CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
“Doris,” Regina said into the telephone, “I hope this isn’t an imposition, but I’d like to invite myself up for a week….maybe two. If that’s ok with you.”
She was sure it would be. For years Doris and Uncle Roscoe had begged her to spend more time with them in the house on the Connecticut shore. She loved the house and in her own way she loved each of them.
Separately.
She just wasn’t crazy about spending a lot of time with them together.
“I’d like to bring Drew. But he can only stay for the weekend,” she added. Drew didn’t particularly like either one of them, together or apart.
Actually, Regina would have preferred to bring her sister Nina, but Nina did not appreciate her uncle’s over-solicitation about her comfort and well-being. While she knew it came from his good intentions, she found it annoying and patronizing, and in the end obstructive. Always trying to help her, he hindered her own successful operating systems.
“I am no longer in the mood for every fucking thing in the physical world fighting back at me,” Nina told her sister, “including him.”
But even she could not always find ways to be comfortably disabled. With a disability, every solution is its own problem; a million increments of compromise. That once you became disabled you interrupted some great basic ecological system of how humans operate in the physical world from the time their ancestors crawled out of the sea;
Locomotion in the ocean.
Sponges were the first and then the sea anemones.
Unhitching themselves from the coral reef.
Sucking the surface and pulling themselves forward, suck by suck.
Going to the food instead of sitting and waiting for it to float into their mouths.
Stealing space from their stationary neighbors,
Spreading mayhem and murder and power.
Walking!
Sometimes Nina was forced to ask for help. And each time, she felt scarred. One little scar on her soul after another, and another. A slash in her self-esteem, a nick here, a prick there. After a time her psyche was bloodied and exhausted. Just from others doing kind and necessary things for her.
Sometimes not so kind
“I don’t work for you,” one of her old boyfriends told her when she wanted him to lift packages without being asked. He pretended this attitude was about her survival. He said he tried to make his own life hard as possible to prove to himself he could survive anything, and she should too. But it was difficult to make his life hard because he was the strongest, healthiest man Nina ever knew. The scariest thing he ever did, to prove he could survive anything, was never clean his filthy stove or defrost his rotting refrigerator.
So Nina preferred to carry things in her teeth rather than ask for help. When people helped her they had a tendency to treat her like furniture, taking control of the wheelchair like drill sergeants, never listening to the directions Nina gave them.
Good will created danger for Nina. Over-zealous wheelchair pushers refused to take her warnings about bumps and potholes and as a result have dropped Nina out of her chair into oncoming traffic. Once while she was holding a carefully boxed whipped cream birthday cake on her lap. The element of slapstick as the cake went flying through the air and landed upside down did not quite make up for cars screeching to a halt in front of Nina’s surprised, but tumbled and humbled body, simply because when she said “Wait,” the helpful friend wouldn’t.
Even so, Nina was not totally at war with the able-bodied world. Nina worried about other people. She knew they had their fears too, their poverty, their sickness and their heartbreak. That they were the ones stuck on the subway. That they didn’t create perfect lives for themselves. That their own behavior often brought a lifetime of losses.
She worried that what she needed might take away from what other people needed: was she blocking their way, taking their time, did her slowness slow them down, her limits limit them?
“I know how difficult it is to be with me, with all my restrictions imposed on those who don’t have to have them.”
She understood that no one would choose to be handicapped unless they wanted to park.
Even so, she admitted to Regina, “Listen, I’m not even as kind to other disabled people as the able-bodied are to me. No, I am not kind. I am not kind at all.”
Nina didn’t like to see other cripples. She found them odd and amazing.
Once, TV Channel surfing, Nina caught the Olympic games for the disabled and was thrilled at first to see their strength and athleticism--something she knew a lot about. But then all their pluckiness, and unnatural equipment, started to make her tired. She would have preferred to see the regular games where ordinary bodies beautifully displayed the miracle of their natural workings.
“I suppose that’s the way other people often feel about me,” she told Regina. “I’m sure there is cumulative exhaustion and discomfort. Eventually I get discounted. Their energy for coping with my difference wears out. My mere presence on a long-term basis must be very annoying to other people, when time and time again, each time they see me, they have to confront their feelings about me. Tolerance fatigue. They become eager to get away to the relief of their simple freedoms, to the special pleasure of being with someone else who can just pick up and go, someone who doesn’t turn every ordinary thing into a complicated problem. Ironically it is the same for me. I get crazy sometimes dealing with the slow, the hard of hearing, the confused, or anyone who likes to stop to eat all the time.
Believe me, if I were able-bodied I’d be insufferable.”
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
Regina was touched by Doris’s enthusiasm for her visit. She knew living with Uncle Roscoe made her lonely.
When Roscoe called back a half hour later, excited, and checking out all sorts of lovely summer plans with her, she thought that this was turning out to be a very good idea.
She wouldn’t tell them about the bomb threats and she might paint a little, while she was there.
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR
i.
