As the Sibs has reminded me more than once, we have caller I.D. because we have a cousin to whom neither of us wishes ever to speak in this life. Or in another life, for that matter. Last night the phone rang and I took a brief look -- it was a time that the ILs like to call, so I expected to see their names -- and it said "Illinois." Now, once before, I was foolish enough to see this and think "Who do I know in Illinois?" and not knowing, answered the phone. DUH. I know one single human being in Illinois, it is my first cousin whom I shall call here Blanche (which was her mother's name), and I'm not interested.My father was the baby brother of two sisters, one sweet as pie, and one sharp and angry. No one got along with her; her mother famously would say when she came into the house "Here comes the storm." She married an angry man and when their first child was born, the first grandchild, she is said to have observed immediately "Oh, it's just a damn girl." Their second child three years later was the golden child, a boy, who actually grew up into a pleasant person. But his sister was also mean and angry since childhood. She was a chubby child, which was generally the norm in my father's family, but my sister, two months younger, was a skinny rail, and Aunt Blanche and Uncle Whoever would constantly -- and I remember this as a child -- yell at their daughter "You fat pig! Why aren't you skinny and pretty like cousin --?" This was when she was, I guess, eight or so, that I can remember.
So you would feel a certain sympathy for her, except the second the adults left us alone, she tried to kill my sister. I remember this pretty clearly, too; I would be terrified, crying, and my sister would be fighting her off, trying not to be punched or hit or smothered with a pillow. Loss of sympathy points there.
When I was nine, my father and this sister had a falling out and never spoke to each other again as long as they lived. (Actually she called once and asked him if he would come to her son's Bar Mitzvah and he said No and hung up, although he sent a nice gift.) Consequently, I had little to do with my cousins after that, although I visited my boy cousin once when he was in college -- Yale, he really was a golden child -- and I was in high school, and I later attended his wedding. There I saw his sister, who was very arrogant, although she seemed saddened by the loss of her relationship with us, her cousins. She was in her twenties at this point, and unlikely to attempt to kill any of us, but even so.
She's still a somewhat angry person, but her mother is gone now, and her father, remarried when he was nearly 90, has very little to do with her. Her brother avoids her like the plague. So why does she call us?
She tries it a few times a year, either me or the Sibs or both. She will call and start talking and not stop for hours. She is not interested in conversation; she only wants to talk and not listen. I have been polite in the past and let her go, and after a half hour have said "Well I have a doctor's appointment" or even once, I think "My kid is bleeding" but nothing cuts it with her. Here's what she talks about. Every conversation includes something about how terrible her parents were to her -- which they were, no question -- and didn't send her to college or anything, although her brother went to Yale. (He had a free ride, they didn't pay for that, either.) And how she's alone because ... well, she's alone, she's been married four times, I think, and has never had children. Her first husband, when she was 19 or so, was, I believe, a Greek sailor. She visited once with her second or third, who was Iranian or Iraqi, I believe, and we liked him very much, but he didn't last either for reasons we don't want to know. I believe she has recently married a Russian guy whom she told me about last year, but again, I'm not waiting to find out.
She talks about money. A lot. How she's worked for every penny she has -- I believe that, although I'm not sure what she does, possibly real estate -- and how she has nothing. She loves to talk about how hard her life is because she's on her own. Then once she said something about the economy being bad and how she had to sell one of the paintings in her art collection and she could only get a quarter of a million for it.
Dollars? DOLLARS? DOLLARS?
So now we get to the real reason for her phone calls. What she really wants us to know is that poor little she, whom her parents abused emotionally and physically -- I'm not arguing that -- and who had to make it all on her own, has more money than everyone else put together and she wants to tell us about it intimate detail. Once again, big loss of sympathy points here. Ray Romano says that when his wife complains that he's away at work too much, he tells her to go cry on a big bag of money. I know what he means.
My father, Jack, was probably the best judge of character I have ever known. He also had a real soft spot for children whose parents were not especially close to them. My dear OldFriend, of whom I sometimes speak, had a real shrew for a mother, and Jack was incredibly fond of her. In two other families that we were close to, fathers were not so good to their sons, in one case constantly calling the boy a sissy, and in the other, just being too involved in himself and his own creature comforts to spend anytime with the kid. My father loved all these children, and spent time with them, even if it was just talking. It was his nature to pay extra attention to children who needed it. All except this particular cousin. And it wasn't just because he didn't like her mother, because he had a nice relationship with the kid's brother.
Anyway, now this is a crazy long entry. Clearly, I do have some sympathy for her, otherwise I wouldn't feel so guilty. But I'm still not picking up the phone.
