It is an immutable law of families that the person the adults hate the most, the kids love the best. In our family, that person was Aunt Elizabeth. As my mother’s oldest sister, she was an unavoidable fixture at family Thanksgiving dinners, although not at the de rigueur Christmas dinners, an absence she explained to me as, "More than once a year? No one is that thankful for family."
As far as our parents were concerned, once a year was enough for them also because Aunt Elizabeth was the worst kind of troublemaker: a teller of secrets. She refused to speak to us as children, and willingly went into the gruesome details about the horrors lurking in our family closet. For our parents, that single transgression, her refusal to pretend that we were a perfect family, was reason enough for their hate.
But to us, Aunt Elizabeth was the most grown-up person we knew. She was pretty, a fact that even my mother conceded, "Yeah, pretty like the serpent in the Garden of Eden." Aunt Elizabeth was raised in that generation in which a woman never went outside without a hat and she was the only woman in our family who always wore high heels all the time, leaving our mothers to their flats. She also smoked like a movie star, continuously and elegantly using long black holders, to avoid smearing lipstick on the cigarette, which she found vulgar.
Like many great personalities, she spoke of herself in the third person, a tendency I discovered one Thanksgiving when I was six, when I took her my favorite board game. She looked down at me, arched her perfectly plucked eyebrow and said, "No one has explained it to you, have they?"
I shook my head.
"Aunt Elizabeth doesn’t do that crap," she said. "She doesn’t play Chutes n’ Ladders."
She paused to blow smoke in my face. “You understand?"
I nodded my head. "Aunt Elizabeth is no fun."
"That’s right, good boy," she said, patting my head like a puppy just learning a new trick. "That’s why I like you best."
Being her favorite afforded me no special favors, no preferential treatment. And as far as I could tell, being her favorite was a pure accident of birth. Aunt Elizabeth always visited her siblings whenever one of them had a child, not to share in the joy of the parents but to judge what she considered the future of her lineage. It seems that she came away disappointed each time till I was born, when she is reputed to have laughed as soon as she saw me a few days after my birth.
"Look at this face, he looks like a little Dalai Lama," she said, picking me up. "This one has a very old soul."
She held me up so she could laugh at my face some more.
"You can have all the others," she told the other family members in attendance, "This one is good. I like this one."
My mother tells me that the other parents never forgave her for that. Despite this, however, Aunt Elizabeth was our savior. Whenever she was in attendance, we kids could become as unruly and disruptive as we wanted because any anger that was directed at us would pale against the ire Aunt Elizabeth could inspire. She was hated for her acerbic tongue and bright intellect that churned out unstinting criticism of everything she turned her mind to. In the narrow window of time between her late arrival and early departure from Thanksgiving dinner, she always managed to infuriate every adult member of the family. Sometimes the anger would bubble up through old grudges, like the Thanksgiving Uncle Harry accidentally set too many place settings at the table, which prompted Aunt Elizabeth to comment, "The man can’t count. Is it any wonder he lost his business?" Many times, however, she took Thanksgiving as an opportunity to create wounds afresh, like the time she pointed across the table to Uncle Tony’s new wife and asked him, "What else besides her boob job do you two have in common?"
As a result, no one else seems to remember Aunt Elizabeth with the fondness that I do. After Thanksgiving dinner, I could hardly wait until Aunt Elizabeth had her last cocktail and left, so that the reviews could come rolling in: "Oh, that was terrible what she said to Steve. I’ve never seen him so angry" or "You know, I have half a will to call that Elizabeth up and give her a piece of my mind. The nerve of her to say that." Family secrets and shames that were never spoken about would come pouring out then, illuminated by everyone’s angry invective and indignation at Aunt Elizabeth. Allied against a common enemy, those after-Thanksgiving dinner conversations were lively and vibrant, and not the poor excuse for after-dinner conversations we have now about college bowl scores and how we all ate too much.
The only sign of their affection for Aunt Elizabeth was the sympathy they showed her by never mentioning her failed marriages. Although sure-footed in other aspects of her life, Aunt Elizabeth was unlucky in love. She had been married and divorced so many times that few of us are able to remember any of her husbands in particular, only the melancholy air and the nervous glances they all seemed to have in common.
Since men were unreliable income, Aunt Elizabeth owned what my mother uncharitably called a "junk shop" on the piers of Honolulu. The store catered to tourists and locals alike; its success lay in the fact that both groups were physically separated from each other. The front part of the store was for tourists, where it underwent several transformations to meet the needs of her eclectic clientele. In the sixties, it was a head shop, selling paraphernalia to the hippies. In the seventies, she imported ethnic goods like kimonos, saris, crystals and African jewelry. In the eighties, Aunt Elizabeth made it into an army-navy surplus store, selling East German army hats and insignias before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Through the years, she sold the opihi shellfish, limu seaweed, and octopus that the old fishermen would bring her, as well as surplus sailing through the store’s unmarked back door. The old salts would come bearing gifts of seafood, poke among the shelves of junk in the back room, and chat up Aunt Elizabeth, bewitched by her aloof attitude, short skirts and high heels.
By the end she was left with only her family to visit and care for her in the hospital. My aunt remained her old contentious self and after a couple visits, most of our family stopped going to see her except me and my mother. In one of our final visits together, I asked Aunt Elizabeth why she remained so grouchy. She rolled her eyes, exhaled loudly and gave me the derisive look that recalled my childhood.
"Well, honey," she said, emphasizing the endearment she had never used with me, "They won’t let me smoke in here AND I’m sober."
Aunt Elizabeth has moved from this life to the realm of myth. Whereas other families can refer to their epochs by births, deaths or graduations, our family shows their belated affection for Aunt Elizabeth by recalling family events that she inspired, such as the year that Aunt Harriet burst a blood vessel in her eye because she got so mad when Elizabeth put out her cigarette in Harriet’s awful pecan pie, or the "the Thanksgiving Uncle Steve was so mad at Aunt Elizabeth that he couldn’t see straight, and he missed the garage and drove his car into the side of the house."
And now this, the year that I acted just like that troublemaker Aunt Elizabeth, and told our family secrets to everyone who could read. 
