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“Poor Lolly,” aka my mother, Vera? Poor Lolly was always said as one word, always crooned with crocodile sympathy. “Poor Lolly, all the way from Cape Cod, and without her Jenny for Christmas Eve,” and on and on.
    I said I could come but I couldn’t stay long, an hour at most. I had someplace to be. A home of my own (well, not quite, but almost), a man who waited for me (delectable thought), and two fancy parties to go to, I didn’t say. I was too nice a girl.
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    The door is opened by my perfumed and taffeta-ed aunt, with my mother behind her, a shadowy second. Elfrida is tall and very fleshy. Always too-too, she dresses to stun—too flouncy, too tight, too low cut, skirts too short, heels too high. Alternately boisterous and coy, she drinks too much. She writes songs and doggerel poetry, and volunteers at a hospital as a nurses’ aide. She has an appetite for life that approaches gluttony and is never sated. I always liked that about her. Unless it spilled over into empty promises made to me about sweet-sixteen parties at the Plaza, or a trip
to Europe . . . someday. She carried herself away on her own promises, and until I eventually knew better, she carried me away, too.
    Elfrida kisses me noisily, hugs me fiercely, and bustles me into the den, a room rarely used except as a repository for coats and such. I once spent a squeamish night there on the daybed tucked into its dimmest corner. Shrouded and be-pillowed for decades in heavy rugs and tapestries that spoke of Africa and Turkey and Persia—when Persia was Persia—that bed, and the room in general, would be forever redolent with decades of dust and mildew, mixed with the exotic musk of Eastern bazaars and camel dung.
    The room is also the repository of all things foreign. Nothing is functional. Everything is decorative. From tiny carved jade and ivory doodads to the leopard-skin rug, its mouth a travesty of mortal ferocity that now could frighten only small children, its cracked teeth yellow and cobwebbed. Curio cabinets crammed with trinkets of beads and shells and ivory, and mother-of-pearl fans, and boxes of filigree and cloisonné smelling of ambergris and musk and cedar, and necklaces and bracelets and amulets of animal teeth and horn and topaz and shells and tiger-eyes. The walls are lined with elephant tusks, and prayer rugs of velvet and silk, fading and shredding day by day, and staffs carved with totems, and weapons of all kinds—spears, machetes, and daggers—and a world of masks, painted and beaded and feathered to fend off bad spirits, enemies within and without, and to put the fear of God in me.
    Also sprinkled on the walls and on every surface are the faded photos of the man responsible for all the contraband and trophies of the hunt, my maternal grandfather, Hermann Norden, the long-dead adventurer, trust fund provider—for my brother, not me, I hadn’t been born when he died—and the progenitor of the Plattdeutsch genes that Clem had bulls-eyed the night we met.
    That Christmas Eve, I never make it out of the den. I never make it to a chair. I am never offered a drink, though I do think I take my coat off. While my aunt, with murmurs of something we need to talk about, scurries off to get the others, my mother and I stand waiting in that den, lit only by a few small lamps jerry-rigged out of bronzed animals and snakes and ivory cupids with faces eroded and veined, all shaded with red moiré.

    My uncle Rolf enters. Rolf, with the mouth that only knows how to turn down. Pomaded black hair slicked back. With overpoweringly bad breath. My mother always said it was because, as a child in Germany after the Great War, he had had nothing to eat but turnips. Clem would always say bad breath was a sign of bad character. Either way, Rolf is stuck with it. He clicks his heels through life as he orders his dominion at home and in a travel agency—an occupation neither vaunted nor bruited