Thy Neighbor

by Norah Vincent

  Still, I’m thinking she must have been pretty well three sheets to the wind when she said those things, which wasn’t that often, because midday, most of the time, when she was probably just mildly buzzed and playful, she rarely had a rude word to say about anybody. She was basically a good person, if a bit caustic on the delivery when you touched a sore spot. And before the drinking got really out of hand, she was a good mom, too.

  A mom who even made breakfast.

  Weird breakfast. But breakfast nonetheless.

  Other kids got Cheerios and Count Chocula on weekday mornings, or at the very least oatmeal with milk and honey. I got frozen fish sticks and canned lentil soup.

  I wasn’t allowed to eat sugar during the week. Not even after school or after dinner. Only on the weekends and on vacation. So brekkie in the Walsh house was always a savory affair, and the only desserts I ever got, as Mom was so fond of saying, were just ones.

  If I’d known at the time that in a few more years I’d be getting no breakfast at all, except what I could forage out of the pantry, I probably would have appreciated the hot meals a lot more, even if they were any kid’s nightmare menu for supper, let alone breakfast.

  But it’s hard to have that kind of perspective when you spend the occasional sleepover at various pals’ houses and in the morning you get Mrs. Sappy Sunshine serving you hand-squeezed orange juice and blueberry waffles shaped like stars and crescent moons.

  The comparison was not favorable.

  Except on rare Saturdays or holidays, when we all slept late and with Dad’s help Mom managed to fork over something resembling pancakes, the closest Mom came to traditional breakfast was eggs, invariably scrambled into dry gray balls. Other times I got bean with bacon or cream of tomato soup, which was miles better than lentil, but still.

  Breakfast trauma aside, I never really resented Mom’s refusal to play homemaker. She was a highly educated woman who didn’t take tips from women’s magazines. She didn’t need the guidance of other women, or the culture, which, as she pointed out, was just a bunch of C-students with dicks sitting around a conference table trying to sell you crap you didn’t need, or trying to make you feel inferior if you balked.

  Mom was impervious to criticism in this regard. Most regards, actually, but this one in particular. You couldn’t make her feel inadequate as a woman or a mother. It was impossible, because her logic was airtight.

  To the woman charge she’d say:

  “Last time I checked, I had a vagina. QED.”

  And to the mother charge she’d say something equally cunty but hilarious, like:

  “Motherhood? What is this ‘hood’ business? I whelped the bugger. Trust me on this one. I was there.”

  Where it counted emotionally, she was there, too, or, as I’ve said, she put on one hell of a performance of being there. And when you’re a kid and you’re in the presence of the Sarah Bernhardt of the fucking doll’s house, you don’t know the difference.

  Trust me on this one. I was there.

  Or don’t trust me, and tell me that you would have known better, when even victims of cult abuse love their captors as moms and dads. And why? Because this “hood” business is actually powerful brainwashing, and damned near impossible to resist.

  It sounds confusing because it is. Nobody’s love for a parent is simple, and usually it’s made up of numerous, opposing points of view, none of which on its own gives a true picture, but which together are more than the sum of their shards.

  Contrary things can be true of a person at the same time, and usually are. This was no less true of my mom than my dad. That’s just how personality works. It’s fickle and abstruse and kaleidoscopic, and trying to order it predictably into something called character is just an exercise in futility and gross oversimplification.

  Like mistaking a movie for the real thing, or—hey, now here’s a useful simile—like taking a ghost for a real person.

  All this—my mother, my father, our family—doesn’t need to make sense. It can’t. I’ve learned that much after thirteen years of chewing on it. When I see my parents, especially through the warped lens of memory, and describe what I see, I’m just gilding an illusion. That’s all. And that’s okay now.

  That much is okay.

  Though okay in this sense only: this is the familiar pain of the disease that I know is killing me, and I take comfort in the fact that someday it will end.

  Meanwhile, the memories are coming faster, though still piecemeal and incomplete. They roll in with the odors like storm clouds from the sea.

  Now I am smelling frankincense, and the decomposing pages of old hymnals, and the dank of the old cathedrals we visited together in France. And then there is the carpet again in the upstairs hall of this very house when it was new, and the wallpaper when it was new, too, and I am thinking of Mom teaching me to pray.

  I am probably seven or eight, right around the time of my First Communion, and we are both on our knees in the widest part of the hall, where it bends the corner between my room and the guest bath. A crucifix is on the wall above us, a simple dark walnut cross with a yellowed ivory Christ carved in fine detail. It once belonged to my grandmother, who gave it as a blessing for the house when my parents bought it.

  Time seems still there in the hallway, with the overhead light falling down on us and through the opened doorways of the darkened rooms, and the two of us are almost touching, head to head, like twins in the womb, bowed, kneeling close, our hands folded in front of us. And now I can hear Mom speaking, softly, instructing.

  “The most important thing to understand about prayer, Nick, is that it is not a wish list. The purpose is not to speak but to listen, and if you ask for anything, ask only for the courage to face with compassion, fortitude, humility, and patience everything that God asks of you.”

  “But what if I can’t?” I ask, weakly.

