Reading: The Hundred Years War

Moving: swimming and walking

Watching: sand pipers, dogs, sunset

Listening: waves

19 June 2001: Tuesday

We were so late getting started Tuesday that if we visited Granny again we wouldn't get to the lake until early afternoon. I suggested seeing her again Wednesday morning and leaving for Boston thence, and CLH agreed, relieved. It was past 11. Again, I had tried to calm myself, but I was seriously chomping at the bit to get the hell out of the house, to get to some water. I had been awake since 6:00 and gone for a walk already and taken pictures of the turkeys that have staged a remarkable comeback--my mother can't understand how the species might still be endangered since they're "all over" the vast ecosystem of Old Lyme. We brought Hallmark's grilled cheese sandwiches to the lake and broke our fast there.

And so we had more blissful hours at the lake, swimming and sunning and floating on rafts, lying around being comfortably silent together, rousing ourselves enough to talk about whatever whenever. That's what I went home for.

Our mother got out of work in the early afternoon and joined us. We asked her if she had seen the deer, which really was unmissable by sight or smell, flyblown and bloated. No, she replied prissily, she had been watching the road. CLH recently had pointed out that everything about the woman pisses me off, down to the rate of her heartbeat. If I happened to know that figure, I'm sure I'd find something wrong with it, it's true. But her tone of voice perpetually annoys me, and one of my reactions to being annoyed, and to being constantly criticized and as such on the defensive, to ongoing resentment, and to reactive fear that any morsel of personal information I let slip will be twisted and used against me, is to swear more. I fully acknowledge that this is also partly conscious on my part, since I know she dislikes it. While I have always sworn like a sailor around her, she has only in the past five years--i.e., since BDL and her newfound religion--objected to it.

CLH and I were talking about the books we were reading, not consciously trying to exclude her from our conversation, not whispering to each other as she and BDL are wont to do in our presence. CLH was reading my book of literary puzzles and I was reading about the Hundred Years War, and so we followed ourselves to the Wars of the Roses and Alison Weir and Margaret George. BJWL couldn't contribute to this subject, so she interrupted, "There's an ant on you, Lisa," which comment I ignored, finishing my sentence. She repeated herself. I listened to CLH's response. When I felt something crawling on my chest, I brushed the half-inch, black ant from my flesh. CLH pointed out to her that she had interrupted, and that's why we hadn't acknowledged her previously. "But I didn't want Lisa to be bitten," she protested.
"Ma," lapsing from my 48 hours of effort to call her Mom and returning to my least possible expenditure of nomenclature, I pointed out, "it was an ant. A big black ant, not a nasty red ant. They don't bite."
"Fine," she snapped. "Next time there's a rattlesnake on you I won't say a word."

Sigh.

At some point, and this is where the six-day remove works against a factual if not an honest recollection, I said fuck, and BJWL bestirred herself to say that she really didn't like it when I used that f-word. Well that's too fucking bad, isn't it? I failed to retort. If I didn't say exactly that, whatever I did say failed to be calm and neutral. I told her that she stresses me out and I always swear more when I'm stressed. This is true, though needlessly antagonistic. Conversation ground along until CLH declared she'd had enough and was going to go visit RML before dinner. I joined her (to leave), and our mother followed, and we walked, single-file and with several feet between each of us, back to the cars.

If we had had an less incendiary topic of conversation, I would have filmed Bill Hill and Town Woods Roads on the way back, but we were each doing our best not to be mad at me and the abrupt end of the afternoon. CLH reminded me that this is why she had wanted me to come home the weekend BJWL would be away, so this wouldn't happen. Yep.

While CLH showered and changed, I attempted to tell BJWL gently that for me "damn" and "dang" (with which she herself replaced her previous own damns and darns) are syntactically the same, that dang is nothing but a derivative of damn, as Sally is for Sarah, as Bill is for William, and the words express the same intent. I restrained myself from saying that they're just lower-class substitutes, because what was in my head was that BDL was named with a nickname, which lacks rigor and taste just as his swear substitutes do. I had given up and was drinking a glass of water when CLH came down and tried to talk to our mother briefly before leaving. She tried to tell her what had irritated her to the point of abandoning the lake: our mother's interruptions and criticisms, my inability to deal with her, CLH's own refusal to play her honorbound rule as the eldest child of a dysfunctional family, the peacemaker. Our mother chose that moment and no other to turn her back on her daughter and put the trash out. This is classic avoidance behavior that she indulges in to avoid emotion, conversation, conflict. So CLH left.

