She's the centre of attention: Characteristics of Narcissistic Mothers Pt 9

 The black text is a shortened version of an original work by Chris, The Harpy’s Child. Original at https://sites.google.com/site/harpyschild/  Copyright 2007, all rights reserved

[There are two basic types of narcissistic mothers, the ignoring type and the engulfing type. These may—and often do—overlap but most NMs have a basic style and will be primarily one or the other. Some of the following points may not apply to your NM simply because they describe an engulfing characteristic when your NM is an ignoring type—or vice versa. But our mothers are not the only narcissists we will encounter in our lives. In fact, being raised by a narcissistic parent actually sets us up to be prey for more of the self-centred emotional vampires as we go out into the world, from girlfriends who are anything but friends to lovers who love themselves best to husbands who are the mirror image of dear old mom. So, whether something looks like it applies to your NM or not, read and consider it carefully—it may give you the awareness necessary to avoid the predator lurking around the next bend. As ever, my comments are shown in violet. -V]

It's about secret things. The Destructive Narcissistic Parent creates a child that only exists to be an extension of her self. It's about body language. It's about disapproving glances. It's about vocal tone. It's very intimate. And it's very powerful. It's part of who the child is. ~ Chris

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Part 9. She has to be the center of attention all the time.

She has to be the center of attention all the time. This need is a defining trait of narcissists and particularly of narcissistic mothers for whom their children exist to be sources of attention and adoration. Narcissistic mothers love to be waited on and often pepper their children with little requests. "While you're up…" or its equivalent is one of their favorite phrases. You couldn't just be assigned a chore at the beginning of the week or of the day, instead, you had to do it on demand, preferably at a time that was inconvenient for you, or you had to "help" her do it, fetching and carrying for her while she made up to herself for the menial work she had to do as your mother by glorying in your attentions.

Maybe malignant narcissists are different—my NM never thought she had to wait until I was up to send me off fetching and carrying. Whatever I was doing was eminently interruptible because, of course, nothing I was doing could possibly be more important than that cup of coffee or glass of beer she wanted. The only exceptions were if I was in the bathroom (she would wait until I got out, then send me to do her bidding, if I was sleeping, or if I was doing homework). And I had a lot of homework, if you get my drift.

My senior year of high school I had a job working in a hospital kitchen. I got off work at 8 pm and the bus dropped me at the end of my street around 8:30, about a mile from my house. In the winter a cold wind blew in off the ocean, a wind that was at my back (and up my skirts) my entire walk home, a walk that was mostly uphill and always in the dark. When I would get home, freezing and tired after a day at school, a four hour shift on my feet, and then a mile uphill walk in the penetrating cold wind, the first thing I would hear when I walked through the door each evening would be. “Do the dishes and be quick about it!” Fortunately, I ate dinner at work…there was never anything left for me. As long as I was in the kitchen rattling things around, she felt free to interrupt me with demands for coffee or to make her some popcorn or some other task. It wasn’t until I hit the shower that she would leave me be, and not until my light was out and I was curled up in my cot in the kitchen (yes, I slept on a cot in the kitchen under a window where the kitchen table and chairs were supposed to be) that I would know I was free of her incessant, petty demands.

A narcissistic mother may create odd occasions at which she can be the center of attention, such as memorials for someone close to her who died long ago, or major celebrations of small personal milestones. She may love to entertain so she can be the life of her own party. She will try to steal the spotlight or will try to spoil any occasion where someone else is the center of attention, particularly the child she has cast as the scapegoat. She often invites herself along where she isn't welcome. If she visits you or you visit her, you are required to spend all your time with her. Entertaining herself is unthinkable. She has always pouted, manipulated or raged if you tried to do anything without her, didn't want to entertain her, refused to wait on her, stymied her plans for a drama or otherwise deprived her of attention.

Again, the malignant narcissist may be a bit different. My NM never found it necessary to have an excuse to draw attention to herself. She dressed in cheap, flashy clothes, was loud, and even emulated popular actresses of the day in her dress and make up. She went through a Marilyn Monroe phase, where she bleached her hair pale blonde (she had naturally auburn hair), bought herself a black taffeta halter dress like Marilyn’s iconic white one, and even painted on a fake beauty mark. At another time, she went through a Lucille Ball stage with bright red hair and lips and Lucy-style clothing.