  “Then you must do the best you can. That is all that anyone can ask.”

  “Even God?”

  “Yes, even God can ask only that much.”

  “But what if I fail?”

  “You can never fail to do your best. You can only stop trying.”

  “And what happens if you stop trying?”

  “You must never do that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it is the gravest of sins.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it is at the root of all the others.”

  “Worse than anything?”

  “Yes.”

  “Worse than murder?”

  “It is murder. It is the murder of your own soul.”

  I told you she talked a good game. She, who I’m pretty certain didn’t believe in the soul or, let’s say, had serious doubts about it, because she knew she didn’t have an identity.

  There she was, dressing it up nicely, the whistling void herself, whistling “Dixie.” Or was it “Nearer, My God, to Thee”?

  What’s the difference, when she had whiskey on her breath?

  Wait.

  Did she?

  Conveniently enough, I don’t remember.

  * * *

  What happens if you stop trying?

  She never said.

  But she knew, just as I know. She knew because she was in it, or on the verge of it even then.

  It being what?

  Well, so many things, really.

  First, despair.

  There is her gravest of sins. The one at the root of all the others.

  Then drinking.

  For what?

  To assuage the despair? Indulge it? Make it feel good?

  Sounds right.

  Then, of course, drinking to excess.

  And why? Why ever?

  Because you can’t help it anymore, or because your wi
ll is a flaccid rag by then.

  No question there.

  And finally?

  Drinking to death.

  Yes. The familiar thing.

  Except not quite the way it usually happens.

  Not the way it happened to my aunt, for example, Mom’s sister, who died before I was born. Drowned in her own vomit.

  Or the way it happened to my grandmother. Mom’s mom. Classic thing. Her liver tuned to gristle, she turned the color of a golden raisin, and expired. Game over.

  But Mom?

  She did it her own finagled way, maybe.

  You’ve heard of suicide by cop.

  Was this suicide by husband?

  Her blood alcohol content was absurd, and so was his. That much the coroner could say. Plus, of course, the wounds to the head. Two each. Point-blank range. Hers between the eyes and out the back. His under the chin and out the top.

  Oh, and her liver looked like—well, he was too discreet to say what it looked like. I believe the word he used was “necrotic.”

  Whereas Dad’s was nothing of the kind. Just the usual wear and tear for a social drinker of his age. Being drunk was rare for him. Very rare. Even I knew that.

  But being that drunk. Never.

  So what gives, Daddy-O? Mamacita?

  Do tell.

  8

  I’m awake.

  Again.

  Fuck.

  Very old people must think that every morning. Or the terminally ill.

  Wake up, and the first thought they have is one of two things.

  Either it’s, “I’m awake. Again. Yep. Still alive. Sigh. Fuck.”

  Or it’s, “Ahh. Life. Yet another day. Thank you.”

  * * *

  Thank you?

  What is that bullshit, anyway?

  The guy on Dateline who’s got five tubes in his face, is in excruciating pain every waking moment, and can only move the pinky on his left foot, but with that pinky he’s dictated his memoir, Ordeal Is Just a Friend You Haven’t Met Yet, a work of “trenchant beauty and majestic courage that gives a whole new meaning and dignity to the word ‘survivor.’”

  Jesus. Give me Jack Kevorkian any day of the week.

  Give me a little genuine grief.

  And you can stick a stake through the heart of the human spirit.

  Mixed metaphor notwithstanding.

  * * *

  Strangely, Monica is here. Still asleep. Right here with me on the couch.

  She’s never done that before.

  She’s never wanted to, but even if she had, I wouldn’t have let her.

  Now, somehow, we’ve both let it happen, and I can’t decide whether it’s a good or a bad sign.

  God, she is so beautiful in her sleep. Like an infant, the way she breathes.

  She’s fully clothed. Even her shoes. So I’m thinking she was on her way out and changed her mind, and I was too drunk to notice.

  I remember very little of last night.

  I know that Dave and I started at the Swan. The last thing I remember clearly is Dorris Katz sidling up to Dave, all familiar like, the way you kinda presume you can when someone’s had his feet in your sheets and his balls in your mouth not twenty-four hours before. But Dave, cretinous scumbag that he is, tried for my benefit to pretend that the two of them weren’t on bumping terms and never had been. I knew otherwise, of course, but neither Dave nor Dorris knew that.

  Still, it would have been obvious to anyone what was between them. Inexplicably, Dave seemed to think I viewed him as a man of discriminating taste, or an expert dissembler, whereas Dorris must have thought that one more humiliation among so many wasn’t worth a fight.

  We stood there awkwardly, the three of us, with pained smiles on our faces, playing our assigned roles badly: I oblivious (read: annoyed), Dave haughty (plainly guilty), and Dorris beaten (gulping to forget).

  Following Dorris’s lead, I finished my three fingers of Jameson and ordered another.

  And therewith memory scarpered.

  Good dog.

  And with it went the vision of Dorris and Dave, as well as whatever meet-up I had with Monica.

