I was eighteen when I saw her with the champagne baskets protruding beneath her blouse. She was absolutely straight-faced, because she was good at pulling a joke. She’d taught me not to pop my eyes like my mother and then immediately look down if we saw somebody strange or outlandish. She explained that their appearance might be intentionally funny, and we wouldn’t want to appear unsophisticated and react negatively to the joke. Of course the majority of people just passed us by, but I tended to take her word for which of those people intended to be funny with their attire and which didn’t.
She could tell instantly whether someone was aware she was dressed ludicrously or was just a loser. Even weird, old-fashioned hats didn’t confuse Aunt Sophie. To me, the length of the feather or the amount of swirled netting or the rhinestone clips were indecipherable, but she could tell if a man dressed as a woman in line at the drugstore was kidding or serious. She explained that it would be rude to laugh at a man who thought he looked nice. Little old ladies — the ones that came out of certain apartment buildings — she discounted as being in a time warp. Age was a big factor in whether someone was putting on the audience, but I didn’t see clearly, as she did, whether someone was fifty or seventy; they just looked old.
She coached me, but it seemed like almost every case was different and I would never have an eye for nuance. She dressed a lot of different ways herself, though I never saw her wear a hat. Sophie wore high heels, kitten heels, ballet flats in wild colors, tennis shoes, and espadrilles. When she went to work, she favored platform slings, though she sometimes wore red Keds and put on stiletto heels when she got to work. In her opinion, shoes were something people did not kid about. They might buy a dress because they knew it was ridiculously girlie, or wear a color such as bright orange that was meant to shock. But whatever shoes they had on, they weren’t joking: ugly shoes they knew to be ugly shoes, though thank heavens it had become as fashionable to wear ugly shoes as attractive ones — or really any kind of shoe you wanted. Many kinds of shoes cut across class lines, such as clogs with closed backs. Nurses wore them, waitresses wore them, but so did college students and rich ladies walking their little dogs on the Upper West Side (East Side shoes were totally different). I pretty much understood Sophie’s point, but I still found certain distinctions hard to make. Boots? She explained that because they always cost so much, boots automatically conveyed wealth. Sophie granted my point that if we were somewhere else, there might be some confusion about boots, but the bottom line was that they were not working-class footwear in New York City. Also, you had to invest a lot of time in breaking them in, so however strange they looked — reptilian or gold-cap-toed, bright purple with stacked heels — they were never a joke joke.
I kept it in the back of my mind that if I married Bryce Seward (I had such a crush on him), I’d just ask Sophie to pick out absolutely everything I’d wear on my wedding day. I had previously thought I might marry McGann O’Marra and Jerry Underwood — in fifth and sixth grade, respectively. Then came the long stretch of believing that I would never marry anyone. That no one would ever want to marry me. All Jerry Underwood really wanted to do, it was clear to me, was to draw concentric circles around my budding breasts with Magic Marker. It took forever to fade, and I had to make sure my mother never saw me naked. My father would have killed him, and that’s not an exaggeration. Anyway — this gets me back to where I began, more or less: Aunt Sophie and the little wire champagne baskets.
She did this at the garden party, which was held at a big house in Maine nearly five hours from New York, on a river. She told us she’d called ahead to make absolutely sure that Roy, her first ex-husband, wouldn’t be there, but I thought that, secretly, she would have liked running into him. The couple giving the party had told her that she was “fun” and that they hadn’t kept up with Roy, let alone invited him to the party. She remembered these people only slightly, from a dinner she’d had with them at a restaurant when they’d all been offered a room at the hotel across the street if they’d leave. She loved to tell people how scandalously she and her friends acted, though you could never press her and get details.
Inside, I saw something I thought was a piece of sculpture. Closer inspection revealed it to be a great quantity of cooked lobsters stacked on the shelves of a tall metal stand surrounded not by devotional candles but by open jars of mayonnaise. At that point, I don’t think I even knew lobsters existed; I was fascinated by their bright red shells. Wasn’t this more of an adventure than going on another pointless coffee date with Les Allan? Sure — everything I did with Aunt Sophie was exciting and new, though getting up at six in the morning in order to set out before seven had made me feel a little faint. I rode in the back of the car with Bryce’s boyfriend, Nathaniel, and the cat, who was stretched out in a cage with one of Sophie’s old bed pillows for a cushion and a cone around its head so it couldn’t overgroom its tail. Aunt Sophie rode in the passenger seat, map in hand, her eyes shadowed in silvery green powder, the lashes thick with mascara, even though you could see dark raccoon circles under her eyes. She turned around often to talk to us. I was so excited to be going to a garden party — whatever that was. For one thing, they were rich people who had a big lawn — this much I figured out from what Sophie said about them. The Boyfriend kept saying that so much driving wasn’t his idea of a good Sunday, and Bryce and Sophie both said, almost in unison, that the words good and Sunday were an oxymoron. Sundays were boring; they signified the last-minute desperation of having a good weekend. The two of them were united in their scorn of Sunday. To them, the day meant nothing but newsprint on their fingertips and eggs prepared with glutinous, highly caloric sauces. Sundays were always straining after fun, like a horse being whipped to win the race, when fun came naturally during the rest of the week. Sundays carried a burden too heavy to bear.
Bryce was wearing a white shirt and tight jeans with a few little slashes on the thighs (and this was way before anyone did such a thing). He wore sandals a friend had brought him from Morocco. The Boyfriend had on madras Bermuda shorts and a navy blue Lacoste shirt and leather sneakers with tan colored laces and tan socks folded over at the ankle. He had very hairy legs. He worked at another restaurant — more like a bar — in Chelsea. He’d graduated from Juilliard but had some sort of breakdown and couldn’t play music or listen to any female vocalists. No one dared to turn on the car radio. Methuselah kept trying to stand in the cage, although all the turns in the road kept knocking him down, making his bell ring, and sometimes provoking long, weak cries of protest. I was wearing a wrap dress in a nice shade of gray that I’d bought at a flea market on Amsterdam Avenue for next to nothing and black patent-leather ankle-strap inch-high heels. It seemed pretty radical not to wear any jewelry, so I didn’t. The rumor was that Leo Lerman (who apparently wrote about the arts) was going to be at the party, and also a famous painter. I didn’t catch his name, but the Boyfriend clearly thought he was an idiot and that the party wasn’t worth going to, even if it was Sunday and there was nothing better to do. He refused in advance to do any of the driving, and he insisted that we stop every two hours so he could pee. He was the first person I heard worrying aloud about bedbugs. He wouldn’t go to the movies because he was afraid bedbugs might be in the theater seats.