“Ah. The Bruskins. See you on Sunday, Sweetie.” Aunt Venita flicked her gold-bangled wrist, rolled up the car window and sped away.

I was walking home from Danise’s when she happened to drive by, in a hurry as always, but it would have been rude not to stop. I wished I could see the stylish high-heeled shoes she wore to show off her fabulous legs. In a few years we would wear the same shoe size, and if they pinched her toes, she would pass them on to me. They fit me better, and I loved them because they once belonged to her. I still like to sit in my sun-room in the morning, wearing a robe that belonged to my mother. It’s more than the sun making me feel warm.

Her Bruskin remark was in response to my bit of small talk, which was about my grandparents coming for Easter. See you on Sunday meant she would be at Aunt Jackie’s for Easter dinner.

Easter was a big deal, beyond the religious significance. Around that time the weather is pleasant for up to 30 minutes at a time, and the bluebonnets are out, which makes everyone joyful. I feel sorry for anyone who hasn’t looked upon the glory of rolling Texas hills turned blue as far as you can see. It is a singular pleasure.

But Bruskins? My grandparents’ last name was Benskin. Did I hear wrong?

Aunt Venita’s attention was elsewhere even before she drove away. I loved the lady, but if you got one thought in before she started talking again, you were lucky. I saw her for the last time in 2012. She was 98 years old, and she listened long enough to figure out who I was, then she filled me in on everything she ate, drank, and wore since the last time we met over 30 years before.

I took her picture and showed her the preview. “Look how pretty you are.”

“Oh, sweet Jesus. I look like hell.” Ninety-eight years old, and that’s what she said.

But back to Fourth Avenue. I was 11 or 12, and the neighborhood kids were crawling all over outside, as usual. Johnny came by on his bike, and circled me twice, a la The Wild One. Theaters in town avoided showing movies that might be a “bad influence on our youth,” so he probably never saw it, but everyone knew about The Wild One. Marlon Brando was even called “Johnny.” Fourth Avenue Johnny was in seventh grade at Blocker Junior High, and in a bad-boy phase, white t-shirt, hair slicked back in a greasy duck tail. The playing card on his bicycle spokes didn’t really sound like a motorcycle, but I didn’t mention it. He demanded to know why “Mrs. Benskin” stopped to speak to me.

I shrugged. “She’s my aunt.”

He looked dumbfounded. “Mrs. Benskin is your AUNT? Boy, do you have it MADE!”

Aunt Venita was the secretary at Blocker for years. I didn’t see how this was going to help me, but it did once, during final exams in ninth grade. I made it back from lunch seconds after the bell rang, and tardiness was not tolerated. The vice principal, Mr. Sowers I think, loomed like a skinny bat, waiting to banish us all. No hall passes. No final exam. Go home. This was a calamity. From her office Aunt Venita spotted me looking like hara-kiri would be my next test. What would happen to me now? I would fail English. I would not graduate from Blocker, and thus not from high school. My mother would kill me dead. My reputation would be ruined. Aunt Jackie would hate me. Another full-bore junior high catastrophe.

Aunt Venita motioned me into her office and asked what class I had next. She scribbled a note and handed it to me. Mrs. Schaeffer, Please excuse Becky for being tardy. She was helping me in the office. Mrs. Benskin. She had a steely gaze when she could focus long enough, and she warned me she would never do this again. My family didn’t make empty threats or empty promises. If they said it, they meant it, but I’d been taken off death row, and I didn’t care about the other late-comers who didn’t have Aunt Venita to save them. Let them die.

She had things to do, so she stood up and walked away in her high heels, and I scurried off to class, worshipping my aunt and so full of adrenalin I aced my English final. When I think of my days at Blocker, I hear her staccato click-click-click down that marble hall, and when I hear the word savior, I’m supposed to think of Jesus Christ, but I think of Venita Benskin.

After Johnny foretold the usefulness of having my aunt at Blocker, I could see his attention dribbling away, so I put one hand on my hip and whipped my braids around, nearly putting my own eye out. I didn’t have that move down right, apparently, and he rode off, impervious to my elementary school attempt at flirtation. I went home and asked my mother about the Bruskins.

“Where did you hear that? Oh. Venita. Well, it’s nothing you need to know about. Or mention. I don’t remember. Something a long time ago between your grandma and Papaw’s sisters. Della or Louella, if I know those two. Maybe Leola. There were a lot of ’em, and they ganged up on your grandma sometimes. There were hurt feelings.”

