Somehow, We All Mostly Get Through

(Skip this one if suicide, substance abuse, or sexual abuse are no-gos.)

I started this installment with the following observation:

Why on EARTH would Google return these answers ahead of what I WANTED, which was CLEARLY “Did Robert Wagner kill Natalie Wood?” The algorithm is FLAWED.

And it made me think: if my bad grandmother had ever run into Robert Wagner, she would have SCURRIED her scrawny cigs-and-coffee-and-vodka body over to him like the deranged Lucille Bluth she always was, and SHRIEKED at him “I KNOW WHAT YOU DID TO NATALIE WOOD, AND SHE WAS AN ANGEL! AN ANGEL WHO WAS TERRIFIED OF DARK WATER! I KNOW SHE CAUGHT YOU AND CHRISTOPHER WALKEN SCREWING AND YOU THREW HER OVERBOARD!” and then we would have been asked to leave the restaurant.

When I think about my bad grandmother (which is often, she was the most memorable soul I ever met), I think less than I used to about her badness (I’ve told so many times the stories of her repeated bigamies and lies and this gets into how she was as a parent to my father and aunt, which is Dickensian, honestly, and the fact they neither suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome NOR became serial killers is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit) and more about the things about her that were…God, what a survivor.

My dad and his sister have made peace with their mother, who passed circa 2003. My mother, her former daughter-in-law, never has, because, like so many of us that love very deeply, she can forgive any injury, however great, to herself, and absolutely never one inflicted on a person she loved. And it’s hard to love someone and see all the ways they’ve been broken and fucked-up by a truly heinous mother, and then spend decades doing your best to fix that person, while still having to occasionally interact with the mother who fucked them up in the first place.

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The end, for my mother, the absolute end of her dogged attempts, as a SAINT, to remain in my bad grandmother’s life so that we kids could have a bad grandmother (our good grandmother, her own mother, having passed), is also the story I tell if I really want to capture the awfulness. My mother called my grandmother (my brother and I were small children, I remember this very clearly, while my brother, four years younger, does not) and asked if it was a good time to bring the kids over for a visit. We lived about five minutes away, at the time.

“Of course!” my grandmother said, in a completely normal voice, “this is perfect.”

We arrived, on foot, to discover her building surrounded by cop cars and paramedics, and dashed to her floor, which was open. My terrified mother pushed it open, and said “DOREEN, WHAT HAS HAPPENED?” and my grandmother dramatically, and with great elan, hurled her body against the doorframe, like an actress in a soap opera, and said “Walter has HANGED HIMSELF,” at which point I, looking over her shoulder, saw my great-uncle Walter, greyish, slumped in the closet, with a noose around his neck.

“DOREEN,” my mother said, pushing us behind her, “we called five minutes ago! WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME?” My grandmother looked at her like she was crazy. “You wouldn’t have brought the children.”

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My grandmother and I spent a lot of time together, after my mother had thrown up her hands. She let me smoke cigarettes (she offered me one when I was…11?), and we watched…so much television. We watched McMillan and Wife, Biography on A&E, The Rockford Files, All in the Family, The Golden Girls, Roseanne, Designing Women, McCloud, Murder She Wrote, and, most importantly, The Young and the Restless. We ate Heavenly Hash ice cream, which I think might be only regional, and let me tell you, if you have not had it, you are missing out. We ate so much white bread with salted butter, two things my father never allowed in our house, see also baloney, see also yellow mustard. We ate TV dinners. Boxes of cookies.

She loved historical romance novels, and I would trudge to the public library with a backpack sagging with the last round, ready for the next. She loved bad Hollywood biographies. She, I am quite sure, loved me.

By the time I was in high school, her really big drinking days were behind her (though I have no idea how many nights my mom and dad spent in detox with her and just made sure my brother and I didn’t notice.) She was (obviously) a vodka drinker, and she hid bottles everywhere you could imagine (vinegar bottle! ice cube tray that never hardens! toilet tank!), and was the sort of drinker who could easily go months without a drink and then spend three weeks on the floor. She was the sort of drinker who my parents could try to shake awake for ten minutes, assume was dead, and then if the phone rang she would extend one bony arm, grab the handset, and say, in the most normal of voices: “Oh…Maggie. No, I don’t think I can play cards on Tuesday, give them my love!” and then immediately pass back out.

