Scream (6 page)

I had my own issues with Veronica, and not only because she really hurt my mom's feelings. My mom said Veronica told her she was a hunchback. My mom cried. This is nothing against hunchbacks but my mom was not a hunchback. She had a little osteoporosis. Even if my mom
was
a hunchback, do you go around saying, “Hahaha! You are a
hunchback
!”

For me, though, the trouble started many years ago when Tim and I went to visit them outside Boston. When it was time to go I went to the closet to get our coats, but they were gone. And I said, “Hey, where are our coats?”

“I put them out in the garage,” said Veronica, “because they smelled. Sam is allergic.”

I did not have an odoriferous coat. And I did not want to visit people who said I did.

Of course Veronica was even worse the last time my mother went to see them. Sam and Veronica accused my mother of wearing perfume. And when my mother said, “I am not! I knew you were sensitive to odor and so I deliberately did not wear any perfume,” they did not believe her. They ransacked her items and went through everything she had brought with her to find her perfume, which they assumed she had hidden after she applied it. But she hadn't.

I DON'T KNOW WHY TOLSTOY
said “All happy families are alike.” First of all, he couldn't have spent much time with any family or he would have found out that there is no such thing as a happy family. I have met happy families, and after a few minutes one of them takes you off to one side to explain the real truth.

Tolstoy was busy writing or touring the countryside visiting serfs, which caused his wife unhappiness since she had to spend all her time fixing up her husband's novels and raising eight children, even though her husband the count was giving away all their money to the serfs he hung out with, faster than he could impregnate her.

I am pretty sure you can't find one family on the entire planet where there is not one family member at war with another.

In Schuyler County I made a lot of new friends through Newell Farm, where I rode. Everyone seemed to have a normal family, until they started confiding. There was “Dressage” Amy: her sister came down with a virus that overnight left her paralyzed and barely able to speak. So her youngest son took her to Canada and lived with her in an apartment. They had the woman's Social Security disability money to live on, but this son said, “I have to take care of my mom all the time, and that's not fair!” Because he wanted more money from other family members.

But they did not want to give him their own money because the last time they did that he tied his mother to the toilet and took the extra money and went to Toronto and hired a prostitute. I believe he also bought some drugs, but I do not know the full details, only that he forgot he had tied his mother to the toilet and sometime between twenty-four and forty-eight hours went by before he got back and untied her, unsoiled but greatly dehydrated.

Or my friend “Trail Rider” Melanie. When she was young her mother died. Her younger sister disappeared for years to live in a trailer, where she had many children by different men. Then Melanie's aunt called to tell her her father had died. They hadn't been that close, but it still came as a shock. One day, about ten years after the death of her father, she thought she would call her father's wife, who had inherited all the money, to find out if she knew where her sister was. And her father answered the phone. He was not dead! He just didn't care enough about her to bother calling.

Meanwhile, of course, Melanie was in recovery from breast cancer and her husband and her mother-in-law (with whom they lived) would not let her drive a car or ride a bike, because she had suffered concussions in the past, and so they did not let her have those privileges. The area that they lived in was not near any stores and it snowed most of the time, and when it wasn't snowing it flooded. She was quite trapped there, with her mother-in-law, whom she was not permitted to address by her first name. And her husband and her mother-in-law made her dog wear underpants in the house because it was a short-haired dog with an up-curling tail and they did not like to look at its anus.

So each family has its troubles and woes, and in some way all unhappy families are alike, because as far as I can tell there really aren't any happy ones, at least not fully or all the time.

In my father's case, it was dislike of my brother's wife that caused him to disinherit my brother, and then he turned his back on me when I left his house after realizing just how many weapons he had lying around—well, that and my objection to the drug dealer.

By the way, the morning I fled his home, I returned his munitions and wrote him a note:

Dear Dad,

You tell me:

1.  Your drug dealer is “gentle” but “unreliable”

2.  You brought up and discussed your sawed-off shotgun FIVE TIMES at great length during the course of one day.

There was no way to explain anything to him. Years before, he'd gotten an acre or two of land as some kind of settlement for a lawsuit (he and his past wife were always embroiled in lawsuits of one sort or another), so he sold the land for something like five grand. Then, when he complained that my brother could have bought land and lived near him instead of moving to Alabama, I said, “Right, Dad, but if you had wanted your son to stay near you—your son who helped you build your house!—you might have rewarded him with the acre of land you got in a settlement, instead of selling it for five grand!”

“It was two acres of land and it sold for five thousand per acre!” Dad said.

I'm telling you, you just couldn't argue with him.

When I went back recently, I think Dad was happy things were going so badly for me, and that I had ended up totally broke and living up in the middle of some bizarre black hole of the United States without culture, and I think when my brother called, he encouraged him against me.

My brother is highly litigious and not only had gone to court to get appointed his father-in-law's guardian, and put him in a house with a padlocked door, but also had sued his sister-in-law, plus took on a gas station. This gas station charged him for two more gallons of gas than the tank capacity in his car stated. “You overcharged me!” my brother said.

“No, we didn't,” they told him.

So he went to court and got them put out of business. Me? I might complain and if that didn't work, I would—in future—not go to that gas station.

And there were malpractice suits, plenty of them. I'm not saying they had anything to do with his medical skills, but a Jew ob-gyn in Alabama is going to be subjected to them. Any time an Alabamian has a baby born without a brain, it's going to happen. My brother has, therefore, become inured to the agonies of our legal system.