But she wasn’t above using someone else’s event or occasion to call attention to herself. Since she had skipped my high school graduation and tried to prevent me from getting married, nobody expected her to show up at my wedding. But she did—arriving so late that she actually interrupted the ceremony and wearing a skin-tight white linen sheath dress! Wearing white? To someone else’s wedding?

When my first child was born by Caesarean section, instead of admiring her new grandchild and fussing over her daughter’s surgery, she spent her time trying to seduce my father into reminiscences of her C-section with me and how much worse she was, in more pain, unable to move or laugh.

But perhaps the single most memorable example…and I don’t know how she did it but it is too perfectly timed to be a mere coincidence…was when she had a heart attack at her mother’s funeral. My grandmother was buried and we and most of the family was back at grandmother’s house, socializing and remembering Nana when my NM flopped into a recliner and began melodramatically grimacing and pressing one hand to her chest. Within a few minutes she had gathered a crowd, everyone offering advice, her waving them off. “It’s just stress,” she would say, gasping for breath. “I’ll be fine.”

I used to work in an ER—she was sweating and had turned an odd colour, like a manila folder. “Mother,” I said, “You need to go to the hospital.” She refused. So I approached GC Bro and told him that she had all the symptoms of a heart attack and she wouldn’t go to the hospital. He spoke to her and she tried to wave him off, whereupon he picked her up in his arms, like the knight rescuing the menaced maiden, and carried her to my aunt’s Cadillac, which had a backseat big enough for her to lie down on.

It took several hours of tests at the ER, hours in which she continued to insist she was “fine,” hours in which I, my GCBro, my aunt, my daughter and the ER staff had to constantly plead and bargain with her to keep her there until the tests came back from the lab. She was in her element! Anybody else would have quietly taken someone aside and said “I need to get to the hospital—I think I am having a heart attack…” and gone to great lengths to avoid disrupting the event that was going on around her. But not my NM—she had to play it for what it was worth, passive aggressively sucking up the attention and sympathy of all the people who had come to celebrate my grandmother’s life and mourn her death.

And yes, it really was a heart attack and six weeks later she underwent a quintuple bypass. We had all gone home by then, though, so there was no opportunity for a big drama over that.

She loved being the centre of attention and believed everyone else did too—if you professed not to or you didn’t take advantage of a situation, she thought you were lying or being manipulative. When I was about 14 or so, my stepmother was heavily pregnant with her second child. She and my father and my 2 year old sister were in the car and were hit head-on by a drunk driver. Seatbelts were not common equipment in cars back then, but my father had installed lap belts in that old car and if you were in his car, you had to be buckled up.

My stepmother went to the hospital to be examined, but she was fine and they released her. When I went back to my mother’s after a weekend with my dad, I told my mother what happened and she looked at me kinda funny when I told her that Patsy was fine and back at home already. “What on earth is the matter with her?” NM asked. “If that was me, I’d be playing that up to the hilt!”

Older narcissistic mothers often use the natural limitations of aging to manipulate dramas, often by neglecting their health or by doing things they know will make them ill. This gives them the opportunity to cash in on the investment they made when they trained you to wait on them as a child. Then they call you (or better still, get the neighbor or the nursing home administrator to call you) demanding your immediate attendance. You are to rush to her side, pat her hand, weep over her pain and listen sympathetically to her unending complaints about how hard and awful it is. ("Never get old!") It's almost never the case that you can actually do anything useful, and the causes of her disability may have been completely avoidable, but you've been put in an extremely difficult position. If you don't provide the audience and attention she's manipulating to get, you look extremely bad to everyone else and may even have legal culpability. (Narcissistic behaviors commonly accompany Alzheimer's disease, so this behavior may also occur in perfectly normal mothers as they age.)

My NM, in her later years (she was only 69 when she died because she would not follow her doctor’s orders after her bypass), substituted my daughter for me. I did not get birthday cards or letters or any kind of contact from her. It was not like she went NC with me but more like she substituted Annie for me and I just didn’t exist anymore.

