[cont.]
Family dynamics don’t change.
When Lori was nine, Teddy hurt his hand. His hobby was making furniture and he was very skilled at it. Their house was filled with perfect built-in cabinets and furniture modeled after Shaker designs. As everyone in four counties had heard repeatedly, he’d won an award for his walnut chair. The awl made a fairly deep puncture which luckily managed not to sever any major arteries or tendons. Jody stopped everything to wait on him. She never ventured beyond his calling range. Lori got Uncle Henry to drive her to school and she walked back because he was working and she knew he needed the income. A week later the nurse called Jody telling her that Lori had pneumonia and needed to go to the hospital. Jody thought the nurse was exaggerating and it was a simple cold overdramatized by her daughter, so she told Lori to call Uncle Henry to help her. Uncle Henry had to close his shop to take Lori to the hospital and get her the antibiotics she needed. Lori was then banished to the cold guest bedroom in the garage so her father wouldn’t get infected. She learned early on to care for herself.
Uncle Henry was the reason Lori had come home. He wanted to see her. He had lung cancer and weighed barely a hundred pounds. Not much time left, he whispered to her. He had checked himself out of the hospital to die at home. After Lori left her parents in the waiting room, she went back to read articles in the New Yorker to Uncle Henry, both of them laughing at the cartoons, her concocting elaborate stories to explain the ones they didn’t really get. His arms were so withered that even turning pages was such an effort. His strong, useful arms now not much more than bone and skin. She had brought him some weed to help with the nausea; and, with the hospice nurse’s blessing, she gave him a juiced up brownie. It seemed to help. Her cousins were a bit horrified that their father was using an illegal substance but when they saw his face relax and his parched smile return, they patted her on the shoulder, thanking her for taking the risk. Not much of a risk if you take the train, she told them. If it does help, she had more brownies double wrapped in the freezer. The nurse said, good, using it regularly will likely increase his appetite.
While he was still smiling, she picked up with her reading. She liked reading out loud. She’d never thought about why. But sitting there, reading to her uncle she realized that the only time she ever felt connected with her parents was when Jody told her stories. The one most often repeated was the creation story: how Jody met Teddy before they moved to this area. She was married at the time to a very successful businessman her mother had basically pushed on her and was miserably unhappy. One Saturday morning, her first husband insisted that she hand out water to runners in a 10K race his company was sponsoring. She didn’t want to but he insisted. There amid the sweaty people was the most handsome man she had ever seen. He stopped at her table and asked for water. He was a good bit younger than her. All she could say was, “Here, take this bottle.” But he turned to smile at her as he trotted away. She didn’t see him again for six months, even though she started attending every race in the area. The weekend after she stopped trying to find him, her husband was invited to a barbeque and she dutifully tagged along. Teddy was there alone but he saw her across the yard and immediately walked over to greet her.
From that moment on, Jody had devoted her life to this man.
Lori was all too aware that Teddy was a full-fledged narcissist. Junior year in high school it had dawned on her that it was probably not entirely his fault. Uncle Henry was his brother. Not as talented as Teddy, not nearly as handsome, he was a good and caring man, a good father. If Teddy had married someone who had not babied him so completely, he might have grown up the way his brother had. All small children are completely self centered until they are trained to think of others, until they run into reality. With Jody around, reality was not allowed to seep into Teddy’s life.
Lori sat reading the magazine to Uncle Henry, his eyelids fluttering as he struggled to stay alert, glad that her father was going to be ok. She really didn’t want the bright light of her mother’s love directed solely at her. As long as Teddy lived, she could vanish and neither of them would notice. Her uncle’s death would release her from this family.
When Uncle Henry was too tired to listen, after he kissed her tall forehead goodbye with his crusty lips and touched her face with those skeletal fingers, she returned home to all the custom furniture and the gigantic state of the art television set built into the wall. Her mother stayed in the hospital by Teddy’s bedside all night. She was alone in the house.
It’s weird when epiphanies hit. Sitting on the comfortable recliner, her reflection clearly visible on the dark screen of the television set, she saw her father looking back at her. Her father who couldn’t be bothered to visit his dying brother. Her father who thought he was so superior to his little brother. Her mother told her often enough that her eyes were shaped just like her father’s. The set of her jaw was just like his too. It was like the set turned itself on and what she saw even beyond the physical inheritances was a clear picture of herself with that same drive for drama, the same need to be the center of attention. Yeah, she had to admit the reason she felt so comfortable living in Laurel Canyon surrounded by Hollywood types was that it was so much like the drama at home, everything pushed to hyperbole, every small action inflated into epic proportions. As much as she wanted to think she had rejected how her parents lived, she was exactly like them. Her use of drugs, the wild partying, the tattoos and piercings – all of them were her way of keeping some drama in her life. Just as landscaping was mostly laborious hard work and planning, so was painting. She balanced that blandness out with extravagant behavior, just like her father. She sighed. It was time to detox and rethink how she was living. Eating healthy food wasn’t enough by itself. She needed to clean up her act and be more like her uncle. She needed to be kinder.
The next morning Teddy returned home to great fanfare. Her mother had insisted that the ambulance drive him back, regardless of the cost. Lori, attempting to follow through on her epiphany, volunteered to rush out and buy foods without cholesterol or salt. Jody let everyone know that she would now have to cook everything Teddy ate to make sure he didn’t stray from a heart friendly diet.
Lori hauled all the bags of groceries into the kitchen and began taking the “bad” food out. She would take it over to the soup kitchen later – the plant in town had closed and she knew the food was needed. It was amazing how much food her mother had hoarded and how much of it contained large amounts of salt. Nearly done, she heard her phone with its funny ring tone and took a break from emptying the bags to take the call. It was Tommy on Hondo’s phone. At first she couldn’t understand what he was saying. He was crying so hard. Tommy had left Hondo alone for a couple of hours and the stupid fool had scampered over to his dealer. Tommy had just found him. He was dead of an overdose.
She went into her parents’ bedroom to tell them she had to leave. Jody said, “You can’t desert your father. He needs you.” When Lori stood there crying, Jody snapped at her, “You can’t be surprised. That boy has been trying to do this for years. It’s what he wanted. Now maybe you’ll find someone who will marry you so you can give your father grandchildren. He’s not going to be here forever, you know.”
……………………..
Return on Wednesday for the next chapters of Just Like Suicide.
