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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisque_doll |
My dad ran off with his secretary, to the surprise of just about no one. My cousin worked at the same upstate cable company as them, and linesmen know all the gossip from the constantly clucking office girls. She was a poor country girl with buckteeth, bad eyesight, and what was used to be called "rotgut" which is today's Celiac's Disease, turning her once embarrassingly-skinny frame into the huge marketing hit now called "Gluten-Free Living", a new diet for hiding eating disorders, much like the low-fat craze of yesteryear and the also retarded "Paleo Diet"; food fads that die fairly quickly on the shelves, but unfortunately for her, she has the real thing.
She'd been shopping around for a man for quite some time, with poor luck. It was a small rural dating pool that had (by necessity) to include married men as well as single ones, guys who figured out really quickly that she was just some scared kid looking for a steady gig that came with a guaranteed paycheck, with a job no one could fire her from, and given my parent's obvious tensions at the company Christmas parties, my dad was just the meal ticket she needed to get out of town, to fulfill her small town dreams about success.
We didn't really blame anyone involved. It was obvious to us by now that our parents generation was fatally flawed; some of it was not of their own choosing, like canned foods with extended shelf lives and the spoiled upbringings of "Depression Era" parents looking to give their kids a better time of it. We had no such allusions about life: for me and my brothers, life is no mystical magical fairy tale ride at some overpriced amusement park. We do the real thing. There's nothing else for us in this life besides hard work, which is exactly what we do almost every single day of our lives, stopping only to rest by G-d's command on Sunday, as a necessary respite from the weeks labors. Our rewards are the excellence we achieve through the sweat of our own brows, and that's just the way we like it.
But for people with severe challenges like the ones faced by their "Silent Generation", sometimes the only recourse they had in life was a kind of needy co-dependence, which is exactly how we continue to see our damaged family members. It's not really a "blame game" as much as it is one long, exhausting, and highly overwrought group therapy session from which there is no escape except bad vacations and more shopping trips. Of course we wanted more. What do you do after you buy everything you ever wanted?! And that's exactly the place where my and my siblings wanted to land; a place exempt from petty competitiveness and dead-end jobs. We came around full circle from the often degrading hatreds that lead a family downhill and spiraling out of control, which is another reason I'm in charge: I'm the best!
So, it's with that overall perspective that we hold our parents mistakes. My stepmother's horribly awkward provincial tastes reflect the insular values of backwoods farm folk: people who greatly fear and also lust for the supposed treasures that our fair Gotham is portrayed as giving away so easily in t.v. shows and movies. They actually believe t.v. shows and movies offer redemption for them, or at least provide another delusional fantasy to prolong their inevitable facing up to reality. When my dad's secretary finally had all the money she ever wanted, she had absolutely no idea what to do with it. She bought the requisite gaudy jewelry and furs that ridiculous "trophy wives" are supposed to have, like the show Dallas taught her how to do, in order to blend in with her new western surroundings.
It was obviously infuriating, but it wasn't my life to live, and I thanked the heavens every day for it (still do). It was a horrible fate to be stranded in a dusty town in the decline that's so far off the beaten path, they pay people to visit them there. I didn't blame my dad for checking out of reality through John Wayne movies. He's from Bed Stuy neighborhood drunks, and he considers living well his revenge against the ravages of their WWII generation's alcoholism and PTSD. She follows his suit, which was the ideal presented to him as the picture perfect way to ride off into the sunset. It doesn't work, but they still try really hard to give us their best stage smiles. It's heartbreaking, and it's not my world to live in. I wait, patiently observing them from a safe distance, offering them ancient hopes about redemption and family life that is theirs for the taking, if they make it back home in one piece. We'll be here.
And so it was no surprise to us that my dad's wife decorates like a twelve year old girl with too much time on her hands, in that QVC/HSN style known as "Country Quaint". It's so fucking bad that I feel bad for my dad, a guy with a keen eye for good wood furniture and genuine antiques. He tries to steer her in the right way, but given the material he has to work with, he meets with uneven success on any given day. Their weirdly overdone mini palace is like a combination of gaudy floral prints mixed with the throw-up from a hungover cowboy's hat. With that in mind, we learned a long time ago to just let it pass, while they give visitors these weird "tours" of their house decorated in all corners with odd trophy cases, like two lost children taking our hands to seek a validation that we do not have to give to them.
For awhile, when Denise was in full-on housewife mode raising my youngest brother, the shopping was through the roof, as she desperately worked to stave off the soul-crushing bordedom that comes with semi-arid plains living; there's no one around for miles and miles but plain dirt road, which must have been excruciating for a small-town girl with dreams of glittering diamonds, never-ending champagne, and tacky Broadway musicals. Big gay shows don't work in the provinces real well. We tolerated their shopping trips with the same rolled eyes we have about their head-in-the-sand routines so indicative of their "do-nothing" generation; we don't get it.
