Welcome to the Unhome

When I left Big Sur to return “home,” I knew I was in bad shape. Suicidal ideation was my norm. I thought I was returning home, to the bedrock of safety and stability, a cradle of love and warmth. The place I’ve always thought was supposed to be a nest, a second womb. I desperately needed that womb after my breakdown in Big Sur. I needed a non-judgmental mother to hug me and hold me and refrain from saying “I told you so.” 

Intellectually, I knew better. When I’d left for California two years earlier, we still lived in Scarsdale. I knew that Vernon wouldn’t be like Scarsdale and yet my image of the old home lingered. My image was of a place where onions sauteed on the stove, along with some braised beef or oven-roasted chicken. The smell of my father’s homemade French bread greeted me as soon as I entered the house. A place where six kids and a dog vied for attention and created benign mayhem with homework, tossing footballs and Frisbees, launching food fights, and hosting late-night sleepovers with friends, all “playing” their tennis rackets like guitars as they accompanied their favorite rock stars. One foot inside the house in Vernon and I knew it was no womb. There were no cooking smells. There was no music. There was no nest. Most of the time, there was not even a mother. 

I don’t remember much from my time in Vernon. I’m not sure if that’s because Vernon was so unmemorable in and of itself, or if it’s because I was stinking drunk all the time on Schlitz Malt Liquor, and high on Darvon, or because that house was so unhappy that I’m blocking it out. What I do remember is my mother proudly giving me a tour of the house which she’d tried to decorate in the mirror image of our home in Scarsdale. It was a colonial style house with the staircase in the middle, separating the living room on one side from the kitchen and dining room on the other. I also remember the fist-sized hole in the sheetrock wall going up the stairs. I flinched when I saw it, but Mom walked me up to the bedrooms as if she didn’t notice anything unusual about a wall decorated by framed prints of Redouté’s roses with an unrepaired hole midway between them. It had become wallpaper to her. 

My sister Andrea doesn’t remember the hole in the wall. Maybe her memory is accurate and mine imagined. Maybe mine is a metaphor. What she remembers is an atmosphere electric with tension and the constant threat of violence. She shuts down completely when I bring up Vernon today—defensively and deliberately refusing to discuss it. I try to remember; and to understand what the hell happened there. 

Here’s what I know: Vernon was the unhome. 

When my mother sold our house in Scarsdale, she sold out the family. She created an upheaval for my youngest siblings that bordered on the abusive. The family evaporated like a culinary reduction into a concentrated sauce, like something Dad would have learned in his gourmet cooking class. Gastriques. Gravies. Demi-glace. Where once there had been enough volume in the family to dilute the flavor, now there was only intensity. The only ones left were Andrea and Patrick. Kit was away at Ithaca College as a college freshman. Geoff had an apartment in Portchester, NY, not far from the old neighborhood. My brother Mark had enlisted in the Navy and I had been “on the road” since I’d dropped out of college. All together, we were no more than a reduction of our old family.

My mother cleaved my sister Andrea from her friends, her studies, her basketball team, and other activities at her old high school. She did it during Andrea’s senior year in high school, such a delicate and crucial stage of development, a stage that should have been joyous and glorious in my sister’s memory. Instead, it was damaging. I don’t use the word cleave lightly.

When I think of cleaving, I think of a violent wrenching, a splitting and tearing, like the cleaving of meat, cutting animal carcasses into joints or pieces in a butcher’s shop—rump roasts, ribs, tenderloin steaks. I think of the word cleaver, an instrument strong and sharp enough to cut through bone. 

The dictionary points to two uses for the word “cleave,” both seemingly opposite:

1. To divide by or as if by a cutting blow: split
2. To adhere firmly and closely or loyally and unwaveringly

My mother and Andrea are examples of both meanings. My mother cleaved my sister from her home, her life, and her identity. Yet, despite what must have been emotionally devastating for my sister, my mother expected Andrea to cleave unto her, move with her to Vernon, do her bidding without hesitation. To become one with my mother. 

