Today, I’m sharing some of the writing I did when I was still a lowly college undergrad (as opposed to now, when I’m a lowly entry-level professional). The piece I’m sharing was written during my senior year of college for a class that focused on reading your work to an audience. I read it once or twice then decided to go with another piece for the class, but I always kept it in the back of my mind, hoping that one day I’d come back to it. I haven’t, yet, but oh well.

It’s after the jump.

Cloe Crates was my great-grandmother’s sister, ever married, never heavier than ninety-eight pounds, never taller than four foot ten. She always wore white canvas sneakers that seemed to have just been bleached and delicate gold necklaces and chunky gem-studded rings and colored fake pearl earrings. By the time I knew her, she had age spots all over her face and glowing white hair. I was taller than her by age ten. I knew her as Aunt Cloe, and she lived in Blawnox, a faraway mysterious place that I finally saw when I was twelve. A small red rowhouse with over-reaching green and white awnings. An Astroturf porch. An old wooden swing. During the visit, she pressed bite-sized Snickers bars into my hands when my grandmother and aunt weren’t looking.

More often, though, she’d come to our house, bringing with her a person called Cousin Lois Catherine, to whom I was related but I hadn’t the faintest idea how. A trip from them always meant a rousing game of Shanghai, a card game that, to the best of my knowledge, exists only in my family. Aunt Cloe always won. After awhile, she wasn’t allowed to be the banker anymore because she had the unfortunate habit of forgetting to distribute winnings to other players. If she got irritated with another family member during the game, she’d hurl curses at them that she must have made up a long time ago. “Go suck on a tit,” she’d growl, or “Go shimmy up a dark alley.”

***

To her, I was Jeannette, because in her world, all the girls were named Jeannette and all the boys were named George. The first time I ever wore a bra, at age twelve, was during one of her visits and I was modeling it for all my female relatives in the living room, feeling a bit anxious, a bit exhilarated, a bit lost. She strutted up to me and pressed on my back, making me stoop over. “Go on, Jeannette,” she said, eyes glinting as she pushed with surprising strength. “You have to shake those titties into it.”

***

Later on, she couldn’t be trusted alone. Our family once got a call from one of her neighbors, who told us that the smell of natural gas was coming through the walls of her
rowhouse just adjacent to Aunt Cloe’s. She had mistakenly left the stove on for three straight days.

***

After she died, when I was sixteen, I learned that there was a small town in Pennsylvania named after my grandmother’s side of the family near Clarion. We all trooped up there to a cemetery next to a simple white country church to bury Aunt Cloe. It wasn’t so much a town, really, as an acre or two of land with an inconspicuous blue and white sign whispering “Village of Crates” to the very few travelers who must pass through it.

She was buried in a large graveyard next to the small church, along with her ancestors. There are pictures of my grandmother and her sisters from that day, crowded around the gravestone of their grandfather. There are pictures of forty-odd relatives crammed into a small local diner, smiling politely at each other and appraising the menu for something palatable. Bill Scalski, whose wife died of a brain aneurysm a long time ago. Cousin Lois Catherine, who passed away a few years ago. These are pictures of a family who doesn’t know each other very well and only seems to see each other at a birth or a death.

***

Last year, somehow, I found myself in a car with my boyfriend driving through Blawnox. The industrial remains on the river. The cramped city streets. The rowhouses with over-reaching awnings.

“Blawnox,” he said, tasting the word on his tongue.

“Mmhmm,” I replied, thinking of days past. “I had an aunt who lived here. She died a few years ago.”