Blood Simple
Jul. 20th, 2004 01:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraSo while I was scribbling the above, Jeanna called. Teary. All is not good with the gene pool - Deneene, my youngest half-sister, was just picked up for methamphetamine possession. Expected to get serious jail time. This is in Kansas. I guess Kansas has changed a lot since Dorothy and Toto lived there.
I've never actually met Deneene. Not even when we were children. I was 12 when she was born and the way I learned of her existence was by eavesdropping on a conversation my mother had with Annie. “Can you believe it?” my mother said, wringing her hands together in that way she only did when she was very excited. “The man's not human! He's a rabbit! This makes - what? Seven children he's had with that woman? You'd think he'd send some money to support the one he's already got -“ head jerk in my direction - “but no-o. He's too busy making more.”
“Lynnie,” said Annie uneasily. “She can hear you.”
“Oh, relax. She's reading. She doesn't hear a thing when she's reading. I could talk and talk till I was blue in the face. She wouldn't look up once. You know what the best part is? Wait till you hear what they named it.”
“Lynnie -“
“Deneene. Is that not the most perfect white trash, trailer camp name you've ever heard? Fucking Deneene.”
Sometimes when I was alone I recited my half siblings' names to myself. Jeannie, Teddy, Jimmy, Dale, Dane, Denise and Deneene. There were seven of them. This seemed mythologically appropriate somehow - after all, there were seven dwarves and seven deadly sins. For a while I made up stories about them.
But by the time I was an adult, I'd forgotten all about them.
Fast forward thirty years. I was in Santa Fe advising an over-the-hill movie star how to make big bucks off her web site. On impulse, I decided to call up Jeannie whom I knew lived somewhere in New Mexico.
I was safe, I figured. New Mexico was a big state.
But as it turned out, I wasn't. Las Vegas was only fifty miles away, a two hour drive. She insisted on making it.
I was very nervous about meeting her.
She was much shorter than I am and her long hair much wilder, much curlier than mine.
But there was my nose in the middle of her face - that gouche 19th century woodcut nose. Maybe my mouth.
There were other connections too. Most notably, a serious drug history now far behind us. Also Jeannie had rebaptized herself “Jeanna” in much the same way that I took “Patricia,” gave it a more exotic consonant and turned into “Patrizia.”
We stayed in touch. On subsequent visits grew close. I don't really know what having a sister feels like since I grew up as the consummate only child, self-involved and lonely. But if I knew what it felt like, I imagine it would feel much like this.
The other half-siblings, though, were not interested in me at all. Mostly because they had little energy left over to be interested in anything what with all the boozing and hustling and forging drug prescriptions that occupied their time. Yes, drug abuse is a family pastime though not something any of us do or did together. I suppose the current wisdom on the subject would point a finger at an errant gene. Though I think it's very difficult to parse nurture out from nature here. When people are in chronic pain, they look for ways to numb themselves.
“Oh, Patty,” said Jeanna. She was crying openly now. “When they picked her up, she was living under a bridge. How did she get the money to score the speed?”
“Jeanna, honey, don't ask me that. You already know and you don't want to hear it said out loud.”
“I told her she could come here! I said the only conditions were no drinking and no smoking -“
“Well, honey, give her credit. She didn't want to set you up for a heartbreak.”
“Do you know what she did? She called up Jimmy and asked for rent money -“
“Did he send it?”
“Of course. Jimmy feels so guilty. Like he shouldn't have joined the army. Like he should have stayed and protected those girls from Dad after our mother died.”
“His first responsibility was to himself,” I said.
“Oh, you should have heard some of the things Jimmy told me. What Dad did to them. How he kicked them and beat them -“
“He abused her sexually, didn't he, Jeanna?” I said. “I mean every woman Dad ever married - how many were there? Five? - was sixteen when he first started in on them. The man's a fucking pedophile. So did she use Jimmy's rent money for speed?”
“No! No. Her son Anthony had flown in from California to visit her. She used the money to buy him a plane ticket back to California.”
“So she has some pride,” I said. “She loves her son. Jeanna, that's a good thing. It means she has a chance at redemption.”
