Families tend to be littered with characters, most of them ordinary–playing their vital roles and fulfilling their duties in matter-of-fact ways–and a few exceptional, the sprinkles on what might otherwise be a rather vanilla family cupcake. My mother’s younger sister was the sprinkle.
I knew nothing of their childhood until I’d grown well past my own. My mother’s sister was the only one who ever called her Ethel, her given name, instead of Sally. Even as a kid, this drew me to my aunt as a holder of mysteries, a figure able to conjure things about my mother no one else could. But I admired a host of things about my aunt. For one, she had one of those quintessential double Southern names that you pronounced all of a piece–Bar-bran. Barbara Ann. She used it as it pleased her, going as Barb or Barbara professionally and slipping casually into the double moniker when she visited family. I imagine she got a lot of mileage in her mid-twenties out of the Beach Boys’ smash hit. I know every time it crossed my radio’s air waves–Ba Ba Ba Ba BarbaraAnn–there was only one face I pictured.
In contrast to my rather gallumphing, tomboyish tumble of a family, Barbara Ann was a movie star. She might have seemed more at home posing with Princess Margaret or Jackie O than hobnobbing with our lot. On a visit to our grandparents’ home, we’d pile out of the family station wagon, rumpled and cranky like a pack of stray dogs, and she’d breeze in later, headlights sweeping across the front window, usually having driven straight from work with her single son in tow. She’d climb out of her sedan with hardly a wrinkle in her pressed pant suit, smelling of perfume and cigarettes. We were solid suburbanites; she’d lived in the big sprawling city of Atlanta ever since she’d left the sleepy fishing town of Panama City to forge her path. She casually drove its spaghetti highways and thought nothing of commuting downtown in the city my father never drove through without white knuckles and cursing.
In the mornings at my grandparents’, where there was only one small bathroom, she’d rise early with a cup of coffee and settle in at the dining room table. Here, I’d watch, fascinated, as she set up a lighted, magnified mirror and pulled out a tackle box full of creams, paints, colors, and brushes. Under her expert hand (where had she learned this wizardry?), she’d transform her angled pixie face like a canvas until she looked like a magazine model. No one in my family did this. My mother’s beauty regimen consisted of baby oil and lipstick. Barbara Ann had nowhere to be and no one special to see, Lord knows not on the docks by the bay, but it made her feel good to look good, she said. And she did. Her trim, petite frame was always draped with artful size two clothes and her dark, curled locks always tidy. She’s the reason I don’t leave the driveway without at least a cursory attempt at being presentable.
She lived on a sloping, wooded lot with a creek in a two-story house which she filled with a mix of Art Deco furniture and glassware she’d scoured from antique shops. The woman could shop. She knew just where to go to get a bargain, and her closet was a treasure trove of colors and style. On one visit back in the early 80’s, she sat my mother and me down on her silk-covered bedspread and instructed us on the finer points of the Color Me Beautiful philosophy, trying different scarves and draping us with colors to demonstrate her point. “See?” she rested her case. “You’re winters,” she told us. “Neither one of you was ever meant to wear mustard yellow,” something I wish someone had told me before my 7th grade school pictures.
She managed to make it look easy: living as a single mother in that big house, taking care of everything. She had the tenacity of a hungry badger, going after what she wanted and standing up for herself. Facing some rough seas, she did battle against those she saw as takers, refusing to let injustice have its way. Some of this she learned from her father, a salty burl of a man who had his own way of doing things. She once helped him pilot his fishing boat down the Gulf coast from Mobile, Alabama to Panama City–in a full-out hurricane because it seemed a good a time as any and a little wind never hurt anybody. And some of her spunk and perseverance she got from her mother, who single-handedly cared for Barbara Ann’s disabled brother for decades. Perhaps this is what enabled her to remain a die-hard Braves fan for so long, despite–well, everything.
While Barbara was certainly beautiful and carried herself with poise, she could hoe a row of okra, kill a snake in the creek, and knew how to catch a fish that weighed twice what she did. She knew how to laugh and loved to dance. She had vices: she could hold a grudge with both hands and never let go; she couldn’t give up cigarettes. If you crossed her, she might jerk a knot in your tail, but she was a softie inside, taking in ugly stray cats and watching the birds from her window. After my mother passed away, I know Barbara keenly felt the sting of that sister-loss. We should have spoken more, should have visited more often, but hearing my mother’s voice come out of her mouth–that familiar cadence and the way she rounded out her O’s with the trace of an accent–would completely unravel me every time we spoke. The ghostly echo was uncanny.
A woman named Jenny Joseph wrote a poem in the early 60’s that became the mantra for aging gracefully. The first bit goes like this:
When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit.
This, fittingly, reminds me so much of Aunt Barbara. She and her Red Hat Ladies spent some fine times in their slippers learning how to spit. I’m sure she was right at the helm of that particular ship, sailing into the hurricane with her face to the wind, determined to hit the shore of 80. Happy birthday, Barbara Ann. Have a cupcake wherever you are. And make sure it’s got plenty of purple sprinkles.
