Does Good Taste Run in the Family?
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A few years back I asked for and received a hundred-year-old taxidermied kiwi. It was a Christmas gift from my boyfriend Hugh, and it was very regal-looking, a real museum piece. “Oooh,” my sister Gretchen moaned when she saw it standing on my desk a few months later. “Can I have this when you die?” This is her all over. Sneeze in her presence, and before you can wipe your nose she’ll have half your house emptied out.
Another sister, Amy, was with me when I first saw the kiwi in London, and though she liked it well enough, we both knew it wasn’t quite her thing. It’s not that she’s against birds, or taxidermy—she’s got a stuffed white goose on one of her end tables. But that’s enough for now. Moths get to something and it breaks your heart. “Look at my chipmunk!” she wailed a few years back, pointing at what looked like a fetal zombie: hairless, half the face eaten away, one of the paws just bones. If Gretchen were to die tomorrow, and doctors told me I would follow in a few weeks’ time, I could give the kiwi to my brother Paul. He’d like it well enough, but his house is a wreck, like one of those you see on TV that’s just had the roof and two walls ripped off by a hurricane. Our late sister Tiffany lived that way as well, as did our father.
My sister Lisa would not want the kiwi. She’s the oldest, and we cannot understand her taste to save our lives. “She bought the outfit she wore to Dad’s funeral at Costco!” Amy said recently.
Of the six children in my family, five have a similar eye. Were we to walk into the Prado, I don’t doubt that we would all gravitate to the Goya painting of Saturn devouring his son. At a neighbor’s house we’d likely all notice the little hairs in the bathroom sink. It’s the way our senses of humor are similar—not identical, by any means, but in the same ballpark. The differences come down to refinement, I suppose. My sister Amy is in show business, so if you send her a clip from a comedy, she’s likely to say, “That’s sort of overdone now.” It’s her business to notice things like that. I’m that way with books. Amy, Gretchen, and I are all big shoppers. We know what’s out there. We knows what’s a fad, or an imitation, as opposed to Paul and Lisa. “Look at this!” Lisa said the last time I dragged her to a store. “Wouldn’t this be a good present for Amy?”
“Actually, no,” I said. I don’t remember the object in question, but it was everywhere that year, and Amy would have seen it a hundred times already.
“Well, I’m going to get it for her anyway,” Lisa said.
We draw names for Christmas, and special pity goes out to whoever Lisa or Paul get. At their best they offer gift certificates to Amazon. I can’t bear to buy things online. What’s the point when you live in New York and London and there are real shops right outside your door? So I pass the Amazon cards on to Hugh, who gives them to one of his brothers.
Still, I send a thank-you, usually written on a postcard. “Oh my god,” Amy or Gretchen will say. “This postcard, where did it come from?” I always save the best ones for those two. They get them, and so they get them.
This story originally appeared in the October 2021 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
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