the Boyfriend clearly thought he was an idiot and that the party wasn’t worth going to, even if it was Sunday and there was nothing better to do. He refused in advance to do any of the driving, and he insisted that we stop every two hours so he could pee. He was the first person I heard worrying aloud about bedbugs. He wouldn’t go to the movies because he was afraid bedbugs might be in the theater seats.

Now I have to tell the rest of the story another way, because I can’t keep pretending that what happened didn’t happen. It was this: we found a parking spot under a willow tree and left the windows down so Methuselah would be okay. Walking to the party, with my arm linked through Aunt Sophie’s, and the Boyfriend and the man who I now understood would never, ever be my husband, Sophie said, “I went to have my yearly mammogram, and they saw something. I have to go into the hospital on Tuesday afternoon and have it biopsied. If anything happens to me, I want you to promise to take care of Methuselah. I know I should say everything’s going to be okay, but I’ve got a premonition that it isn’t. Do you promise?”

This was bad news, said so matter-of-factly that, right away, I began silently denying it. Did Bryce know about this? Whether the Boyfriend was aware of it didn’t matter even slightly. Did my mother know? That was important. If she did, then maybe she could reassure me, because it was clear Sophie wasn’t going to. On the other hand, if she didn’t know, would I have to tell her? Or, worse yet, keep quiet about it? Sophie said, “Bryce is going to walk Methuselah for me after my biopsy.” (So he did know!) “I’ll have to miss that day at work, but maybe I can go in the next day. Look at that man over there, peeing against a tree. He thinks we don’t see him. The party must already be in full swing!”

I looked in the same direction but didn’t see anyone. “Right there!” she said, pointing. There were many trees. I squinted a little, though I didn’t really want to see a man peeing. But then I did see him: a guy tucking his penis inside his pants, turning and walking quickly away. “That didn’t even happen at the party at the Great Gatsby’s,” she said. “But I guess you can’t expect him to put everything in one book. I’ll write about it in my diary: that it was an omen. Fate was pissing on me.”

At least, I think that’s what she said. Methuselah was crying. We both turned and looked at the car, but now it was quiet.

“I think I’ll have a smoke. You go in and I’ll join you in a minute,” the Boyfriend said.

“I’ll stay with you,” Bryce said. “We’ll see you girls soon.”

We walked ahead, still arm in arm. I hadn’t answered her about the cat. I hadn’t said anything sympathetic or helpful or even acknowledged that I’d heard what she’d told me. I couldn’t think what to say. I, too, trusted her instincts. I couldn’t imagine life without her. And to be honest, I’d always had to fake it about liking Methuselah. I didn’t want to be a young old maid who lived alone with her cat. The thought of it resulted in tears filling my eyes. I wiped them quickly away with my free hand as Star exited the party barefoot, with lobsters raised like free weights above her head, and was chased, giggling, around the side of the house. I never saw either of them again, though I once saw a man with a similar mustache I mistook for Walrus when I was checking out of a CVS a couple of years later.

Another car bumped onto the grassy area: a Mustang convertible with a Vermont license plate, music playing loudly, an old Sinéad O’Connor song, “Nothing Compares 2 U.” The driver and a woman in the passenger seat were laughing loudly, enjoying every tree root the car bumped over, the woman holding her sequined baseball cap to her head in an exaggerated way. So was her hat a joke? Why were so many women at the party wearing hats? Was Aunt Sophie serious in what she was suddenly saying about Bryce and Nathaniel intending to hook up with the man who’d been peeing against a tree? I turned to see Nathaniel cupping his hand around a match to light a cigarette, and Bryce stretching, slowly lowering his hands down his thighs to his knees, then lower, bending further. Was it a kind of preening, or just a postdrive stretch? A puff of smoke went up in the air. I wanted to be that smoke. To disappear. Instead, I listened from afar to my own voice as I lied about my affection for the cat. I let go of her arm. She brushed her hand lightly down my long hair I was too stupid to know was attractive to men, though later I practiced tossing it in front of a mirror. Aunt Sophie’s heels were higher than anyone else’s I’d seen — certainly higher than mine — but she walked briskly, with confidence. How did a person have confidence if they didn’t believe in the future? I wondered. In an hour or so, Aunt Sophie would be placing the little metal baskets inside her blouse, seeming to be having a good time, shocking people but making them laugh.

It was a rocky road to death, full of bumps and obstacles, with low-hanging branches that would slap you in the face if you didn’t duck, and there was always the danger that the underside of the car might sink deeply into a pothole and bottom out, leaving us all stranded. You could call for help, but how to describe where we were, surrounded by trees that blocked out the sun, an anonymous place at the end of an unpaved road, where man pissed on nature and puffed carcinogens into the air, sending up smoke signals to mix with the clouds.

The Boyfriend knew how to blow smoke rings. It was amazing for a few seconds until he stopped pursing his lips, silently puffing out the message of the day, and of every day: O, O, O.