When times were bad, my mother's volatile sister Rickie made everyone pay. We weren't fully settled into the house on Lilac Lane yet when she stormed in on that last Labor Day of the nineties. The sisters had it out with each other right there over the unfinished kitchen tile. No word could be deciphered--each woman struggled to overpower the decibel level of the other--but I knew what was happening there.
Aunt Rickie had been warring upon Mom for subjecting the family to her new friend Matt, deciding now to make this the opportunity for her Bay of Pigs. I wondered whether she couldn't have found another time to scream maniacally in Mom's face--when my ten-year-old self wouldn't have been in the den, indifferently watching Nick like business as usual--if she cared that much about the family. But these were her pre-medication days, when anything and everything flew.
The wrath contended with an unabated brilliance. Aunt Rickie was a scholar in her own unique way. She had the outspoken political tastes which lend themselves to extracting bits and portions of numerous ideologies, creating a personalized doctrine of sorts. Her propensity for devouring several novels at a time--most of them mind-numbing monstrosities like Henry James's Portrait of a Lady--intimidated less studious members of the family.
The music she played for me was cerebral, like her. Deep track playlists from the likes of Tool, Yes, and Cake rolled around in the little gray Volvo she drove. On holidays she lived in the piano room, surrounded by aunts and cousins while playing flawless versions of Muzio Clementi sonatinas. Her musical talents carried over into the family church, where she played choir bells.
Church life was an interesting turn for Aunt Rickie, who for years had lived as a devout agnostic. The same woman who as a teenager confided in Reverend O'Day about her skepticism would find it necessary to call on him after birthing Will. My cousin was a sick infant whose doctors fought to stabilize as he struggled against increasingly threatening respiratory infections. With his immunity only weakening it became imminent the baby wouldn't make it through.
Reverend O'Day was summoned eventually for support. He prayed for the family, my aunt, and of course, my cousin, whose health would begin to turn by the moment. His tiny lungs bested all of those impermissible fluids, granting his life back over to him as it were. It seemed to Aunt Rickie that God had spoken back to her, converting her overnight into a Christ-abiding churchwoman thereafter.
The woman was a compelling fixture in the framework of my family. You were forced to register the complexities and intricacies of her own life, however morbid, however remarkable, however humorous. She took to hair dyes the way she changed moods too, going through tints of red, auburn, strawberry, chestnut, brown--even a fiery orange at my parents' 1987 wedding. By thirty she'd put her thick tresses through hell and back, and on the day of the kitchen squall, was favoring long dark curls which drowned my little mother as she embraced her into a truce.