My mother was a terrible liar and avoided lying unless she had to, so I could tell she really didn’t remember. And what she said made sense. My grandmother could bear a grudge for a hundred years, and there were occasional family dust ups between the women, usually during the holidays. The men stayed in the garage, willing to shuck bushel baskets full of oysters if they could be left alone to drink beer, tell lies, and talk about Kitirik. (Such an innocent time – no one thought a shapely girl in a cat suit might be wrong for a kid’s TV show?)

I made it my mission to find out about the Bruskins because I was obsessed with all things family, and my parents’ divorce played a part. I lost not only my father, but cousins I loved, aunts I modeled myself on (my mother’s sisters were as wonderful), and my Babo, my father’s mother, an amazing woman far ahead of her time (my grandsons call me Babo in her honor). I had a fear of losing my mother’s family, too.

Aunt Venita was my aunt by marriage, but I didn’t make that distinction. She was married to my Uncle Grover, one of my grandfather’s 10 siblings, so he was my great uncle. My Mother grew up calling him uncle, but Aunt Venita thought it aged her to be called aunt by grown-up women. Venita’s boys called my mother Aunt Hazel, even though she was their second cousin. She was another generation, so it would have been disrespectful to call her Hazel. I loved all this.

As for the Bruskins, just because my mother didn’t remember where it came from didn’t mean I couldn’t find out. On Easter Sunday, I might get a chance to ask, and I would certainly get to see what Aunt Venita was wearing. She would see what I was wearing, too, especially my hat.

To this day I’m amazed that Easter sent the ladies into such a hat-buying frenzy, since no one under the age of 50 went near a hat the other 364 days a year. At Easter even the Catholic ladies swapped their head doilies for hats. Mine, a thing that might double as a Frisbee today, was wrapped in tissue awaiting its 12-hour life span.

Also permissible were bonnets with huge brims. Hats with sexy veils were not allowed. It was EASTER, not Mardi Gras, Aunt Venita once remarked, like she forgot her own hat flaunted a fetching little veil.

In fact, when I wander through my family photos, only three occasions exist. Easter (hats and/or bluebonnets), Christmas (dolls and/or ornament corsages), and permutations of go-stand-by-the-car, where all other photos were taken. Go stand by the car in your bathing suit. Go stand by the car with the deer on the hood. Go stand by the car because we’re leaving (or arriving). Go stand by the car because we love the car.

So Easter came, the hats were on, and we assembled in Aunt Jackie’s pretty living room awaiting the wonderful food, all made by her hand, except for desserts, which were brought by others, but also made by hand. I saw my chance. There was room on the couch beside Aunt Venita. My grandma was on the other side of the room.

I made sure I had Aunt Venita’s attention. “Do you like my hat?”

“Yes, Sweetie. Very nice.”

I’d have to be quick or she would be gone. “What’s the Bruskins?”

“Where did you hear that old nugget?” I thought my brain would explode. Did she really ask that about the thing she said to me in the first place?

“What??” This from my grandmother across the room. The feather on her hat quivered.

Uh oh. My grandmother had this tone. When you heard it, something bad was about to happen to someone. I hoped it wouldn’t be me, but it was. Aunt Venita grabbed my face and compressed my cheeks between her fingers until I thought my teeth would pop out.

“She said she’s bruised her chin.” Aunt Venita turned my face from side to side. “I don’t see anything, Sweetie.”

My grandma’s eyes narrowed, and her mouth was an evil little rosette that began to open. Something horrible would come out, I knew it. Everyone seemed to know it. My sister Tish was only seven years old, but her round black eyes told me even she knew it.

The miracle that Easter was Aunt Jackie’s superb timing. She sensed trouble. Food trumped everything, so she stood up and announced dinner, even though the table wasn’t set. My mother and Aunt Venita jumped up with her. Dishes clattered and hats were removed. I was saved. The Bruskins could wait, but I had learned for sure it was about my grandma.

When we got home, I confronted my mother. “I asked Aunt Venita about the Bruskins. Grandma got upset.”

“I knew she was about to be upset about something. I told you not to mention that.”

She went back to removing her Easter make-up. That was all I would get, but I was determined to find out more. By the family picnic on Memorial Day, I had been plotting for weeks, and I singled out my cousin Jim, one of Aunt Venita’s sons. Because they were older, I didn’t see much of him or his brother Don, but Jim was closest to my age, and he seemed incapable of rational thought. Maybe he would blurt out the truth about the Bruskins without thinking it through first.

I sat down beside him at the picnic. “So, Jim. Howya doin’?”

He was focused on a plate of fried chicken and baked beans, so he didn’t look up. I guess he thought his own sneakers had spoken to him.

“Fine.” A bean dropped from his mouth.

