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| The First Church of Toronto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopping_mall |
My mom's youngest sister is addicted to shopping and junk food, just like she's always been. My grandparents took care of her all of their lives until their deaths, but even my grandmother's Norman Italian longevity wasn't good enough for her. If she was having a "bad" day (and they're all pretty fucking bad, by her choice), she'd express her magical desire for my grandmother to live forevuh in her horrible-sounding accent, because apparently her giving life wasn't good enough for her youngest brat. My aunt likes magic instead, a perpetual teenage attitude delivered in the most blatantly obnoxious tone possible, guaranteed to start a fight so she can get high off of the juices that flow from anger; an addict right down to her core.
My grandparents struggled all of their hard-working lives with her terrible presence, alternating between disgust and trying to care for their very sick daughter, between fits of living that they managed to squeeze successfully into the margins of other people's disordered lives. After all, we were experts at it. I was healthy and so were they, and that's about it for our small immediate family circle. Not much material to work with, but we managed it as best as we could, thankfully with our sanity and good health intact, much to the gnashing teeth despair of my mom and her ugly sisters. They removed moles like they tried to shed their awful weight, without ever covering up how horrible they are.
Desperate to escape the confines of their children's miserable homes, me and my cousins sometimes tacked on excursions with our young aunt out of sheer desperation, which my grandparents understood. They can barely drive around, but small distances are fine. If I needed clothes for school, Aunt B. could manage that, with lots of compromises for her girlish brain to accept our passage with her. Given my mom's sugar addiction, I grew up in a house plagued with migraines that only abated until I was well into college and young adulthood. It could have been genetic (I have lots of overweight diabetics on both sides of the fence), but it was certainly never helped by my family. They forgo real food to eat dessert first, which pretty much guarantees I'll get sick if I eat like they do, so I avoid it like the plague. It is the exact opposite of our traditions about breaking bread.
Nonetheless, stuff is stuff, and where better to cadge a ride than from a junkie who goes directly to the source to mainline it? She's never practiced religion, preferring instead to excel in cheap gaudy plastic shit that she can torture us with by using them as "ugly bombs". Her best friend died an untreated hoarder, with my aunt claiming ignorance of it after her death, which fooled none of us. You see, each and every one of the grandchildren in my family have become violently ill on these shopping sojourns with our aunt; every single one of us. At first, my mother and her sisters used cleverly hidden techniques to cover up the fact that they made us sick.
First, it was my supposed "hypoglycemia" that caused me to return home from shopping trips pale and nauseous. Oh, no problem: just feed her food! My mom treated me like I was a pet her sister didn't know how to feed and water. After that, it was on; I had to gulp down these sugar-free foods so she could continue her worship at store windows. "Stuff something down her throat", was an oft-repeated phrase in my mother's house, to keep people from guessing the source of my sickness. Same thing with my other cousins: Bill had a strange gluten intolerance that made him dizzy, Elizabeth ("that poor thing") grew up without a real mutha (not true), therefore she's a sickly orphan...on and on it went for years, until the Nanuet Mall fell into disrepair, in which case, Auntie simply needed a venue change.
Same thing with the "new" mall in West Nyack. We all strangely felt sick just walking through the multi-level building with her, which she quickly devised cover stories for, aided and assisted by our mysterious "symptoms", "Oh, yeah? You don't feel good?", with a quick panicked look to her sidelong glance at us. Uh, no. I feel overly hot and sick to my stomach. Unfortunately for her, I outgrew all of my bad health and habits through hard work. "Weird...I call it 'Mallhead'. Billy gets it, too", and so it went for a few more years, until each one of my cousins confessed to me that every one of them got sick shopping with her, with the exact same set of physical responses.
I let it slide while my grandmother slowly declined in her advanced old age, but not by much; my aunt loved using her as a deferred payment plan to big family discussions that would "out" her true agenda. I let my cousin and his long-time girlfriend buy her a huge flat-screen t.v. one Christmas, with the excuse that my grandmother's cataracts were the reason she needed a new one. They were gone for hours, hours that I comfortably spent in happy companionship with my grandmother and mother. My cousin returned from the excruciating trip red-faced and ashamed: another sucker punch by that crazy incompetent bitch. He was kind enough to install the set for her, just like we all enabled that hateful little dwarf: in honor of our parents' parents, those G-dly people who gave rise to us.
I finally put my foot down during a weekend stay with my mom. I offered to go with my girl cousin (that poor unfortunate "orphan") and my aunt to the mall, but we were barely down the street when something odd happened. Elizabeth suddenly took ill in the car, which forced our aunt to stop at a junk food convenient store chain. She used the same old line about my cousin just being hungry, as she tried to hide her delight at this unexpected pit stop for her preferred type of junk food. For once, she sprang sprightly out of the idling parked car to grab something quick in the store. She was all smiles as she watched my cousin (who was going to nursing school at the time, hence her new-found knowledge about healthy foods and exercise), gulp down rotten food so we could all go shopping for her.
But, for some strange reason, her evil alchemy didn't work this time. Liz didn't feel better as we drove down the same street we were on before the "pit-stop". "I'm not actually hungry", Liz tried to explain to our sick aunt, as she sat in the passenger seat, mulling over a nasty selection of salty junk food over sweets, neither of which is designed to cure anyone on the planet. "I still don't feel good", Liza said weakly, grown pale as I watched her open her jacket for air and crack the window at the same time, the very same actions we all took over those long hard years, as my aunt rehashed her old lines about carsickness and the car's heating system. "I don't think I can go shopping", she muttered, and if there was a heart that was gladder than mine at that moment, you'd have been hard-pressed to find it. I was already in recline just being in the backseat, hearing the same old bullshit in my head about my ill health again and again.
And just like that, we were back at my mother's apartment, with Liz resting on my mom's couch, like I had also done for years and years, recovering from another awful bus trip from the city. It was over....it was finally over. The curse had been lifted! I wished Liz was healthier so I could hug her, but my girl was all grown up, aided and assisted in my mastery of invisible motherhood by no one but myself, just as she had also suffered with her own disordered parents. The curse had been lifted forever. After that, we began to openly speak about "Mallhead" to each other at family gatherings in quiet companionship, whenever that little bitch was out of earshot. Nothing beats an evil witch like the greater good. We had finally won in adulthood. We won.
