| Martha is in North Carolina with her father, who is in the final days of his life. We got a call last week from her dad indicating that he thought it was time. This was right before a massive snowstorm dumped two feet of snow on us. It took Martha two days of horseshit to get a flight out and she had to drive to Connecticut to do it.
The roofers finished the last shingle six hours before the first snowflake fell. Our brand new roof is covered in some areas with almost twelve inches of snow. I shoveled our driveway four times on Wednesday, just to keep it to a level that I might be able to handle for Thursday morning, when Martha was going to need to get the car out of the garage and drive to the airport.
Thursday morning I woke up before the sun and was outside shoveling snow by 7am. I had only two and a half hours to dig out the ice covered two-foot high drifts that our driveway had become overnight. By 9am, I was physically finished but the driveway still had major ice drifts. Martha came out to relieve me and dug out the remaining blocks. After that, she traveled for over twelve hours before she was finally at her hotel room in Winston-Salem.
She wanted me to stay home, deal with the cats and to just be here so she won't have to worry. I am home alone, with nothing but my crazy head. I'm not even working, they can kiss my ass as I have taken some time off. Her last words to me before she left were, "Can you wait till I get back to completely flip out? I don't want to have to worry about you while I'm down there. Just wait until I get home."
"Okay babe, no problem." I smiled.
The whole shoveling two feet of ice balls thing was fucking awesome. Martha promised me that she was going to buy me a snow blower. Three days later my back is still fucked up and now, I have no way to the chiropractor. Whatever, out of sheer desperation I've made a 'homemade' traction device that as long as I don't 'accidentally hang myself', seems to be providing some relief.
Being home alone and thinking about death is always a good place for my head to be. After thinking about Mr. Harvey and all the wonderful years of knowing him, my head starts rattling around all the other kinds of death and weirdness that I've seen. There is my dad and the whole bat filled funeral. And then of course my mom and not only not knowing exactly what she died from but why on her deathbed she requested that I not be told she was dying. Or how both of my parents deaths involved my ex-husband. I am still at a loss as to why the fuck that happened. My thoughts bounce around to when Jasmine had cancer, and how I was so frightened that she was going to die. That constant stomach filled fear that has permanently scarred my innards to the point of chronic nervousness. I don't even know that if she was healthier, and suddenly became obsessed about her wellbeing, if that would make me feel any better.
I think about people that I've know that are now dead. Friends, distant relatives or bizarre friends of my parents, float in and out of my brain. I spent a good half-hour Saturday while scrubbing the floors remembering a neighbor friend of my moms'. Actually, there were two, the Robbins; they were a mother and daughter duo. Mrs. Robbins, who was roughly ten years older then my mom, would come down to the house at least once a week and hang out at our kitchen table, drinking, "coffee" and clear drinks with ice cubes in them. The Robbins lived on the corner and Mrs. Robbins was the atypical sixty-year old Jewish wife of an atypical sixty-year-old Jewish husband. Mr. Robbins had hurt himself years prior and was mostly wheelchair bound. He was a survivor and had the number tattoo on his arm. He seemed nice enough, very quiet almost invisible even though he was in a rather large metal chair. As a family, they were rich and traveled all over the world several times a year. The oddest thing about the Robbins was the fact that their only daughter, Sheila, who in her mid-thirties, still lived at home. There was a rumor that Sheila had been briefly married once but now things were very, very different.
When Mrs. Robbins was over, she would end up sitting in my chair at the table, directly across from my mom, going on and on about all of her jewelry, (she had big gold rings on every finger), and hand blown glass that she bought while they were vacationing on some tropical island. She had a tan that was so bronze that she almost blended in with the antique walnut table that my parents bought while we were on our vacation in Michigan.
When Mrs. Robbins wasn't going over a recent trip tally, she gossiped nonstop about all of the neighbors. Neighbors I didn't even know we had. She knew everyone's comings and goings and wondered aloud about their lifestyles and drama. The family from India who lived behind us and whether the dot on the mothers head was a real ruby; the folks at the end of the street who's son was killed in Vietnam and how sad it must be to be in the house and how she just can't bring herself to visit them. And then there were the kids who were caught drag racing in front of her house, she just happened to notice one kid in particular was a kid she had seen me with before. She had seen me 'climbing' (her word) out of his car. What a great thing to tell a parent.
