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Mama had two brothers and a sister. My Uncle Boyd had married my Aunt Linda and produced Ben and Dan. My Aunt Claire never married, but that’s a whole story of its own. She lived with a toothless, blind Bassett hound named Elvis. My Uncle Sumner had married a woman named Lily, moved to Washington when he got a job with the Treasury Department and given the world my cousins Gracie and Phyllis.
Mama never said anything bad about Lily, but every time her name came up, she’d look down at the ground and shake her head.
I looked forward to the holidays every year because Gracie and I were the same age, and she was my ally against Ben and Dan, who were older and lived in town. If Gracie was around, it was far less likely that Dan would try to trick me into eating a can of Elvis’ Alpo or pour ketchup on himself to make me think he was bleeding. He never got tired of that routine, and I always fell for it and screamed.
Having Gracie and Phyllis around evened out the odds a little more, though Phyllis was such a girlie girl that we she never wanted to play with us. Her mother put her in beauty pageants and she always wore a dress. I suppose Gracie’s tendency to get all kinds of gooey substances on her clothes irked her mother very much.
When I was eleven, though, Sumner and Lily had moved into a new townhouse in Georgetown and invited all of us up to the capital to stay for the holidays.
Lily’s house was clean and perfect. The kitchen was all white tile and chrome. The den had a big white sectional sofa that was comfy for lounging, but we were always afraid of spilling. Everything else in the house was very old and not very comfortable. “Be careful with that, it’s an antique,” was Lily’s catchphrase. Her prized possession was a Victorian style sofa in red embroidered satin. Sitting on it made you feel like you should be wearing a corset, which would have probably been more comfortable than sitting there.
She insisted on putting Elvis in the tiny backyard, though Aunt Claire objected loudly because it was cold out there and Elvis was an indoor dog. Aunt Lily argued that doggie toenails would scratch her floors and doggie hair would aggravate Phyllis’ allergies. We didn’t know Phyllis had allergies, but after a long argument, Aunt Claire put a red sweater on Elvis and allowed him to be tied up on the back terrace.
Ben, Dan and me rode with Aunt Claire and Mama while Nonny and Pap rode with Uncle Boyd and Aunt Linda. The three of us were stuck in the backseat of the car with Elvis. The four hour car ride sounded something like this:
“Mama, Dan won’t stay on his side.”
“Aunt Annie, she’s lying.”
“Shut up you two” (Ben was the oldest and, therefore, the boss of us)
“You’re not the boss of us!”
“Aunt Claire, Elvis just ate my green crayon!”
“Mama, I’m hungry.”
And so on. It was like most trips in the car with three kids. The only difference was that Aunt Claire was more tolerant than Pap, so she didn’t threaten to turn the car around even once. She also stopped more often, so we didn’t have to go four hours without a pee break or a candy bar.
Aunt Claire was, in fact, a far superior driver to Pap, except for the part where Ben and Dan and Me all smelled like dog breath when we got to Uncle Sumner’s. And the parts of us that didn’t smell like dog breath, smelled like dog farts.
So Ben and Dan and Me weren’t too sorry to see poor Elvis tied up outside. We still loved him, but we needed some time apart from him.
“Elvis has left the building,” Ben said, and I had a feeling he had been looking for an excuse to say that all day.
After disposing of poor old Elvis, Aunt Lily poured herself a glass of something and swirled it around while the ice cubes clinked. She didn’t offer anything to anyone else, which made my mother look at the ground and shake her head again. She made a clipped “mm” sound, which made me wonder why Aunt Lily was in trouble.
“Can I get ya’ll something?” Uncle Sumner asked quickly. Aunt Lily had stationed herself on the couch, and she wasn’t speaking to any of us.
Aunt Lily’s people came from Kentucky, but they hadn’t made the trip down for Christmas, so it was just going to be us this year. Nonny never quite approved of having Lily in our family. She was a professor at a college somewhere in northern Virginia, but she only did that part time. The rest of the time she was “batshit crazy” as Nonny put it. Mama just shook her head when Nonny said this.
Gracie grabbed my hand and dragged me upstairs and upstairs again to her room. She hugged me and showed me the bed where I’d be sleeping. It was like a drawer that pulled out from under her mattress. I’d never seen anything like that before, but I thought it might be fun to sleep in a big drawer like that, as long as nobody forgot I was in it.
“Phyllis has to sleep in here too, but she can have the floor. Mom and Dad are putting the boys in her room.”
I had never seen a house with more than two stories before, so I was really impressed.
It was late in the afternoon when we arrived, but Uncle Sumner thought it might be nice to take a drive around the city and see the government buildings, and the Mall and the lights.