So Annie was the one who got the eight-page letters complaining bitterly about her health and aging and lack of money (after she inherited a six figure sum from her mother), the traffic, her neighbours, the weather—Annie would drop by my house after one of these arrived and ask me “Have you heard from Grammi lately?” When I said I hadn’t, she would whip out the latest letter and wave it in front of me. When I would ask “What does she have to say?” Annie’s answer was always the same: “Oh, you know her—pages and pages of complaining about everything under the sun…”

It didn’t occur to me at the time, being so accustomed to being ignored by NM until she wanted something from me, but in retrospect I have to wonder if Annie wasn’t attempting to convey some kind of subtle message about her relationship with my mother. She got the letters and she did the interacting with her and in the long run, she got half of NM’s estate which she rationalized by saying “Well, you and Grammi never had much of a relationship anyway…” Like that was my doing and so I and my two sons deserved to be disinherited in her favour?

But NM's last act, her final “fuck you” from the grave, has kept her the centre of attention years after she’s dead and gone, my sons without an inheritance, my daughter acting like the privileged princess doling out small cash tokens to them, once the lie she told them about their grandmother’s will came to light (she told them Grammi left the money to all three of them and she was supposed to administer it—then she spent it all!). My NM, however, never intended for either of them—or me—to see a penny of the money she inherited from her mother, money my grandmother fully intended to be split evenly between her grandchildren.

When they get old, narcissists get even meaner.

Next: 10. She manipulates your emotions in order to feed on your pain.

Choice

“Don’t take off on one of your marathon ‘walks’ tomorrow morning,” Mother said, slamming the frying pan down on the counter near the sink. “We have an appointment.”

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Just never you mind,” Mother said. “Just you be ready to go at eight and bring along a change of clothes.”

“I’m not going,” she said flatly, looking back to the book in her lap. Out of the corner of her eye she could see her mother doing a slow burn, a dull red flush creeping up her neck, her jaw going rigid.

“Don’t you sass me, young lady,” Mother said through clenched teeth. Her right fist was clenched, too, her arm rigid at her side. “You still aren’t eighteen and you will do what I tell you to do.”

She looked up, keeping her face carefully expressionless…no point in pressing the provocation unnecessarily. “If I don’t know where I’m going, I’m not going,” she looked down at her book again.

“We’re going down to Mexico,” Mother finally said, putting the finishing touches on Frank’s plate. “We have an appointment.”

“What kind of appointment?”

“Just an appointment. Just be ready.” Mother walked out to the living room with Frank’s dinner and coffee.

“I’m not going,” she said again, more to herself than to anyone else.

Mother suddenly materialized in front of her, eyes blazing. “Do not get defiant with me, miss! We have an appointment tomorrow morning and we will keep it, if I have to tie you up and drag you there!”

She shook her head again, her face closed and mulish. “Then that is what you will have to do because unless I know where we are going and why, I’m not going.”

Mother’s hand flashed out but stopped just millimetres away from her face. She had not flinched but continued to stare defiantly at her. “I won’t go,” she reiterated, “Unless I know where and why.” She did not feel as calm and collected as she hoped she looked. Dear God, what if Mother dumped her there or sold her into a whorehouse or something? She wouldn’t put anything past her any more.

“You’ve sure gotten cocky, these last few weeks, haven’t you?” her mother sneered. “But you won’t be pregnant forever and then you will get what’s coming to you, I promise!”

“I’ll be eighteen by then,” she replied. “Eighteen. Legal. Adult. And gone!”

Oh, no you won’t!” Mother shot back at her. “Your birthday isn’t for a month after your sore-footed little bastard is due. But even that’s moot. You just be ready…”

“Oh, for the love of God, Georgia,” came a bellow from the other room. “Tell the girl and get it over with so I can hear my program!”

Mother’s eyes shifted to the curtain dividing the kitchen from the living room with a look of supreme annoyance. “Frank, this is none of your Goddamned business, so…”

“It’s my Goddamned business if it’s drowning out my Goddamned TV!” he interrupted with an indignant roar. “Your mother’s taking you to Tijuana for an abortion!” he continued. “Can we have some quiet now?”

She sat there on the cot, stunned. This was her mother’s first grandchild and she was planning to kill it before it was even born? She was incredulous…she had not thought even her mother capable of such a thing. She shook her head to clear the buzzing in her ears, then looked up at her mother who was standing in front of her, arms akimbo. “That’s illegal,” she said simply.