CLH emailed me this a few days after I returned to Denver:
When I told [her therapist] that Mom walked out on me when I was talking to her, he was literally shocked, he physically reacted! He surmises that our incessant "bitching" about her is a result of our (apparently) fruitless hope that she will ever change and how can she if she is so oblivious to her offenses. I think I told you that [an earlier therapist] mentioned, in response to my repeated "but my mother is a good person" comments that in fact she is very self-centered. I told [this current one] that you and I just want to know if she really doesn't listen, hear, understand or whether she is intentionally awful. That was when he came up with our "bitching" as our self-therapy in reaction to being ignored when we are so obviously in the right though logic does not sink in.

So I gave up etymology and tried myself to talk about real things, about our emotions. She tried to vacate and I followed her; she said she didn't have time to talk then and I countered that she had decided to spend this hour or so at the lake with us, so talking to me here in the house couldn't be a timesuck. BJWL churned out, by rote, some of her Al-Anon psychobabble. This is is one of the reasons this woman is impossible to talk to: she doesn't think on her own, doesn't respond with her own thoughts and emotions to yours.

I told her stuff. I told her that CLH and I spend hours trying to figure her out, figure out whether she says the hurtful things she says on purpose or whether she's really that oblivious to the pain she causes. I told her I try not to tell her personal stuff because of how she unfailingly using personal information against me, against us. I asked her if she remembered the day she told me about the Dittohead.

This was only eight years ago but she pretends that Dittohead never existed, so no, she didn't. I reminded her that I had lain on the deck and pounded it with my hands and feet as I laughed and laughed, so delighted that she had broken away from my father, and I didn't omit to add, "of course, this was before I actually met that loser." I reminded her that later that day, in a burst of closeness, I had taken her to the ledge over Ely's Ferry Road, where she had never been, and showed her the wonderful view of the Connecticut estuary and our beautiful town. That she remembered. I told her that on that day, we were getting along so well and conversing so easily, that I thought that would be a good opportunity, since we weren't stressing and she seemed amenable, to bring up bigger issues in our relationship. I told her how I had said, sitting there on the granite overlook, that this was a wonderful afternoon in part because of its uniqueness, and that I regretted that this was so rare. "I don't remember how I worded it, but I alluded to the fact we're not close, and how you responded was so typical. You slammed down that conversational window by saying, 'Oh but we have a wonderful relationship.' Clearly, that's what you thought so the fact that I disagree didn't matter. But I submit to you that the fact I did and do disagree with that statement shows how mistaken you are."

She was really hurt at the thought we could ever wonder if she deliberately hurts us. She teared up, and I teared up, and I went to her and embraced her and told her she wouldn't be able to hurt us so much and so well if we didn't all love each other so fiercely. I told her HEBD's contribution, which is that parents can push your buttons so well because they installed them. She liked that.

I told her that I was so mean to her when she invited herself to Denver five years ago because I was trying to provoke her into a conversation she refused to have. (I mean, what else were we going to do? She has often claimed she wanted to talk with me, presumably about the wonders of God and Al-Anon, but even before I left Connecticut and my minutes there became so precious, I didn't want to waste my time in Old Lyme talking to her when I feel so much more comfortable with the written word and could be at the beach. I figured that in Denver for a week, she could do all that talking she allegedly wanted to do. She didn't. There was one evening we were sitting next to each other and I was fuming and she rubbed my arm--she knew--and was silently crying but would not ask a question to start such a conversation; and at other less tearful times, like the six-hour round trip between Denver and Laramie where her cousin is, she refused to talk at all because it would distract her from driving (on a mostly flat, mostly straight interstate). She did, after we spotted some pronghorn antelope, sing "Home on the Range" with me. That was nice.)

Somewhere in here she made a declarative statement, that my sister and I are in denial. This pisses me off. "You're in denial" is such an Al-Anon brush-off: "If you don't think as I do then you must just not realize that I'm right," is how I see it. So I asked her, point-blank: What am I in denial about?

It was almost 4:00 at this point. BDL was supposed to be home at 4:30 and after he showered and changed we three were to meet CLH at Oliver's in Essex at 5:15, early enough that I could be home by 7:00 to see RRP, who was driving down from Storrs. I was, as CLH predicted I would be, watching the clock; this is how I know that BJWL's rant about the glories of Al-Anon, which she has been attending for 20 years, lasted 11 minutes. At the end of it, I told her she had not answered my question: what does she think I'm in denial about? I had to ask another couple of times, because she wanted to proselytize Al-Anon and tell me I'm not introspective enough, at which I nearly hooted in her face. Ya wanna read my journal, the paper one? Yeah, baby, I'm not introspective. Then I thought it might help her if I told her what I'm not in denial about:

"You say I'm in denial, but you don't tell me what you think I deny. I'll tell you what I do acknowledge: that my father was an alcoholic, that you were an enabler, that CLH and I come from a long line of drunks and we have reacted to it in opposite ways, by drinking plenty and by not drinking at all, and that my upbringing fucked me up. I also acknowledge that however I was raised, how I am now is my own responsibility. So, again, I ask, what do you say I'm in denial about?"