“Sumner, they’ve been in the car all day. Maybe they’d like to relax a little bit.” I think that might have been the first gracious thing I ever heard Aunt Lily say. What she really meant, though, was that she didn’t want to ride around town in the car.
“Nonsense,” Nonny declared. This surprised me, because I knew Nonny didn’t like to travel. She also didn’t like to agree with Aunt Lily.
Uncle Sumner had gotten a new mini-van, but with thirteen people in it, it might as well have been a clown car. Nonny and Pap decided to stay behind, because Nonny said her knee was bothering her. Aunt Claire didn’t want to leave Elvis alone, so she stayed as well. This made a little difference, but not much. At least I got to sit between Gracie and Phyllis instead of being subjected to more poking and furtive punching from Dan, because he was on the other side of Phyllis, who was riding on Ben’s lap. Uncle Boyd rode up front with Uncle Sumner, and Mama, Aunt Lily and Aunt Linda took the next row.
Uncle Sumner took a wrong turn somewhere around DuPont Circle, though, and we ended up in a neighborhood he didn’t know. He and Aunt Lily got into an awful fight about how to get to the freeway, and that would have cut the ride short, if we hadn’t been so lost.
We got home well after supper time, and we all went straight to bed.
“Are they always like that?” I asked Gracie as we dozed off.
“No,” she mumbled. “Sometimes they throw things.”
She fell asleep, but I stayed awake wondering what could make my calm genteel uncle throw things.
The next day was Christmas Eve, and I found out.

When we woke up, it was raining, and Elvis was howling.
Aunt Lily made eggs and bacon and toast for us for breakfast.
Aunt Claire brought Elvis into the dining room and gave him a few pieces of bacon from her plate. Aunt Lily saw the dog when she brought in the plate of toast and started yelling.
“Get that thing out of my house, now!”
“Lily, it’s raining out there.”
“I don’t care. He’s a dog. He’s supposed to be outside, and the rain won’t kill him.”
“Lily…” Uncle Sumner began, but she looked at him, and he stopped talking.
“Just let me get his slicker, then,” Aunt Claire said, rising from the table.
She dressed Elvis in a yellow rain slicker and booties before leading him back
to the porch and tying him up. She didn’t finish her breakfast, and disappeared into the den with her magazines.
Uncle Sumner had to go into the office for a few hours in the morning, so we were left to our own devices to entertain ourselves. Mama, Aunt Claire and Nonny settled in the den. Pap asked Aunt Lily where the firewood was.
“It’s a gas fireplace, James,” Lily said.
She went off to the kitchen to wash up, and we could hear her slamming dishes around. Nonny followed her saying, “Let us help you with that, Lily.”
“No. It’s fine. I can take care of it,” she snapped at Nonny, who shrugged and went back into the den.
In the meantime, Pap found the valve, and the fireplace lit up in flames.
“Well, that’s nice,” Nonny said and pulled her knitting out of her bag, hoping to finish the socks she was making for Uncle Boyd.
Aunt Claire read Dog Fancy, while Mama and Pap watched the news.
Aunt Linda worked on her needlepoint and Uncle Boyd went outside with the dog to smoke a cigar.
Ben, Dan, Phyllis, Gracie and I played Monopoly.
Dan always had to have Boardwalk and Park Place, while Ben’s strategy was to get the reds and oranges. I’d played with the two of them enough times to know the best way for me to compete was to get all the shitty purple ones and the light blue ones, build them up and build them up, and hope for the best. Gracie threw a wrench into my usual strategy, though, because she took all the railroads. Phyllis didn’t really understand the game, because she was little, so she bought properties at random and spent most of the game arranging her money into piles and playing with the thimble, which nobody wanted.
Ben and Dan got into an argument about which of them would get to be the top hat until Gracie shushed them, looking toward the kitchen door. “Knock it off, you guys. You do NOT want her to come out here.”
Ben, always the more gracious of the two, took the racecar. Gracie took the doggie, which was the one I usually liked, but I definitely didn’t want Aunt Lily to have to leave her kitchen to come out and deal with us, so I accepted the shoe without a fight.
The boys got into it again, though, when Ben bought Marvin Gardens. “You suck!” Dan shouted and wrestled his brother into a headlock, which was stupid because Ben was bigger than him. Dan, however, was small and cagey.
They toppled the board, and Phyllis started to cry.
Pap got up from his chair and started yelling at us. Nonny separated the boys and put them in two chairs, across the room from each other. “…and neither of you move until I say so.”
It was too late, though, because Aunt Lily came tearing out of the kitchen smelling of sherry. “Linda,” she shouted at my aunt, “can’t you control those two little monsters?”
