24- Replaced

We theoretically left all our anxiety behind in the ER, playing gin half the way to Southern California before Tom dropped off to sleep. He was excited, but tired. I was… hmmm… lets’ say concerned. Returning to the lion’s den once more. Going back to my mother’s environment, territory, unassailable rule. Damn well knowing I was reversing my life’s course. So long, freedom. So long, independence. So long having my own wants. I can’t even say I shoulda known better. I did know better. But I was doing it anyway. Dumbasfuck.

My non-remembery has discarded the four-hour flight and hour’s drive home. I imagine my father picked us up, but I don’t see him in my mind’s eye—which can be said for most of the events in my life. I know he drove me to and from wherever it was when I joined and disconnected from the Air Force. I can see him looking around a West LA apartment way out of my price range before I opted, on my own, for the studio near Wilshire and Vermont. He was like a constant non-entity. And here I wondered where I got my sense of nonexistence from!

My mother’s house was Better Home and Gardens picture perfect. She had incredible taste and a decorator’s touch. It was serene and peaceful, and as phony to me as a three-dollar bill. But everyone else adored and admired it.

Clearly, any discomfort I felt was my own problem, created out of nothing, a product of my own warped, selfishness because, yup, crossing the threshold had zipped me right back to that mindset. I was wrong, I was non-worthy, I was an intrusion.

And just in case I had any delusion that wasn’t the case, my mother wasted no time in letting me know she had a marvelous new companion, a friend’s daughter. Just about my age. They phoned each other every day. They went to lunch together and laughed and talked and just had a wonderful, delightful time talking about girl things, like clothes and makeup and boys. They had so much in common! They shared, oh, everything! Such a sweet, happy, full-of-life girl! So energetic, always up to go anywhere, do anything. It was hard keeping up with all her activities and adventures girl. Really, Mom couldn’t remember ever enjoying anyone’s company so much.

“Let me get this straight,” Tom said later. “Your mother… replaced you? Is that what she was saying? ‘Cause that’s what it sounded like to me! Why didn’t you call her on it? Why didn’t you say anything?! I would have, but damnit, Harris, she’s your mother! My mother would never do anything like that! How could you just sit there and take it?”

How, indeed. He was on a rant, as was his wont, so I… listened. And accepted his pissed-off-ness because, hell, he was right, I was wrong. And I didn’t know how to stand up for myself because, well, I was accustomed to being wrong with my mother.

Although this was more than just being wrong. She’d replaced me. She’d found a better daughter, one who was all girl, whose opinions on everything matched her own, one who not only listened to her advice but accepted it as best and followed it to a T. But the scene she played out for her audience of two really had nothing to do with the other girl. It was all about and non-mistakenly performed directly to me.

That’s what I got for being disloyal, her subtext fairly shouted. That’s what I got for driving across the country alone like some kind of hippie; for marrying Tom— a low-life, a musician, for God’s sake!—for wanting a life separate from her. There was no subtlety to the ploy, no way to non-understand her meaning or intention. I’d been gone for two months doing things she didn’t approve of, interacting with the wrong kind of people, thinking I was something special, someone loose, non-attached, self-contained. That was not who she raised me to be!

So she traded me in for a newer, better model.

And shit, yeah, it hurt. She claimed she wanted us to meet; she was sure we’d be great friends. But my Cassandra instincts knew better. She’d never let that happen because Mom’s power came from keeping people apart, from being the only source of information or direction. Let us talk freely and share stories? When had she ever let that happen in her house?

Too Much for a Sidebar…

I can’t prove it, but I strongly suspect that was one of, if not the main reason she and Dad didn’t raise his two nephews, or let his niece stay for more than a week. I’ll unpack.

The non-secret family story goes that my father’s sister, my favorite Aunt R, was a crappy mother. Might have been, I couldn’t say. She was a wonderful aunt, for the little I knew her. She’d been a brilliant student with a rebellious, thinking nature, who, theoretically, believed in the Russian revolution and thought communism was the answer, caught up in the romance of it all ala Diane Keaton in Warren Beatty’s 1981 film Reds.

Her associations had destroyed my father’s chances of segueing from OSS during WWII to CIA, a move for which he’d a’been perfect. I’ve worked with three CIA agents over the course of my ghostwriting career, so I can say without hesitation, he’d a’fit right in. He was beyond adept at non-disclosure with nary a conspicuous behavior in his playbook. Mathematically gifted. Engineeringly brilliant. Textbookedly loyal—the quintessential company man.

I doubt Aunt R’s political leanings gave my paternal grandparents cause to remove her two sons from her care and custody. Family lore claims that decision was grounded in her free-wheeling lifestyle of booze, weed, and sex. Again, I wouldn’t know. I’d heard my mother’s oft-repeated story of how she’d knocked on Aunt R’s door once and found her holding herself together, bloody from a back-alley abortion.

Which, on the face of it, makes no sense at all. A cesarean abortion? After which she managed to give birth to a third child? Musta been a neat trick. Sounds like possibly, maybe, a little tinge of exaggeration.

