One

When I was eight or so, my aunt came to visit us. I have managed, over the years, to get this particular visit mixed up with a similar visit at about the same age from my grandmother and her husband. My grandmother, my mother's and aunt's mother, was supposed to be crazy. We never saw her and my mother hissed dark things about the man she had married, whose name was George. I only met George once and he was nice to me; we went for a walk on the beach and he seemed genuinely interested in the shells and bits of seaweed I picked up. Still, the adults said he was crazy and dangerous and he did have longish hair, which was kind of a novelty on older men in the early 70s. Long hair, I had been reliably informed by my father, was completely unacceptable in men in general and sort of suspect even in women. Nice people had short hair. My parents and their friends all had short hair; my older brother, who was wild, had long hair.

Even at eight, I wasn't thrilled by nice people, who mostly either overlooked children or said cooing creepy things to them that were clearly untrustworthy. I was not that cute, at eight, so saying I was cute was clearly full of shit. I was tall and skinny and my teeth were too big for my mouth and I was completely blind without the bottle bottom glasses I was supposed to always wear. My hair was cut short like a boys so it wouldn't tangle but it did anyway; my socks always fell down and my shirt tails always escaped so that my mother would call me over and say, "You're coming apart in the middle again," pulling me back together with one fond hand. I was shy, yes, but there's nothing, really, worse that you can do to a shy eight year old than attempt to squeeze them and say, "Oh, she's so SHY!" Yeah, thanks, hadn't noticed. Now go away, please, please.

My aunt, on the other hand, didn't coo. Annie has always been a little bemused by children but she doesn't talk down to them. In preparation for her visit, my brother and I had made drawings, since we knew that this aunt, unlike our other aunt, was a famous artist. Our other aunt was mostly a famous mother, what with the six children, and a famous Catholic, what with the going to church all the time, which was something we didn't do in our house. When Annie got to our house, we duly presented her with drawings.
"What is this?" she asked me.
"It's a tree," I said, uneasy, for surely anyone could recognize a tree.
"You can do better than that," she said, "Do real trees look like lollipops? They don't look like that. Go look at a tree."
I stared at her. "Well," she said, relenting, "Look, trees do this. They kind of branch off - " and she took a pencil and drew a Y, adding branches to it here and there. I was fascinated. It was steps above the lollipop tree, clearly, and I felt as if I had been initiated into some kind of Art Mystery. So this was how you drew trees! Aha! I still draw my trees like that; it's been codified just as strictly, now, as the lollipop trees ever were.

We lived at this point in a big faux Tudor house in Darien, Connecticut. It had a private beach immediately next door to the Tokeneke beach club, which made it difficult for our dogs, who thought that the beach club also belonged to them. You couldn't blame them, the beach club was full of children with ice cream and half eaten hamburgers and all sorts of things that dogs really enjoy, like half eaten flip flops. The beach club would complain to my mother that yet again a dog had been over there stealing snacks and sneakers and my mother would sigh and tell me that the dog could not be allowed to go over there and what was she going to do and then, perhaps, a few months later, that dog would move to a farm and another, hopefully more sedentary, dog would join the family. If my father got involved there would be bellowing but then when my father was home, which wasn't, those years, all that often, there was always bellowing. "Goddamnit!" he would shout, "Jesus Christ! Goddamnit, Tucky!"

My mother's name was Norma Claire Truxell. Her father, she said, didn't approve of fancy names for girls. His name was Norman and she was the first born child, thus, Norma. My aunt, who came along 18 months later, was christened Betty Ann, but in one of her many slides from identity to identity, the Betty vanished and Annie was Annie, except to my mother, who always called her Ann, often with a small exasperated sigh. Where did Tucky come from? We don't know; maybe it was a little sister's attempt, maybe she made it up herself, later, when she got to high school or college and discovered a generation of girls called Muffie and Bootsie and Missy. Norma is a pretty terrible name, after all.

My grandfather died when my mother was 15 and Annie was 13. My mother told us, always, of an almost idyllic childhood with occasional uneasy lapses. My aunt is less charitable. My grandmother, it was apparent, had married beneath her. Norman Truxell, my grandfather, was in my childhood imagination, the seventh son of a seventh son, which may or may not be true. What he was, definitely, was a child of Dutch immigrants who belonged to a stern and strange religious sect of dutiful, undiluted Calvinism. He was studying for the ministry when he met and married my grandmother, poor Alice, Alice who was never that stable, Alice who wanted to be an artist. They married in the roaring twenties and produced two children and lived in dire poverty until my grandfather got his first church.

He announced from the pulpit after his first sermon that he had been entertaining doubts as to God's existence for some time and had been waiting, on this momentous occasion, for a sign. The sign had not materialized during the sermon and thus, he felt it would be unfair and untrue of him to continue being a minister. He was now, he said, an atheist and he recommended that the congregation follow suit.

I have always wished I could have seen this sermon. What sign, I wonder, was he expecting? A flight of white doves through a church window? The Virgin stepping in? Do Calvinists even believe in the Virgin? Maybe speaking in tongues would have sufficed or a plague of vanquished serpents or God himself in a burning pew or maybe just a small voice in the back of his head saying something like, "Hold on, Norman. If you don't keep on being a minister life is going to suck fairly hard for a long time." It did, as it turned out, because the other sons were not happy to have this small family land in their Pennsylvania midst. There were jobs for Norman - the family owned a foundry and apparently many of the older manhole covers in Pittsburgh came from it - but somehow, they never quite worked out or never lasted for long. I don't know much more about Norman, or Greensboro, PA, where my mother and Annie grew up, or anything at all about the apparent scores of Truxell aunts and uncles and cousins, except that children were not allowed to read the comics, because they were sinful and nobody was allowed to do much of anything on Sundays, because it was sinful. All in all, it sounds as if there was a whole lot of forbidden, sinful fruit out in the greater world and Annie and Tucky were heading straight for it as fast as they could flee.

Alice Atkinson, my grandmother, came from a far more or less sinful home, depending on your personal definition of sin, in Creston, Iowa, where her father had apparently invented the telephone or brought it to Iowa in a very worthy turn of the century kind of weighty way. My grandmother, the former Mabel Hilton - I tell my children they are related to Paris Hilton on the strength of this maiden name and, who knows, perhaps we are, although one hopes not - and he had three children: Claire and Alice, poor Alice, and then Edward, who died at about age 12, either of scarlet fever or the 1917 influenza epidemic or, honestly, any one of those things that took children away in the beginning of the 20th century. Claire, whose hair turned snow white at the age of 17 when her younger brother died, was the stable one and the one who would be as much a mother, or more than a mother to Tucky and Annie, than poor Alice, who was not, apparently, quite up to the job.