ornamenting everyone’s houses. My dad liked to boil a squirrel head and suck the brains out the nose. Notmy idea of gourmet, but nothing outrageous in Judsonia. Simply the sort of vaguely nasty food enjoyed by adult men where I’m from.
The tails, however, fit into my idea of a good time. While the squirrel skins and grisly innards were dumped in the yard to be picked away by scavengers (or Alex and Cleo), the tails were treasured like rabbit’s feet—a bit of the wild in the palm of your hand, exotic and icky, lucky even, though not for the squirrel. Growing up, all the kids had squirrel tails; in the fall, when squirrel hunting peaked, they were everywhere. You’d carry them around and play with them until your mom decided they’d become too disgusting and threw them away. But before they got too ratty they were sleek and soft, like a secret curled in your jacket pocket for you to snuggle your fingers into.
The pot wore off before I could really figure out whether or not it had done its job on me. Dean left his squirrelly dishes behind for me to clean up, and he took the stairs two at a time to seal himself inside his bedroom. Soon the three A’s came home, and later Jane Ann, but Aunt Jannie, hadn’t. Forty-seven years old, gone into the hospital for a staph infection and held there for lung cancer. I waited for her in the stale cigarette air of the kitchen, but things would never be the same again.
2
Because Aunt Jannie was tough and mean, it was always a comfort to be beside her. Imagine if a fearsome lion allowed you into her den and protected you there. You’d feel like the coolest person ever—chosen by a lion, a beast that munches other people to bloody ribbons, but not you. There must be something so special and excellent about you that secures you the lion’s protection. That’s how it was with Aunt Jannie and me. Aunt Jannie was cruel enough to scare the dark away, but she was never cruel to me. It was a shaky sort of safety, but our standards of safety were so low that we felt protected in situations like that, and I thought I was.
Aunt Jannie was always too hot; she’d sweat like she had a coal furnace in her guts stoking her. She’d crank up the air-conditioning in April to try to keep cool, but it wasn’t enough. She found clothes unbearable. She’d take everything off and sit around in her bra and this underwear called Lovepats that were real stretchy and came up high around her middle. Lovepats were so cool, high-waisted granny chic.
Aunt Jannie in her underwear wasn’t like some lady hangingout in her bra and panties who was too lazy to get dressed or trying to be sexy. She wasn’t trying to be shocking either, but if you were shocked, that was your problem, not hers. That mixture of comfort and defiance was her claiming the right to be comfortable inside her body and her home, with just the right amount of fuck-you, and it fascinated me just as much as her undergarments did.
Entitled: that’s what Aunt Jannie was. Entitled to her own body, entitled to its comfort, entitled to live in her home as if it was hers. I think about her home, with all those people in it, and maybe lounging around in Lovepats was a way Aunt Jannie reminded herself she was the queen. She sat around in her underwear and nobody could say a goddamn thing about it.
Aunt Jannie didn’t sit quietly in her Lovepats, either. She’d let out with a curse word as the inspiration struck her, and inspiration struck quite frequently.
Cocksucker, motherfucker
. I learned classic, shocking swearwords from Aunt Jannie, and I took them with me to the schoolyard, outrageous words that became just another tool in my arsenal. My town was tough, and Aunt Jannie was teaching me how to take up space and keep people away. Saying the shocking thing first made people a little scared. Who knew what I’d do? Are you going to mess with the fat woman sitting in her underwear and cursing in her kitchen? I do not think you would.
I