Even decades later, memories of the dysfunction within my mother’s family continue to shake me to the core. So it is no wonder I am buoyed by any thought of calmer, better-managed moments with relatives, even moments that I realize years later have a darkness about them. This is the case of an incident involving the aunt who took it upon herself to give a home to some of my numerous cousins, the motherless nieces that her brother could not care for.

I am taken back to a particularly vivid memory of a meal around this beloved aunt’s dining room table. I still have the urge to imitate her, my aunt of aunts, Eleanor. And yet to imitate without becoming somebody like she was, standing over the dining room table, snatching up each person’s plate just as they lifted the next-to-last morsel to their lips.

I can remember wanting to take my plate to the kitchen to dish up a second serving of mashed potatoes and gravy, but suddenly my plate was gone and immediately washed by my clean-freak aunt, known in our family for her obsession with scrubbing—floors, cupboards, winter boots, laundry, any child whose face had the smallest jelly smudge on it. I had seen the results: My cousins’ red, raw arms and faces. Their sore scalps. So I decided I had had enough to eat.

I can remember the child I was—that child of ash and air trying to stay quiet and clean and compliant for fear of her volatile mother, and noticing the way her cousins whispered around their aunt Eleanor, keeping their eyes downcast, moving through her house deliberately, carefully. Here’s how that child would have described the event if asked.

I slip from the table, saying I need to go to the bathroom, and go down the dark hallway. But I continue past the bathroom to the end of the hall, where Aunt Eleanor’s bedroom door stands closed against everyone but her and Uncle Eddie. Forbidden to her daughter and forbidden to all her nieces and nephews, including me. Thus, so tempting. I open the door and peer into the dark room. And that’s when I see them on Aunt Eleanor’s dresser…two women…or at least their heads.

“Hello,” I say politely as a young child should. And I can’t remember whether both heads reply or what is said in return. I only remember wondering what had happened to the rest of their bodies. And why does my aunt keep them hidden away in her room? Do they ever join her and Uncle Eddie at the dinner table? If so, do their heads sit on the table or on chairs next to my aunt’s daughter, across from all the cousins Aunt Eleanor has taken in because Uncle Dan can’t manage them now that his wife is dead?

Most of all I wonder where Aunt Eleanor keeps their bodies. In a closet? In the basement? And does she keep them clothed or naked? Does she rub their skin raw when she bathes them? I step back through the doorway, shut the door on the two women, on what one of them is whispering to me at that moment, and return to the dining room, to my seat next to one of my many motherless cousins. I am no longer curious, my interest in what is behind the closed door having been replaced by something like awe, for the way my aunt handles all the people she houses and feeds—bodiless and otherwise—with such efficiency.

*

My aunt was so unlike my mother, Barbara, who constantly shrilled at her children for the clutter of books and school papers on every table in the house, the kitchen sink always slopped full of dirty dishes, the living room floor a repository for coats and sweaters and shoes and stinking socks, but who never devised a plan for daily tidying like her sister did. I liked the spotless order of Aunt Eleanor’s house, how my five (or was it six) cousins all knew what and when they were to scrub and shine and closet-away all their belongings each and every day.

And yet my aunt and mother were much the same, I came to realize, perhaps in the sad and troubling way that mattered to so many women raising families in the 1960s. Both Eleanor and Barbara were obsessed with order, with control in a world that seemed off kilter. Barbara failed to control much of anything—her family’s meager finances after the fire turned our house to ashes, her hungry children in threadbare hand-me-downs, and especially her own emotional highs and lows.

Eleanor appeared so much better at dealing with home and family and the middle-class lifestyle she had adopted. But those two wigs on her dresser—and the third always-perfectly-styled wig on her head—told a different story, one that I didn’t start to puzzle together until I was in my late-teens. It was then that I happened to see my aunt’s scalp in the shining light of her immaculate bathroom. Nearly hairless, raw from scrubbing.