  She must have driven us home in my car—she doesn’t have one—or she’s even braver than I thought. Not that I haven’t driven blotto many, many times and made it home, and not that Monica isn’t suicidal. It’s just that she isn’t passively suicidal. If she does off herself someday, she won’t do it riding shotgun with a blind drunk. She’ll take pills, put her head in the oven, and kiss a pistol, just to be good and goddamned sure. There’ll be no risks or ifs about it, and certainly not those of a bumper car with a sot at the wheel.

  I wriggled my way out from beside Monica without waking her, another miracle—she must have partaken last night as well. This, too, is something she never does. She likes her pain straight up and clear. It’s what she runs on, which, I guess, is why she’s such a wastoid this morning. But hey, good for her. Let her rest. She’s earned it. And I like being able to watch her without her knowing it.

  I’ve been doing all the usual online trolling for distraction. CNN, ESPN, weather, Facebook.

  I hardly ever post anything on Facebook, but my virtual friends do, most of whom are regulars at the Swan, so it’s a way for me to find out what I did the night before and, in some cases, what I need to undo the afternoon after.

  None of these people, except Dave, is an actual friend. I don’t have any of those. They’re just people I habitually molest or abuse while bored and drunk, and who are stunted or desperate enough to take that for real contact, as if now I’d catsit for them or be a groomsman at their wedding.

  I ignore most of their postings, unless there’s potentially inconvenient damage to be undone—a quick pokey poke in the restroom, say, that was taken for more than it meant—or marginally meaningful records to be set straight—e.g., “No, I emphatically did not flush the contents of your wallet down the toilet while making a point about Obama’s tax policies.”

  Usually around this time of day, while I’m having my Irish coffee (hair of the dog doing double duty), I’ll head down to the basement and check my monitors. They’re in a small dead-bolted room in the back that could easily pass for a storage area if anyone asked, but no one has. Neither Dave nor Monica, the only two people who are ever here, has ever had any reason to go into the basement, and when one of them is here, as Monica is now, I don’t go down there, either.

  Lately I’ve been going days without the urge to do even a quick check on Dorris or Dave or especially the Grubers, who are a relatively new and often wildly diverting addition to the network.

  The Grubers live next door to me, to my right if I’m standing in my front door. No one is on my left, because I’m on a corner. The Grubenschwein are my nearest neighbors, and practically spiable without equipment, which is why I haven’t had actual cameras in there for so long. The lots here are small relative to the size of the houses that are on them. Side window to side window is only a matter of forty feet.

  The property line bisects an apple tree, which we both ignore, I by letting the fruit rot brown and stanky on the ground, he by letting his two Rottweilers shit in my yard—no doubt a retaliation of sorts for the compost.

  And by “he” I mean, of course, Edward Gruber the paterfamilias Gargantua, a man of such size and authority and stentorian voice that when he calls his three teenage sons in for dinner on a summer evening he sounds like a subwoofer.

  His voice and physique suit his personality exactly. Underneath the paunch and distributed plumpness of middle age, Herr Gruber has the musculature of a Clydesdale and the temperament of a wild boar. With his devil dogs, his dinner plate pecs, and his permanent scowl, he’s a bit of a cartoon, to be sure, but he can back up the display, and often has, at the slightest provocation. />
  This is another reason why I haven’t needed hidden cameras to know all that needs knowing about the Grubers. They, especially Edward, do it all out in the open, or a lot of it, such that you get the plot pretty well from a distance.

  I once saw him chase his youngest son, Eric, out the front door of their house, both of them at a full sprint, and tackle the kid on the lawn. In Gruber’s grip, the boy—he was probably eleven by then, and not small for his age—was like a rodeo calf, his back to the ground and all four appendages held together at a point above him by a white-knuckled clamp of pissed-off muscle and bone.

  From a standing position, Gruber lifted Eric thus, a good two feet off the ground, and bellowed his reprimand at a pitch that was so low it was practically infrasonic, like a speech that you’d feel in your chest and you’d have to lip-read to get the meaning of.

  When Gruber finished venting, he dropped Eric on his spine and kicked him in the gut, just—and this part you could hear—“to give you something to think about.”

  Eric vomited himself dry, then lay there on the grass for a good forty minutes before limping into the garage.

  From what I could tell, Gruber’s personal philosophy seemed to center around the idea that pain is the best mnemonic, and that a traumatized charge, whether human or canine, is an obedient one.

  He treated everyone the same way—badly: his dogs, his sons, his wife, even the UPS man, whom he once reduced to a whimpering heap with his thumb and index finger alone because, due to a computer glitch, the guy asked him to sign off twice on a delivery.

  Abuse outside the family didn’t happen often, but only because it didn’t need to. Gruber’s reputation spread and stuck. The few people who might have filed charges against him were wise enough not to because they knew what Gruber was capable of, so they chose instead to steer clear of him.

  It’s just not worth it. Which is the third and most important reason why I haven’t had cameras in that house until this past year. Rumor was, Gruber had crucified someone’s daughter’s pet rabbit after a scuffle in a bar. Total bullshit, but people believed it and a lot more besides. And given what I’d seen him do without cameras, I wasn’t slow to fall in line with the superstition.