The Story of My Name
My name is Caroline Amanda Williamson, III. The III is not common for women in our society, and the truth is that I don’t use it, but that’s how I see myself. I am named after my great Aunt Carrie, Caroline Amanda Williamson, who was named after her Aunt Carrie, Caroline Amanda Williamson, who was named after her aunts, the twins Caroline and Amanda Williamson. They were all old maids, a term once used to belittle women who never married.
Technically, I am not an old maid because I was married once, but I never took my husband’s name. When we split my oldest brother, father of one boy named after a succession of Argyles, twin girls and the baby of the family, couldn’t wait to remind me that I was going to be an old maid just like Aunt Carrie. I thought, “Well, hotdog!”
When I was born, my mom considered calling me Amanda. She thought it would be nice for me to have my own name. But she decided on Carrie, which became Little Carrie. Aunt Carrie was Big Carrie. Seriously, that’s what they called us when we were together. At Sunday supper, Grammy Williamson would set the chicken on the table, freshly fried in lard to crispy perfection, right next to granddaddy’s cup of Sanka where she had lined up his evening pills, and then yell like she was still in the hills of Tennessee, “Little Carrie, come sit down at the table with your granddaddy and Big Carrie.”
If central casting were looking for a woman who looked like an old maid, they would have cast my Aunt Carrie. Her silver hair was cut short, almost like a man’s, and she wore a pillbox hat with no decoration. She always wore a suit, usually made of crepe and often navy. The skirt fell below her knees and the jacket was buttoned up to the round collar. Her lace-up shoes were sturdy with barely a heel. At her apartment, where my brothers and I stayed overnight to play marathon sessions of Parcheesi and cards (not Old Maid), she wore a cotton house dress, usually floral. The dry goods store, Stewart’s, would deliver several at the beginning of summer bound in string and wrapped in their trademark purple paper, not unlike the color of the bruise I got on my arm when my brother Jamie punched me once for no good reason.
She was a legal secretary and if she had been born a man instead of the only girl in a family of eight children, I have no doubt she would have been a lawyer. She lived in Indianapolis before I was born and when her boss learned she was moving back to Kentucky, he offered her not one, but two raises to stay, but she wouldn’t.
Aunt Carrie went to mass every Sunday. She rarely drank, except for an occasional glass of sherry from the bottle that my dad gave her each Christmas. (It made her giggle.) She made Christmas cookies every year. She started baking six weeks out and would store the pinwheels and reindeer and molasses cookies in large tins. She gave each niece and nephew their own sandwich bag of cookies tied with red curling ribbon and a crisp five-dollar bill in a money envelope. The tag on mine said to Little Carrie from Big Carrie.
Once when I was home from college, Aunt Carrie invited me to lunch, the usual, an American cheese sandwich on white bread cut into neat squares and a glass of chocolately chocolate milk. She gave me a copy of her recipes, in hopes that I would continue that Aunt Carrie tradition.
I haven’t been to mass since I was five, when my mom, a Baptist-Episcopalian, and dad, a Catholic, divorced. I love to cocktail. My Aunt Carrie’s cookies bear no resemblance to the originals, a great disappointment to my brothers. But I have her name and my memories of her that I cherish along with her tin cookie cutters that my dad gave me after she died. I’m proud to be a member of the Caroline Amanda Williamson Aunthood of Old Maids.