Scream (29 page)

“How about in two weeks?”

“No! You can't come then. We're having people to dinner.”

“In three weeks?”

“We're off to Maine.”

August wasn't going to work because his in-laws were visiting for two weeks. In all the twenty-five years of the third marriage, I was never deemed worthy enough to meet Gigi's parents.

I don't know why I always went to visit after his command was issued. Once there, if I asked to use their washing machine and dryer (normally I had to take my clothes to a coin Laundromat) he would say, “Ask Gigi,” and then she said, “No—it would use too much electricity.”

“Would you like some vegetables from the garden to take with you?”

“No, Julian, don't give her any—there won't be enough for us.” (The garden was at least a half acre.)

Nor did I ever get up quickly enough from a meal to clear the table, wash the dishes, and vacuum the floor, which always got Dad very angry.

It was long-standing. When I was eleven, I was told I couldn't attend Dad's second wedding—to Annette—because “We're going to drop acid at the ceremony. It's not appropriate for you to be there.”

“But Grandma is coming!”

“Not you.”

For the third wedding, he didn't invite me, he said, because “Gigi's parents are going to be there.” I got it: I was the Elephant Girl.

Even when I visited on a designated date, he wouldn't speak to me, or he would scream at me.

After a visit, usually he would continue not to speak to me for months. He had descended into the black hole of rage against me. Sometimes, this would happen while I was there, for the two days he would finally allow me to visit (after begging me to come) when he decided he could, after all, squeeze me in for that weekend. I would arrive, bearing gifts I could not afford.

I would get a report months later, sometimes by hate letter, sometimes by phone, sometimes through a third party. My father and his wife (a social worker) had reached their diagnosis: I was a borderline personality.

What is borderline personality disorder? According to the National Institute of Mental Health, “Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a serious mental illness marked by unstable moods, behavior, and relationships.”

Of course, being slow-witted, it was many more years before I actually took the time to find out what a borderline personality was, and then I learned it was an asocial, amoral person, manipulative and needing to be the center of attention and so on. It didn't surprise me. When I was eight years old Dad called me manipulative: I had some bunnies and they needed a cage and Dad said he would build them a cage and then he claimed
I had manipulated him into doing it.

Years went by. I don't know how long I lived with this knowledge and diagnosis. It turned out, people with this disorder might actually
kill
someone! Why did he want me to keep coming back! “You know,” I finally said, “it always troubled me, that you and Gigi diagnosed me with this.”

“What?” my dad said. “Oh, no. It wasn't you who we decided had this. It was . . . um . . . it was Veronica's sister!”

it's a man's world

D
ad sent me a birthday present! I called him to say thank you. As usual, Dad started in right away about selling his property to the Audubon Society, how
maybe
there will be a tiny amount of money left for me and my brother. He wants, from the Audubon Society, a lifetime tenancy, eight to ten million, and the stipulation that, on his demise, the place will become a writers' and artists' retreat.

What kind of person doesn't leave their stuff to their kids? My brother helped him
build
his house, for crying out loud. It was the summer he was eighteen, for no pay,
of course
. The truth is that my brother was always good and earnest and sincere; he became a doctor, but my dad considers him a total failure—as he does me.

Don't ask why, but thirty years ago a couple of friends gave me a ride to Dad's. This was when
Slaves of New York
was a bestseller, but all he could say was that my short stories were “too choppy,” and “Why don't you write
novels
?” We were all sitting around having dinner before my friends went on to Vermont or something, and Dad's wife said, at the table, “Tama, do you think your book was a bestseller because of your looks?”

My girlfriend let out a squawk and said, “Because of her looks? Her
looks
?” and she was cackling away and I don't know which was worse, to have Dad nodding at the thought, Yes, it certainly wasn't because her stories were any good that that book succeeded, and his wife making it clear they had figured this out, that since the book was so bad it had to have succeeded for some other reason, which was . . . my looks, which got my friend guffawing away, because obviously
that
couldn't be the reason.

I was screwed however you look at it. Of course, years later he was like, “Say, why don't you go back to writing short stories? Your stories are better than your novels.”

I had gotten a break from him telling me on every phone call that he was selling his property to the Audubon Society. I kind of blotted it out when he stopped mentioning it. Maybe he found out they were only going to give him a paltry amount. But no, he was back to it. He wasn't going to leave it to his kids, and not to his granddaughter, either, although he had told me, “Now
she
is a nice kid.”

Philip Roth's mother must have walked around all the time telling him how great he was. Not that Philip Roth ever had nice things to say about his mother in any book! But I figured this out because of my dad. His mother, Grandma Anne, would take people
with
him into the bathroom when he was a little kid so they could watch him whiz into the pot. She would wake him up from a sound sleep to take him in to pee, with whatever guests were around, so they could admire his micturition
and
get a glimpse of the schlong, which, rumor had it, was very large.

Then there was Wife 2 and Wife 3, and in between there were others, patients who mostly (according to Dad) came to him for past sexual traumas. Once, we—me, Mom, and my little brother—came into my dad's place, unannounced, and found him in coitus with Natasha in the master bedroom. He “dated” Violet, who, after he ended both his romance and doctor/patient relationship with her, came in and defecated on his downstairs workroom floor.

There was Emily (owned a greenhouse); and Barbara (had to get rid of her dog, a St. Bernard, to move in with him; relationship lasted only briefly); and Carole (soft sculptor); and another Barbara (had a two-year-old); and Marie-Victorine, who was living with him when he took me, Mom, and my brother to camp out in St. John, but when we got back . . . curiously, Marie-Victorine was gone! She left him for another woman, a fact that Dad later denied.

