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  I never anticipate the zinger. When I’m with Aunt Ruthie, I’m having such a good time I forget she does that. Even though I may not have spoken to Aunt Ruthie for two months because of a past zinger, all is forgotten when I am swept back into the culture of my youth, when I am called “darling,” “light of my life,” or her favorite, “my love.” I am adored, adored. But then there it is—the Aunt Ruthie zinger. My heart and upper arms feel fizzy. It’s an adrenaline surge, the kind you get crossing the street when a car almost clips you.

  This is for your husband. You don’t need it.

  Zing! Does she think I’m fat? Zing! Zing! Was I going to scarf the slice on the Mosholu Parkway, allowing my husband to think I visited Aunt Ruthie without bringing something for him? That Aunt Ruthie provided no gift for the man of the house? Zing. Zing went the strings of my heart. What’s the matter with me? Can’t I have some halvah too?

  It’s a shocker, the Aunt Ruthie zinger. She loves you to death, she loves you so incredibly much you forget she zings. Then she zings. Sometimes I take a little vacation. I don’t call. Then Aunt Ruthie phones, her voice wobbly, and says, “Why haven’t I heard from you, my love?” and I’m overcome with missing her. Why does every encounter come with one poison dart? Is it the power to hurt that proves you still mean something to somebody? Is it a tic? Is this why the daughter-in-law I never met won’t see her? Why the granddaughters don’t call? Why has she never seen and held her great-grandchildren? How does Aunt Ruthie survive the hole in her heart where family should be?

  “For the life of me”—Aunt Ruthie dabs her eyes with a hankie —“I don’t know what I did. As God is my witness, you tell me, darling. What on the face of this earth did I do?”

  This is the theme, the central gnawing conundrum of Aunt Ruthie’s every waking day. How can people hate an old lady so much they won’t let her see her own flesh and blood?

  Some zings are breathtaking.

  To a child having trouble in school: “Your brother gets nothing but straight A’s. What a pity you’re having such difficulties, darling.”

  To an aunt with a weight problem: “Would you like a safety pin for that seam, my love? Fat people are so hard on clothes.”

  To my mother whose hand-me-downs Aunt Ruthie depends on: “It cost me eleven fifty to fix the shoulders on the pink suit. Can you imagine, light of my life? Eleven dollars and fifty cents! It was that out of fashion.”

  To me as she points to one of my children: “Now that child is extraordinary.”

  What about the other one?

  If you say, “Aunt Ruthie, it hurts my feelings you only inquire about one of my kids,” her jaw drops open like a nutcracker. “Darling, you misunderstood me,” she says.

  Does she do it on purpose? Does she not know she does it? What’s in it for her? Why does she keep doing the thing that makes what she wants most in life impossible? Only once, when my mother refused to retreat, did Aunt Ruthie back down. “I know.” Aunt Ruthie wept. “I can’t help myself. Forgive me, Audrey darling. I don’t know why I do that.”

  I cherish Aunt Ruthie for loving my grandmother Polly as much as she did. “There’s no words,” Aunt Ruthie says. “I don’t know how to describe her. She made up for everything heavy in my heart.” And for remembering details like how my grandmother wore her braids on her wedding day and how a woman could fake having a hymen on her wedding night with chicken blood. Aunt Ruthie is the last survivor of the generation that spawned my mother. She never complains about money. She’s never had any. She makes me think of my beloved godmother, whose financial security can’t do a thing for her Alzheimer’s. It’s advanced to the stage where my dearest Dorothy doesn’t know she’s Dorothy. The last time I took her to lunch, she couldn’t remember our names. We sat in a luncheonette on West Seventy-second Street, and she kept asking, ever polite because patterns of civility are the last thing to go, “Now, you are . . . ?” and “Who, may I ask, exactly are you?” The first few times I told her, “I’m Patty.” Then I’d say, “I’m Patty. Cecil and Audrey’s daughter, Jo Ann’s sister, Peter and Polly’s mother.” Then I took a paper napkin out of the dispenser and began writing it down. Each time she asked me who I was, I’d write Patty on a napkin and hold it up for her to read. Then she’d work the clasp of her bag, stuff the napkin in, and say, “Ahhhh. And how do I get in touch with you . . . uh . . . Patty?” So I’d take the napkin back and write my phone number on it too. When we used up all the napkins in our dispenser, I took a dispenser from an empty table. Each time I wrote my name and number down, Dorothy looked relieved.