Instead of graduating with her high school class of three years, Andrea would spend her senior year at a new school in Vernon, only to graduate with relative strangers. Friends in Scarsdale had generously invited Andrea to live with them while she completed her senior year at her old school, but my mother declined the offer. She claimed she needed Andrea with her to help with the transition. What my mother really needed was a responsible adult at home with Patrick, so she could escape to Willimantic (what we kids called Romantic Willimantic) to play “house” with Ed, our soon-to-be stepfather. 

My mother essentially created an unofficial foster home for Patrick, leaving my sister Andrea in the role of unofficial foster mother. Mom spent her time working for and living with Ed, about 20 miles from Vernon. She rarely came home during the week, leaving Andrea and Patrick to fend for themselves until the weekend. 

She.

Abandoned. 

Them.  

Abandonment. That word puts my empathy, already toxic, into overdrive. When I moved to Vernon and saw Patrick, I’m sure I was feeling what he felt. I’m sure I absorbed his feelings. His pain of being unworthy of his parents’ love, his feelings of being unlovable. Even with Andrea there, he must have experienced desperate insecurity and uncertainty about getting his needs met. He was young enough to be traumatized by my parents’ separation—his father, a ghost; his mother, a shadow; both, leaving him behind. He was left witnessing without understanding. 

A little boy watching as his mother drives off without him. 

Permanently. Resolutely.

Never looking back.

Why wasn’t he enough to make her stay.

Not only did I feel his suffering, but I also felt my own. I felt extreme guilt for having been gone so long, selfishly doing my own thing. I felt like I too had abandoned him. As his big sister, 10 years his senior, I had often been put in the role of mother. But I hadn’t been there when he needed me most. I felt guilty for growing the hole of abandonment instead of mending it. 

In correspondence with my sister before I moved back east, I learned that Patrick had immediately started skipping classes at his middle school in Vernon. As his school attendance waned, disruptive behavior replaced it. Afterall, there was no one at home to stop him. He came to the attention of the school authorities, who scheduled ineffectual meetings with my mother to discuss the problem. “Are there any issues at home?” they would ask. They didn’t push too hard because they knew he’d be off to high school by the end of the year. Let them deal with him.  

Patrick stole frequently from my mother and Andrea, and after I moved back, from me too. Here was a child screaming for attention, but his mother wasn’t listening. Her response was another $20 tacked to the fridge door on Sunday with a note that said, “I’ve gone to Ed’s. Be back Saturday.” Eventually, after one too many $20s, after one too many notes about Ed’s, after one too many reminders about the leftovers in the fridge, Patrick started acting out his anger.

 First it was just the occasional shove at Mom, then a frustrated fist pounding the wall. Then he directed his anger at my sister. On one occasion, he pinned her against the wall when she tried to get him to stop hitting Mom. He gripped her by the shoulders, almost lifting her off her feet, his face a menacing six inches from hers, threatening retribution if she interfered again. One rare day when my mother was home, Patrick threw her down the stairs. Bruised and battered, my mother took no action. Instead of facing the emotional combustion at home and responsibly addressing it, she posted another $20 on the fridge and escaped to Ed’s. 

For me, even worse than the anger was witnessing the remorse afterwards. Just like what you’d see in those Lifetime movies about domestic abuse, Patrick would display well-intentioned contrition after each crisis. Every time. 

“It will never happen again,” he would say, weeping and inconsolable, often bearing flowers for Mom. Each time I felt his suffering. It was unbearable. Following each outburst my mother wanted to believe that this time would, in fact, be the last. She wanted to accept Patrick’s sugarcoated assurances. 

I watched. Although I should have known better, I wanted to believe Patrick’s reassurances too. He was my little brother. What I failed to accept, or even to acknowledge, was that he was not the little brother I had left behind. He was a deeply troubled adolescent whose screams for help went unheeded. 

