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I’ve come to think of this post as one where you come for the music and stay for the conversation—so feel free to drop a note. The diarist gets to sleep in if she so desires and can show up long after the post is published. So you know, it's a feature, not a bug.
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Note: This is the second part of a post on self-inflicted family drama. If you’re interested, you can find the beginning at this link: It Takes a Sanatorium, Part 1. That story ends as my older sister (and proxy holder, B—) begins her report on the annual meeting of a family-owned corporation. But first I have to provide background on two of the cast members, a brother and a sister. Though you may have your doubts, I have to preface this second part with the assurance that I really do love my sisters and brothers, though some more than others.
It Takes a Sanatorium, Part 2
As I noted earlier, there’s always been a subtle shifting of camps and allegiances among the 11 of us children. And even with the obvious psychological deficiencies that run in the family, I have two siblings that are outliers: my oldest brother and oldest sister. Both, unfortunately, have thrown themselves into this near-worthless, ever-aggravating family corporation with the intensity of a kid who just discovered—and claims to have invented—masturbation. My brother is a college professor that fancies himself a heavyweight financier (pronounced with a slight English affect) and expert on business law. Fact is it took him close to a decade to earn his PhD and he’s been “released” from more universities than I’ve attended. He’s ended up on a small campus of the University of Texas system. My sister is a guidance counselor at a middle school (a made-up job that keeps her out of contact with children) and presents as intellectually superior to anyone and everyone she comes into contact with. With her, the fact is that she’s actually pretty dumb.
The problem, of course, is that siblings have known you forever~so all the made-for-public-consumption artifice they display comes across as slightly insane when we get together. While it may not sound overly odd that my brother will approach someone at a gathering and say something like, “Good. Afternoon. I am A—. What a pleasure. To meet. You.” it’s actually quite jarring when he’s your brother. It comes across as, well, odd. And he does it all the time, including to my sister at the corporate meeting Thursday before last.
The signs are all there if you know where to look. The clipped speech we put down years ago as an early, beta-testing alien-abduction that was abandoned as a failed experiment. There have been competing theories over time, of course. One front runner was that he had been dropped on his head from a great height when he was a baby. But hours and hours of exhaustive investigation turned up not a scintilla of evidence supporting this theory. Another was the heavy drug use during undergraduate school, but a careful analysis showed that many of the odd mannerisms and tics of personality appeared years before then. So we were forced to conclude that the drugs probably exacerbated the first generation issues with the alien mind implants and probably explained why he was never “updated,” so to speak. [If nothing else, this at least demonstrates that my family is logical and meticulously sound in our analyses of familial personalities.]
Then there’s the name: A—. That’s not actually his name. About 30 years ago he announced that he had “found” his original birth certificate and that his name was A— (which happens to be my maternal grandfather’s name). Though my cousins long ago gave up and just started referring to him as A—, the rest of us still call him by his childhood nickname, “Pudgy.” Why? Because it aggravates him, I suppose, and lets him know we don’t buy into his peculiar, patented and copyrighted, brand of crazy. If I had to take a layman’s guess, I would categorize him as paranoid schizophrenic—the same diagnosis (though official) as my mother’s. Most everyone outside the family just refers to him as “freaking weird.”
In an attempt to be fair, I will say that his wife (whom he married in 1981) has always been nice to our children and clearly is devoted to my brother. Though there’s been considerable debate about her real name (my brother has been reticent about clarifying it and she’s never answered a direct question about it), we’ve settled on just referring to her as Mrs. Pudgy.
My oldest sister, in contrast, is a rambling, manic talker and consummate consumer well beyond her means—the sort that sees you for the first time in almost a year and launches into a soliloquy that seems as if she’s continuing on from a conversation interrupted only moments before. Breathlessly, she barges in, “Oh, B—, I don’t know why they’re even worried about it because as far as I know it’s a stupid situation and anyway I was stuck in the kitchen all weekend because the kids are sick again and I can’t tell you how hard it is to have twins if you only knew you wouldn’t wish it on your best enemy or have it keep you from a living life or at least the sale at Nordstroms that had something last season like what you’re wearing now. Is that new? I don’t know how you do it but I guess you’ve had it pretty easy all these years with the kids and all and are they still working offshore or something and how’s Snowball?”
Again, a casual eavesdropper might not catch all the craziness in L—‘s stream of consciousness monologue; but when you’re family your chest tightens, sweat begins to appear on your forehead, and your palms get sticky. She’s manic most of the time, but it’s fairly well hidden by the pure, distilled evil that inhabits her soul. On a genealogical chart of mental disorders, she would be the direct, bolded line from my grandmother to my mother to her.
When my mother died (years after my father) I was tasked with going through her papers. Her will had been stolen by my oldest sister (and, we believe, destroyed) and the estate, such as it was, was a mess. What I did find, though, were the checks my mother kept in two shoe boxes on the top shelf of her closet. Never one to keep a single piece of paper (even important ones), my mother had for no explicable reason kept checks she had written to L— over the past 40 years or so. Only those checks. No others. Neatly bound in stacks of 50 or so.
