I don’t remember my mother working until I was older, though I vaguely recall my parents owning a record store when I was very young. Also, when I was little, my father did some extermination work for my mom’s dad, who owned an extermination business.
During my teens, both parents traveled the state selling eyeglass frames to optometrists. They even traveled a bit in New Hampshire and Vermont.
In my early twenties, before they moved down to Florida, they owned a jewelry store in a mall. It was actually one of those carts set up in the center of the walkway between the rows of stores.
The pets we had growing up consisted of poodles, birds, and some rodents. I had gerbils and guinea pigs when I was older. We also had a rabbit for a while during my later childhood, as well as some hermit crabs.
The only thing I really remember my mother telling me about sex and boys was basically not to do anything more than kiss on the first date and to make sure the man I married was Jewish.
“But what if I fall in love with someone who isn’t Jewish?” I once asked her.
“You don’t let it happen,” she said.
As I grew older, I realized how silly that was. Like we can control who we’re attracted to or who we fall in love with any more than we can control our preferences for colors or flavors? Should it even matter who we fall in love with as long as we’re happy?
But I always preferred women over men, at least for the most part. So later on in life, when I was twenty-four, openly bi, and visiting my parents in Florida, my father told me not to tell anyone about my sexuality.
“Why?” I asked him. “Should I be ashamed of it? Because if someone I told had an issue with it, I wouldn’t want them in my life anyway.”
During my preteen years, I was often left at my aunt and uncle’s house with their two daughters, which wasn’t usually much fun. June was a bundle of nerves, and Ronnie, my mother’s brother, was a mean bully. This was probably why June was usually wound up and divorced him later on.
Cousins Lori and Lisa could sometimes be fun to hang out with, but sometimes they could be little terrors. Lori, who was a year older than me, liked to boss me around. I was closer to Lisa, who was a year younger.
For reasons still unknown to me, my uncle always seemed to harbor animosity towards me. I haven’t seen any of them since I was around twenty years old, and I can’t say I miss them.
Ronnie was definitely the worst, shoving me around when I didn’t move fast enough for his liking when we’d go out somewhere, and just being a bully in general. My sister Tammy did her own bullying too, and once bloodied my lip right in front of him. He just sat there staring at us dumbly, as if it was perfectly normal behavior.
I had mixed emotions about leaving Ronnie and June’s place when I stayed with them. While I looked forward to returning to my own bed and toys, I dreaded facing my mother’s wrath, which could be quite nerve-wracking, even scary. It was worse when Tammy was with me because I knew she would tell my mother all sorts of horrible things I supposedly said and did, most of which she made up. But Tammy was the oldest, and that meant she was the most believable, so I would certainly be punished if she decided to tell on me, whether the stories were true or not.
When I was around ten, the visits to their house stopped. I’m not sure why. Maybe Ronnie and June were tired of having me there, or maybe my parents were fighting with them. I know they had their fights with them, just like they did with my father’s brother and his wife. Someone was always fighting with someone in my family. Mom or Dad would beat up on Larry, who beat up on Tammy, who beat up on me. It was crazy, and I often wondered if there’d ever come a day when someone was killed.
The more I think about it as I write this, the more I believe they did have a falling out, and it was probably over an injury I received in the town’s high school gym. This seems to be around the time the visits stopped. During the summer when I was around ten, I spent most of the summer at their house, and Lori, Lisa, and I would ride our bikes to the high school for daytime activities. There were sports, crafts, swimming, etc. It was actually kind of fun.
I was a bit of a gymnast in those days, though I certainly preferred ice skating and roller skating. One day in the gym, I was doing a series of handsprings over the vault. On one particular handspring, I veered toward the side once my hands hit the vault and my feet were directly overhead. I ended up badly spraining my pinky finger. At first, I thought it was broken because of how swollen it was.
My less-than-sympathetic uncle did nothing about it, and this could very well have been why they stopped talking. When I later joined my parents at our summer cottage at the beach, Mom wasn’t too happy about it at all. She took me to a clinic right away, and they put a splint on my finger. So yeah, it probably was broken.
I always felt more uncomfortable when Lori and Lisa would come to stay with us versus when I stayed with them. There may have been Ronnie to deal with at their place, but at my place, there was my mother, who would often compare me to them (not in a good way) and give me the “Why can’t you be more like them?” spiel, making me feel like I wasn’t good enough as I was. It seemed I could never measure up to Lori and Lisa, no matter what I did.
My other uncle, Martin, who people called Marty, wasn’t much better. He was a mean bully too, and I doubt he’d have hesitated to kill me one day when I pissed him off by slamming the door in his face if I hadn’t frozen in fear.
“Open this door!” he demanded when I shut it on him when he came over looking for my parents, who weren’t home at the time. This was because of the way he and his wife treated me when I stayed with them at the campgrounds they camped at which I’ll get to later. So I opened the door and let him scream at me. Even his mother was scared. As I grew older, my fear turned to anger, so it’s lucky for both of us that I simply stood there and took his shit. Had I been like I am now, I’d have either gone to jail for kicking his ass, or he’d have gone to jail for kicking mine. I hope he would have anyway!
Even my father had an underlying macho stance despite being usually mellow, and I did see him slap my mother once when I was around eight. This memory has haunted me throughout the years. It’s even more disturbing to know that had my mother resisted after being slapped, he’d have probably beaten her right there in front of me, never caring how it might have traumatized me. After he slapped her, my mother tried to justify his behavior in a private one-on-one, assuring me it was only because of his heart issues. I was just a kid back then and believed anything I was told. However, as an adult, I know that this was a poor excuse for his actions and that if my mother had had any self-respect, she wouldn’t have made such lame excuses for him. Lots of people have health problems like he did, yet they don’t go around slapping their wives and traumatizing their children.
Marty’s wife, Ruth, could be sweet at times, but she was the phoniest person I ever met! She had a big mouth and loved to gossip, but so did the whole family. They had two kids, Polly and Philip though I didn’t see them very often.
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