“Not in Mexico,” Mother said. “Not if you’ve got the money.”

“Then you will have to drag me kicking and screaming to the car and you will have to tie me up and gag me because I will jump out and run away at every red light. And if you succeed anyway, I will call Daddy when we get back and I will tell him. And I will call police and tell them,” she paused for effect. “And then I will call Nana and Grandpa and tell them.” She gave Mother that slit-eyed look that had come to signify seriousness between them and held her gaze unwaveringly. Mother clamped her jaws tightly together and left the kitchen without a word.

She spent the next morning in a state of nerves, skittish as a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, to quote her grandfather. She kept waiting for Mother to sneak up behind her and drag her down to the car, but Mother had made herself scarce. By early afternoon she had begun to relax her vigilance a bit, and then Mother came in from one of her outings and sat down on the cot beside her. She instinctively moved away, knowing that to be within arm’s reach was to be in peril.

“So,” Mother said conversationally, “What are your plans?”

She was nonplussed. “Plans?” she echoed dumbly.

“Yes,” Mother said, continuing conversational tone, “Your plans. Exactly what are you going to do? Having a baby isn’t free, you know. How do you plan to pay for your prenatal care? Your hospitalization? How do you plan to support this baby?”

She hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I don’t know yet,” she hedged. “I thought we had medical insurance?”

Mother laughed. “Yes, but it doesn’t cover the illegitimate pregnancy of a dependent,” she said. “So what are you going to do?”

“Mark will help out,” she said, even though she and Mark had barely spoken since she found out she was pregnant.

“Really?” Mother laughed again. “Have you spoken to him lately? I had a conversation with his father this morning and they are both claiming the baby isn’t his. Where does that leave you and all your fine plans?”

She bit the inside of her cheek to control her indignation. Of course the baby was his! There wasn’t anyone else! Assuming a calm demeanor, she shook her head. “I wouldn’t believe anything Mr. Hornung says,” she replied. “He thinks we aren’t good enough for his family.”

“Is that so?” Mother bristled. “And just what makes him think that, pray tell?”

She shrugged noncommittally. “Because of the bar,” she said.

Mother looked uncomprehending. “What is that supposed to mean?”

She shrugged again. “Mark’s father thinks we are white trash and not good enough for his family because you used to own that bar. He’ll say anything to put as much distance between me and Mark as he can. So you can’t believe anything he tells you.”

Her mother sat silently for a few minutes, digesting that bit of information. She could see it rankled her mother, being thought “not good enough,” for it was something she watched her mother struggle with all of her life. Mother’s face cleared.

“Be that as it may, you still haven’t told me what your plans are. Since getting rid of it is apparently not an option, you must have had something in mind.”

Mother’s conversational tone was unnerving her. She could sense she was being lulled, lured into a trap of some sort, but she just couldn’t see where the hook might be. She shook her head. “I hadn’t really planned very far ahead yet,” she admitted cautiously.

“Well, then, I have a plan for you,” Mother said brightly, the uncharacteristic cheeriness more frightening than comforting. “Actually, more than one plan so you have something to choose from!”

She began wishing she had begged harder for Nana and Grandpa to keep her with them. This was beginning to sound a bit scary, and she wondered if she would have a chance to call them for advice before a “choice” was forced upon her. She stayed silent, knowing Mother would reveal these “choices” whether she wanted to hear them or not.

“There are lots of people who can’t have babies themselves and would be happy to adopt…”

“It’s my baby and I’m keeping it,” she interrupted flatly.

“Let’s not be hasty,” Mother said placatingly. “You haven’t heard me out. These people will give the baby a good home and give it all the things you can’t. They’ll pay for your prenatal care, your hospitalization, even give you some money to help you get your life back on track after the baby is born. And you can stay here, live at home, during the pregnancy.”

A warning bell went off in the back of her mind, but she remained sullenly silent.

“There’s also a home for unwed mothers here, the Florence Crittenton Society. You can go live there and they will take care of everything and you can keep the baby if you want.” Mother sat there expectantly, a parody of a smile painted on her face.

She turned the information over in her mind a few times, then took a deep breath. “It’s my baby and I am going to keep it. And I don’t want to go to a home for unwed mothers, either.”