I can't even remember all of them now. There was the woman with ninety million dollars—he
hated
her because apparently she talked too much! No matter how nice and kind she was, he hated her. He was horrified that somebody could get that much money from their husband in a divorce settlement. Obviously, these were bad people.

There was, next, a very large woman who—as he said in disgust—was still married and didn't want to get divorced, but her husband didn't have sex with her. This was later in life, when Dad went on and on about how he had to take Viagra because his prostate was enlarged and how this large woman was very sexually demanding but he was finally able to get rid of her when, as he sat in a chair or bench by his swamp, the woman leapt upon him, out of pure lust, and knocked him backward, toppling him to the ground and painfully crushing him.

It was amazing. A simple walk in the woods with Dad around his estate? Women just popped out from behind the bushes, giggling, or you would come across them casually sunbathing topless atop a rocky outcropping, just out there in the middle of nowhere. I'm not making this up, it was surreal: the nervous giggles and come-hither looks—as well as the glares at me, not knowing I was his daughter and not a rival.

Shortly after he married Wife 3, Gigi, Dad decided to retire. He handed in his license to practice psychiatry, because otherwise it would have been revoked. One too many women had tried to get his license revoked before. This time, it was a high school girl who claimed he had slept with her.

Dad vehemently denied it. He said she was mentally ill. But too many women had made similar accusations in the past. So he decided the easiest thing would be to forget the whole thing and give up psychiatry. All the money his parents spent, getting him through college and through medical school and residency . . . gone. He was about fifty when he “retired.”

Thankfully, Gigi was able to support him. She worked full-time, and as Dad liked to say frequently, in front of her, “Hahaha! I get to stay home and play all the time while
she
has to work!”

After she left him, Dad had no clue as to why. “Gee, Dad,” I said, “maybe that wasn't the best thing to keep saying in front of her?”

“What?” said Dad. “No, no, no—she
liked
her job.”

Of course she did. When Willow was, like, five years old and she wanted to water some of his plants, Dad said, “Hahaha! Isn't this great! I sit here while my granddaughter works!” and Willow immediately stopped. Even Tom Sawyer had more sense than to announce, “Hahaha! I fooled you! You're whitewashing a fence and I'm not.”

So Dad not only wanted you to work, tidy, cook, and clean when you visited him, but he wanted to revel in your servitude—and to revel in his
not
doing those grim tasks.

Maybe we could just leave the work to the man my brother and I called “Dad's real son,” some guy named Alan, who Dad decided to make executor of the estate after he got angry that my brother went to court and got power of attorney over his father-in-law. I didn't know who he was, exactly; I only met him once or twice. He came hanging around Dad, and Dad kind of . . . set him on the right path—although I don't know what path he was on.

Dad shared too much information. If a guy was about to come over, Dad might say, “He's in transition to being a woman! He used to be a lumberjack, and he had his Adam's apple removed. The last time he was here, he wanted to take a hot tub with me, so I could look at his new breasts—and I didn't want to, because he is NOT a pretty woman.”

Okay, so these things happen to people. Still, you don't need to sneer at someone who is your friend who went through this. But it was just one more confirmation to Dad: he was better than everyone.

Maybe it's a genetic flaw, but I want to repeat all the strange facts about people. I'm a writer, maybe that's my excuse. Or it runs in the family, like my grandmother, his mom, who kept saying, “My doctor told me I have the breasts of a sixteen-year-old!” when she was about eighty. Some images, they never go away.

my little brother

I
n the years before my mom died, I had to move her from one nursing home to the next. I was still trying to figure out a way I could get her back home. Meanwhile, my brother's angry and accusatory e-mails grew in frequency, length, and demands. He asked over and over for all the bank statements and Mom's retirement fund statements. I tried and gave up. “When you come to visit,” I said, “everything's in a box, you can go through it all and take all you want.” But he never did look.

I sent him what I could. He examined all the receipts. “You used Mom's credit card at the ice cream store! You claim you were buying her an ice cream! No one spends thirty dollars on an ice cream!”

I had to submit the addendum: the thirty dollars on mom's credit card had gone to the ice cream parlor for a cake for the entire nursing home on her birthday.

I couldn't explain every detail. I couldn't keep on top of the bills, the endless paperwork that came with having Mom in a nursing home. He insisted I hand everything over to him and give him power of attorney and executorship. But Mom had told me many times, “Please don't let your brother get power of attorney! Please don't let your brother get any control! I don't want him around me.”

I forget when she said this exactly. Maybe it was after Veronica told her she was an overweight hunchback. I just know my mom said she didn't want anything more to do with them. Years before, she went to a lawyer because she wanted to rewrite her will so that Sam's wife wouldn't end up with her property. But this ended up being too complicated. Eventually, after she paid the lawyer close to a thousand dollars, she gave up.

I asked Mom's accountant to send her tax returns to my brother. It took me so long just to get the info! I was trying to keep on top of my life, which just wasn't really . . . working out for me.

Sam got the tax returns and wrote back to the accountant, who contacted me. “Your brother says your mother's retirement investments are terrible. Please explain to him, I am the accountant, I'm not in charge of her investments! He didn't include a return address. Please! Your brother is very angry.”

The accountant was alarmed and agitated. He was eighty years old and Mom had been going to him for thirty of them. Now I had to do damage control and soothe an octogenarian CPA.

Day after day in my mom's house I packed and tried to get rid of stuff. I also filed and put things away, like the retirement statements, which came tumbling in every day. When Sam came from Alabama—he came twice a year, for two days, to see Mom for two hours each day—I told him, “If you want the records and statements, they are in those boxes. They're all yours!”

But he didn't. Sometimes he would come up with his wife. She wouldn't come in the house, even though she had come all the way from Alabama. She waited in the car outside. I said, “Won't Veronica come in?”