L— was forever in debt despite the fact that she lived in a house my mother owned, paid no rent, no utilities, no insurance, no property taxes, and defrayed no expenses toward upkeep of the property; my mother even paid to have her grass cut. In fact, the reason my youngest sister ended up suing her [I mentioned this in Part 1] was that she claimed she “was owed” the house after my mother’s death and demanded that the she be allowed to stay there free of charge and that the family continue to pay the expenses on the property. Her reasoning? Because she had twins and a hard life.
But back to the gamboling speech she gave my sister at the corporate meeting and those mysterious checks. You see, L— was forever complaining to my mother how hard it was to have twins and the fact that the costs were destroying her. Despite the fact that my sister has always had a full-time job (which was the same—teacher—as five of her six sisters) and lived rent free, she could never seem to keep up with the bills. So she would “clean” my mother’s house for extra money. Now, given that L— is a total slob and wouldn’t allow anyone (family or otherwise) to ever enter the house she lived in because of its condition, this always struck us as both funny and sad.
“Cleaning,” however, consisted of her showing up at our homestead Saturday mornings, taking out all the cleaning supplies and accoutrements, then sitting at the dining room table and complaining to my mother about her (L—‘s) failed marriages, extolling on the brilliance of her sons, and regurgitating the myriad problems with my mother’s other children. For this she would get paid $100 and one of us (usually me or my younger sister) would have to thoroughly clean and disinfect the house when we visited. In addition to all those weekly $100 checks were tens of thousands of dollars of checks (all in small amounts ranging from $25 to $250) to L— with memo notes such as: “Happy St. Patrick’s Day” or “For the Boys” or “Tuition” or “Food” or “Shoes for the Boys” or (my personal favorite) a $52 check marked, “Loan.” My mother left those checks for us to find, but after I documented them, entered them into the estate’s accounting, I destroyed them. They could do nothing but plant hatred and there was already enough of that in my family to last several generations.
Deconstructing her word salad to my sister at the beginning of the meeting (to which she was late in arriving because she hasn’t once arrived on time for any family event in all the years I’ve known her) further illustrates why I sometimes wake doubting my own sanity. The “twins” she refers to as kids have been grown and living out-of-state since the mid-80s and seldom visit their mother. Her veiled reference to my other sister’s outfit as “last season” highlights that L— has never appeared in the same dress twice (or at least none of us have ever seen her in the same clothes twice). The problem, you might guess, is that she has an awful, awful sense of style and always looks like she’s dressing as a woman half her age.
Her reference to B—‘s children “working offshore” is a worn and intended slight. L— always loudly announced that her sons (my only nephews who had a private education their entire lives, thanks to my mother’s largess) would “never work offshore. That’s for the ignorant and unskilled.” Given that B—‘s three sons, respectively, fall out this way, (#1) lives in Dubai and is a vice-president of a multi-national, Switzerland-based fortune 100 company, (#2) lives in Houston and is the head of international sales for the second largest oil industry supplier, and (#3) lives in Kentucky and is head of a department at a major hospital, L—‘s slight doesn’t have the cut she probably thinks it does. Her twins (one of whom is a dear and the other who’s inherited his mother’s obvious mendacity and overt spitefulness) have both bounced from sales job to sales job since graduating high school. That’s not to mention that B— didn’t have twins but did raise three boys on her own since the youngest was three.
The reference to Snowball? Well, that was a cat B—‘s youngest son had in the mid-70s.
In my ongoing attempt to be fair (like with my older brother), I will say that even though L— (who couldn’t cook an edible meal to save her own children from starvation) deludedly fancies herself a master chef, she truly can bake a great cake.
You are by now again wondering where all this is going or when it will end. These two portraits, though, are necessary background if you’re going to understand the comedic drama of the annual stockholders’ and directors’ meetings that took place a couple weeks ago. So, again, I will ask your leave—patient reader—to finish this story next week.
Friday’s Lagniappe
This week, I want to highlight another photo essay from The Bitter Southerner. It’s a journal where art happens and the ghosts of our Southern past aren’t ignored. Despite our sometimes despicable history, the folks at The Bitter Southerner recognize “there is another South, the one that we know: a South that is full of people who do things that honor genuinely honorable traditions. Drinking. Cooking. Reading. Writing. Singing. Playing. Making things.”
My azaleas started blooming last weekend and, by the end of this week, will be in full splendor. They are, as noted in Rick Olivier’s “Acadian Azaleas, 1979,” a favorite shrub in bayou country. That and I’m a push over for polaroid pictures.
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Be well, be kind, and appreciate the love you have in your life.
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Grab your coffee or tea and join us, please.
What's on your mind this morning?