Scarf

A visit to Aunt Lorrie necessitated the very best attire. My sister, looking as though she had been confined to a straightjacket, wore her blue and pink dress, laboriously pressed into folds down the front the night before. Only I knew how very much she hated wearing it, because I had hated just as much, five years before, the navy blue suit which had been forced upon me on the eve of every trip to Aunt Lorrie’s. She was now twelve, and I was seventeen, just beyond being coerced into wearing my childish best; the outfit I chose to visit my most feared aunt was what passed for fancy dress in those days: an ironic ruffled shirt, starched and bleached pure and sparklingly white and a pair of black pinstriped pants most unsuited to my only jacket, which was brown and scruffy to a degree that just missed the necessity of elbow patches, due to my youthful poverty, and although I did not altogether deplore this state of affairs my mother did, most wholeheartedly, bemoan the sad state of the wardrobe of her only son. She seemed to take my complete and utter disregard of conventional fashion sense as a sign of fiscal irresponsibility; as I was someday to manage her affairs, she nearly had a heart attack when I appeared in this garb, and could not restrain a whimper when she saw the device with which I would be endeavoring to protect my bare neck from the January winds.

Disregarding her pleas to remove the hateful object from her sight, I wound this monstrosity of a scarf, an insanely colorful thing knitted, in a moment of inspiration, by a friend of mine in the storms of November as a birthday gift for me. Needless to say I treasured it. By the time I had finished tying the elaborate knot, which in its ornate splendor seemed to keep my head itself on, she was speechless; I ignored her look of incredulous animosity. If it were not for the undeniable fact that I had evaded visiting my aunt for the past year, and the lamentable absence of my father—my mother, having grown up in an age of female repression, had never learned to drive—I am sure she would have left me at home. I led the way to the car, keys in hand and humming a little tune.

My mother remained silent until we had nearly pulled into my aunt’s two-story house, twenty minutes away from our considerably smaller version. When she spoke, I could tell she had trouble restraining her annoyance. “Harold.”

Pulling into my aunt’s driveway with a spin of the steering wheel, I turned exuberantly to face her and found myself cut off by the mute concrete wall she had formed her face into, baleful eyes glaring up at me; there was an expression there, part regret, part wariness, part sadness, that I’d never seen there before—nor have I seen it since. “Mother dearest?”

“There’s something you must understand about your aunt’s family and mine. You know. They never approved of me.” I thought I was beginning to understand something, slowly, like sand falling off a fossil. The thing you must realize about my aunt is that she isn’t actually my mother’s sister—nor is she my father’s sister. She is the last of my father’s family, true, but technically she’s his aunt, not ours; a whole other generation.

“Because your father’s family is very high-class. And my mother was a working woman, and my father was a painter.” I nodded. This part of the family history was well known to me; my grandfather’s artistic talent had been continued in my little sister, who at her young age was certain she would, one day, be wildly famous as a painter, like he was (I’ve no doubt that, one day, she will be.) I had never conceived of my grandmother’s employment as disgraceful. The thing is, you understand it in theory, the way women were repressed, but when it comes down to application you fail. For the first time, I realized that my aunt disapproved all the more heavily of my mother because of her family; then I realized my mother disapproved of her own mother. By this point I didn’t need the rest of my mother’s explanation. “I’m afraid she’ll think I’m raising your father’s children badly.”

I was amazed that she could care about such an archaic worldview, until I realized she held it herself. It was her incredible family loyalty which had kept up her intense, exasperated communication with her mother until my grandmother’s death a few years previously. I looked at her with new respect; without another word from her I unwound the scarf, folded it and tucked it tenderly under my seat. I straightened the shoulders of my jacket, tied the loose shoelace on my right shoe, and dusted off a streak of dried mud on my pants leg.

Now that I was securely on her side, my mother returned to her tart disapproval. “I don’t understand why you treasure that awful thing so.” She slammed the door to the car; my sister scrambled as slowly as she could to follow her.