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Shaking Off That Claw From the Grave
Apr. 3rd, 2015 09:40 amIck. Aunt Jane somehow managed to get hold of my number and tracked me down yesterday. And left me a long, rambling, breathy, psychotic message.
Kind of like that scene at the end of Carrie where those hands shoot up out of a grave and fasten themselves around Amy Irving’s neck.
I looked at the calendar and realized, Right… It’s the 14th anniversary of my mother’s death.
Aunt Jane is like a combination of Miss Haversham from Great Expectations and Joan Crawford’s character in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane. The family madness has enveloped her entirely.
My earliest, earliest memory is of being thrown down the Lefforts Avenue porch steps by Aunt Jane – not once but multiple times. I must have been – what? Three? Four?
She’s toxic.
She’s also old and clearly losing her mind, and horribly, horribly lonely, I’m sure, since David had the good sense, apparently, to install her in an assisted living home a respectable distance from the Connecticut manse where I’m sure she’s driving the staff insane.
I hate that I can’t just hate the woman unalloyedly. That some part of my mind continues to make excuses for her: Right. But consider the circumstances under which Jane was brought up – under the thumb of that ravening monster, your grandmother… This being the same grandmother who apocryphally played for Rachmaninoff. In fact, being a superstitious sort, I’m now forced to contemplate the notion that I summoned this phone call from Aunt Jane, evoked it, like a character in a Japanese horror movie, by listening to Rachmaninoff the other day… Don’t go into that basement, Jamie Lynn!
ICK.
I feel polluted.
Well, I definitely am not going to call her back.
But strip away all the reactive defensive posturings in my mind and she really is a lonely old woman who couldn’t help being what her schizophrenic mother shaped her to be.
I’ll send her a Passover card. A Passover card without a return address. I even know the one I’m going to buy. It’s got a silly little cartoon rabbit on the outside with the caption: What Would the Easter Rabbit Be Without His T? And a silly little cartoon Rabbi on the inside.
My mother – who was pretty crazy, too, but considerably less insane than Aunt Jane – gave me several pieces of useful advice over the course of her lifetime, and one of the most useful was, It never pays to cut off anyone entirely. When you don’t know what to say to someone and don’t want to talk to them, send them a postcard with a picture of a dog or a cat.
A rabbit’s kind of like a vegetarian cat, right?
###
In other news, starting on Sunday, I will be cycling into another week of Exhaustive Social Activities so I’ve been hunkering down, massaging and caressing the revenue stream, and reading a lot. The place where I do taxes in Hyde Park is the annex of FDR’s own public library, a place where various living people dump huge piles of books in an effort to clean clutter out of their senile, dying, or dead relatives’ houses. Since Hyde Park is a veritable walking mausoleum filled with decrepit IBM pensioners, this stream of books is unending, and this week I scored what’s probably the very best biography of Scott Fitzgerald – did I evoke him too by channeling Gatsby’s last line? – James Mellows’ Invented Lives. Of course, I’ve read it before. Also the first volume of Martin Stannard’s Evelyn Waugh biography. Which I haven’t read before.
Also, yesterday, L and I decided to make an Easter Basket for LiRong’s daughter Emily, who is growing up in the Bronx without a word of Chinese because LiRong wants her to be completely Americanized. This necessitated going out shopping at the local Dollar Store.
Now, I dislike shopping in general – which my wardrobe makes fairly obvious. And I particularly hate shopping in discount stores because all of them have that ultra-cheap fluorescent lighting that gives me headaches.
But I always have a blast when I go shopping with L. It’s very odd but behaviors I'd find maddening if I had to put up with them in other people, I find quite delightful in her. We really should make our own movie together: The Best Exotic Hyde Park Air B’n’B.
She’s a very conventional Middle American lady, and we couldn’t be more dissimilar, but we get along really, really well and I have a strong affection for her. I think we must have been sisters in a past life.
I’ve also been exercising a lot, which means I’ve been sleeping well. That makes a huge difference.
Kind of like that scene at the end of Carrie where those hands shoot up out of a grave and fasten themselves around Amy Irving’s neck.
I looked at the calendar and realized, Right… It’s the 14th anniversary of my mother’s death.
Aunt Jane is like a combination of Miss Haversham from Great Expectations and Joan Crawford’s character in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane. The family madness has enveloped her entirely.
My earliest, earliest memory is of being thrown down the Lefforts Avenue porch steps by Aunt Jane – not once but multiple times. I must have been – what? Three? Four?
She’s toxic.
She’s also old and clearly losing her mind, and horribly, horribly lonely, I’m sure, since David had the good sense, apparently, to install her in an assisted living home a respectable distance from the Connecticut manse where I’m sure she’s driving the staff insane.
I hate that I can’t just hate the woman unalloyedly. That some part of my mind continues to make excuses for her: Right. But consider the circumstances under which Jane was brought up – under the thumb of that ravening monster, your grandmother… This being the same grandmother who apocryphally played for Rachmaninoff. In fact, being a superstitious sort, I’m now forced to contemplate the notion that I summoned this phone call from Aunt Jane, evoked it, like a character in a Japanese horror movie, by listening to Rachmaninoff the other day… Don’t go into that basement, Jamie Lynn!
ICK.
I feel polluted.
Well, I definitely am not going to call her back.
But strip away all the reactive defensive posturings in my mind and she really is a lonely old woman who couldn’t help being what her schizophrenic mother shaped her to be.
I’ll send her a Passover card. A Passover card without a return address. I even know the one I’m going to buy. It’s got a silly little cartoon rabbit on the outside with the caption: What Would the Easter Rabbit Be Without His T? And a silly little cartoon Rabbi on the inside.
My mother – who was pretty crazy, too, but considerably less insane than Aunt Jane – gave me several pieces of useful advice over the course of her lifetime, and one of the most useful was, It never pays to cut off anyone entirely. When you don’t know what to say to someone and don’t want to talk to them, send them a postcard with a picture of a dog or a cat.
A rabbit’s kind of like a vegetarian cat, right?
###
In other news, starting on Sunday, I will be cycling into another week of Exhaustive Social Activities so I’ve been hunkering down, massaging and caressing the revenue stream, and reading a lot. The place where I do taxes in Hyde Park is the annex of FDR’s own public library, a place where various living people dump huge piles of books in an effort to clean clutter out of their senile, dying, or dead relatives’ houses. Since Hyde Park is a veritable walking mausoleum filled with decrepit IBM pensioners, this stream of books is unending, and this week I scored what’s probably the very best biography of Scott Fitzgerald – did I evoke him too by channeling Gatsby’s last line? – James Mellows’ Invented Lives. Of course, I’ve read it before. Also the first volume of Martin Stannard’s Evelyn Waugh biography. Which I haven’t read before.
Also, yesterday, L and I decided to make an Easter Basket for LiRong’s daughter Emily, who is growing up in the Bronx without a word of Chinese because LiRong wants her to be completely Americanized. This necessitated going out shopping at the local Dollar Store.
Now, I dislike shopping in general – which my wardrobe makes fairly obvious. And I particularly hate shopping in discount stores because all of them have that ultra-cheap fluorescent lighting that gives me headaches.
But I always have a blast when I go shopping with L. It’s very odd but behaviors I'd find maddening if I had to put up with them in other people, I find quite delightful in her. We really should make our own movie together: The Best Exotic Hyde Park Air B’n’B.
She’s a very conventional Middle American lady, and we couldn’t be more dissimilar, but we get along really, really well and I have a strong affection for her. I think we must have been sisters in a past life.
I’ve also been exercising a lot, which means I’ve been sleeping well. That makes a huge difference.