Regina packed too much stuff. That was the temptation when traveling by car. She took old clothes to paint in, as well as swimwear, casual summer clothes, dressier clothes, and colder weather clothes for both dress and casual. What was she thinking! Well, I might need them, and then what? In addition, she had a briefcase of paints, brushes, small rolled up canvasses, a light portable easel. And a tote bag of books.
When she approached her car she saw that a large delivery truck had double parked, blocking her in. In addition, the newly-parked car behind her had left only an inch between itself and her trunk, just as she had been forced to leave only an inch between the front of her car and the one ahead.
What was it a nervous out-of-town driver once shouted at her in heavy traffic?
“Back off, lady, you’re only an inch away.”
“In this city, buddy, an inch is all you get,” she told him.
But now there was not enough room to stand in the street and directly load the trunk. She would have to try to unlock it by leaning over from the sidewalk, then contort her body to lift the bags in sideways. She couldn’t even go around to the other side to distribute the luggage evenly, because the delivery truck was in the way. And if she did get everything in, she wouldn’t be able to go anywhere until the truck moved. Whenever that would be. She would have to stay there and wait it out because it was not wise to leave her bags in the unguarded car.
Well, at least the car behind her that the bags kept bumping into didn’t have one of those shrieking alarms. And when the mammoth truck, with its urgent cargo of teeth-decaying soda finally moved, Regina was able to scramble into the driver’s seat and shout at the dashboard: “GO!”
Regina talked to cars. Named them. Cried when her old car was gone. When she mistakenly spoke to the new car with an old car’s name, she was terrified that the new car would conk out from jealousy. “Marius was right. I’m eccentric as
hell,” she thought.
She would do the driving until Drew took over out of the city. This worked well. Regina had nerves of steel in the city, but she was uneasy on the highway. Besides, she loved watching Drew drive. When the sun hit his muscular arms on the wheel, it excited her.
But first she had to find a gas station. This was one of the trickier jobs of driving in Manhattan. Considering how many cars there were, filling up was getting harder and harder. Drivers exchanged information about station locations like sharing secrets about where to find the best pizza. It didn’t help, since gas stations were constantly being torn down to build large apartment buildings. It used to be that oil made millionaires. Now it was rent.
ii.
Regina found few things sadder than driving through America. It never ended, the ugliness of the highway--mile after mile. “The physical world I live in is not beautiful,” Regina mentioned to Drew as she stared out the window.
“You don’t live here,” Drew said.
“I don’t just mean the highway. I mean New York too. I mean none of it is beautiful with nature. And it’s so much effort to get to nature--look at this--we’ve been out of the city for over an hour--do you see anything you could rightfully call nature anywhere near here?”
Obviously her mood had not picked up. Getting away from the city was supposed to be a solution of sorts to stop being afraid for awhile. On the other hand, the combustible relationship between Roscoe and Doris was like a low rumbling volcano that never fully erupted. It just made you constantly aware the hillside was not entirely safe. It was a decision where desperation played a part.
“You’re being so good to come with me,” Regina told Drew.
“I’ll never understand how that man puts up with her,” Drew said about Roscoe and Doris. “What does he see in her?”
“I understand what,” Regina said. She knew that Doris had been a woman so striking that when she passed, other women nervously checked themselves in the nearest mirror.
“Actually, I was crazy about sweet Uncle Roscoe when I was young.”
Roscoe had always been in Regina’s life. At first, his pleasant, non-assertive nature endeared him to everyone. But Regina eventually learned that a lot of what you saw in Roscoe was a mask. His true nature was underground.
“How come you’ve changed?”
“As I grew older, I realized that what seemed to be a dear guy who never made waves is just someone who is so non-committal that there is no commitment. You get no flack, but no support either. I soon felt cheated by his passivity. There you are, giving him your all and he’s giving you nothing. And smiling.”
“A self-effacer is a self-eraser,” Drew dared pun.
It was hard to talk to someone who was punning.
But because they would soon be with him, Regina suddenly wanted to get her mostly unspoken feelings about her mother’s younger brother out of her system. She so seldom got the chance, or took it, since she instinctively defended him to Doris, who never had any trouble making her feelings known.
“What really makes me crazy,” Regina said, “is his never-ending carelessness with daily life. I mean what do you do with a guy who always gets out of your car and just walks away leaving the car door wide open, no matter how many times you have reminded him to close it. Or when you make plans to meet, he is always late. If you are supposed to meet at seven he calls at eight to say he’ll be right there and shows up an hour later than that. Then he blindsides you with a change in plans mid-stream without telling you. And you can never get a straight answer or complete information from Roscoe. He always told me: ‘Once people know what you really think, they can hate you.’“
“He’s right,” Drew said. “When I was eight, one of my grade school teachers picked me as her favorite. I used to stay after class with her and clean the blackboards and talk. I felt so grown-up, so chosen. Then I made the mistake of telling her that I didn’t want to sit next to another boy in the class because he stuttered. Her attitude changed toward me right then. I could see this from the look on her face. The sanctimonious bitch dumped me and picked someone else!”
“Well,” Regina said, “you know you were wrong.”
“I was eight.”
They drove in silence for awhile.
