I decided to take the high road even though I was bent out of shape that she forced me to have this little meeting. I was also quite frustrated and angry by her running verbal onslaught exercised to remind me that she was in charge. The unwavering deliberateness of what she was mouthing at me was cruel. The specificity and calm of her delivery made her commentary grotesque. Fortunately for me my mind tends to wander a bit and I have rapid cycling bipolar tendencies. So, one minute I'm furious and the next I'm off in la la land. I do this a lot in the face of trouble or confrontation.
'This isn't about you,'� she said, furrowing her brow. It looked like there was a long fuzzy caterpillar napping on the lower part of her forehead, but appeared to have rested there too long and had died. It seemed that it had been killed intentionally to create a proper adhesive base for an eyebrow pencil ' a bit Frida-esque but without the underlying beauty. Did she kill it on purpose, I wondered. 'It's about what she wanted. So just deal with it.'� Did she whack her forehead with a boot or did she have someone else do it? 'You get what I say you'll get. If you've got a problem with that then you can just kiss my ass.'� Did the caterpillar's insides ooze out slowly? Did they spurt out like an engorged tick does when it's stepped on?
I am prone to taking things very personally. Blowing little things hugely out of proportion is something I have done quite often, even from an early age. 'That decoder ring from the cereal box was mine. Mine! And you took it because you hate me. You hate me!'� Yes, I understood that there were larger and more significant fights to choose, but attacking the small things was what made me happiest. I know I looked petty arguing about a decoder ring, but at least I didn't look pathetic, which was how I felt. I made sure to space out my tantrums just far enough so that they wouldn't be able to see the real me. If they found me out then they would have won. I swore that I would never let that happen. My family always had easy work when it came to pushing my buttons so, in order to contain the rage I felt towards them I sought out these small things. Irritating things. I still do this, even today. I look for petty things to push at people with, although it's not intentional as it was growing up, just habit. It's as natural to me as scratching a mosquito bite ' and as easily scarring. I think that somewhere in my subconscious I am comforted with knowing that I don't have to worry whether people like me or not if I remain reclusive. People, like my family, don't understand this. This often ends with me being either unemployed or removed from someone's email send-to list. 'You all must really hate me.'� This, however, was different, and I knew that. It was about hate and power and a lifetime of bad blood.
'Can't you just unlock the door and let me get my things?'� I asked.
'No.'�
'How about you put a divider between my things and whomever else's things are in there?'�
'No.'�
'Well, what about letting me move my things out onto the lawn - this way you can lock things up and I can do what I need to do?'�
'No.'�
'Are you staying until I'm gone?'�
'Yes.'�
'So I can't even have five minutes at the house by myself to, you know, mourn a little?'�
'No.'�
'Three minutes?'�
'No.'�
'Can I at least pull out of the driveway after you to take a picture?'�
'No.'�
Legally she did have the authority to do this. She told me about a month ago on the phone that she wasn't so big of a bitch that she'd deny me of what was my moral right. I apologized for getting so mad at her. But now I understood the full context of the statement. She wasn't that big of a bitch. She was a bigger one.
After work on January fifth was the only time she had available to give me access to the garage at my mother's home. I thought she looked like a whore but her business card says that she's a human resources director for some development company.
She was dressed in her work clothes. They looked to be three sizes too small and it made me think about the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. It was his heart that was three sizes too small, though and I thought about how her heart seemed non-existent. They both are ugly, too. Irredeemably nasty things, regardless of whether 'Ya-Hoo-Door-Ray'� is sung by a circle of forgiving strangers or not. Both of them took things that weren't their rights to take. The Grinch took things delivered by an unseen hero named Santa Claus. Unknown things that were waited for eagerly as the Whos slept on Christmas Eve. The Whos would be sad upon waking Christmas morning not having any presents where the tree had been the night before. Sad, questioning whether or not they had been not good enough for Santa to bother with them on Christmas Eve. Mad even. But they had no connection with the promised gifts except anticipation. There was a future with these unknown things, but there was not a history.
She, on the other hand took the things that meant something to me; the large green cabinet from my mom's kitchen. She took important things that I had a lifetime history with. My mother's tea-kettle. She robbed me of the small yet significant things that shaped my past and helped me to become the person I am today. She stole things that belonged to me. The Grinch gave back the things that he stole. She didn't. Wouldn't.
The Grinch has nothing on her, I thought.
She wore lipstick the color of monkey shit and the rouge on her cheeks made her look as if she's been beaten. It warmed me to think about how slapping her a couple of times right now would make me feel. Knocking her senseless. A good single malt scotch going down on a cold and irritating day - or a plate of hot Indian food. Her hair was died black. The color reminded me of the pasty gray color of old car tires set out in the sun for too long. I wondered if she shined her hair with Armor-All on nights she went dancing with her husband. I remember seeing her dance with her husband a few years ago. She looked like a prop in a department store window. They were dancing the Merenge, a dance popular in South America and on par with the Cha Cha and the Salsa. Her husband whirled her around like a ninja sword, spinning this way and that. I thought it peculiar that neither of them looked at the other. They just sort of peered out into the distance like strangers and just kept spinning. There she was, all rouge and black pasty hair, dancing with a distant stare. She looked like she should have been drinking away some awful, tragic memory. Maybe she was. She looked owned.
I drove down the night before from my home in Asheville, North Carolina. She gave me a deadline of picking up the things she had selected for me by mid-January. She told me that if I wasn't there in time she would dispose of the items as she saw fit. A mere six weeks after her death in late November and my mother's effects had already been pilfered.