Aunt Linda said, “Lily, they’re just boys. It’s what boys do.”
“Exactly,” Aunt Lily replied. “They have no manners. I don’t know how you stand them.”
Dan started to say something, but Ben knew better and hissed, “Shut up, Dan.”
Gracie and I were already putting the game pieces back into the box.
“Lily, do you want some help with the turkey,” Mama asked, trying to smooth things over by changing the subject.
“No, Annie, I do not. What I want is for you to keep your little rat quiet,” she said.
I hadn’t said a word.
“Lily, Molly hasn’t done anything. They’re kids. They’re bored, and they can’t help that they’re cooped up in the house.”
Uncle Boyd came in at that moment. “So, playing Monopoly are we?” He settled down on the carpet between Gracie and Phyllis. “Can I be the shoe?”
Aunt Lily made a small shrieking noise. “Christmas is going to be ruined,” she said.

Despite the offers from Mama and Nonny and Aunt Claire and Aunt Linda, Aunt Lily refused to let anyone into her kitchen. “I want to be sure everything is done right,” she said. That insulted Nonny pretty good.
“Lily, I know how to defrost a turkey,” she said.
“We don’t eat frozen turkey here,” Lily replied.
While the grown ups negotiated the plans for cooking dinner, the five of us crawled around under the tree looking for boxes with our names on them and shaking them to try to figure out what was inside. Mama caught us, and parked us in front of the TV. She brought our sleeping bags and blankets downstairs and gave us a bag of gummi bears to keep us quiet while we watched A Christmas Carol.
We were accustomed to eating the main meal and opening the presents on Christmas Day, but Aunt Lily insisted that the meal should be on Christmas Eve. We usually went to church on Christmas Eve for the pageant, but their church didn’t have a pageant. Just singing.
In the afternoon, Aunt Linda sent us all upstairs to get bathed and dressed to go to church. We all put on our best outfits—Ben and Dan wore ties. When we came downstairs, Uncle Sumner was in the big leather chair in the den, and Aunt Lily was tapping her foot.
She looked at us. “We’re not going,” she said.
“And why not?” Nonny asked.
“This house is a mess. We’re going to have to clean it up.”
“Lily, we’ve been offering to help you all day….”
“Look at all these things on the floor. There’s food everywhere. It has to be cleaned up.”
Uncle Sumner stood up then. “It’s okay, Lil, we’ll get it cleaned up, and then we can make it to the service if everyone pitches in.”
But we were not dressed for cleaning house. To make matters worse, Ben and Dan started a game which involved picking up the wayward gummi bears from the floor and spitting them at one another, which left little spots of sticky goo on the rug. Then they got into a water fight while the cleaned up the spots.
Phyllis hid in her room and cried, so she was no help, and once again, Aunt Lily ran Mama and Aunt Linda out of the kitchen.
By the time everyone had gotten cleaned up and calmed down, we had missed the start of the church service.
“So I guess we won’t be paying our respects to the baby Jesus this year,” Aunt Lily huffed and disappeared into the kitchen.
By this time we were starving, but we were still supposed to eat after getting home from church. The only thing was that now we didn’t have church to distract us. Aunt Claire suggested that we all go change back into our regular clothes. Aunt Lily overheard her and came out of the kitchen. “I think we can have one meal together like civilized people,” she barked.
We were all dressed up with no place to go.
“Mama, I’m dying,” Dan announced to Aunt Linda around 9:00. “Maybe if I got to open a present I’d feel better.”
Gracie said, “Dan, we don’t open any presents on Christmas Eve.”
“Well that’s silly. Mama always lets me have just one,” I said.
“Our mama doesn’t,” Gracie said.
Through the glass door leading to the porch, we could see poor Elvis, sopping.
Aunt Claire had taken enough. She sneaked Elvis into the house and up to the guest room she was sharing with Mama. We followed her and helped her tend to him. She took off the slicker and toweled him off, then she put a red sweater on him, wrapped him in a blanket and held him on her lap.
“He’s a good boy, yes he is. He’s my special boy. Poor boy out in the rain but now he’s with Mommy and Mommy isn’t going to let him stay outside anymore. Noooo. Elvie is inside now where he can be warm and safe. We’re not going to let that mean lady put him back out in the rain. No we’re not.” Then she trailed off into a series of coos and clicks that we didn’t fully understand.
Dinner was finally served at 11:00. Aunt Lily rang a little silver bell to summon us all. Aunt Claire left Elvis in the guest room and closed the door behind her.