My mother’s boyfriend, Ed, was a gun owner with a significant collection of guns. When we still lived in Scarsdale and he first started seeing my mother, he had frequently brought guns into our home. He even built a shooting range in the basement to teach Patrick how to shoot and to give him a place for target practice. He often left loaded guns behind after his visits. You never knew when you might accidentally stumble across an unexpected gun.

My sister Kit used to tell a story about coming home one night from a babysitting job in Scarsdale. From the outside, the house was mostly dark as she took the front steps two at a time. She assumed everyone was in bed. She came through the front door and turned on a light in the living room. There was Ed, sitting by himself on the couch, in the dark, with a revolver in his hand pointed at the ceiling. He just sat there, cocking the hammer and pulling the trigger, again and again. She was totally spooked by the event. I think we all knew, even before my mother moved to Vernon, that things were getting out of hand, escalating to a point of no return.

I had come to Vernon with two misguided expectations. The first was that I’d be coddled back to mental health by being home. That my mother would be a mother. I left California depressed and suicidal. I left in need of the embrace of my family. The second expectation was that I’d be able to help them, that I’d play the role of avenging angel, swooping down into the midst of the drama, wrapping my wings gracefully around my mother and sister and brother, around all the hurt and the violence and the drama, and saving them with my love. I think I’d watched one too many of those Lifetime movies that ended on notes of hope. Both these expectations were deeply flawed.

I realized that I’d held onto the myth that we were a close family—maybe it was a defense mechanism I clung to in a frightening world—but we weren’t close at all. I realized that we were two separate families—the big kids, Geoff, Mark and me, and everyone else. In many ways, we’d grown up in very different homes. I loved them, but I didn’t know them. I loved the memories I held and the fantasies I created. 

Maybe the fist in the wall was only a metaphor I used unconsciously as a lesson in survival. Patrick’s disturbing self-awareness that if he didn’t punch the wall, he would punch his mother. So, he punched the wall. Or worse, he might one day pick up one of the stray guns that Ed left lying about carelessly. Guns we would find at random times—when we were pushing the Hoover in the living room, moving the armchair on its castors, not realizing there was a stray revolver underneath. Afraid to touch it lest it was loaded. 

Or Patrick might pick up the stray rifle that Ed left for my mother’s protection in the corner of her bedroom closet, leaning against the wall next to her high heeled black patent leather pumps and her winter-white chiffon dress with its beautiful, feminine drape. That would have been the faithful Remington, pump action, 12-guage shotgun. It would have been loaded for her protection. Or the small .22 revolver he left in the drawer of the dry bar in the dining room, a small caliber gun that just about anyone could use to defend themselves from intruders—you know, all the robbers and gang members and rapists in the neighborhood. It too would have been loaded. It too would have been there for our protection. 

One time I asked just where Ed thought these intruders were coming from. This was a safe neighborhood. He responded that the guns were there to keep it that way. 

My metaphor of the fist through the wall was probably my way of absorbing my silent rage over my mother’s abandonment of all of us. Of Patrick. Of Andrea. Of Kit, Geoff and Mark. Of me. The neglect I had never been able to acknowledge. Where was she when we needed her? Any of us. Where had she ever been? 

By nature nonconfrontational, I was seething now. I pictured myself, good girl and bad, combined at last into the avenging angel, picking up that pump action, 12-guage shotgun—what was it that Ed had said about the Remington? “Accurate, reliable, stylish…unparalleled craftsmanship”—it felt like a lover in my arms. 

I watched myself standing in front of a mirror, cradling the stock against my shoulder, running my hand along its smooth, strong casing. Holding it, glancing my other hand quickly over the action, and taking firm grip of the barrel. 

Looking at the mirror, I pictured my mother standing there, twirling in her feminine dress and high heels, pleased with how she saw herself. But then she saw me behind her. She was startled to see me holding the Remington, startled that for all Ed’s protective measures, she had become a target. In shocked recognition, she brought her hands to her face. A grossly inadequate shield from what was to come. 

“Tell me,” I said. “Who’s the intruder now?”

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