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Aunt Virginia and the car.

Article Excerpt
A story is a lie. As soon as the teller opens her mouth, the tale jumps out like a toad and hops into the bushes as fast as it can. She won't see it again. All she's left with is the story of the time the toad jumped out of her mouth.

The story of Aunt Virginia and the car is a classic story-as-lie, propagated in this instance by my mother. I first remember hearing the story when my mother was teaching me to iron my father's handkerchiefs. Kleenex was ascendant in the seventies; my father may well have been the last young man in the U.S.A. to routinely blow his nose on handkerchiefs, but this was no surprise, as my father has always favored the habits of his grandparents. What was a surprise is how long my mother kept up the chore of ironing them. She was not an enthusiastic housewife and would much rather have spent her time drinking coffee and reading D. H. Lawrence, adding her own brief and inscrutable marginalia as she crossed and recrossed her lovely Kim Novak legs.

But for whatever reason, the handkerchiefs were destined for the iron, my sister and I were destined to iron them, and my mother hung around the kitchen to make sure we didn't burn holes in them. This was the sort of moment in which stories were likely to jump out of her mouth. At previous ironing sessions, she had entertained us with (1) a reenactment of how Uncle Melvin's mother, old Mrs. Thomas, used to walk across the room (apparently she looked just like her son, and he looked like a cross between Edward G. Robinson and, of all things, a toad), (2) the story of how Aunt Sarah and Aunt Rose got involved in naming their mother's new babies (who ended up as Betty, Babe, and Boy), and (3) the tale of why Aunt Rose married fat Uncle Melvin on the rebound and how that snap decision worked out for them. The material of these stories required much exaggerated slouching and hip-rolling in the case of Mrs. Thomas, a general sense of...

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