Huh. It’s only occurring to me right now that Aunt R, with whom I felt such a strong connection may have been more like me (or me like her) than realized. But we had no language for it! We had no liberty to introspect, to self-explore, to discuss. For all I know, we might have been equally non-girl/non-boy. Would make sense.

But I non-know because loose lips sink ships, never hang dirty laundry in public, ew, ew, ew, don’t talk about sex! What if the children hear? They might not grow up to be good Christians—even though we were Jews. But Christian culture, with its all-exclusive power structure, infects everything it touches. That’s why orthodox Jews cluster and isolate to the point of cultism. To avoid the stain of fearing a supposedly loving god….  

Okay, that opens a totally different worm can. Digression ends here, now.

So Aunt R’s mommy and daddy, aka Papa M and Nana, usurped… I mean, took in my two cousins, also both brilliant, the younger severely gifted and socially non-adept, a harbinger of my own of-the-same-line offspring.

Then, with no reasonable explanation, Nana developed cancer and died. I was… wait for it… two.

Yup. Same age as when my forehead introduced itself to that radiator. As when my father discovered that men-who-cuddle-their-daughters-are-child-molesters article next to his coffee cup. I was two-years-old when my mother decreed my father and brother shouldn’t have to be bothered with me.

But before all that happened, Papa M, being a traveling salesman, sent Cousin J and Cousin D to live with Mom, Dad, Brother and me because he was non-home enough, non-mother enough to raise two boys on his own.

Even if I had a great memory, I doubt I’d recall the fun, happy times of living with them. Those days must have occurred before post-toddler cognition kicked in. I don’t know if Brother remembers—that would require talking to each other. But I do remember my mother’s explanations for why she sent my cousins back to live with our mutual grandfather.

Not enough room. Couldn’t afford it. One of my personal favorites: “You can never love someone else’s children as much as your own.” Cousin D needed special education / too much attention / hid his soiled underwear in the drawer, an absatively precious justification that cropped up sometime in the early 2000s in the middle of a discussion about nothing whatsoever germane to either my cousins, underwear, or poop.

To my knowledge, no one had ever questioned my mother’s motivations for returning my cousins to her father-in-law, yet her rationalizations appeared randomly and unprovoked. I’d accepted the first few without question because, well, what the fuck did I care? Said cuzes had come and gone before I knew the difference between my toes and my nose, and the story hardly seemed worth the retelling.

But that’s the thing about mendacity—it can gnaw away at a spirit, never fading, never resolving, until said spirit must needs address it one more time. Come up with a something new, a more resonant accounting. Plausible. Ergo, I got a fresh, way-more-gooder defense of something no one else gave half-an-eye-blink about every handful of years or so. She knew she could confide in me. I’d keep it to myself. Because that’s what I was there for: to keep my mother’s secrets.

And not notice, in my sleazy, vividly imaginative way, the non-prompted upgrades.

At some point a decade or so ago, I was talking to a maternal cousin and mentioned something about that mutual grandfather’s relationship with said cousin’s mother. “Good Lord, why would you even bring that up? It’s ancient history. Nobody even thinks about it anymore.”

Likely true. But I’d brought it up because my mother had just brought it up, again, as she was wont to do, likely another mendacity or perhaps simply exaggerated fabrication that, so clearly, was still gnawing, gnawing, gnawing at her spirit.

What, if anything, is the upshot of this ridiculously long digression? Simply that my mother utterly non-intended for me and her new, better daughter to ever meet or sit down to a share-and-share-alike brunch. I might have non-seen it so clearly before, but every fiber of my being knew it as truth in that crucial, spot-lit moment.

Divide and conquer.

Keep the masses ignorant.

Malign others, expel outsiders.

Never reveal, never let anyone know.

Lie, hide, deny—I’d learned from the best.

And while I could never again non-realize that compilation of mother truths, I could also non-acknowledge them—especially right then, when she’d so pointedly ousted me for my disloyalty, my wrongness, my being non-girl, which so patently stuck in her craw that she’d reiterated, twice and five times, all the girl things she and her so-much-lots-more-gooder non-daughter shared.

Which left me on the brink of a precipice—one of her favoritest expressions—because I certainly could non-stand up to her the way I already never had. But I could also non-appease my husband’s expectations, which had now come into sharp contrast to my mother’s assumed dominance.

He virulently non-understood why I wasn’t who he knew me to be, who I’d presented as to everyone in his Chicago life: non-girl, wise-cracking, always with a ready quip, a push-back, the answer for what to do next, how to handle any situation. What happened to him/her?

How could I explain that my mother had fabricated an entire relationship, possibly even a person, just to blatantly reel in her line, its hook firmly in my maw, exactly where she’d spent over two decades setting it?

Another pivotal nanosecond, during which I’d love to say I manned up and stood up for myself against both my mother’s manipulation and my husband’s anticipation—right then, right there.

Oh, come on! Nay, nay!

I let the incident pass, as always, betraying myself once again, stuffing my gumption, my capacity, my personal sovereignty deep, deep, deep into my shell. Where I knew it belonged.

But it didn’t.

But it did.

And wouldn’t you know? As soon as Tom and I agreed that same day that she could arrange for a “real” wedding—right there, in her beautiful house—two months hence, my mother’s other, gooder daughter was never mentioned again.

Shocker.