12
The Fall of Nineteen Seventy-One had started out like it was going to
be a great year as my sister had graduated from College and was going
to be a teacher at a nearby town. This meant she would once again be
living in her bedroom and keeping hours that synced with mine and
thus my original mother figure would be back in my life full-time
along with the rest of my siblings. But in reality, having graduated
from High School the same time as my sister graduated College, my
eldest brother was given a set of luggage from dad as part of his
surprise disowning. This was postponed as mother intervened, but by
the turn of the year my eldest brother was gone.
Surprisingly enough, his room wasn't. His furniture and stereo
remained, just some of his personal belongings were gone. My not as
older brother had grown up idolizing him and in his absence decided
to move into his room. This lead to my not as older brother's room
being available and our mother encouraged me to move to it in kind.
My own bedroom had been next to the master bedroom so perhaps she
wanted more privacy or something. Unlike my not as older
brother, I did personalize his old room to make it mine with some
moon landing related large photos and painting the window trim.
I wasn't suppose to ask why my eldest brother had gone.
Before the end of second grade, my sister was gone.
I wasn't suppose to ask why my sister had gone.
A month or so later, mother moved into my sister's vacant room. And
this was my family by third grade. On the holidays I wasn't supposed
to notice that two siblings were missing. Once in a while alone with
mother she might mention that my eldest brother was living in a
different state and my sister had moved in with her boy friend after
she had been thrown out of the house...
A couple years earlier, after Pappy had built his apartment and moved
into the house from Spring to Fall, my mother had been assigned to
help take care of him on top of watching out for her own dad, Bumpa,
and everything else. The daily visits to Bumpa became less frequent
as she tried to make new time in her week to run the necessary
household errands. Soon after this, I was with mother on one of
these fewer trips to see Bumpa after she had not been able to reach
him by phone. When we arrived, he didn't answer the door and my
mother used her own key to let us in. She had grown very quiet and
ordered me to wait in the living room portion of the house with the
dining room between me and Bumpa's closed bedroom door. She knocked
and heard moaning, and she let herself in. After a bit, me looking
to the open bedroom door through the vertical slates of a dining room
chair like bars reminding me that I was to stay away, my mother came
out crying and went to the phone.
I honestly don't remember what happened next. I was later told that
Bumpa had a stroke in bed and it had left him partially paralyzed and
unable to speak, or get out of bed, or go to the one phone in the
house. In a bit of a whirl Bumpa was soon in a nursing home and we
were helping mom clean-out his house and ready it for sale.
As my mother had already become distant with my father from the
living arrangements with Pappy, she went to the store owner, Joe, for
comfort. That soon turned into an affair and they would sometimes
meet with their cars at a location near some woods, then take one of
their cars to a place where they could have some privacy. During one
of these trysts, in early Winter Nineteen Seventy One, my eldest
brother had spotted her car while driving by and assumed it had
broken down and been left there. When he got home he asked Dad about
it. Dad had my brother take him there and they waited until Joe
returned with our mother. That's
how they found out about the affair.
While I had started second grade joining the grocery store owner's
son for the morning bus stop, mother stopped working at the store and
started taking me straight to school and dropping me off. She found
a new job as a motel cleaning lady, a type of job she had during her
teenage years. I was no longer joining Joe's son in the morning
because if my mother stopped there, it might be thought she was doing
so to see Joe. While I had enjoyed a few play dates with the owner's
son at the start of second grade, I was no longer allowed to go to
his home or him to visit mine.
My eldest brother had been told by our father to keep the news of the
affair from the rest of us. Despite this shared secret, or perhaps
because of it, my eldest brother was soon gone and living on his own.
Or perhaps his unintentionally outing my mother's affair had
ended her support for his not being tossed out of the house.
Suddenly, mom and dad were joined at the hip and would do things
together that I had never remembered them doing. Going out to eat
while the rest of the siblings stayed home. Going to a movie, this
time with me in tow. Going on a vacation trip to Florida, with me in
tow again. It was my first time flying, and our first chance to see
the completed Disney World and take some of its many rides. In part,
this trip was so my father could meet-up with my snow birding
paternal grandfather, Pappy, and the two would drive back to New
England while mother and I returned by plane. It was soon after this
trip that my sister was disowned and told to move out of the house.
Originally, dad had told her that she was to move out of the house if
she didn't go to College but this soft peddling had back fired as she
did, then, go to College and graduate. He made sure not to make that
mistake when it came to my eldest brother thus providing him luggage
to move out with upon graduation of High School, and rectified his
mistake with my sister once he was back from the Florida trip. My
sister, incensed as she had done College as he had said, retaliated
by pointing out that mother was still having an affair with the
grocery store owner, just now with the convenience of her working
at a motel. With this news, the brief period of mom and dad
being tied at the hip ended with them now living in separate
bedrooms. My mother resumed her original job at the grocery store
and dad invited Pappy to stay at the house year round and no longer
snow bird. This stalemate remained for the next three years.
It was a little Cold War at home that I was blissfully unaware of, at
first.
The odd thing about my father disowning my siblings, as I learned
many years later in life, was that Pappy had disowned my father in
his own teenaged years. It was an emotional confrontation and, as my
mother told me, it ended with my father pushing Pappy through the
plate glass window of their then Massachusetts home. I don't know
how or when they reconciled later in life, but as for the emotional
trauma of being disowned, my father had decided to pay it
forward...
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