This was only the third time in my life I’d felt sorry for my mother. The first time had been in Ceres when I thought of her walking up and down the streets trying to sell her cosmetics. The second was when I heard her crying and saw her sitting up late at night smoking cigarettes after I’d been caught shoplifting.
It turned out that Aunt Natalla, the great woman, was not the gracious, loving, and kind person I’d imagined she would be. In fact, she seemed aloof, rigid, egotistical, and unwilling (or perhaps unable) to be the least bit flexible or compassionate.
After my aunt’s visit, my mother became more critical of her and less excited about the Christmas box. For me, it was the loss of the fantasy aunt I carried in my head, the sweet, caring aunt who loved me from afar. I suspect it was an even greater loss for my mother—the loss of the loving older sister she adored and admired. Now she had to face the truth that Natalla—like Kay and even Forrest—was selfish, self-centered, and not so loving after all.
I had now met every one of my mother’s living relatives and I was extremely disappointed. Except for Uncle Frank, they all seemed arrogant, self-centered, selfish, and demanding. It was all about them. They didn’t seem to have the ability to put themselves in the other person’s shoes. They were all “experts” on every subject; they all thought they knew everything and their opinion was the only one that really mattered.
And they all seemed to think they were better than everyone else. I wondered where they’d gotten this. With the exception of Natalla, who had married into money, none of them had any money or any real accomplishments to boast of.
I now understood why they weren’t close to each other. The Depression may have torn them apart, but what kept them apart was their difficult personalities. I think Forrest tried the hardest to stay connected to his siblings. He certainly did with my mother and I, and I know he helped Frank out from time to time. But my aunt Natalla wiped her hands of Kay and Frank very early on because of the humiliation their alcoholism caused her among her elitist country club friends in Poplar Bluff.
All my life, I’d dreamed of having a family. But it sure wasn’t this one. Just like I had realized from having Kay live with us that having a bad father was worse than having no father at all, I came to the conclusion that it was better to have no family at all than to have a family like the one I had.
Most of all, after having met all of my mother’s siblings I came to understand my mother better. I gained a deeper understanding of why she was the way she was. She’d been raised around people who were constantly criticizing other people. People who always had an opinion about what someone else should do. She’d been raised by people who were arrogant and self-centered, who always thought they were better than everyone else. Realizing this helped me to judge my mother a little less harshly. Maybe she couldn’t help being the way she was.
chapter 28
One evening in the fall of my sophomore year, Helen Barnes, Cherie’s mother, called and asked to speak to my mother. I was worried at first, thinking that something had happened to Cherie, but as it turned out Helen was calling to invite my mother and me over to their house the following Saturday. Since Cherie and I were such good friends, she said, she thought that they should meet. My mother just happened to be in a good mood—she’d just drank a couple of beers—so she agreed.
That Saturday, Helen picked us up in her late-model beige Buick and drove us up to their house in Hillcrest. Though I’d been to their house many times, my mother had never seen it, so Helen proudly gave my mother a tour. You could tell she was proud of the house, and it was immaculate—which, I knew, was all thanks to Cherie’s hard work.
The Helen on display on this day was a different version from the angry, red-faced monster I’d known. This Helen was gracious and charming. She was not a beautiful woman but she had the air of someone who was. Her face was puffy (which I would later come to understand came from drinking too much) and her eyes were too small for her round face, but she was very sexy. She wore a blouse with a plunging neckline and a skin-tight pencil skirt with open-toed stilettos, which made her walk like Marilyn Monroe—very short steps, one foot strategically placed in front of the other, making her hips swing in an exaggerated way.
After the tour, Helen had Cherie provide us all with drinks— martinis for the grownups, 7Ups with maraschino cherries for Cherie and me—and we all settled into the living room. Helen sat down on the couch and crossed her legs in a provocative way. Then, with her hands crossed in a pose over her knees, she bent her head and looked up with seductive eyes and a pout on her lips. She leaned over, showing plenty of cleavage in the process, and took a very slow sip from her drink.
Helen caught me looking at her, and just for a second her eyes met mine. I could tell she was a smart cookie, and like me, she could read people. She scrutinized me carefully, as if trying figure out whether I was someone she could respect or someone she could walk all over. I