The turkey sat on the table between two white candles. It was surrounded by steaming bowls of green beans garnished with almonds, yeast rolls in a basket, a casserole of pineapple and cheese, broccoli, and a plate of sliced, roasted eggplant.
Aunt Lily passed me the eggplant, which I refused on the grounds that I don’t like eggplant. She sniffled and made a smacking noise like she was about to say something, but then she didn’t.
Uncle Boyd carved slices off the turkey and served them to our plates.
I think the smells must have been too much for a hound dog like Elvis, because he started to howl and whine upstairs. We could hear him scratching at the door.
“Is that dog in the house?” Aunt Lily growled at Aunt Claire.
Aunt Claire neither confirmed nor denied the presence of the dog with her silence.
Lily got up from the table and followed the noise upstairs.
Uncle Sumner motioned for us to continue eating. We heard a shriek from the guest bedroom. “My door! My floors!”
Later we would discover that Elvis must have had at least one tooth left, because he had taken some sizeable chunks out of the guest bedroom door. And his little feet had clawed up the hardwood floor as he tried to dig his way out of the room and toward the feast below.
Aunt Lily walked back into the room, looking dangerously calm. She picked up the turkey then and sent it sailing at my Uncle Sumner’s head. “There!” she shouted.
Then she left the table and went into the living room.
We all sat there looking kind of stunned, and feeling a little disappointed that the turkey was now kind of splattered on the floor.
We heard a crash, and everyone stood up at once, following Uncle Sumner into the living room, where Aunt Lily was trying to shove the Christmas tree out the open window. Uncle Sumner tried to stop her, and she started slapping and kicking at him. To his credit, he didn’t slap or hit back.
“Christmas is ruined,” she shouted. “And it’s all your fault!” She pointed a finger at Uncle Sumner, then swiveled toward all of us.
Then she left the tree hanging half in, half out of the window, and locked herself in the bathroom. She yelled threats to do all sorts of things in there.
Ben never liked turkey very much, so he darted off to the kitchen to see if he could find a Chinese take out menu.
Nonny said, “Well, I have had just about enough of this.”
Mama and Pap both looked at the ground and said “mm” under their breath.
Nonny rapped on the bathroom door. “Lily!” she snapped. “What has gotten into you. You’re acting like a jackass. Now what are you going to do in there? Eat those little rose soaps?”
There was wailing from the other side of the door.
“Lily!” Nonny shouted again. “Stop that now, and get out here and entertain your guests.”
The wailing stopped.
Elvis continued to whine and howl from the top of the stairs.
“Will somebody shut that fucking dog up?” Lily’s disembodied voice moaned from the other side of the door.
“Well, you heard her. Shut the fucking dog up,” Nonny said to Aunt Claire.
My mouth dropped open, and I looked at Ben and Dan. They didn’t seem quite and shocked as I was, but I had never heard an adult use the f word in person before. I didn’t know Nonny even knew what it was. Gracie and Phyllis were turning red, but they didn’t seem surprised either.
Aunt Claire brought Elvis downstairs. He followed his nose to the dining room, where the turkey lay waiting for someone to eat it.
Aunt Lily came out of the bathroom, smudged and puffy. She poured herself a drink and sat down on the couch. She didn’t say anything.
Uncle Boyd helped Uncle Sumner pull the tree back through the window and set it upright again. But it was too late. Aunt Lily was right. Christmas was ruined. She just didn’t seem to understand that it was her fault.
Ben came into the room and announced, “Hey, Mr. Chang’s delivers even on holidays! And they have Moo Shu Pork!”
At least there was a bright side.
Mostly, I was surprised that neither Gracie nor Phyllis said a word. Gracie went to get a broom and help her dad sweep up the broken ornaments. Phyllis crawled up on the couch next to her mom and put her head on Lily’s shoulder. Lily didn’t respond, but that was good, because it meant she had stopped yelling.
We spent Christmas morning on the interstate that year. Ben and Dan and me didn’t say a word. Mama spent the whole trip shaking her head and going “mm.”
The whole thing was more than poor old Elvis could take. When we got to Aunt Claire’s house, he went straight to his bed, curled up in a circle, and never did wake up again.
Aunt Claire never spoke to Lily again. She wouldn’t even acknowledge when she was in the same room with her. Luckily, after that outburst at Christmas, there were precious few opportunities for them to see each other, or it would have been awkward. It took two more years, though, before Uncle Sumner decided to leave Aunt Lily once and for all. He packed her off to her people in Kentucky and moved with Gracie and Phyllis back to Reynolds. So Gracie and I started seventh grade together. Unfortunately, by that time, Ben and Dan were old enough that they didn’t want to pick on me anymore. But Gracie was still on my side when everyone else started to.