i am tying up the phone line, i am avoiding conflict & a decision.
my cousin nancy, who is in fact not my cousin but my mother's, is in a probably-fast car right now heading north through ohio. she is travelling with a man i have never met who is only calling himself her Fairy Godbrother.
my cousin nancy is bipolar but has lied to her doctors who have in their deceived wisdom given her medications that have pushed her into mania. the state has given her $13,000 in back-pay for disability. she is staying in motels, spending it all. she is coming up to see me & who knows if she is visiting other on this odyssey, or just me.
my mother is probably nancy's closest friend & only advocate right now, & nancy is shoving her away. she is yelling, accusing, feeling righteous.
this is what my mother told me on the phone today: "nancy told me that all the suffering she's had recently is for the family's sins. that she is doing all this suffering so that we can all be clean & forgiven. & that's a scary thing to hear."
my mother told me she thinks it is best that i not see nancy. but the fact remains that nancy is the only blood relative i have, outside the house i grew up in, who has ever taken interest in me as an individual, as an intelligent & interesting woman. she campaigned for carter, she was on the editorial staff of a major magazine, she worked as an advocate for the mrdd/mi community. she is out-queer & out-crazy & let's face it, this may be the only family role model i will ever have. i can't turn her away.
i am going to call this fairy-godbrother on the cell phone, i am going to do something weak & middle-ground like meet them for coffee (i won't have coffee).
i am resentful. i wanted to spend this afternoon & evening quietly, reading, eating something sweet, waiting for the evening when jeff would come over for law & order. this has been taken away. i hate making decisions. i hate the thought that nancy's is the brain i might inherit.
i spent most of my morning at work on the phone to bean, on the phone to my parents, all while i was scrubbing surgical instruments & packing tissue specimens into metricide. my mother told me story after story about cousin nancy, warned me not to meet her at all, said "i think she wants to use you to get back at me, she is angry with me now."
at the end of all this consutling, my father came on the phone line to thank me for the box of cds i'd given him for christmas. "who is that one guy," he said, "who sings like [my dad tries to gravel his voice] come on up to the house?"
i said, "that's tom waits."
my dad said, "he's great! i want more of him."
maybe there will be no coffee tonight, maybe i will just make a tom waits mix for my dad, maybe i will just sit here re-reading poems about caves.