"But you never told me any of that," she protested. "I thought you were in denial because you never told me any of that."

Here's where my brain kicked in to connect the dots: "Mom, see what I mean? Just because I haven't told you a thing, doesn't mean I deny it. The fact that you don't know this about me is a point toward my argument that we don't have any wonderful relationship, and the fact that I don't discuss this with you should indicate to you what level of personal detail I don't tell you about because I don't know how you'll use it."

From this conversation, which I was glad to have, this is my main worry: that she'll remember it selectively against me.

Also in this conversation, my mother said something about how Al-Anon teaches you to detach. I think it's taught her to detach so damn well that she can't respond to us with her emotions but only with catechism, and I told her that. Also I told her that if she believes that CLH's anger toward me is CLH's problem, then similarly her own upset at my swearing is her own problem. I don't think that computed.

So once again, I have tried to tell her how she hurts us by not listening and by not caring and by twisting our mistaken revelations against us. This time, we actually had an exchange. I am trying not to let myself think that she will remember it in any other way but her own.

---

At Oliver's, same old same old. She whispered to BDL, seated next to her, while CLH and I stared across the table at them. It turned out she was telling him something about work that she didn't want to discuss with us, and I caught CLH's eye and we laughed and I asked why in that case she was talking about it in front of us and why, in fact, she wanted to go to dinner with us when she didn't want to converse with us.

Overall, the dinner went a lot more smoothly than the earlier afternoon. BDL, who thinks he is extremely amusing, told a joke that was funny only in how unfunny it was, so I told the only clean joke I could think of, which was the logic test from "Car Talk." CLH considered, but her new favorite joke she couldn't tell to them.

The meal progressed and whether I was laughing at BDL's notverywitticisms or just near him, I was laughing, which led CLH to talk about the Tact for Dummies incident. Describing the unamused woman, she said that RDC had wanted to buy her a drink but CLH thought she needed, and here she considered her phrasing, settling on "some lovin'." The Happy Couple seemed to appreciate the tale, and BJWL, expansive, wanted to confirm what CLH thought the woman needed.
She said, "You mean she needed an H.B.I.?"
We had no idea what this meant. She says "p.g." for "pregnant," apparently holding her own speech to the standards of "I Love Lucy" which I believe could only say that Lucy was "in a family way."
She whispered, reluctantly in front of her husband, "I thought you two would know what I mean. Hot beef injection."
My sister and I nearly fell to pieces, laughing as much at the coy abbreviation as at the hackneyed phrase as at the fact that our mother had uttered it as at her expectation that we would just understand her.
After that, CLH decided that she could tell her joke, which is a conversation between a man who wants the worst possible blowjob and the madam who doesn't understand and concludes, "Lady, I'm not horny, I'm homesick!"

---

RRP arrived soon after we all returned home and we went to the beach, walking and talking and playing with two dogs who ran to join us from one of the houses on Griswold Point. We walked up to where a storm cut through the peninsula, making Griswold Point an island again, watching the sunset, throwing sticks, wading. She exclaimed at how beautiful it is, even though she summered just across the river in Saybrook. My beach is the most beautiful in the whole wide world, it's true.

On Sunday with my father's family, people were talking about the La Jolla-ish area where my cousin and the son of another of the women now live. The mother said something about that being the most beautiful coast she had ever seen. I offended again (I had earlier by mentioning being the cousin's flower girl at her first wedding) by suggesting that Old Lyme's beaches were the best. I really don't see how you can live there and not appreciate it. Sure, it doesn't have cliffs and fabulous weather all year long and the Sound is dirtier than that section of the Pacific, but it's fantastically gorgeous nonetheless. I pity anyone--this I didn't say--who has the grace to live there but not appreciate it.

Back at White Sands, RRP and I climbed the lifeguard stand and shared the wide seat, gazed out across the dusky Sound and seeing the lights blink on Long Island.

"When are you moving home?" RRP asked.

Tomorrow, I told her, I am moving home tomorrow.