Thoughts on Aunt Ruth

For some reason, I found myself thinking about my Aunt Ruth this evening. I think it may have started because I bought some Italian pastries at a shop that packs them in white cardboard boxes and ties the boxes with string. My mother used to bring Aunt Ruth pastries called elephant ears, spirals of flaky puff pastry covered in cinnamon sugar that shattered when you bit into them, making the back of the MG--where I often found myself back in the day--a mess of crumbs.

The elephant ears did not come in those white boxes; they were packed into brown paper bags. But the bakery she bought them at used those boxes, which I remember noting at the time. They seemed particularly celebratory: the plainest of packaging with the most decadent of offerings inside. In the back seat, we picked at the elephant ears, broke off little pieces hoping my mother wouldn't check before turning them over.

Aunt Ruth was not actually my aunt but my mother's. She was my grandfather's sister, and when I was growing up she lived near us, one town over, in a condo; her husband was dead. Come to think of it, I did not know very much about Aunt Ruth back then. Like my grandfather, she had retained a thick Swedish accent. She was skinny, bone-thin, with scraggly curly hair that may have been a perm. She used to come to my grandparents' house with a half gallon of ice cream from Friendly's. And she smoked, although I don't really remember her smoking; I just knew that she had lung cancer, from smoking, which is why we brought her the pastries and went to visit her at the condo in Framingham.

At the time, I was not sure exactly what lung cancer was, and I had no idea how sick she must have been. My mother often took us along when she paid these kind of calls; she is the kind of person who makes sure an elderly aunt dying in solitude has the kind of pastry she most prefers. When I squint and try to see Aunt Ruth then, near the end, when Alison and I watched Brady Bunch episodes in her bedroom while she and my mother talked, she looks sick: even skinnier than usual, pale, maybe bald with a scarf, although I may be inventing that image--no, I think I do remember a scarf, a silk one, geometric pattern of some kind.

I don't remember much about her beyond what she looked like. She was kind to us and sort of meek. She seemed a little hard, inside, and a little scared. I knew even then that her husband had been a jerk, a bigot. My mother had been sent to visit them down South as a child and he had become enraged when she defiantly drank from a "colored" water fountain. I knew her son, a sad sack, a damaged man, but also a kind one. I am pretty sure I remember overhearing the husband had hit her. It would not surprise me. I wonder what I made of this as a child.

I don't really remember Aunt Ruth with my grandfather. Did he love her? Did she love him? I imagine so. She was his baby sister. They had come to this country together from another world, another time. I wish I could remember if they spoke Swedish together. I can't. Maybe, just maybe, I remember them laughing in my grandparents' kitchen? I can see her walking across the driveway with the carton of ice cream in a bag.

I am fascinated by how my childhood memories are peppered with a vast supporting cast, people who were, of course, the centers of their own stories, but lent such texture and richness to mine.