Mother’s eyes narrowed. The gloves were off. “Well, miss, you don’t have any other choices…unless you want to make that trip to Mexico. If you think you are going to live here and waddle around pregnant in front of the all the neighbours and then bring a bastard child home with you, you had better think again because it is not going to happen! You want to keep your little bastard, fine…but you’ll go off somewhere so that I won’t have to put up with the gossip!”

“You mean that my choices are to give away my baby like an unwanted piece of trash or you’re going to put me in an institution?” she cried, her composure evaporating. “Is that what you are telling me?” She couldn’t believe that shrill voice was hers! She braced for the mind-numbing slap that she knew had to be coming but instead, Mother just laughed. Loudly. And long.

“Yes, ma’am,” she smiled, “that’s about the size of it. It may be your brat and I can’t have any say in the decisions about it, but you are my brat and I have full power over you!” Mother was virtually crowing.

“Daddy won’t…”

“Oh, don’t even think about that, missy,” Mother grinned thinly. “With that fat-assed broad of his and those three little curtain-climbers, not to mention Brother, the last thing he wants right now is a pregnant teenager in the house. He doesn’t want you, missy. I am all you’ve got!” From the look on her face, Mother was positively delighted.

“And how much time do I have to think about this?” she finally asked. “It’s a big decision. It will affect the rest of my life…and this baby’s,” her hand went protectively to her lower abdomen.

“Tomorrow morning should be fine. I need to give the people at the Home an answer so they can reserve a space for you. You’ll stay here until you start to show, and then off you go.” Mother stood abruptly and brushed her hands together as if dusting them off. “Think on it. Sleep on it. You have three choices. Give me your answer in the morning.”

She felt deflated. She sat there on her cot after Mother had gone and wondered what to do. Nana and Grandpa would go for the adoption idea…they had already suggested it. Daddy didn’t want to have anything to do with her. Mark was only six months older than she was…he wasn’t exactly in a position to spirit her away to a place of safety, even if he wasn’t scared spitless about having made a baby with her…besides, he was adopted, so it was a pretty good bet that he’d weigh in on that side as well. Why didn’t anybody understand that this was her baby? Flesh of her flesh, blood of her blood, bone of her bone? All of her life she had wanted someone to love without reservation, without fear of rejection, with the certainty of reciprocation, and now, with that just within her grasp, why was the whole world conspiring to snatch it away from her before she even had a taste?

She lay down on the cot and turned to the wall. Despite the warm temperatures she curled into a tight little ball and buried her face in the pillow and felt a gaping, cavernous, echoing hollow open in the region of her heart. What was she going to do?

True Confessions

“Oh, no you don’t, Miss Priss,” Mother’s voice stopped her as she was half-way into the passenger seat of the car. “You get your smart ass in the back seat with the dog, where you belong.”

She was beginning to think she was crazy. She had no idea why she was being dragged to the juvenile court…she hadn’t been arrested…she hadn’t gotten in any kind of trouble at school…her grades were good…she didn’t talk back to Mother or defy her rules. What on earth was going on?

“You incorrigible little bitch,” Mother snapped from the driver’s seat. She could see the garish red-lipsticked mouth in the rear-view mirror…almost as if it was dripping blood. “I don’t know what you think you are up to, conspiring with your father against me, but let me tell you, you won’t get away with it! Not this time, not ever!”

“Daddy?” she said. “What does Daddy have to do with this?”

“As if you didn’t know,” Mother sneered, twisting around in the seat to face the back. “You and your precious father…you two think you’re so goddamned smart, but you’re not. He thinks he can run me broke by dragging me back to court for custody but it’s not going to happen because before this day is out, you’ll be out of his reach.”

She must have looked puzzled, because Mother laughed. “I have outsmarted you both, this time! There won’t be any more lawyers and court visits and trouble because you are going up the river, my girl. Up the river!”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she replied, keeping a tight rein on her fear.

“You know, this is all your own fault, don’t you?” Mother said, almost conversationally. “This whole thing centers on you…but then you always did like to be the center of attention, didn’t you?”

She shook her head slightly. Actually, she preferred to be as close to invisible as possible, at least around Mother. It was safer that way.