When my mom died I told her that I wanted to come down. I wanted to stay in the house my mother had lived in for 20 years and in which I had lived, myself, for five. This was the house that I, and my family, stayed in every time we had visited over the past 13 years. I wanted to help go through my mom's effects ' to touch the things that were meaningful to her. To see and touch and know the things she coveted so that I might know her a little bit better than she had let on in life. My mother was a person who kept her emotions very close to her chest, as if guarding some secret. Now would be the chance for me ' and my sisters to understand more, perhaps, of what made my mom tick. Again the ever-present 'No,'� steeped from her lips. She got emotional. She said that going through my mother's things would be something that she would do on her own ' on her own terms. She said that it might be months before she was feeling well enough to do so. I asked her to call me to let me know when this would be. 'Please let me be a part of this. This is important to me,'� I said. 'No.'� Now here I am at my mother's house with the homeowner, my younger sister, standing before me with keys in hand, not allowed entrance. Not allowed to linger for three minutes by myself to grieve. She just stands there in front of me jingling the house keys like she has much more important things to do with her time and that arrogant smirk on her face. She reminded me of the prison guard who gave Paul Newman so much hell in Cool Hand Luke.
'Getting some water, Boss!'�
'�Wiping my brow, Boss!'�
'Shaking the bushes, Boss!'�
Boss would give a slight nod and relent, sighting a rifle on the man who made the request, but allowing the man to do what he needed to do. Here I was standing under the watchful eye of a Gestapo not even allowed three damn minutes to walk alone around my mother's house. Because of her hovering I considered dragging out the process of loading the items into my rented truck, just to inconvenience her. In the end I decided to speed things up as quickly as I possibly could, focusing only on the task at hand. I set myself on trying to pay no attention to her lingering gaze and getting the hell out of there as fast as I could.
She unlocked the garage. There were a few large piles spread throughout. She pointed to my things; two bookcases, my grandparents' old kitchen table, and the small stack of things that she had selected for me. Then she pulled up a chair inside the garage and sat down. There she goes again jiggling the house keys again. I'd like to ram those keys up her tight ass and dream that a little bit of soul would fall out. The keys would never make it in, though. And her soul, if there was one, would probably plop out like a bag of afterbirth; nothing but crap. 'Get the mop Ethel. We gots a clean-up on aisle six and man, oh man, is it nasty. Shoot.'� I'd rather have someone belt-sander my exposed brain than listen to those keys jangle. God this is a nightmare. But I don't say a thing and I just start lugging the few precious items she's allotted me to the truck. I feel like an inmate on release day. 'Turn in your jumpsuit at window A, strip down naked at window B and prep for your cavity search, dress at window C ' make sure you tuck in your goddamn shirt, too. We ain't lettin' no goddamn hillbillies out on the street on our watch. And comb your hair. You're 'reformed'� now, dumb ass. Pick up your box of beetle shit at window D, get on the damn bus and don't you never let me see the likes of you anywheres near this place, yuh hear.'� My box feels pretty much like what I imagine an inmate's box of possessions might feel like. It's a whole lot lighter than expected and filled with the crap leftover after the warden robbed you blind. It's a big box, mind you, but the contents are nowhere near the level you came in with. You've got a wallet that's devoid of anything green or transact-able, a pair of loafers with the soles torn off, a mustache comb, a crushed pack of cigarettes ' no lighter, and a note from the warden chiding you to, 'fuck up again, big shot. Fuck up again.'� This was as meaningless as what my box contained.
We said nothing to each other during this time. My mind, though, was racing. In it I am beating her senseless. I'm tearing the monkey shit lips off her face and throwing them into the street, watching car after speeding car run over them. There they lie in the middle of the road looking like a glob of Silly Putty that was pounded flat using a craggy rock. She would scream, clutching at the bloody tears on her face where her lips were and I would now bear the arrogant smirk. In my mind she is bawling. The sound of her sobs taking me fondly back to the time she hit me with her birth candle. The candle was pink and had numbers running down one side of it. In theory you burned it down every year from age one to 18. She was 11 at the time but the candle had her marked as a three-year-old. We were having a fight, typical in my house during the stifling, turbulent times when I was a young teenager. She picked up the large pink candle and came at me. Snarling and screaming, she ran at me. She was calling me a fucker or dickhead or some other genius remark, as she was always capable of retrieving from her flaccid vocabulary. She lifted the candle high over her head and swung it towards my face. I lifted my left arm, blocking it, and watched it break in half at age nine or ten. She called me a prick and sobbed. I looked quickly at her clutching the candle. She rolled up into a ball on her bed, and continued through her anguish with the verbal assault. 'Ha!'� I bellowed and turned and left the room. I probably spat at her before going and probably called her a bitch. Later she threw the candle out. I didn't tell her that she could easily melt the two broken ends together. It would have been a simple solution, but she had always been simple-minded.
Now, however, I was relegated to only moving the things that I had come 500 miles to retrieve and she's sitting in front of me watching me with the same contempt that I felt towards her. And the keys. The goddamn keys.
What could I do in a situation like this except relent. Bottle my rage up inside me like a genie who was no longer useful - a threat even. All wishes used meant that someone else might come along and take back the things that were yours by the simple fact that they had found the same worn, beat-up bottle. My emotions were like this. Mine alone. If I allowed her access to them then she would have indeed won. And I would have a lifetime set back from which I would never recover. Should I allow her to see the effect of her glares and jingling then she would know that she had won. She would see my desperation. She would understand the profound sadness that had overtaken me because of her struggle for power. I would have lost. And then she would know how, when she hit me with her birth candle years ago, she had broken my heart. This woman had been my friend, my confidant ' my sister for nearly 40 years. And now she, like my mother, was gone.

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