2000-07-14 - 21:47:20

Today I conclude the story of my sister, Janis.

Sometime after the events I talked about yesterday, Janis did a very intelligent thing: she got the hell out of my parents' house. After some meandering, she wound up settling in one of the large Mid-Atlantic cities on the East Coast.

Occasionally she would come back to Frown Town to visit, and stay in her old room.

One time when she came home for such a visit she brought back one of her housemates with her, a rather short, very skinny, very nervous, very gay black guy whose name escapes me. He seemed nice enough, but I was very amused watching my father's reactions to him.

I could almost see the thoughts moving behind his twitching face: "He's BLACK... but at least he is a GUY... but he's BLACK... but at least he is a GUY..." and so on.

When we were alone he asked if I thought Janis was going out with the skinny housemate. I laughed and said that I really, really doubted it. My father's face fell. He was really in denial. It was practically his mailing address.

On the other hand, my mother was more direct in her dislike of Janis' lifestyle. She talked to me while she was rewriting her will. She set up a trust fund with the money of her estate that would pay income to Dad after she died. After Dad died the money would then be split up between us three kids. EXCEPT, that Janis would not get her share until she married and had a child.

My mother informed me of this last clause with an unpleasant smile on her face. I told her that I thought it was a bad idea, and rather unkind to boot. She curtly informed me that it was her money and she could do what she wanted with it. Sending a little message of love from beyond the grave, so to speak.

In her new home city Janis met a woman named Tia, and the two of them moved in together. They had a house full of animals: cats, rabbits, ferrets, you name it.

Janis and I were talking again, but not that much. Not living in Frown Town mellowed her out substantially. Occasionally I talked to Tia when I called Janis, and she sounded like a nice person, if a little loud.

My brother Harry and I would ruefully compare our love lives to Janis'. She was the only one of the three of us with any sort of a stable homelife. Both Harry and I were well past thirty and unmarried, with few immediate prospects for the future. Our own parents' marriage was so unhappy, that neither one of us really relished the prospect of yoking ourselves to another human being like that.

Janis, for all her problems, seemed to have escaped the family curse. At least so I thought.

Harry was still nursing a grudge for Janis, though. One time I remember him telling me that he was at a friends' house, and the friend introduced Harry to his very pretty and girlish younger sister. With much bitterness, Harry realized that he would never want to bring any of his friends back to the family home and introduce them to Janis.

I had mixed feelings about this story. I felt sorry for Harry, and of course I sympathized: NONE of us liked bringing our friends into our unhappy home life. Like I said, a pall of shame hung over the place. But on the other hand, he was being a jerk. It was not Janis' job to be a "cute little sister" for him to introduce to his friends.

Janis doesn't have much use for him, either.

In the hellish time after Mom died, Harry helped me out quite a bit with family matters, but Janis did not. On the other hand, I did not expect her to. I knew she was utterly irresponsible. However she did stay out of my way while I got things in order, and that made life easier.

After our father was put in a nursing home, it was my very unpleasant task to empty out the family house of a lifetime's worth of garbage. That, in and of itself, would be the subject for a full journal entry. It was practically a soul-crushing experience.

During this time I started to understand that a lot of the problems I had in relating to other people and even to myself, had their roots in my early life at home, and not in the things that happened later, as I assumed previously. I was going through some heavy stuff.

I called both Harry and Janis and talked to them about our childhoods, seeing if I was remembering things clearly. Like I said, my memory is hard to trust.

The phone call I had on this subject with Janis was a very revelatory one, and not in a nice way either.

Because Janis spent so much time at home, I assumed that she and Mom got along well, but she informed me that this was definitely not the case. She and Mom fought constantly. Mom was constantly nagging her about her appearance, her lack of friends and social skills, her lack of ambition, and so on.

It is true, Janis looked like a slob, had almost no social graces and no ambition or self-discipline. However, the way to teach a child these valuable skills is to show them and tell them and help them, not nag and hector them about it. Without going into detail, our mother herself was not a good role model in any of these things, so by nagging Janis, Mom was definitely sending her mixed messages.

However, what Janis had to say about our father shook me up badly.

When I told Janis that Dad seemed mostly senile these days, she snorted and said: "So what? I ALWAYS thought he was crazy!"

I cautiously asked her what she meant by that, and she told me a whole bunch of things that I hadn't known previously.

Dad acted very weird around her.

Dad liked to wear comfortable clothes around the house, VERY comfortable clothes. He was constantly wearing pajamas that were so threadbare that they hid little. Literally, his ass was hanging out. I had forgotten all about that. I thought Dad was just being eccentric, but Janis found it more than a little disturbing when he paraded around like that in front of her.

When Janis was in her early teens, Dad seemed to be constantly walking in on her when she was taking a bath. She would cower behind a shower curtain while he was trying to have some inane conversation with her. Creepy, but not as creepy as the following.

On a couple of occasions, late at night, he would climb into bed with her. He would hold her close, and call her "Mommy."

Janis made it very clear that he never sexually molested her, but still... it was not the way a father should act toward his young daughter.

Hearing of all this horrified me. It had a bad effect on me.

It dawned on me that our father was an utterly lost soul. He was running and hiding from himself so hard that he had actually succeeded in losing himself. A pitiful figure.

And then there was Janis. No wonder she was so bad at handling life's problems. No adult support from anyone, no decent role models of any sort. It was a wonder she turned out as good as she did. After all, she was enjoying a happy life with Tia...

About a year ago, I came home one day to find a message from Janis on my answering machine. She wanted me to call her, and gave a phone number I was unfamiliar with. She sounded like she had been crying.

When I called her back, I heard a very unhappy story.

Tia had thrown her out of the house. She was staying with friends until she could find a place of her own. Talking with her, she painted a very different picture of her homelife than the one I'd naively pictured. Tia was very overbearing and abusive, much worse than Mom ever was to her. It seemed that Tia only kept Janis around for the money she had.

The three of us kids each got a pretty large lump sum from our grandparents' trust fund. I used a part of mine to buy this house I am in now, the rest I invested for my retirement. Harry did something similar.

Janis' share of this money was now all but gone, eaten up by Tia, who booted Janis when the cash finally ran out.

She wanted me to hold any mail or checks for her until she could get a new address. I said, no problem.

So, Janis had not escaped the family curse after all.

When that large lump sum was handed out years before, Harry said to me that he wondered if Janis could handle that much sudden money. I said I thought she could. Sadly, he was right and I was wrong.

Janis got re-established in a new apartment, in a not-so-great part of town. According to a letter she sent me recently, she is working in a sandwich shop. Not exactly an executive position.

And yet, she still managed to send me a box of stuff for my birthday.

********

Right now, I am working on a modest project. I am trying to rebuild a broken bridge.

Because our mother is dead and our father is in a nursing home, I am, more or less, the head of what is left of our family. I am in charge of what family finances there are left.

I get along fairly well with Harry and Janis now, even though they still don't talk to each other. I think they both resented the fact that I got more attention as we were growing up, but now they see that being eldest has its costs, too. Both of them were spared dealing with the family house, and the nursing home and all that crap. I can tell that they appreciate this.

These days when I talk to Harry, I always make a point of saying "Janis says hello," even though that really isn't the case. I do the same thing when I talk to Janis. At first they both were skeptical and suspicious, but then, guardedly, they began return the greetings.

And now it looks like things are moving another step forward. It sounds like Janis is planning on sending Harry a box of stuff for his birthday, which is still a couple months away.

My little sister...