“Well, you’re going to get your wish, little girl! You are going to be the real main attraction here! This whole hearing centers around you, and when it’s over, your father will have to pay the court fees, my lawyer’s bill, and a whopping monthly maintenance bill.” Mother paused to wipe a tear of laughter from one eye.

“Yessiree! Your father and his pasty-faced little paramour are going to rue the day they crossed me! And you are too!”

She shook her head again, wiping the beads of sweat off her upper lip. It was hot in the backseat, with the windows rolled up tightly. “I don’t understand.”

“Well then let me spell it out for you, Miss Genius,” Mother laughed scornfully. “Your precious father is taking me to court again for custody. But before that hearing, you have a hearing in chambers…I’m having you declared an incorrigible child, the judge is going to send you to reform school, and when your father gets to his custody hearing, all he’ll get from the court is a bill!” Mother’s laugh was triumphantly self-congratulatory.

She paled, sitting immobile in the back of the car. Reform school? Wasn’t that where girls who rob and steal and stab each other get sent? She wracked her brain for even a single transgression sufficient to warrant such a sentence. “What did I do?” she wailed, suddenly overwhelmed with panic.

“Incorrigible child,” her mother said smugly. “The law says I can have you committed as an incorrigible child and that is exactly what I am going to do!”

She wept. “If you don’t want me, why can’t I just go live with Daddy? Why do you have to do this?”

“Because he wants you,” Mother said through thinned, tight lips. “Because he wants you and I will be Goddamned if I will give that man anything he wants!”

“Why?” she said through her tears. “Why?”

Mother lit a cigarette and blew the smoke into the closed interior of the car. “This is all your fault, you know,” Mother said, resuming her conversational tone of earlier. “If you hadn’t been born, none of this would be happening, my life would be different…better. But no, you had to come along and ruin everything!”

Mother blew a couple of smoke rings before continuing. “You know, I had it all figured out. Your grandfather, that rigid, old-fashioned old fart, wouldn’t let me go out or do anything. Oh, Pete and Gary could come and go as they pleased…they were boys, and even though Pete was two years younger than me, Grandpa let him do whatever he wanted while I had to ask permission to do just about anything other than take a pee.”

Sounds familiar, she thought to herself, but held her silence rather than break the spell of Mother’s memories.

“And then one night I was at a high school football game and there was this cute sailor in the stands, home from the war. And I flirted with him and when the game was over we went off on his motorcycle for some ice cream and he took me home.”

Mother took another deep drag off her cigarette, rolled the window down an inch and blew the smoke out the window, then cranked it up tight again.

“I had to sneak out after everyone had gone to bed to see him, Grandpa wouldn’t let me go out with him because he was Hill People…you know, poor dirt farmers who lived in houses with no plumbing or electricity. But I knew he was my ticket to freedom.

“So one night, just after school was out for the summer we sneaked away and got married. He was 21 and I was almost 17. His leave from the Navy was almost up and he was going to be shipped out to China…the Navy was going to send me money every month as his wife for living expenses…and as a married woman I wouldn’t have to answer to Grandpa anymore. I could take that money, move out of the Godforsaken little gossip-ridden hick town, and live my own life, no father…and no husband, either…to tell me what I could or could not do.”

Mother stopped talking and looked out the window, a faraway look in her eyes. “At least that was the plan,” she said softly.

“But things didn’t work out that way,” Mother resumed, her voice tinged with bitterness. “Gramma Janssen wrote to the War Department and told them that he was their only son and they needed him to help out on the farm and the War Department discharged him. There went my freedom…he wasn’t going to go to China and there wasn’t going to be a monthly check from the Navy and before my father could put together an annulment…” Mother turned her hard, embittered face to the backseat, “…guess what happened?”

She shook her head slowly, afraid to hazard a guess.

“I found out I was pregnant. With you. And then it was all over for me.” Mother opened the car window again and flicked out the burning butt. “I swelled up like a poisoned pup. I got stretch marks all over my belly, my boobs, I got so fat I would barely waddle. Then, when I went into labour, you wouldn’t come out. I was in labour for 36 goddamned hours before they finally decided to do a caesarean section…your head was pointed from being crammed against my pelvic bones for so long! And then I almost died. I had to have a live transfusion from Grandpa because that tiny little shit-assed town didn’t have a decent blood bank. I got milk fever. You lost weight because I didn’t have any milk and those blockheaded nurses wouldn’t give you formula.

