Of Families and Fitbits
Jul. 8th, 2020 09:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_camera
When Annie was ten years old, she came home from the fifth grade one day to find half the furniture in her house gone and her mother missing.
Schizoid Etta had finally flown the coop!
This was the pebble thrown into the lake from which all waves have rippled.
It dawned on me while I was listening to Annie chatter on the phone yesterday—yes, she called back! I was surprised—that I am probably the only person on the planet who knows that about Annie.
The co-guardian of that lonely, salient memory.
I don’t remember it, of course, but it’s a peculiar feature of my own dysfunctional upbringing that I was inculcated with every single one of my mother’s memories and her sisters’ memories of their dysfunctional upbringing.
That’s not just a literary device!
I mean I have actual sensory impressions stored in my hippocampus, right next to my own memories.
I can tell them apart from my own memories.
Still, it’s strange. When I think of my own mad mother’s martyrdom, I “remember” that time her mother, Etta, was beating her with a wire hanger—Joan Crawford alert!—and how my grandfather, lying on the sofa, pulled a newspaper up over his face as though that could drown out my mother’s screams. I can see the sofa—it was brown, it had once been upholstered in some sort of velvet-like material though all the nap had worn off—and I can smell my grandfather, a kind of acrid stink compounded of sweat and tobacco from the Chesterfields he chain-smoked. I can see the madness that contorted Etta’s face and Etta’s peculiarly light green eyes.
###
Alicia has never had the slightest bit of curiosity about her mother, so I imagine she knows very little about Annie’s early life.
She may know that in her 20s, Annie published two novels, and it was the money from the second sale that allowed Annie to purchase the spread in Soquel. But I doubt Alicia’s ever read either of those books.
She knows about the latter days of Annie’s musical career only because she was an adolescent by then and later, a young woman who was desperately struggling to get some kind of attention and validation.
It was hard!
Annie was charismatic, got attention and validation effortlessly.
Alicia was not charismatic.
Remains uncharismatic to this day.
Alicia does not know about those days in New York. How Annie and Grace and Michael Stocker used to hang out at a diner on West 66th Street that was actually called “The Greasy Spoon,” and got razed to make way for Lincoln Center. How Michael Stocker gave Annie a parrot she named Abraham, and how Annie taught the parrot to quote Leopardi: Quando sovviemmi di cotanta speme.
How Annie used to have a boyfriend called Richard Miller who took her to fly model airplanes in Riverside Park. How when Richard Miller dumped her, she fell into a deep depression and didn’t really want the attentions of Rik Steinhardt who nonetheless pursued her relentlessly, eventually persuading her—against her better judgment—to get married.
That’s Rik and Annie in the photo above.
And here’s another picture of them. They were a very pretty couple.
Anyway, Annie was very happy to hear from me. Which somehow shocked me.
Alicia had described Annie to me as being in the early stages of dementia. Her associative patterns have always been loose, of course—for that matter, so are mine—she rambles; but I listened very carefully for other signs, and yes: She has a tendency to forget what she’s talking about in the middle of her sentences. She did it twice. I guess that’s a diagnostic sign.
I kept talking about “mobility” as in, Of course, you’re scared this accident will hamper your mobility, but you’ll do your PT exercises and be good as new!
She kept mishearing this as “nobility,” and kept interrupting me, “It is hard to keep being noble! Alicia, God bless her, can be such a… But I force myself to rise above!
“Oh, but the worst thing, the worst thing about this covid mess, dear Patty, dear, dear Patty, is that all the libraries are closed, and I’ve had nothing to read for the past six months”—Annie is a complete Luddite, has refused ever to have anything to do with computers or digitized media, hence the world of epub is completely barred to her.
“Fear not!” I said. “At this time tomorrow, Demi Moore’s autobiography will be winging its way toward you, courtesy of the US Postal System! Of course, I have to finish reading it first!”
“Read fast,” said Annie. “Is it juicy? Does she spill all the dirt on Bruce and Ashton?”
“Oh, so juicy,” I said. “She claims Ashton was the great love of her life, which I thought was rather hard on Bruce who was, after all, the father of her children—“
“Yes, but then Ashton divorces her and goes on to have children with that what’s-her-name—“
Of course, I will speak to Annie again. She ended up getting lots of $$$ from the property suit and she’s now living with Stew who totally adores her. So, she’s in a good situation.
But I could tell she is desperately lonely.
I am also thinking it would be a tremendous mitzvah to send her a care package of books every couple of weeks.
I’m gonna try and put some effort into that. Although there aren’t any used bookstores around here, so it might end up being too much effort.
###
In other news, the Crush I am Maintaining Mostly Out of Boredom sent me a Fitbit.
I already have a Fitbit.
The Fitbit he sent me is much more expensive than my Fitbit and has many more functions.
We’d been texting about resting heart rates, and I’d confessed that I didn’t know mine because the Fitbit—which I never take off except in the shower—doesn’t do resting heart rates.
I don’t really know what to make of the gift.
We have that extended familial relationship, which I suppose covers gifts like this without explicitly assigning them romantic intent.
But if it was a romantic gift, I would have much preferred jewelry.
Anyway, I am going to continue wearing my own low-budget, no-fuss Fitbit.
no subject
Date: 2020-07-08 02:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-08 02:07 pm (UTC)Demi definitely didn't come from privilege. 😀
I love celebrity bios myself. But then, I did used to work for People Magazine. 😀
no subject
Date: 2020-07-08 04:11 pm (UTC)Make hay while the sun still shines if you can be bothered. That's the question... :)
no subject
Date: 2020-07-08 04:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-08 04:40 pm (UTC)I'm addicted to my Fitbit. Without it, I wouldn't know when I'd logged my five mile quota when I'm out tromping, and I'm convinced that five miles is all that stands between me and becoming grotesquely large.
But in terms of this most casual flirtation, it ups the ante considerably. More than I really want to bet.
no subject
Date: 2020-07-08 04:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-08 05:10 pm (UTC)Love-love-love you guys talking about the Demi Moore book! Definitely a mitzvah--for meeeee as well as Annie.
Expensive gifts scare me. If anyone wants to woo me, they can only give me weird things they find on the street or wildflowers, or maybe something from Dunkin Donuts. If they send me expensive gifts I--at least according to past precedent--return them and never talk to the person again. ... I mean maybe it would be different if I liked the pursuer, but actually expensive gifts would be a turnoff so maybe it wouldn't be different.
no subject
Date: 2020-07-08 05:18 pm (UTC)