Aunting

I tell my nieces that when I went to concerts when I was a teenager they were in basements and the water dripped from pipes onto the giant electrical systems and speakers and that we almost died in there every time.

They say: No, you didn’t.

They think I’m crazy. It’s the truth I tell them and that things barely cost money back then. Not like the Taylor Swift concert they want to go to that costs many months of my rent if we were to all go together.

My eldest niece asks me: Aunt Tracey, is she going to come out with another album?

And I say: Of course, she is. She’s Taylor’s swift.

And she tells me that I could start saving money now for the future Taylor Swift concerts that I can take them to. My nieces at nine and eleven years-old have started asking me when we go out for the day what their budget is. I always buy them something, nothing too much, but when they asked me that for the first time, I told them that when I was eleven I used to sneak out and deliver menus for pizza places in my neighborhood. I got $25 for the day. They call what I tell them about my childhood in the late 80s and 90s, the olden days. I guess when I imagined my aunts’ and my parents’ childhoods it was through a foggy lens too, like a hiss or whisper of a time I could never fully understand.

I show them a music video of Tori Amos’ Little Earthquakes on YouTube where she is in and out of a box in this clingy blue slip dress, her hair stronger than fire. I’m so excited to watch this again. They stare at it like they’re watching someone defecate in public, but they watch.

And then the youngest one asks: Where is she?

And I say:  She’s in her head, I guess.

After the video comes to an end, they take a moment then ask me to put something else on.

We always have serious talks in the car. When the war in Ukraine began the youngest one asked me what thermal nuclear war was. I said that nuclear war was the end of everything. But I told them not to worry. When we were driving home from the mall one day the eldest asked me if my deceased father, who they never met, was crazy. I asked her how she heard that. They don’t answer. I know that they’ve heard that he was a drug addict. They’ve heard me say things to my husband, their Uncle Shane, about how I worried. Maybe even how I thought he was dead before he was dead. A lot. I know that I told them stories about how he always used to take me and my sister to the movies. How one time he took us out of school early, arriving at my Catholic grade school and asking for us to be summoned to the main office. I thought that he had come because his mother, our Bubbie, had died. I prepared my sister for this while we walked through the empty hallways on our way there. When we got to the office, he said that he was taking us to a dental appointment.

When we got outside, he said: Kids we’re going to see Under Siege with Steven Segal!

At this point in the story the youngest one asks:  Who’s Steven Segal?

I say:  A martial arts guy with an awkward ponytail.  He was a movie star in the olden days.

The eldest one asks:  Why do they call it art if he is beating people up?

And I say that everyone has the right to express themselves in any way they choose.

They show me YouTube videos on their phones when I’m driving and when I tell them to hold on, they put it in front of my face at a stoplight. I tell them they should read more books. The videos the youngest one shows me are of dogs with voiceovers anthropomorphizing them. The eldest one shows me videos of DIY art projects or adults dressed like pre-teens commenting on children playing with toys. I tell them that I don’t understand. And they say that this is how they learn. That they are funny. 

The car is where they always ask me to have a baby.  They talk to the back of my head, and many times I’ve agreed to let them do something that I didn’t mean to approve in that space.

The youngest one says: Just have one.  We’ll take care of it and play with it.

The eldest one wants to dress it up and fix its hair.

I say: No, babies. Your aunt is not having babies. And babies are not dolls. 

Sometime in the near future we go to see Barbie and while watching the film the eldest one notes that Barbies can’t have babies either and that Midge’s pregnancy is fake.  It’s the most adult thing that she’s ever said. Many times during the film the youngest one leans over and asks me why I am laughing.  She doesn’t think that it is very funny.

I feistily respond:  Oh, yes it is!

They know that I am older than the normal baby-making age. They know that I had a sister who died when she was seventeen and that some of the things I’ve done in my life have something to do with that. They know my sadness. They know I can’t explain it. I want them to eventually know that I had two abortions. I’ll go into the details of why, all of it. I’m terrified of them growing up in a post-Roe world. Their minds are going to be different. The boys or girls they date are going to be different, very different from what I experienced. I can’t help but think it is going to be worse. But isn’t that how this aging thing works? It’s depressing really. I have friends who are mothers of young children who are hoarding quantities of Mifepristone for their girl children who aren’t even toddlers yet, just in case. I haven’t done that yet. But I think about it.

I told my nieces when they were pretty young about what happened to my sister, about how she was shot and killed when a 9 mm gun was passed around at a party when she was seventeen. They had seen her picture in my house. They ask about her. When they were very young they invented on their own that she lived far away, probably in Hawaii, and that’s why they never saw her. But they eventually came to know that she was dead. When they asked me how she died, I said I’d have to tell them later. 

Later arrived after we took a three-day trip to the Jersey shore and visited a bench dedicated in her honor. My sister’s favorite color was yellow and we needed yellow-colored roses to put on it. When we arrived at the grocery store to acquire the roses we watched as a woman lifted the last bushel of yellow ones and the youngest one called out: We have to go get them! We have to go tell her!

I said: Ella, she has nothing to do with this, babe.

It was the heart of our quest that day. The eldest one identified a yellow teddy bear sitting on a shelf close by. We could put it on the bench instead. We got white roses, too.

