Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [61]
I took care of her Jack Russell, Emma, one weekend when she was in the hospital for one of her ailments. (She had surgery on both hands for carpal tunnel syndrome, which she believed she got from horseback riding; she had sciatica, a shooting pain that began at the base of her spine and ran down both legs—a horrific pain that she said was relieved best by a drink; and something called spinal stenosis. She always had a headache and could take four aspirin without water, crunching them up in her teeth like they were pistachios; she had high blood pressure; she had shingles; she had an ulcer that Eleanor claims is when Mom’s interest in salt, coffee and spicy foods really took off. As for her beautiful blue eyes, she never let you forget one had a scratched cornea and one had a detached retina and she was legally blind. She also had “obtuse-angle” glaucoma, but she didn’t need to smoke pot for it or anything, just to mention it whenever there was a break in the conversation. She was deaf in her right ear, she had depression, obviously, and took antidepressants.) Out on a walk, Emma pooped out a bunch of True Blue cigarette filters. When I told my mother about this, she just said, “Oh, that Emma. She just gets into everything.” Mom wouldn’t acknowledge the dirty, depressing mess in her apartment, her cigarette-pooping dog or her drinking. Her dog walker talked to my mom and took Emma home with him for good one day. I think we all wished he could have taken Mom home with him, too.
Jed’s family was normal compared with Mom and Dad. Then again, most people were normal compared with Mom and Dad.
Jed was also sober, which was adorable and exotic.
“He’s a junkie,” I proudly described my new boyfriend to my friends.
“Was a junkie. He’s been sober for a year. He quit dope at the Chelsea Hotel, where he was living.” I’d really never known anyone who did drugs. When I told my parents about him, they just couldn’t put it all together.
“His parents live on Fifth and Ninety-third and he was a junkie, you say? That can’t be right,” my mother said.
“He’s sober now,” I said, but they had no idea what that meant. “We’re all sober, honey, until we start drinking” was their understanding of it. I barely knew what it meant myself, because my mom had never gotten any sober time outside of a rehab.
Mom loved to emphasize the fact that he was a junkie, I suppose, because it made her feel better about her own drinking. Drugs were really bad, she implied, as she sat in her crummy West Village place, chain-smoking and drunk most of the time now. At this point she was forbidden to drink at any family events—no one would be around her if she was drinking—so she began transporting vodka in her big bottle of contact lens solution, which Dad squirted in his eye one day: “God damn it, Doris, what the hell is in here?” But drugs? “We don’t do drugs, sweet pea. We’re from Ladue.”
Jed’s sobriety never even registered with my dad. My dad registered Jew even though Jed was about a quarter Jewish, Jewish-ish, and had never practiced Judaism. They both liked Jed a lot, everyone liked him. But where my mom saw junkie my dad saw Jew and after giving me a book of poetry by Ezra Pound became concerned, chronically concerned, that Jed might consider having Pound’s work around an insult.
“I hope to hell I haven’t offended Jed with that book of Pound I gave you. Just love him up to World War Two, before he began the anti-Semitic radio addresses and all that. I’m not saying anything good about Pound after World War Two, but before the war, my God. Give it a try. Is the Pound going to be a problem for Jed?”
Jed, like many people, would have no idea that the poet Ezra Pound was the Mel Gibson of his day, nor would Jed even identify as a Jew.
“No, Dad. It’s fine.”
Jed and I were on a Somerset Maugham kick, working our way through everything he wrote, his short stories (Rain), his novels, Of Human Bondage and The Razor’s Edge. My father thought he was a total waste of time. “You might want to try Proust again, Jean-Joe. I know you struggled the first