Yes, growing up on the corner of Thomas and Sunrise had its sorrows, the lines preceding these among the darkest in my life. Enter alcohol, which at first I spurned from immobilizing emetophobia. Alcohol did not cause me trouble until I was twenty, after my brain injury. There’s chapters there, both clinical and metaphysical, surrounding my relationship to it, and how my relationship to it influenced my younger siblings. Still, life wasn’t all bad, all the time, and that’s the rub, as it always is. The word dysfunction suggests there is a normal function it deviates from. Friendly family feelings were dangerous. It makes me think of the soft pelt of the wolf, that would be comforting, if the wolf didn’t have the capacity to turn and wound with teeth and jaw. There was plenty to love in my siblings, even if I had to watch out for Mum. I stopped doing her dance when I left the house at 18, returning on occasion for laundry or hot meals, always leaving with the rueful thought, “Well, what did you expect?” when she would inevitably push my buttons. When I was the first to give a grandchild, I thought perhaps she would be more interested in me or her grandkid, and less self-absorbed. Not so. Still I stayed in orbit of the family as if to defy her unspoken wish that I go away and stay there.
Occasions were tolerable. My brother Matti lived on Staten Island for a time, having dropped out of college to become a mechanic and play bass in a working band. My two sisters and my mum and I took a chartered bus to go hang out in the city and take him to lunch for his birthday. I think I was about 31.
My younger sister Leena was largely pregnant so I ruthlessly interrupted her, incessantly peppering our conversation with accusations of having The Dick Obsession, which was what got her pregnant. "You like the peen. You LOVE the peen," I reiterated. She was a very good sport and was too distractingly pregnant to mind, and she put up with my obnoxiousness. Mum, about 60, was tired, as usual, so after walking several blocks and meeting up with my brother we went to a restaurant adjacent to some museum gallery. (Lumi remembers it as The Museum of American Illustration, I thought it might be the Cooper-Hewitt. We’re not sure.) It was a vast open restaurant space like you see in movies, and the sound carried. High ceilings, hard floors, and a hushed gallery atmosphere carried sounds of barware and dishes, the clink of silverware, and a polite susurration rising around us. We were seated toward the middle of the back of the room, one of several round tables on a raised platform.
Everyone got beers except Leena. “I’m ready to ask for a bag of pitocin,” she joked. Three sips of wine made Mum silly, my brother was already drunk from earlier. At this point we all still liked to be together because we all still liked to party. We put in our lunch order, and a server came back and plunked a glass bottle of ketchup in front of Leena, so now it looked like she was joining in the libations.
Oh god, ketchup. My kid, then age 6, ate ketchup on everything. I bought a new bottle every other week, so I was familiar with the trendy "ketchup is healthy" marketing. It had antioxidants! It was good for your heart! It had– lycopene!
I pulled up my stage voice from my diaphragm so the sound boomed, and held deadpan: "They knew to give you that because it's obvious you like the peen," Halfway through the sentence the room fell silent and everyone heard me say that.
"What?" Lumi asked.
"Well, the ketchup, of course," I said as if it were the most reasonable notion to be pondered. "It has lycopene. That's why it's for her.”
Lumi is much more witty than I am and caught it immediately. Peals of laughter rang out over the room.
"What the hell are you talking about?" My mum demanded, disgusted. “What? What do you mean?” Clearly she thought I'd crashed her party, but I was not going to let her have this. Her bewilderment was hilarious to me, and I felt power in holding her in humiliation for being outside the joke, my siblings laughing with me for getting away with it. The dick joke was funny, if tired. But it wasn't the dick joke. It was having to explain the dick joke to my mum in the middle of this elegant luncheon while Leena rolled her eyes and Lumi and Matti howled with laughter, and the entire restaurant looked on.
Between gasps I parsed the joke for Mum, and by the time she understood, I had tears rolling down my cheeks and it felt like I might choke and hyperventilate. My abs hurt. My face hurt. Leena was starting to bristle at being the butt of the joke so for her sake I didn't prolong it but the hilarity started afresh after lunch when we walked by an oversized Greek statue with an enormous organ. "Hey Leena, it's your favorite…”
I mentioned before that Leena is likely the one of us who is deepest into the spectrum. Her fits of rage as a toddler were typical displays of autistic neuro-dysregulation, intolerance for change in routine, and reactions to literal interpretation. She didn’t play with toys so much as she organized them into groups. For years her favorite thing to do was spin around on the backyard swing– for hours. It took her a long time to follow through on directions and she could not follow more than one at once. She was pretty and blonde though, conventionally intelligent and attractive, so she got lots of special attention at school. She also broke her ankle in first grade which kicked off mum’s Munchausen by Proxy. I wouldn’t trade places with her for any reason. We don’t talk much, perhaps twice a year. It’s for the best, for now.
“I still catch myself doing their dance, unfortunately. I have a $200.00 busted easel in the garage that demonstrates that.” —Fintan