When I told them about my sister, we sat in my living room and they stared at me waiting for the secret with sharp eyes.

Right before I started to speak the youngest one asked: Was it alcohol?

Afterward, we went on with our afternoon. They didn’t seem very affected by the story but I knew it would sit with them forever. That is what I wanted. So many fathers of families in the development that they live in with so many guns.

One recent night their dad called me late after a night of drinking, and said: We did it! The three of us did it! They’re great!

The three were himself, me and his wife. It’s true, although we stand at the precipice of preadolescence and adolescence. I reminded him.  He was so high on the fact that he had beautiful daughters. They are smart and kind, and can do things, all by themselves.

When the eldest was about four she tromped over to play with two kids maybe a year or two older than her on a beach.  They had dug a hole near the surf that was filling up with water and were sitting in it.  She went in without asking, as four year-olds do, and I could tell the kids didn’t want her in there.  But she opened her balled up fist and put a tiny seashell on the girl’s knee, explaining it was for her.  The girl flicked it off when Avery wasn’t looking and when she noticed, she just picked it up and held it out for her again, explaining: You dropped it.

The youngest one really loved my cat Elsa from the time she was an infant. I have pictures of her naked except for a diaper, something she did when she came to my house, stripping down, standing next to the green chair that Elsa slept in most of the time.  She’d have conversations with her.

She’d ask: How are you, Elsa? Are you a good girl? I’m a good girl, too.

The romance, the first of many with many animals, continued up until Elsa died when Ella was about seven. She mourned. She drew tens of drawings of Elsa, all the same with angel wings and a halo in the sky above all of us with the moon on one side of her and a sun on the other because, she said: We think about her in the daytime and at night.

We went to New York City for the eldest one’s tenth birthday, just the three of us.  She wanted an American Girl doll.  As usual, I worried about affording it, and really affording anything.  Being an academic, and especially a post-pandemic academic, is a lot like indentured servitude.  But when I’m with my nieces, money doesn’t matter although of course it always has to, and this is dangerous. I don’t want them to feel that I spend money on them just because they ask me to. I also don’t want to intrude on their childhoods with monetary concerns.  I want them somewhere between the clouds and the ground.

During that day in NY, I decided we were just going to do it all, within reason. I made a reservation at Serendipity because it is iconic for ice cream Sundays and they ordered a Caesar salad and a cheeseburger. I had to talk them into sharing a sundae. But they loved the ambience, the energy of being in New York.  They spent loads of time just leering into the lives of others which is what I always do in NY. We went to Central Park and on the walk there they told me to look to my right and not to my left because there was a table full of Trump bobble heads. We get each other. After a lot of walking our heels were worn raw and we stopped to get tie-dyed Band-Aids we layered on our ankles. I asked them if they were having fun and they ignored me. I shouldn’t have asked.  They were enjoying the day and it felt I’d slammed the book a little. So, I rephrased, in our language: On a scale from 1 to 10?

In unison, they exclaimed: 1000!

I got married in June of 2022 and my nieces were the flower girls. I had a vision to send off lanterns at my outdoor wedding. I imagined they’d waft out over the river that was right beside the venue. When I ordered the lanterns and they came in the mail, they were about ten times larger than I thought they would be, and they looked like giant paper condoms.  The girls laughed as I took them out of the packaging also struck by their size and awkwardness. I decided to test them on the front stoop of my house in a narrow urban neighborhood in Philadelphia. We set one up and I asked them to hold the edges of the paper form as I put a lighter to the wax block.

It took a while for the block to Ignite and I was burning my hands holding the lighter. The girls were getting nervous.

The eldest one asked: Why don’t we wait for uncle Shane to get home? Are we allowed to do this here?

I told them that we could do whatever we wanted. I told them that it was just a lantern. And then the wax block burst into a more significant flame than expected and the younger one dropped her side of the lantern and ran to the front door.

She said: Aunt Tracey, we need a pre-fessional!

The older one held on with me even though the flame was touching the walls of the lantern but it filled with hot air and we stood there illuminated by it, Ella watching cautiously from a short distance. 

Then I said: Now!

We released it.  I told them that we were professionals and they eyed me skeptically then turned to the lantern as it shot up into the air, banging up against some electrical wire and the neighbors’ windows before it found freedom and got smaller and smaller and smaller in the sky until it was a very bright star.  I wondered if any neighbors would complain about me on our neighborhood Facebook page.  I wondered if I should use these lanterns at my wedding.  I asked the girls. 

With a menacing smile on her face, the eldest one responded: It’s a little dangerous.

And the younger one said, flippantly: I dunno.

Of course, I included them in my wedding.  The three of us happily watched the launching together after we set off our own lantern.  The wedding guests struggled with the flames, the lanterns slowly filling with hot air, and the launching didn’t go over the river but in the opposite direction to an apartment complex that would complain and force the venue to never allow such a thing again.  Before they went up, the lanterns bounced at average person-height almost igniting some heads of hair.  The three of us watched with a sense of caution and great delight. I caught glimpses of my nieces’ profiles, so thoughtful and maturing but in the end the firey orbs didn’t burn anybody.  Just almost. After it was over, the two of them said:  We did it!

And I thought that we always will.