For a time, I gave my younger brother much-needed doses of reality to temper the credit card fantasies of excess they dreamed of while I lived in Colorado, which was a relatively quick drive away for us used to being apart from nearly a continent's width away. We made fun of them as we drove down to the ranch in one of their old pick-ups, giving him guidance, support, and discipline along the way. He had so freaked out my older brothers during his own Spoiled Brat stage, that they cut him off completely, to stave off any infections that might pass onto their own young children.
Unfortunately for them, genetics doesn't work that way, and as a lifelong educator, I don't believe in writing off children, especially the ones in my immediate family, and so I talked and talked and talked to him, breathing fresh life into their stale routines, by planting the seeds of wisdom that he would need later on when I wasn't around. Just like with my grandparents, I talked to him directly (without any of the deliberately frustrating and weirdly convoluted hints that pass for secret-keeping in seriously disturbed social groups), letting him know that his mom's taste freaked me out, too. Whether it was out of a deliberate perversion about childhood or her own unsatisfied needs about her upbringing, she went through this dreadful faze of using life-size porcelain dolls to decorate with, like creepy stand-ins for the friends and family she didn't have around.
I don't know, man. It was so fucking strange, we laughed cautiously about it, hoping to stave off whatever fucking voodoo is cooked up with those things. Again, I wasn't sure if she was using them as evil guards to stand sentry by the guest room door, but there they were for many years; silent, still, unblinking, and very dead-looking dolls, the stuff of every decent kid's nightmares. Like all their other weird ploys, we couldn't figure out if it was on purpose or from her innate brain-damage, and that was the brilliance behind her ploys: she could actually be that stupid for real. My bro told me she was dumb at six years old. I calmly reassured him that it meant our Doucette DNA had survived their many travels intact, and this was the bane of our advanced consciousness: to suffer fools gladly (at times).
He was her only meal ticket to a greater portion of my dad's will after he died; the only kid she had to bargain with, and in their world, that makes all the difference. It meant they could continue to use money as a form of leverage in our family, using their deaths as the strings to pull along family members they viewed as vulnerable, as it suited their games between each other. It worked as a dysfunction between the two of them, but not with us. We don't need money to get ahead. It left them alone in their barren wasteland while we chomped on the Big Business douchebags of Gotham, a wolves feast of fools if ever there was. Our bloodsport is survival, and it helped my younger stranded bro to know that he was not alone in our clan. We are the wolfpack.
Still, I grew up on the stories of New England Gothic and Stephen King's horrors, classic fables that we all know so well (BIG FANS, Mainer). And so, on one rare morning while our parents slept in or drank coffee elsewhere in their strangely built house of hidden corners, I flat out asked Patrick if those fucking dolls scared them shit out of him, by the laundry room where they stood silent and glassy-eyed. "Yeah...", he shrugged, bolstered in confidence by my visit and the strength my big blond Scottish boyfriend represented to him, as a clannish tattoo-covered rock star with seriously Christian ideas to match his own Methodist upbringing, "...but I got over it a couple of years ago." Oh, good! How did you do that?
I asked him because I was concerned for him being alone as a young boy, stranded in the middle of nowhere with two adults who may or may not physically abuse him while he quickly outgrew them: "One night I just couldn't take it anymore! I just stood in front of them like this," and he planted himself squarely in front of the tallest girl, "and I said to her: 'OK, evil doll. Do whatever you're gonna do. If you wanna kill me, go ahead. Just do it already!'" He'd been taking self-defense lessons on the suggestion of me and my older brothers, because we knew his bratty ass would get beat up on the very first day of school. He liked to brag about money back then, and how much of it his parents had. Wouldn't go over so well with the Mexican kids of teenage sharecroppers, and unlike them, we didn't want him to actually die, just grow up.
Good answer! Me and my boyfriend smiled at each other. He might just survive childhood alive after all! My dad liked to take people into the desert with horses that may or may not hurt them really bad, like the one that almost took off my sister-in-law's head when it suddenly sprang into a bolt towards the barn. She barely made the duck before the barn roof would have chopped off her head. He also strung us along a line of horses uphill in shifting sand, his wife putting an end to trips in the remote back-country because we told her that Patrick's horse almost tipped over on top of us. She went completely white back at the house, and cautioned my dad against his follies for the rest of our time there, a rare show of moxie for his mostly-chastened secretary.
After a heartbeat or two, Patrick turned towards me proudly, "And that's how I did it!" What happened then? "Absolutely nothing! I realized that those dolls couldn't kill me. They're not evil. They're just a bunch of stupid dolls," and like that, the cloud lifted on his nursed fears about old toys and their supposed powers over him in this life. There ain't nothin' we can't do against a bunch of dumb-looking, silly-ass girly toys that any kid outgrows real fast. They're dull! Well done, kiddo. I'll be seeing you under a full nighttime moon, with stars that still shine brightly in the sky, on a beach with no-name. Come on, boy. You know the spot. It's in your DNA, werewolf.