“And once I got you home, all you did was cry. All day, all night, you cried. Then you got the goddamned eczema and had raw, open sores all over you and I had to keep your diapers and your bedding and your clothes sterilized…but we were living in that drafty old shack next to Gramma Janssen’s house with no electricity or running water. And I couldn’t drive, so I was stuck out there living like a goddamned heathen, only ten miles from town, but I might as well have been in the goddamned middle of nowhere! So there I was, stuck out in the sticks with a screaming baby…it wasn’t at all what I expected, you know. You can’t put a baby back in the closet and close the door when you are tired of playing with it. I was stuck in that horrible little shack with Gramma Janssen always looking over my shoulder and telling me what to do and no way out!”

Mother paused for emphasis, fixing her with an unmistakable glare of enmity. “And all because of you. If you hadn’t come along, I’d have had that annulment and found another way to get away from Grandpa. But you ruined it all.”

“But…” she hesitated.

“What?” Mother snapped.

“But what about Brother? If you hated it so much, why did you have another baby?”

Mother shrugged and lit another cigarette. “When your life is already ruined with one screaming, demanding brat, what the hell difference does two make?”

The McKenzies

“For the love of Christ, Georgia! Get down from there and mind your own damned business!”

She stood just inside the kitchen door, agog. Daddy was yelling at Mommy!

“Shut up, Eddie!” Mommy hissed at him. “They’ll hear you!”

Daddy put his hands around Mommy’s middle and tried to drag her down from the wood and steel milk crate upon which she was standing, but Mommy grabbed on tight to the top panel of the redwood fence and hung on. “Stop it, Eddie!” she hissed at him again. “Keep your hands to yourself!”

“Georgia, what goes on in the neighbour’s house is none of your business, now get down and go in the house! You are making a spectacle…”

“Oh, all right!” Mommy was exasperated. “The whole goddamned neighbourhood has heard you by now…” She stepped down off the milk crate and Daddy moved it back to its normal place by the clothes line pole.

“What in the hell did you think you were doing up there, anyway?” Daddy asked, his voice sounding very annoyed. “You can’t go snooping on the neighbours like that!”

Mommy lit up a cigarette and blew a smoke ring. “Eddie, you should hear the way she lights into those poor kids! Screaming at them like a banshee! And have you seen how skinny they are? I don’t think she ever feeds them!”

“Georgia, it’s none of your business. The kids look fine to me and everybody yells at their kids once in a while. Leave it alone!”

Mommy scowled but didn’t say anything more.


Connie McKenzie and her sister Nellie were big girls…at least sixth graders. They were very tall and very skinny...Nellie said they were going to be models when they grew up...and they got to stay home alone at night because their mother was a nurse and she worked nights like Daddy sometimes did. Nellie was the oldest, she was already big enough to wear a bra…you could see it under her school blouses…and Connie was just a year younger. “My little stair steps,” she had heard Mrs. McKenzie call them. Connie said Mr. McKenzie had died in the war, he was a tail gunner, whatever that was, and that she didn’t remember her father at all. How sad!

She liked Connie and Nellie. They always had some kind of delicious afternoon snacks that their mother made for them and they were always willing the share. And they were nice to her. And they recognized Brother for the annoying little pill that he was, too, which was also very nice. And they had a cute little dog that was more hair than dog, and Connie said Coco even was allowed up on the bed with her and her sister. Life in the McKenzie household seemed a lot more attractive than in her own.

“You stay away from those girls,” Mommy said to her one afternoon after she had been playing with Connie in the front yard. “And I don’t want you in that house, either. The place is unsanitary. It’s a sty.” She nodded her agreement…did she have any other choice?...but puzzled over Mommy’s indictment of the McKenzie household. She’d been there, it was clean enough, as far as she could tell. What was Mommy talking about?

But she stayed away and she didn’t tell Daddy that Mommy got up on the milk crate every evening he was at his second job and watched and listened to what was going on in the McKenzie household. She didn’t tell Daddy that when he was at work on Saturday, sometimes Mommy would actually jump over the fence and peek into the windows of the McKenzie house. And she didn’t tell the McKenzies, either…Mommy was so busy with the McKenzies, Mommy was leaving her alone!