"Hey, yeah I saw your fifteen year old daughter climbing out of a dark green Nova the other night. That boy was arrested for drag racing right in front of my house. He looked like trouble." Doesn't really sit too well no matter what kind of family love you've got going on.
My house was already a war zone without any help from Mrs. Robbins. I must say I hated to see her around the house because it usually meant that a handful of shit was going to be flung my way before the visit was over.
She was an insentient neb and I have always believed that she is the one that told my dad she saw me sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night and even more menacing, she was the one who anonymously called my folks and told them I was pregnant when I was thirteen. The result of that particular phone call caused me to run away for weeks on end to avoid being smacked into a pulp on the vinyl kitchen floor. Mrs. Robbins was so vocal about everything and felt that she was well within her right to say whatever entered her mind, no matter what.
One hot summer day while I was lying on the couch watching Gilligan's Island, Mrs. Robbins was over, yakking with my mom about being discriminated against at Krogers. Something about how the bag boy would not help her wheel her groceries out to the car. As I was lying there listening to her, I wondered to myself how that panned out to discrimination, when suddenly the conversation switched up and she turned towards me and shouted over the banister that separated the kitchen from the family room;
"She is never going to amount to anything." She snorted while pointing in my direction. "I can tell to look at her."
My mom just stared at me. I rolled my eyes, crawled off the couch and went up to my room to smoke a bowl. Ah yes, memories, like the cracks of my mind, dirty water memories of the way it was.
But the real story with the Robbins has more to do about their own hidden family dynamics then I could ever realize. Even though my mom was as nutty as they come, I knew then that I was glad that Mrs. Robbins wasn't my mom. Even at my pathetic self-absorbed teenage age worst, I still pitied her daughter, Sheila who lived at home. Sometimes Sheila would also come down to visit with mom too, not nearly as much as Mrs. Robbins but at least once a month. Mom didn't like Sheila too much because she felt that she was too depressing. (I find this very amusing, and still do.) She would rather spend time with Mrs. Robbins then listen to Sheila talk about her mother.
Mrs. Robbins was driving Sheila bat shit and given what I had seen up till then, I was totally on Sheila's side. Sheila was roughly eight ways of fucked. She was in her mid-thirties, questionably married, (in hindsight I think she was gay) She did go to college and had some kind of liberal arts degree but was never able to really find a job or move out of the house. Her mom always insisted that she help with her father, who was partially paralyzed and needed a full time nurse, not his daughter wiping his ass full time. What Sheila was doing, and she was only doing it with my mother, was reaching out. She had no friends, and never went anywhere, except to my house about once a month.
Sheila's miserable life went on this way all thorough the 70's and sometime in the early 80's she decided that she had had enough. The details are sketchy but the gist was that one morning Sheila snapped and killed her mother, stabbing her several hundred times all around the kill zones. She then turned around and stabbed her father, who was unable to do anything but sit there and watch his daughter kill his wife. She only stabbed her father a few times but just enough to kill him too. Then, Sheila went upstairs and hung herself in her bathroom. They didn't find the bodies for over two-weeks when finally a neighbor, not my mother, called the police because their mail and newspapers had been littering their yard.
I remember the day that mom told me of the murder/suicide. She was shocked, as was the whole neighborhood I sure. I was living far away from Shadowcrest Court and hadn't been home in years but as mom was going over the details of the murder I kind of understood. Sheila's buttons had been pushed. All those years growing up there, I just figured my house was, you know, 'That House. The police were always there, you could constantly hear my mom screaming at me over the Rolling Stones and there was that nasty time my dad beat the shit out of me in the front yard in plain sight of Mr. Pishotti, who was walking his two full sized poodles. You know, we were 'That House'. But clearly the winner here was the Robbins family for the murder/suicide at the corner house. I think we came in second place. |  | | Untitled |  | | George's House |  | | Martha in a Blizzard |  | | Split |  | | Anne is Waiting |  | | Red Barn |  | | Ice Chunks on the Hudson | |