“What’s the Bruskins?”

“I dunno. Uncle Charley and Aunt Ruby? She’s crazy, you know.” Back to his chicken.

Aunt Ruby and Uncle Charley. My grandparents. So my grandparents were the Bruskins. I had that figured out, but what did it mean? But now I had something else to think about. My grandma was crazy?

There were little things. She drank nothing but Dr. Pepper and sang off-key. She was super religious and she scotch-taped strange pictures to the walls in her house (my favorite was a newspaper photo of Siamese twins playing the saxophone). She hid candy, which I discovered one summer when I meddled in her dresser drawers. She nagged my grandfather mercilessly, but I thought that might stop if he took the trash out the first time he was asked instead of the sixth or seventh. She seemed odd, maybe, but not crazy.

I couldn’t wait to ask my mother, though I didn’t bring up the Bruskins. Twice I was told not to talk about it. As usual, the question came directly out of my mouth, by-passing tact altogether.

“Is Grandma crazy?”

She stopped removing her picnic make-up. “Who said that? Jim Benskin? Just like Venita. He speaks more than he thinks.”

“So Grandma isn’t crazy?” I can still hear the sigh of the Butterfly as she considered her answer.

“OK, some people say that. When she gets wound up, she can seem pretty crazy. There’s a crazy gene or something that gets worse if bad things happen to you, and God knows she has reason to be really crazy. Crazy like insane. But she isn’t insane. She’s just a little crazy. Every crazy family is crazy in its own way.”

I doubt if my mother ever heard the famous lines from Tolstoy, All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but I had just been doomed to hear that quote differently for the rest of my life. Each crazy family is crazy in its own way.

I see the Benskin craziness now. It’s a kind of paranoia, nothing major, just the sense that any one of us could turn weird any moment, misinterpret something, misunderstand and pounce. Saying the wrong thing is my specialty, but at least I’ve learned it’s best to say nothing most of the time.

And all families are crazy. When I talk about my family, and tell some of the craziness, without exception, I hear this:

“You think your family’s crazy? Wait ‘til you hear about my family.”

And the race is on: my-family-is-crazier-than-your-family. All families are crazy, zany, weirdly, fabulously, humanly nuts. I have known a couple of exceptions – I’ve lived long enough to find exceptions to everything – but over all? Yup. Crazy.

And here’s something. The exceptions are boring as pudding. They don’t laugh too loud, or get angry, or belch in public. They don’t call each other names or miss church. Their slips never show; their hair never moves. They make sensible decisions and never re-gift. No swimming after eating, no silly trips overseas. No slap and tickle, and no hats with veils, especially on Easter. That’s pretty emphatically not the Benskins.

I finally lost interest in the Bruskin business. It was a dead-end, and probably nothing much anyway. However, when the age of the internet arrived, I was able to find out family things I never imagined. While browsing around Ancestry.com, I came across something. It took 50 years, but there they were. The Bruskins. It was only a minor mystery after all, and I failed to see what all the fuss was about. I printed the page. My mother read it, and although my grandma died in 1973, she was fully resurrected in that moment.

“I remember now,” my mother said. “Your grandma went to the county clerk or something. See here? I was only nine. She raised a stink that went on for weeks, and Papaw’s sisters thought she was crazy to care. They started calling her ‘Ruby the Bruskin,’ and she got her feelings hurt. She stayed mad about it for years.”

My mother was full of nonsense, most of it misspelled (to her, any word worth writting down deserrved a set of doubble letters). Still, she could do math in her head faster than anyone I ever knew, and her flighty charm was punctuated with flashes of insight. She made observations about people that hit the mark so square she should have been a sniper.

“Your grandmother grew up very poor, and motherless, too, way out in San Saba County. She felt like trash, and she hated it when she and her sisters got church charity and old clothes. It made her feel like she was nobody, and never would be anybody.”

She handed the paper back. “Then for a while in Texas City, she was somebody. Papaw owned a business, and she was in the proper ladies’ clubs. I don’t know the details, but she tried to fix this.” I waited while she regained her composure. “She was proud to be Mrs. Charley Benskin, and she felt like she counted. She wanted to count.”

The length and breadth of my grandparents’ story bears telling, but I’ll save it for another time. What I found on Ancestry was silly and funny to me, but because of what my mother told me I realized why it hurt my grandmother in a way her sisters-in-law didn’t understand.

The document above shows how my grandparents and their children were recorded in the census. It made her feel like a child again, like she still didn’t count and never would. In the photo below, The Bruskin Family, so-named forever in the U.S. Census of 1930.

NEXT: Reappear the Bombardier