Deneene would be 40 now, 12 years younger than me. Too old to be foistering responsibility for the wreck that is her life on a miserable childhood. But what else is there?
Ripples in the pond.
I've never actually met Deneene. Not even when we were children. I was 12 when she was born and the way I learned of her existence was by eavesdropping on a conversation my mother had with Annie. “Can you believe it?” my mother said, wringing her hands together in that way she only did when she was very excited. “The man's not human! He's a rabbit! This makes - what? Seven children he's had with that woman? You'd think he'd send some money to support the one he's already got -“ head jerk in my direction - “but no-o. He's too busy making more.”
“Lynnie,” said Annie uneasily. “She can hear you.”
“Oh, relax. She's reading. She doesn't hear a thing when she's reading. I could talk and talk till I was blue in the face. She wouldn't look up once. You know what the best part is? Wait till you hear what they named it.”
“Lynnie -“
“Deneene. Is that not the most perfect white trash, trailer camp name you've ever heard? Fucking Deneene.”
Sometimes when I was alone I recited my half siblings' names to myself. Jeannie, Teddy, Jimmy, Dale, Dane, Denise and Deneene. There were seven of them. This seemed mythologically appropriate somehow - after all, there were seven dwarves and seven deadly sins. For a while I made up stories about them.
But by the time I was an adult, I'd forgotten all about them.
Fast forward thirty years. I was in Santa Fe advising an over-the-hill movie star how to make big bucks off her web site. On impulse, I decided to call up Jeannie whom I knew lived somewhere in New Mexico.
I was safe, I figured. New Mexico was a big state.
But as it turned out, I wasn't. Las Vegas was only fifty miles away, a two hour drive. She insisted on making it.
I was very nervous about meeting her.
She was much shorter than I am and her long hair much wilder, much curlier than mine.
But there was my nose in the middle of her face - that gouche 19th century woodcut nose. Maybe my mouth.
There were other connections too. Most notably, a serious drug history now far behind us. Also Jeannie had rebaptized herself “Jeanna” in much the same way that I took “Patricia,” gave it a more exotic consonant and turned into “Patrizia.”
We stayed in touch. On subsequent visits grew close. I don't really know what having a sister feels like since I grew up as the consummate only child, self-involved and lonely. But if I knew what it felt like, I imagine it would feel much like this.
The other half-siblings, though, were not interested in me at all. Mostly because they had little energy left over to be interested in anything what with all the boozing and hustling and forging drug prescriptions that occupied their time. Yes, drug abuse is a family pastime though not something any of us do or did together. I suppose the current wisdom on the subject would point a finger at an errant gene. Though I think it's very difficult to parse nurture out from nature here. When people are in chronic pain, they look for ways to numb themselves.
“Oh, Patty,” said Jeanna. She was crying openly now. “When they picked her up, she was living under a bridge. How did she get the money to score the speed?”
“Jeanna, honey, don't ask me that. You already know and you don't want to hear it said out loud.”
“I told her she could come here! I said the only conditions were no drinking and no smoking -“
“Well, honey, give her credit. She didn't want to set you up for a heartbreak.”
“Do you know what she did? She called up Jimmy and asked for rent money -“
“Did he send it?”
“Of course. Jimmy feels so guilty. Like he shouldn't have joined the army. Like he should have stayed and protected those girls from Dad after our mother died.”
“His first responsibility was to himself,” I said.
“Oh, you should have heard some of the things Jimmy told me. What Dad did to them. How he kicked them and beat them -“
“He abused her sexually, didn't he, Jeanna?” I said. “I mean every woman Dad ever married - how many were there? Five? - was sixteen when he first started in on them. The man's a fucking pedophile. So did she use Jimmy's rent money for speed?”
“No! No. Her son Anthony had flown in from California to visit her. She used the money to buy him a plane ticket back to California.”
“So she has some pride,” I said. “She loves her son. Jeanna, that's a good thing. It means she has a chance at redemption.”
Deneene would be 40 now, 12 years younger than me. Too old to be foistering responsibility for the wreck that is her life on a miserable childhood. But what else is there?
Ripples in the pond.
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Date: 2004-07-20 08:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-07-21 09:56 am (UTC)This was wonderfully written, by the way.