The Closed Book Club

The things that I know about my aunt can’t fill a book.

Her favorite color was brown.

She shaved her eyebrows off and drew them back on every morning.

She lived alone. She never so much as dated someone as long as I’d been alive.

She always had a pet. A small dog that was the kind of spoiled that made you believe in the demonic possession of animals, and later, two very, very obese cats.

She loved my father fiercely.

She disliked my mother with the same passion.

She loved my brother.

She liked me less and less with each passing year.

She told me stories when I was young. That she was an award-winning ballerina. That her parent’s house had gold bars stored in the attic and the local police officers would come guard it on occasion. Neither of these was true. Imagine how surprised I was when I first had to fill out a FAFSA form, only to ask my parents what happened to all the gold my grandparents had. Yes, I made it to 18 before realizing that was a story…college maybe wasn’t the path for me.

She collected porcelain dolls and watched dateline late at night. I remember this distinctly because I hated the dolls and could hear the stories of missing people from downstairs as I turned all the dolls around in the guest room so that they couldn’t see me while I slept.

She would bring tons of presents each year for Christmas.

Most from HSN or QVC.

She had a shopping addiction.

As much as my father was a mama’s boy, she was a daddy’s girl through and through.

We laid her ashes to rest over her father’s coffin a few weeks ago.

She smoked.

She had no natural teeth left even when I was young. She’d take her dentures out to make me and my brother squeal.

She double majored in accounting and German.

I never heard her speak German.

She worked at a big bank in downtown Cleveland when she was young.

She’d leave for fancy lunches with coworkers and they’d spend hours drinking. I watched MadMen for the first time years after we’d stopped speaking and this is immediately what came to mind.

She was crass and crude and blunt.

She was a firm hugger.

She wore White Diamonds.

Her obituary was written by the funeral home. It was two sentences.

There were eight people at her funeral.

She was a hoarder.

She loved to read.

I’m not going to pretend that I was close to my aunt Tess. That’s not the point of this experiment. I realized, standing inside her apartment for the first time, surveying the clutter and disarray, that I knew nothing about her. We’d stopped talking before I could get to the juicy stories and before that I was more interested in my own life.

Seeing her house, her two sentence obituary, I felt like I needed to see her. She deserved that, everyone does and I don’t think she ever let anyone close enough.

She was a certified hermit her last few years and it seems like the only company she kept was in the form of books. Boxes of mysteries and crime. A decent interest in best sellers that seem to have no genre loyalty, leading me to think she had them auto-delivered. Some books are starred in the front page, making me think that maybe the starred ones were particularly good. She ripped the title page from most of the paperbacks, keeping a neat paper-clipped packet of them so she knew which titles she’d read.

I went through all of the books and took the ones I thought looked good. I brought 51 books back home with me. My goal is to read them all, trying to figure out the mystery of my aunt as I go. What did she like about these books? Did she hate some of them? Are there patterns to storylines she read over and over? All the while, I’ll be shifting through the things we brought back. Beneath the packing peanuts and hoarded Christmas cards were sets of real silverware, report cards, journals, and pictures. I hope I can find people to talk to about her. Old friends, family, my dad.

I think she’d have mixed feelings about me doing this. I wasn’t her favorite but we were more alike than I care to admit. She walked ahead of me like a morality tale. My own ghost of Christmas Future. Going through the initial books, I found multiple copies of ones I owned myself. She loved horror and thrillers like I do. With every similarity I found, I felt like she was trying to tell me something. Which, sounds exactly like the kind of thing everyone thinks when a family member passes. But I could imagine her there going through those books with me, trying to show me how to learn from her mistakes.

Or hey, maybe she was happy, living alone with her cats and her books and insane amounts of frozen pot stickers. Who can say?

So, at the onset of this, if I could tell my Aunt Tess one thing it would be this. “Tess, you would have really loved true crime podcasts.”