  We walked back to her apartment at the Majestic, her handbag crammed with napkins. Then I left the city for the weekend. When I returned Sunday night, there were nineteen messages on my answering machine: “Hello. . . . Who are you?” “Hello. . . . Where are you?” “Hello. . . . Who is this?” “Hello. . . . Who is Patty?” “Hello, this is Patty. Call me.” That was three years ago, when she was still able to speak. Aunt Ruthie is a reminder it doesn’t have to be like that, not with our gene pool.

  I thanked Aunt Ruthie for the needlepoint pillow and the halvah. “Good-bye, Aunt Ruthie.” I bent to kiss her.

  After visiting Aunt Ruthie, that night I dream I’m taking her to the Metropolitan Museum. “Leave your shopping cart at home,” I tell her. “We’ll slide.” We do the Great Hall like ice-skaters, gliding over the stone floors in flat shoes.

  I wake up thinking about her applesauce and call my mother. “What’s the thing you push food through that gets out the pits when you make applesauce?” I ask.

  “A Foley Food Mill,” Mom says.

  So I dial the Bronx.

  “Of course!” Aunt Ruthie gasps. “The letters are right there on the side! Darling, would you tell me something, please? I want to know. How on earth could I forget that?”

  Ethel Edythe Shure Volk, the First National Bank of Princeton’s first calendar girl

  STURGEON

  With one or two notable exceptions every-one in our family was gorgeous. In a gorgeous family everybody looks like somebody else. That’s how you establish how gorgeous they are. My mother was a Lana Turner double. My father bore an uncanny resemblance to Stewart Granger and Prince Philip—people actually took sides. My mother’s mother was a Gloria Swanson look-alike. My sister was likened to two people: Elizabeth Taylor and Cyd Charisse. That left me.

  “So who do you think she takes after?”

  “I don’t know. Lily Pons?”

  Lily Pons? Who was Lily Pons? How come everybody else looked like a brand name, and I looked like Lily Pons? Whoever Lily Pons was, she must have had gorgeous arms. One day, while my grandmother was playing canasta with her sisters, I stood in her kitchen making a ham sandwich.

  “Look at that arm.” She glanced up from the card table.

  “Did you ever in your life see such an arm?” Aunt Ruthie chimed in.

  “As God is my witness,” Aunt Gertie swore, “never.”

  NANA: “Look how it curves near the shoulder!”

  RUTHIE: “Look how it moves!”

  GERTIE: “Gorgeous!”

  NANA: “Did you ever?”

  GERTIE and RUTHIE: “Never!”

  In a gorgeous family even meat can be gorgeous. As in, “That’s a gorgeous lamb chop.”

  Objects too.

  “Is that a gorgeous hat or what?”

  “Did you ever?”

  “May I be struck with lightning, never.”

  My father set the standard for men. Tall, skinny, with a big nose and plummy lips, he was our male gorgeousness ideal. Naturally, my sister and I married tall, skinny men with big noses and plummy lips. Her husband looks like Montgomery Clift. Mine, like Gregory Peck.

  In a gorgeous family, whatever you have, it’s gorgeous. If it’s on the small size, it’s “petite.” If it’s bigger than normal, it’s “generous.” Take our feet. Most of us had generous ones.

  “What a shame.” Relatives would point out an otherwise nice-look
ing person. “Look how shrimpy her feet are.”

  We were told large feet made us look more balanced. We were less likely to tip over. Big-foot support arrived via Jackie Kennedy. My sister, who by the time she was eleven was taller than our mother, had the biggest feet of all. How I longed for them. With nine and a halfs, I felt like a munchkin. I couldn’t wait to get pregnant and add half a size. If hair was kinky, it was naturally curly. If hair was limp, it was Garboesque.

  In the beginning I hoped I was gorgeous too. If commenting on someone’s looks was the first thing people did when they ran into each other, gorgeousness had to be important. “Muh-wah! Muh-wah!” They’d air kiss. “You look gorgeous!” Every chance meeting started with a mention of looks. Every parting was followed by a looks postmortem. But all this time something nagged at me: What did I have to do with how I looked? Wasn’t being gorgeous a genetic fluke, like being able to roll your tongue or make your thumb touch your wrist? It wasn’t something you could take credit for like cleaning your plate.