She was fantastic at AA, which she probably did about eighty times (my mom also tried Women in Sobriety meetings with her, Moderation Management, etc.) She didn’t want to be in AA meetings with poor people, so she found the rich person AA meetings and went to those, seeing them largely as social occasions to meet the right kind of people. She dressed to the nines.

My grandmother came home from AA for the first time (by the way, I should say that I have known many people who are alive today bc of that and other sobriety programs, my grandmother is the common factor in every choice she ever made) and my parents asked how it went, and she said “it was marvelous. They say that you need to forgive me for everything, and that I was powerless.” My parents were like…”we’re pretty sure there’s some other stuff in there,” but that was all she ever took from it.

My father was not the talking sort, nor was he the sort for recriminations. What’s the point of saying “you made my childhood a misery, pass the peas?” There would be years where he would just silently pass the phone to me if she called, and years where we would do things as an extended family. The only time I ever remember him calling her out was at Christmas one year, when, dramatically, it turned out that the Wrong Stuffing had been prepared, and my grandmother announced that Christmas was ruined. This was the worst Christmas ever.

“Oh,” my father said, calmly putting his fork back down. “I thought the worst Christmas ever was when I was seven and you were so drunk that Santa forgot to come.”

My grandmother was committed to making sure that no one else in her life could form an alliance. She lied to my father about things my aunt said. She lied to my aunt about things my father said. She lied to my mother about my father, and my father about my mother. She lied to my father that his father was dead. She lied to her third husband that her second husband was dead. She lied to her second husband that her first husband was dead. In order to avoid unpleasantness, she left her first husband and just pretended the whole thing had ever happened, legally speaking, returning to Canada from the UK (he was a British soldier) on a troop ship in the middle of WWII. It was a mulligan, that one.

My aunt has a wonderful, kind, generous, slim, gorgeous blonde daughter, a few years older than me, who I worshipped as a god. When we visited, she had, aligned in perfect chronological order, every single issue of YM and Seventeen magazine, which I was totally allowed to read. This, to me, was like being invited to go see the treasure vault of Asgard. This, of course, deeply upset my grandmother, so she developed the brilliant tactic of dividing us with praise. “Have you met my granddaughters? Ella is the pretty one, and Nicky is the smart one.”

We love each other very much, but oh boy did that take some time for both of us to shake, each in our own way.

Occasionally, when we were together, my grandmother would mention that her father had physically abused her and her siblings, in a manner that was pretty impressive, even for the time and place of their youth. He was also a drinker, and the son of a drinker (who once got arrested for shooting in the street at the kid he had sent to buy him a bottle, who had just pocketed the money instead.)

Several years after my grandmother passed away, so did her surviving brother. He was a quiet sort of man, as had been my great-uncle Walter. After the funeral (it may have been a few months after), his widow told my father and his sister that, in the last few months of his life, her husband had told her that he and Walter and Doreen had been sexually abused by their father. There is no reason to think that is anything but true.

Which was very healing for my father and his sister, I think my father especially. That he was the final link in this whole fucked-up chain of multigenerational abuse and neglect, and that it’s not that his mother didn’t love him or couldn’t be bothered to feed him, because he was unworthy of love or feeding, she was just a hopelessly broken and damaged soul. She couldn’t do it. She was just too fucked up. And now she’s gone.

There are a lot of people who grow up in hellscapes and abused beyond measure and become good people and have very little sympathy for other people who grew up in hellscapes and, you know, didn’t become good people. My dad has never been that guy. He thinks there are a million variables as to whether growing up in a hellscape breaks or twists you, and that a million different little things could have pushed him into being the sort of person who does ill to others, instead of being the quiet, pleasant man he is.

I miss her sometimes. I think she would have LOVED the internet. I am sad she missed Hoarders. I wish we could watch I Survived together.

Maybe someday we will.

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