Families

Alicia called me last night to complain about her mother.

I was kinda shocked: I wouldn’t call Alicia and I particularly close.

But we are the two sole survivors of Torture by Vogel Sister Childhood, so in that sense, we have a lot in common.

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We talked for about an hour. Or I should say, she talked. I mostly listened, tried to connect the dots.

“She’s demented!” Alicia cried.

I snorted. “How can you tell? She’s always been nuts. Has her behavior changed?”

Came the litany of objectionable behaviors, but since it was mostly the same thoughtless, mean, passive aggressive shit that Annie has been pulling for years, it was difficult for me to see any evidence of neuronal degeneration.

Basically, Annie and Alicia push each other’s buttons.

And they could not be more unalike.

Annie being an aging hippie and Alicia being a Martha Stewart wannabe.

They’re each pretty difficult.

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Annie was kind of a role model for me when I was young. She wrote a novel and used her advance to buy an old chicken farm in Soquel, a Santa Cruz border town, that she converted into a little house. She was so cool that “visiting Annie” became one of the scheduled stops on the See Patrizia’s Fabulous Life tour I took all my pals on.

Then she became a semi-famous musician. This drove my own mother, the classically trained violinist, insane with jealousy, especially since the instrument that Annie picked up and taught herself was the fiddle. So, my mother decided to join a band, too.

My mother’s band, Hearts on Fire, was standing on line behind The Charlatans to become rich and famous when the San Francisco Sound was a thing.

Was Annie’s first band called Django? I honestly can’t remember. The second band was called Pele Juju; it was an Afro pop-inspired band consisting of seven lesbians and Annie. They did the international music festival scene with some success. There was a lot of drama; the band members were always coupling and breaking up and recoupling, and eventually the band went into therapy together, which fact I found hilarious.

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When my mother lay dying, Annie and the other Vogel sister, Jane, sat in an adjacent room, loudly discussing my mother’s various objectionable behaviors over the course of a lifetime and cackling like the witches in Macbeth.

I sat by my mother’s bedside, holding her hand. I’d had major issues with my mother, but I’m never going to let anyone die alone if I can help it.

I was doing my usual, “It’s just a river, Mom. All you have to do is cross it,” shtick, but I could see from the way my mother was wincing that Annie and Jane’s talk was extremely painful for her.

I excused myself to my mother and marched off to the other room.

“You need to stop that,” I said. “She can hear every word you’re saying, and it’s upsetting her.”

“Oh, listen to you,” Annie said. And she started to laugh.

“Patty, darling, surely you exaggerate,” Jane said. “She doesn’t mind. She’d be the first to say it’s all true!”

“You’re wrong,” I said. “She does mind.”

“Well, she won’t mind for long!” Annie said with an arch smile. And they exploded in laughter.

Typical Vogel Sister behavior.

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It shames me to recall that I put out a plea for help to Annie during that absolutely wretched time in 2009 when my entire life fell apart.

And she was like, You dug the grave. What’s the matter? Doesn’t it fit?

I got the absolute sense that she gloried in my misfortune.

Although if I’d had the presence of mind to confront her about it, I’m sure she would have said, It’s a joke, Patty. J-O-K-E. What’s the matter? Don’t you have a sense of humor?

After that, I stopped talking to her. Except at those family events where it was unavoidable.

###

Anyway, I did the long-distance equivalent of nodding my head during Alicia’s phone fusillade. During the rare pauses, I would murmur things like, What a trooper you are!

Even if I could have thought of something more substantiative to say, she didn’t leave much room to say it. One thing mother Annie and daughter Alicia do have in common: They’re enormously self-involved.

Families! You can live without them. So why do they always try to make you live with them?