  When I was twelve, we moved to Kings Point, one of nine villages forming a town called Great Neck. It was a suburb where girls got their hair done every Saturday. On Saturdays I’d feel gorgeous too. Was I only as good as my do? I loathed how important it was to have the single solitary look that passed for beauty. I couldn’t bear having my looks be the barometer of my soul. The only time I ever heard my mother curse was when she broke a fingernail. I decided I would never have long nails. Watching her apply pancake makeup to her gorgeous face with a clammy beige sponge that smelled like an attic, I swore I’d never wear any of that stuff either. If artifice was the hallmark of beauty, how legitimate was beauty? My mother didn’t need makeup. She was more gorgeous without it. I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. She took this in her stride. If pressed, she would say Ingrid Bergman was the most beautiful woman in the world. Despite “a low hairline,” my grandmother voted for Kay Francis.

  I decided not to let looks be important. And they weren’t until I had the occasion to doubt mine. One summer at camp a bunk bitch put together the perfect girl:

  “Bonnie’s knees . . .” Harriet made a list. “Sue’s nose . . . Addie’s hair . . . Diane’s waist . . .” Nothing came from me.

  “Of course you’re gorgeous,” my mother consoled me. “Anytime someone tries to hurt you, it’s because they’re jealous.”

  It was self-preservation. I had to make gorgeous not matter. If I was gorgeous, fine. If I wasn’t, that was okay too. Gorgeous was too frivolous an arena to compete in. I began loathing compliments.

  “Big deal,” I’d respond. “Cut to the chase.” Or “My skin is so smooth? What were you expecting? Pumice?”

  I especially couldn’t stand the three questions my mother never failed to ask after a party: “How did you look? What did you wear? Were you the most gorgeous girl there?”

  Most of all I detested the possibility that people were saying I was gorgeous to make me feel good. And the dark thing that meant was that maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t gorgeous after all. That compliments were good manners, like “Let’s have lunch” or “Nice to meet you.” If I was so gorgeous, how come the most gorgeous boy in our high school never asked me out? How come nobody outside the family ever gasped and said, “Is she gorgeous or what?”

  “Jewish girls don’t hit their stride till their thirties,” my mother consoled me. “Gentile girls peak before twenty.”

  Always, the first day of school, I would check out all the other mothers. There was never any competition. Mine was the most gorgeous.

  “Did anyone ever tell you you have one gorgeous mother?” was the refrain of my youth.

  “Your mother? Go on. I thought she was your sister!”

  “Do you know,” strangers would say as if I didn’t know, as if it was news, “your mother really is quite beautiful.”

  “Thank you.” My mother’s eyes would widen as if she’d never heard it before.

  Sundays, when the family sat down to breakfast together, my father would say, “Isn’t your mother the most gorgeous woman in the world?”

  “Yes!” my sister and I would answer—glad she was, sorry we weren’t.

  People looked at me with curiosity. “Tell me,” they’d ask. “What’s it like to have such a gorgeous mother?”

  To support the idea that gorgeousness didn’t matter, I began to collect women I admired who, by the gorgeous family’s standards, weren’t gorgeous: Gertrude Stein, Emily Dickinson, Alice Neel, Ella Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor, Simone de Beauvoir. Then a funny thing happened. They got gorgeous.

  Loving them transformed them. In college there was an odd-looking boy in my drawing class. David had a potbelly. His acne raged. But he was funny and quirky and a brilliant renderer. After class I’d hang around his easel to see what he’d done. We began to take walks. I started thinking his skin wasn’t so bad and the fact that it fulminated was a sign of masculinity, a testosterone zetz. David became even more attractive because he didn’t seem to care if he was.

  One afternoon, lying in the grass between classes, bodies almost touching, we stared at the sky. “David,” I leaned over him, “have you ever wanted to kiss me?”

  “No,” he said.

  Mostly though, I was attracted to gorgeous men. I couldn’t help myself. They didn’t have to be 100 percent gorgeous, but inky hair, rosy cheeks, a well-defined platysma popping out of a white T-shirt, bulging forearm veins, or the one that still takes my breath away—a concave spinal column, the kind of spine that goes in, a valley in the mountains of a man’s back. Any one of those and I was powerless. Yes, I loved how they looked. But I had a double standard. I resented that what may have drawn them to me had anything at all to do with how I looked.

