Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So_ A Memoir - Mark Vonnegut [10]
Fifteen years later, at age fifty, my mother tried to get a master’s degree in social work. When she was told that she would have to repeat the first year of a two-year social work program if she wanted to continue, I explained to her that maybe she was being counseled out of the field.
Jane had an utter and complete lack of distance from people with problems. As long as it was all in a book and hypothetical she was okay, but as soon as she met flesh-and-blood people with real problems, she thought long and hard about what could be done and could never escape the idea that she, Jane, should move in with the family and straighten things out and maybe call up Ruby and her cousins to see if they could help.
Before the orphans came, my mother had a friend or two but was mostly having a hard time fitting in. My parents were over-educated midwestern liberals a long way from home with hopes and ambitions that would have perplexed and mystified their neighbors. Most Cape Codders had grown up on the Cape like their parents and their parents before them. They had quiet jobs and inherited a little money they didn’t talk about. The women probably didn’t like that Jane was pretty and our house was rundown. We were not into team sports. We were doing nothing for property values. It was not at all clear what my father did for a living. He was a tall, dark-eyed, gawky, hunched-over guy you wouldn’t just go up to and get to know or talk to about baseball.
The year before the orphans came, some neighbors down the street asked my mother if they could take me to a football game. It must have been at Barnstable High. I went and was fascinated but didn’t have even a little idea about what was going on.
Average looked good to me growing up.
There are a bunch of things my father said that I could, as long as I was very sure he wasn’t around, mimic with close to perfect tone.
“Do you want to be average?”
“Take your friends and shove them.”
“Not world-class.”
I took it as a compliment—maybe I was capable of being world-class if I worked a little harder. It just meant my father had high standards and wasn’t going to gush about every little thing his children did.
One of my sisters, defending a report card, said that C was average.
“Do you want to be average? Sandy’s average,” said my father, maligning our sweet, part sheepdog mongrel. This was my sister Nanny, who I thought for a while might have been average like me. My mother took me aside one day and told me that Nanny had taken some test at school and that she was very smart. I imagined her IQ vanishing up into the stratosphere. “Gee, that’s great,” I said.
I couldn’t help noticing that when you got A’s, grades didn’t matter.
Most of the children I take care of travel. Just about everyone goes to Disney or some version of Florida, or at least they go on long drives to see relatives.
We took one trip to New York; the buildings were tall and it snowed. And one trip to New Hampshire; the car stalled and almost fell off Mount Washington.
“Uncle K, are we going to die?” asked Tiger, who was nine years old.
My father was not average. He was a better writer than Hemingway or Fitzgerald, but no one knew it yet, which was why we didn’t have any money. The pressure to make money made it so he couldn’t write, so he had to try to sell cars, which he was very bad at. You couldn’t do just anything if you were a genius.
My mother wasn’t average. She was Phi Beta Kappa and had worked for the CIA. She knew my father was going to be famous and it was all going to be worth it. She knew about lots of things before they happened, like my cousins coming to live with us