My father was so nervous he had Sam removed as executor of his estate. If they took the ice cream and the live-in alleged prostitute away from Veronica's father, surely they would take away Dad's pot.

an attempt at explanation

O
kay, none of this is coming out right. I want to try to explain how I ended up living in Schuyler County absolutely dead broke, in the middle of nowhere, and doing nothing but visiting my mother in a nursing home, trying to clean up her house, which has books up to the ceiling in every single room, and going to the emergency room in the middle of the night when the home calls to tell me Mom's fallen out of bed and they have no one to take her to get checked. My writing career's gone to hell in a handbasket, and then there's my kid: she's not happy. It's hard changing schools in eleventh grade.

There's more. It all goes on, the minutiae, the nonliving, while my brother, who's about to retire, is off to Denmark, Hawaii, touring stately homes in England with his wife, and—when he comes up to visit, once a year—berates me about Mom's house not being kept clean. Right. There's mold on the walls because . . . it hasn't been painted in thirty years.

It's all just stuff, I know it. It's all small stuff. I'm not living in a barrio, a tin shack, a favela, a ghetto where there are constant mudslides or shootings. I'm not trying to pick up grains of rice where they have fallen from the back of a truck. But this thought? It doesn't help.

I can't sleep. I can't write. Two weeks ago my horse head-butted me—it was an accident, but still, she gave me a black eye, and I'm starting to think it was worse than that. I have blurry vision and my head still hurts in that spot.

But I keep on going to the nursing home every single day to visit Mom, waiting for the latest attack from my own brother. He started to accuse me of things. Like, my mom's Social Security check is directly deposited into her bank account, out of which I pay my mom's nursing home bills. He's accusing me of committing Social Security fraud. Then I get a letter from him saying I'm embezzling. There's more and more accusations about me stealing Mom's money. He e-mails me vitriol, constantly.

I'm still trying to get Mom calmed down from his visit six months ago, when he went to the home and read James Thurber to her every day for three hours at a stretch. It's become hard for her to talk and she can't move. She was trapped. They had to increase her medication after he left.

And now he's after me. And I am afraid. You can try to be good, you can try to do the right thing, but no good deed goes unpunished, etc. Look at my mother. She was about the most decent, moral, good person on the planet, although she did make a porn film once. It was private and she did it before it was something everybody did, and I don't really see what that has to do with morality. She was just doing what my dad wanted, since he liked girl-on-girl action, just as he loves lawsuits. So does my brother. Lawsuits, I mean: I don't know about girl-on-girl.

divorce in the 1960s

M
y mom got arrested in 1968, a year after my parents divorced. The local townspeople, had they learned of this, probably would have said it was to be expected. She was already a divorcée, and at that time, in a small New England town, divorce was a shocking thing.

One little girl told me she could no longer come over to play because her mother said I was “from a broken home.” In my family, divorce did not just mean Mom and Dad split up—it meant no one else on my father's side ever spoke to us again. Well, except for my grandmother, for a bit, when she came to see my dad. Otherwise, even now, I get these Facebook friend requests from strangers, and it turns out we're related. Their messages are all some version of “I spent a lot of time with your grandmother, who was my great-aunt, when I was growing up—but I never met you, because of the
divorce
.”

At least this makes me realize I'm not making things up.

Dad was busy. He was having an affair with his secretary, and then a bit later with some guy. The secretary lived with us for a while before the divorce—Mom, me, my brother, Dad, and his secretary. Also he was having sex with his patients, neighbors, maybe more guys? I don't know!

It didn't matter to Dad—he had had his tubes tied, or whatever the slang is for a vasectomy.

As he once said to me, “I would never have any more kids, not after the way your mother ruined you and your brother.”

He kept the big house. Dad “borrowed” money from his mother, Grandma Anne, although he never repaid her. Later, when he sold that house and could have paid her back, he still did not. “All I want, Julian, is when I get old, you will build a little house for me to live in on your property,” she used to beg.

But he never did. And he never gave her back her money. She went on living in her second husband's tiny house in Paterson, New Jersey. It was a step up from the basement she had inhabited for many years, prior to her remarriage. She had spent years working in various discount department stores, where she lovingly purchased for me various women's undergarments of a peculiar nature, and dating a man who was in the Mafia, or who was at least a gangster, with whom she smoked pot even though she did not care for it.

Her neighborhood got worse. Men broke into their house. She heard them coming in the window (her husband, Harry, was deaf). “Harry, take this knife and stab them,” she would say. Harry was eighty. The burglars took the knife from Harry and stabbed him first.

There was no use robbing the place, though: it was filled with my grandmother's paintings and items from Korvette's, May's, and S. Klein's—brassieres, sweaters with sequins, and other items you could find on sale.

She and Harry moved to a low-income Jewish ghetto in Florida. Then Harry died, and then she died, and Dad took her ashes and threw them in the wild blueberry bushes on the bank of his swamp and said, “My mother always liked picking blueberries, now she can be part of them forever!” This was at the memorial.

But I'm getting out of order. Mom let Dad keep the big house because she felt sorry for him; Dad loved that house so much he said he would kill himself if he didn't get to stay there.

So he built us, his ex-wife and kids, a tiny house at the bottom floodland of his property. I guess that was part of the divorce settlement. Maybe he just gave her five grand toward it, I don't know. I don't remember the details except at that time Dad earned thirty-six thousand dollars a year and he gave his ex-wife and children five grand a year that got upped to six.

The deal was, he would pay her this six grand a year until we each turned eighteen, and then he would pay her three grand a year for life or until she remarried. But he didn't. He just stopped paying the money.

Going to court with Mom to face off against Dad and his wife was not a whole lot of fun. But who else was going to go with her? And Mom needed the three grand a year! Dad and his wife Gigi showed up stoned and giggling and sneering; and the judge's decision was yes, Mom was entitled to that amount of money. But, still, Dad never paid.