  I lived in a whirl of beauty. But even a gorgeous family has degrees. My mother was a true beauty. Her mother was a classic beauty. But it was my father’s mother, Ethel Edythe Shure Volk Wolf, who was considered a great beauty. Her thick chestnut hair was long enough to sit on. It had to be professionally combed. Her eyes were light blue and her nose was tiny. Granny Ethel was so gorgeous, she once received a letter addressed simply:

  Post, postman

  Do your duty

  Deliver this letter

  To the Princeton beauty

  There was one unusual aspect to Granny’s gorgeousness. It had what some people might call a tragic flaw. No one else I knew with this flaw was considered gorgeous. But the rest of Granny’s beauty was of such magnitude, it overrode the problem. She was—there’s no other word for it—fat. Not plump. Not zaftig. Fat.

  “She was made when meat was cheap,” Dad used to say when he saw a fat woman. “It must be jelly ’cause jam don’t shake like that!” or “Fat, fat, the water rat. Forty bullets in your hat.” But never about his mother.

  “It was more than fat,” my sister says now. “She had no muscle tone.”

  Exercise in my grandmother’s day meant walking two blocks on Sunday to pick up bagels. Granny’s upper arms hung. Six grandchildren used them as pillows. You could flick the upper part, and it would swing until somebody quieted their palms on either side to make it stop. Those arms held the secret of perpetual motion. We pressed our cheeks into their warm powdered softness. She laughed.

  Granny Ethel was on an eternal diet. When we ate in restaurants, she’d work the breadbasket, starting with the Ry-Krisp because she was watching her weight. When those were gone, she’d dive into the saltines followed by the sesame breadsticks. Only then, if the appetizer still hadn’t arrived, if the waiter wasn’t in sight, if there was still downtime, would she go through the salt sticks and rolls: kaiser, Parker House, poppy seed, working her way up calorically to the hot cross buns.

  When I was five, Granny took me to Schrafft’s to introduce me to the ice-cream soda. We sat at the polished mahogany counter, and she ordered me a white-and-black, a vanilla soda with chocolate ice cream. Then in her amused and patient way she taught me how to drink through a straw:
“Pretend your mouth is an Electrolux.” It worked. That ice-cream soda was the best thing I’d tasted to date, cold and sweet to drink, cold and sweet to eat. And then there was the taste, the classic chocolate and vanilla, a combination that remains unparalleled. I dangled my legs from the stool hoping that soda never would end.

  When Granny married her second husband, Charles Wolf, she left Manhattan and bought a house in Trenton. Then they bought a winter home in Miami, where they maintained a cabana at the Thunderbird. From the time I was eight, I would be sent to visit them at Christmas. Dad would wrap a sturgeon in waxed paper and two layers of gold foil, and I would sit on the plane with the sturgeon on my lap. The Flying Fish I called it. Planes to Florida took six hours then. Men wore suits, and women wore white gloves to fly. There were propellers out the window. I would sit on the plane for six hours holding the sturgeon. When the plane landed, I’d scan the crowd on the tarmac. Granny would be there making a visor out of her hand. Then she’d spot me and wave. I would see her eyes roam until they lit on the sturgeon. The relief, the joy, on her face. The question for me was, Who was she happiest to see?

  Granny’s house wasn’t big. To get to the guest bathroom, I had to pass the kitchen. And there she’d be, night after night, standing at the counter, picking at the sturgeon. She’d be in an enormous belted robe, her hair in a loose thick braid down her back. She went through the fish in layers. First she’d eat it by the slice. Then she’d scavenge the debris. Finally she’d peck the skin. Toward the end of my week in Florida, the sturgeon remains were wrapped in newspaper and I’d go home. Only Granny ate the sturgeon. When friends stopped by, she put out mixed nuts and mosaics of dried fruit on wicker trays. These arrangements came packaged with an ivory-toned two-pronged plastic fork. But Granny preferred her own dried fruit instruments, an engraved silver nutcracker with a matching metal pick. Some of the things—the dried apricots and glazed maraschino cherries— were identifiable. But some were mysterious, beige with veins, black with stubble.