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altogether more charming older sister of my grandmother, who a diet that consisted almost solely of doughnuts and cigarettes. not-lingerie relative, but my mother and grandmother were wont to remark on our physical resemblance, and my mother, perhaps dabbling in projection, on our similar temperaments and taste for fun. Had her definition of “fun” included “expensive,” and perhaps it did, I think I can now see her point, though I’m more apt to bypass the diamonds in favor of a safari and a beruffled blouse. I personally think the physical likeness dubious aside from a certain fullness of face and figure otherwise not common in our family’s womenfolk. She was moreover by all accounts a highly fastidious woman, having her clothes tailor-made for her at Marshall Field’s, whereas I shop happily off the rack, not to mention online (I have ModCloth bookmarked), though I do have my particularities about cuts. My mother kept a whole chest of Aunt
Judy’s angora cardigans preserved in moth balls in her bedroom, treasures that she never dared to wash or wear, but that she brought out at times, like sartorial gold, merely to gaze upon as an accruing investment, never to spend. She had me try some on at one point in my adolescence, but, although I could see they were finely made and well preserved, the moth ball scent and outdated fashion deterred me from fully embracing their regal vintage splendor, especially during the height of the 90s Grunge era. I hadn’t yet come into my early 20th-century fashion sense and failed to fully appreciate my inheritance. Somehow, by that time, my jazz records had also long since disappeared, and I had taken honors in my last piano competition. Yet my mother never threw away the sweaters, likely cherishing a secret hope that
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they would come to life again someday through someone who knew their worth, even if only on herself in front of the bedroom mirror. Justine, like myself, was of the non childbearing feminine sort, though whether that was entirely her choice I’ll never know; people just didn’t ask questions “like that,” as they said, in those days, and my mother was certainly nothing if not far from candid when it came to the juicy stuff. It was my father, an entirely different animal as well as gender, who told me the reason why my maternal grandmother wasn’t on speaking terms with one of her other sisters: my grandmother had slept with her lothario brother-in-law and been discovered by the overly trusting sibling in coitus after coming home from the market. Such stories just didn’t fall from my mother’s lips. Sex 63