“But you’ve got to admit,” Drew pointed out, “it would be hard to say what you think to Doris. She must make his life miserable.”
Regina shook her head in agreement, but then said: “I think Uncle Roscoe has learned the art of being craftily forlorn.”
iii.
Regina was pleased and surprised that Drew was telling her stories of his childhood, pleased to listen and learn. There was so much about him she still didn’t know. And God knows, it was only relatively recently that, with her uncomfortable new awareness of past and present self, which seemed to jump out at her seemingly from nowhere, did Regina stop thinking that hers was the only story worth telling. Her art, her loss, her fear.
But she hoped Drew wouldn’t become like Marius who had a need to tell his stories over and over. At first she was glad to hear them, believed they gave her insight into who he was, and put her firmly in the special role of the person who shared all of his life. But soon with their sameness they became a cliché of who he was. And she learned that Marius shared them with everyone, including strangers in restaurants. It was not a special connection with her, but just a fine-tuning of himself.
He used to say, supposedly joking, “Regina, we have to break up. You’ve heard all my stories.”
CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE
i.
Drew, who like others of his generation, was uncomfortable unless there was a lot of noise that wasn’t conversation, turned the car radio on. Regina hated this but knew it was necessary to make some concessions to him. She closed her eyes and tried to tune it out, by thinking about what she was about to get into.
ii.
One summer night several years ago, when Roscoe was at his weekly neighborhood card game, Doris and Regina sat on the screened-in porch of the Connecticut shore house, with its lawn sweeping down to the rocky wall that separated it from the slowly rolling waves of protected Long Island Sound.
“This is nice,” Regina said.
The quiet swishing of the waves and a couple of glasses of wine put Doris into a soft confiding mood. “I’m not interested in ‘nice,’” Doris said. “Not interested in nice people, not in nice towns. Never wanted to see Seattle, Atlanta, or anywhere in Virginia. I was probably wrong. But I did like Naples, Florida. Maybe because it looked rich.”
Regina laughed.
“I’m not nice either,” Doris added.
“Oh, of course you are!”
“Well I don’t feel nice around your uncle.”
“Really? Why not?”
“He’s nice enough for both of us,” Doris said caustically. “A real sweetheart.”
Regina raised an eyebrow as she reached over for more wine. She was already a glass behind Doris.
“But beware of the emotionally insecure bearing gifts,” Doris continued.
“We’re all emotionally insecure.”
“Ah. Well.”
They were silent. A moist breeze barely stroked the hanging bells into faint clicking sounds and flying insects hit the screens like kittens clawing.
“Don’t let your uncle fool you.....”
“He doesn’t”
“...people like your dear uncle tell you ‘yes’ when they mean ‘no’--god forbid they should tell you something they’re afraid you don’t want to hear, like whether they prefer steak or lamb chops. They think that just because they are not able to ask you for what they want, you’re the one at fault for not giving it to them. So they sabotage you ahead of time, the burrowing bastards.”
Regina thought she should feel uncomfortable with Doris talking about her uncle like this. “Well, someone who basically says ‘yes’ to everything must be fairly easy to get along with,” Regina tried in Roscoe’s defense.
r /> “Are you kidding? It’s depressing,” Doris continued. “…..he constantly complains that I’m controlling…”
“….Really?…” There was a slight tinge of amusement in Regina’s voice.
“But just because he feels controlled, doesn’t mean I’m doing it to him. The degree to which a person feels controlled by someone else is in direct proportion to how out of control that person is all by himself.”
“Well, that’s pretty much the whole world,” Regina said.
“Look,” Doris continued , “It’s not like I’m pushing him down; I’m just filling in the vacuum he leaves. On the other hand, I see no advantage to losing control either. I’ll take as much of it as others insist I have. I’d rather have it than the alternative.”
“Why do either of you have to have…….?”
“Whatever your uncle may make others think about me with that false innocence of his, he has his own way of getting his own way, He’s the Imperialist in the closet.”
“You must have seen this coming.”
Early on Doris overestimated how much of a companion of the soul she actually had in Roscoe since he had a tendency to agree, or seem to agree, by silence. “I was taken in by his amiable, cooperative charm,” she tried to explain to Regina.
“We all like that in a person,” Regina replied.
“OK, I admit it. If you put brash personality like mine with someone who, before I even knew him, was a self-protector, there has got to be trouble. I scare him to death. But I don’t do it to him. He brought his fear with him. He just uses me as a place to put it. Just because he is afraid of me doesn’t mean I’m a frightening person. It only means he’s a frightened person by nature . I’m weary from taking the rap just because he was born with scared genes. It’s not that I intimidate him; it’s that he intimidates himself. Hey, with these people, everybody who knows how to tie their own shoelaces is intimidating.”
“Forgive me, “Regina said in her now caught up wine bravery, “And I say this only in the interest of improving the situation, but I have seen you ….”
Doris flinched. “You’re right. I guess intimacy brings out the worst in me. Well, at least I only ‘hurt the one I love’,” she tried to joke.
Regina was annoyed. “I think over the years we have had this same conversation many times…”