March 15, 2009

• I’ve been up since 4:30.  My sister (the crazy one who is back from Germany) asked me to drive her to her colonoscopy.  ”Sure,” I said, “what time?”  “You’d need to be here by 6:15,” she insisted.  Who makes their appts that early?  Crazy people, that’s who.

  Once we checked in she was either in the bathroom or trying to get outside for one last smoke.  They weren’t having it.  I cringed as her voice took on this very high pitched,  almost falsetto tone with the woman in charge.  My sister was balking at having her picture taken and snippy about filling out the form.  Clearly she has issues with those in a positition of authority.  It’s what happens when people have too many brains and not enough power.

  She is living with my mother so that invovled returning to the torture chamber, I mean home, I grew up in, having their version of a conversation.  Still high from the IV, my sister was barely coherent.  My once chillingly ruthless mother now quacks like a duck, something she must trot out to amuse those lucky few who find themselves sitting in the tweed chair across from her on the same red couch I grew up with.  Somehow the couch wears its years better which I don’t understand, as she looks much younger than 82. 

  She explains there’s a lake where I used to catch salamanders in the stream behind our house and that a new family of ducks lives there now.  She and my sister relive the night the basement flooded when my brother had to come over at 1 am in the pouring rain and dig a French drain all the way from the back door I used to sneak out of to the ravine where the lake is.  It’s a slightly different version than the one my brother told but my mother and sister can’t agree on anything and try to outdo each other with the telling.

  I’m slightly curious about these new voices I hear, not just with my sister and my mother but my ex-mother-in-law, too.  I was cutting up vegetables to roast and she was attempting to gather together all her tax stuff.  If I hadn’t been standing there I wouldn’t have recognized her voice.  It was almost a full octave higher and she used it in kind of a teasing manner, talking to herself about the horrors of taxes. 

  I find these old women fascinating.  Both use their voice in a more child-like manner, experimenting with sounds for their own amusement.  Each used to be so sparing when it came to their feelings.  But all prestense is gone now.  

  Listening to my sister blather in the car on the way home, my mother quacking, and my ex-mother-in-law sing-songing makes me nervous.  Terra firma was never my role.

  • 9:41 pm
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