Mommy’s friend, Betty Moran, lived across the road in a small bungalow with a huge, gnarled pepper tree in the front yard. Betty had three kids and a new boyfriend, so she didn’t get out of the house much, but she found time almost every evening to talk with Mommy on the phone. And these days, the talk was always about Mrs. McKenzie and how bad she treated her girls.

“She’s a nurse, you know,” Mommy told Betty one evening over the phone. “I heard she was a drug addict, that she steals stuff from the hospital. No, really! That must explain the bruises I saw on the inside of her arm when I went over to complain about the way she keeps her front lawn. It’s bad enough living next door to her and all her weeds…what an eyesore you have to see through your front window!”

Over the course of several weeks she learned, through Mommy’s conversations with Betty, that Mrs. McKenzie wasn’t really a widow, that her husband had left her for a “cheap chippie,” whatever that was, that Mrs. McKenzie had her water service cut off and the couldn’t flush the toilets so the house was a health hazard, and that she was a nurse so she should know better!, that the dog had had her puppies in the middle of Mrs. McKenzie’s bed and nobody had done anything about it, and that she was starving those poor girls. Having been in the house several times, she was astounded to learn all these things. Why hadn’t she seen any of that?

The final straw came one night when Mrs. McKenzie was yelling at one of her daughters. Mommy picked up the telephone and called the police, reporting Mrs. McKenzie for beating her children. It was a chaotic scene for the next couple of hours, the police parked in the street, Mrs. McKenzie arguing with the police officers, Connie and Nellie begging to not be taken away, and Mommy standing in the shadow of the big Japanese fatsia in the front yard, watching the whole drama unfold.

A week later she saw a “For Sale” sign in the front yard, and when she went to ask Connie why they were moving and where they were going, the girl slammed the door in her face. Surprised…and very hurt…she knocked again. What had she done that Connie was mad at her? This time Nellie answered the door.

“We aren’t supposed to play with you or even talk to you,” Nellie said, a rather sullen look on her face.

She didn’t understand. “Why? What did I do?”

“Our mother went to jail and she almost lost her job and Connie and me had to go to a foster home for a whole week,” Nellie said.

Her eyes were round with surprise and shock. “Why?” she breathed.

“Because of your mother,” Nellie replied. “Your mother has had it in for my mother ever since you moved in.”

She shook her head. “That’s not true!” she said hotly.

“Oh, yes it is,” Nellie said, her curls bobbing. “We just don’t know why. But your mother has been spying on us and snooping and looking in our windows and making up lies about us ever since you guys got here and now my mother is tired of it so we are moving.”

She looked down at the door stoop, shame flooding her. What Nellie said was true…she had seen Mommy snooping on them and heard her telling stories to Betty over the phone. And they were all lies, to make Mrs. McKenzie look bad. But why?

“I’m sorry, Nellie,” she said. “I’m sorry my mother has been bad and is making you move away.”

“It’s OK,” the other girl said, giving her a thin little smile. “It’s not your fault, you’re just a little kid.”


The walls in her house were paper thin and if she lay quietly and breathed softly, she could hear every sound in the living room as if she was actually in there. She could listen to the TV and imagine the pictures playing on the insides of her eyelids. Tonight she could hear Mommy on the telephone with Betty.

“She’s moving!” Mommy was crowing. “The old biddie is moving! Put her house up for sale and is taking those sacks of bones she calls kids and they are getting out of town. I heard she got fired from the hospital for being a drug addict and God only knows how she got those children back from the foster homes…slept with some judge, if you ask me.”

There was a pause while Betty said something, and then Mommy resumed. “Thank you,” Mommy said to her friend. “It feels good to rid the neighbourhood of such a bad influence, you know? With any luck the new people will be decent folks, the kind who will keep the yard kept up and the house maintained so they don’t bring down our property values like that old bitch did…”

Was that what it was all about? she wondered. Mrs. McKenzie had no husband to cut the grass and fix the house up, so it looked kind of shabby…was that what it was all about? Or was there more to it than that? She shuddered, despite the warmth of the evening, wondering what was going to happen now, with the McKenzies no longer there to monopolize her attention.

What was going to be Mommy’s next “project”?