Aunt Garnet

I used to have an Aunt Garnet. I started thinking about her earlier because something she once said popped into my mind. When I was about ten years old, she and her family--her husband, three of our four children, their spouses and her five-year-old granddaughter--came for a visit. To be honest, I always hated when they visited. The women in the family used excessive amounts of hairspray, and Aunt Garnet was the worst. She had tight, curly helmet hair that would not have moved if she had stood outside during a hurricane. And the men used that thick, greasy hair gel popular back in the ’50s. Our little house stank of their hair care products all while they were there, and for hours after they left. Hair care products and cigarette smoke because Garnet was a chain smoker. But if they were happier, nicer people, I guess I wouldn’t have minded the smell so much. Aunt Garnet was especially unpleasant. She was always angry every time she visited. She would sit in our living room and fuss, and complain and cuss. And she was always promising to swear out an arrest warrant on the latest person who had done her wrong.

During this particular visit, she decided she wanted something from her daughter Charlotte’s purse, but since Charlotte was out of the room, she simply retrieved the purse herself and started rummaging through it. Her granddaughter objected to this. Sandy said her mother didn’t like for people to go through her purse. Aunt Garnet stared at Sandy with her angry, hard eyes and said, “I’m not afraid of your mother.” She had obviously stumped Sandy with that one. You could tell that she realized that something wasn’t quite right about what her grandmother had said, but she was too young to put it together. Charlotte obviously deserved her privacy no matter if anyone feared her or not. But Aunt Garnet lived in a rough, dog eat dog kind of world, and such niceties where never even considered. She was going to make sure her family knew who was the boss of them, and if she wanted something from her daughter’s purse, she was going to get it.

Aunt Garnet became an unwed mother back in the ‘40s, and she refused to tell anyone the name of the father of her son Tommy. As far as I know, that was a secret she took to her grave. She did manage to find a man who was willing to marry her, but he never showed any affection for Tommy.

Uncle Kiefer was a coalminer, and he, Aunt Garnet and their kids lived in a decrepit little coal company house right beside the train tracks near Charleston, West Virginia. There was a chemical plant just a few miles up the road, and the horrible smell it emitted was so strange and unearthly it simply can’t be described. This smell was so pungent it actually left a sour taste in your mouth. And the coal trains left everything in Aunt Garnet’s yard covered in oily black coal dust.

Aunt Garnet would become highly upset and call up my mother, who wasn’t exactly the most stable person around, and cuss her out if she didn’t visit regularly, so every other Sunday, Garnet and company would come to our house, or we would go to hers. And if there was anything worse than having Aunt Garnet come for a visit, it was going to visit her. Dad had to park the car on the side of a busy highway, and we had to dart across traffic and hope that we wouldn’t be run over by a coal truck or a chemical tanker. Then we had to descend a very steep set of stairs with a rickety handrail. And once we were inside, Aunt Garnet would insist on proudly displaying her stash of groceries. She always had a freezer full of meat and her cabinets were filled with staples. She seemed to buy everything in bulk. And she cooked like it was Thanksgiving every day. As a result, half the people in her family were quite large. But Aunt Garnet was always skin and bones. I didn’t find out the reason for this until I was in my thirties. I was talking about Aunt Garnet with my mother one day, and I asked her if she had some kind of disease that kept her so thin, and mother explained that Aunt Garnet had been a rather large woman when she was young, so she started throwing up after her meals in order to keep her weight down. Aunt Garnet had bulimia.

As if visiting this hellish place and being around this unhappy, angry woman wasn’t bad enough, going to the bathroom at Aunt Garnet’s house was quite an ordeal in and of itself. She always had about five or six ill-behaved little dogs who barked constantly, probably because she kept them locked in her bathroom. I was always warned not to touch them when I went in there or they’d bite. So I stood terrified at the toilet and did my business as these dogs yapped at my feet. And the smell of that bathroom….dog shit and piss, hair care products, cigarettes, coal dust, and chemicals.

All of Aunt Garnet’s children are now dead. Not one lived to be sixty. Her youngest son was the first to go. He died when he was still a teenager. He was born developmentally disabled. When he was about two, Aunt Garnet followed a doctor’s advise and placed him in a long term treatment facility near the Ohio border. About twice a year, Aunt Garnet would insist that we all go with her to see Billy who never learned to talk or walk. Aunt Garnet used to rock him like he was a little baby even after he grew up. He died in her arms from a heart attack when he was about sixteen. Tommy died of testicular cancer, and Garnet’s other son Dale died of a stroke. Charlotte became addicted to tranquilizers and ended up killing herself. Then about a year later, Charlotte’s husband committed suicide by turning on the gas in his apartment. A spark caused the entire apartment building to explode. Thankfully no one else died.

Sandy became an unwed teenage mother like her grandmother. She had her son when she was about fifteen, and when he became a teenager, he started getting into trouble with the law. So the whole ugly cycle is repeating itself.

Aunt Garnet herself died of cancer about twenty years ago. I wish I could say that I miss her, but I don’t. I did love her in a way, and I felt her pain. I now know that she most likely had bipolar disorder. When she wasn’t cussing and fuming, she took to her bed and stayed there for weeks. Uncle Kiefer was still alive when I left West Virginia five years ago, but he had developed Alzheimer’s. Just the memory of these sad people is oppressive, and I’m thankful I’ll never have to be around them again.

I’m sure it was easy for many to judge them, to simply look at them and dismiss them as redneck, hillbilly trash. But I saw it all up close over a number of years, and I know that not even an entire crew of the best psychologists the world has ever produced could have unraveled the complex pathology spreading out through that family. It was the result of generations of crushing poverty, an absence of hope, little education, poor healthcare and poor nutrition and a deeply engrained belief that they were stuck at the bottom. They believed the world was a nasty and mean place and that they were born to lose.