Chapter Twenty
-- March, 2000
Pearl Jam – “Better Man”
After everything that happened at Christmas, I wasn’t about to spend spring break at home. When Mom suggested I visit Aunt Sheila in Florida though, I knew I had my out.
I flew into Ft. Myers because Naples didn’t have an airport. The terminal was nautically themed with a massive whale exhibit hanging from the ceiling. I waited under it for Sheila to come pick me up.
I saw her before she saw me. She was scanning the crowd for my arrival. I watched as she psyched herself up. When she finally laid eyes on me, she managed a warm smile. I gave her a big hug. It was great to see her again. She seemed better than when I’d seen her last; more grounded, more settled.
We got into Sheila’s gold, Chrysler Sebring convertible. Before we got on the highway, she made sure to put the top down and we drove back to her place with the wind whipping our hair. The first thing I noticed was that her house looked like the “Golden Girls” house, all pastel and wicker and steeped in palm fronds. The air conditioning was going at all times, just in case the pool in the backyard didn’t do it for you.
I was surprised to learn that Sheila had a roommate, a friend of her and Nick’s from back in Jersey named Ron. He had a shiny bald head with an amiable walrus moustache. To me, he kind of looked like an accountant.
On my first day there, Sheila took me to a country fair; a real podunk, carnie-filled kind of place. While I went on the rides, she stood around awkwardly waiting for me to finish. It was clear she really didn’t know what to do with me.
Fortunately, she was at work most of the day. I tried to do Florida right, but once I got sunburned, I stayed inside. Sheila had had her big screen T.V. shipped down with all her other belongings, so I spent hours in front of it. It was good to get a piece of my old life back.
But not everything was the same. One morning, I was standing in the kitchen when Sheila started making out with her roommate. And not just making out, giggling too, like some kind of giddy teenager. The two of them seemed to have extra arms as they pawed at each other. Surely there were better ways of broaching that she’d moved on.
From then on, Ron went out of his way to be nice to me. When I found the Gershwin-soundtrack to “Manhattan” and played it on Sheila’s stereo, Ron made sure to compliment my “sophisticated” musical tastes. I felt like a ten-year old whose new stepdad wanted to throw the pigskin around.
I reacted by renting dozens of movies. Sheila could afford it. Besides, I was behind in my studies: there were still foreign films to sit through, sci-fi classics to try to understand, and I still hadn’t watched a single Chaplin.
At night when Sheila got off work, all three of us would have dinner out somewhere. These became difficult to sit through because in the retirement capital of the world, I was usually the only teenager in the restaurant. I guess I was being annoying because when I made the mistake of telling Sheila that I needed to be back at her house at a certain time to watch a movie on cable, she flipped out on me.
“Taylor, going out to dinner is supposed to be a treat!”
“It was a treat, but we ate and now it’s time to go...”
“We are not on your personal timetable. We are here for some quality time--”
“You can’t force good times!”
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A passing waiter slid the bill onto the table. I grabbed it and handed it to Sheila’s roommate. “Here you go, Ron – you got this?”
An embarrassed, bewildered look came over the man’s face, but he was stopped from answering by Sheila. She bellowed, “Outside now!”
I stood and without a word, led the way out of the restaurant. I was only a few steps out of the front door when she grabbed my arm.
“You are acting like a spoiled brat!”
I spun around to face her. “How can you go from Nick to that-that fucking nerd!”
“No one is replacing Nick! But you are taking advantage of my hospitality!”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I knew I wasn’t perfect, but how did this get turned around on me? I wasn’t the one who moved on with some mustachioed dweeb! But I sure was being punished for it.
On some level, I think I knew she was pushing me away. Still, if this was what she needed to heal, then of course I would leave.
The next morning, I told Sheila I wanted to go home early. She looked at me sadly, like she might object, but ultimately agreed. I think that no matter what she was going to say, she knew it’d be less complicated with me back at home.
I got on the plane, my skin peeling, feeling raw in more ways than one. If this was how she acted around me, I truly doubted that she wanted a child of her own. Last year I had lost an Uncle, it just took this long to lose the Aunt too.
I flew home, wondering what might have been if I was allowed to grow up in Summit with three parents. I fell asleep shortly before we landed and dreamt vividly. I was in Sheila and Nick’s old house, but it had been remodeled, a strange mix of their old décor and Sheila’s new house in Naples. When I knocked upon the front door a woman that looked like Sheila answered but she didn’t seem to recognize me. She asked who I was. I gave some flimsy explanation and suddenly she was gone. I was left to explore the house alone. It was dark and there were sheets and dust covers on everything, like I had arrived in the off-season by mistake. No one lived there and if I thought I did, then I was mistaken.
When I landed, Mom picked me up. She was on her way to dinner at the Vanowens. It was the last place I wanted to be, but showing up out of the blue, I really didn’t have any other options. When we got there, naturally there were some questions. Why was I back so soon? Who was this guy living with Aunt Sheila?
“His name’s Ron Payer.” I told them.
Uncle Kev turned to Lynn. “Yeah, we know Ron, don’t we? Man, I could tell you some stories about him... guy’s main goal was meeting ‘some rich bitch’ to show him the good life.” Lynn looked at him sternly, so he added defensively, “His words.”
“Well, it just goes to show you,” Lynn ventured, “she’s getting exactly what she asked for. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. She spent so many years enabling Nicky, this is just more of the same!”
“Lynn, how could you say that?” Mom asked.
“Is it not true? He was lazy and childish and needed to grow up.”
“You know, I went to school with her,” Kevin interjected. “You did not want the bottle to land on her during spin the bottle.”
His kids laughed at that, then decided to jump on the bandwagon. Kady shared, “she always gives us savings bonds for our birthday, even when we ask for cash!”
Ollie joined in. “Yeah! And then the moment Uncle Nick died, she stopped!”
Kevin finished his drink and rose to get another. “Eh, she’s full of herself. Thinks everyone’s obsessed with her money.”
I nodded to myself. “I guess this time she was right...”
As we got into our car to go home, Mom said, “That was really sweet of them.”
“What was?” I had no idea what she was talking about.
“Did you not realize they were defending you in there?”
“By talking shit about Sheila?”
Janet nodded. “They saw your heart was broken and decided to stick up for you.” She climbed into the driver’s seat as I looked back at the Vanowen house. I wondered if that could possibly be true...
On the last day of spring break, I met with Dr. Nance, the British psychiatrist who prescribed my meds. She added Bupropion to my cocktail of drugs. When I returned to school, I found it hard to sleep and had exponentially more headaches. I lost interest in everything. I stopped caring about grades, I stopped talking to people altogether.
I spent my time writing sad, little stories in the basement of the library. I started work on my magnum opus, “Rube” – an epic tale of runaway teens, highway rest stop pedophiles, and traveling carnies. In the climax, the evil cult leader gets bitten by a rabid raccoon and foams at the mouth as his teenage followers try to escape from his farm.
One afternoon, during my research into hick culture, I passed a wall in the library basement covered in old class photos. There, two frames down and to the left, I saw a picture of Uncle Nick and his dorm mates. The picture was dated 1973.
The year a fire destroyed one of the buildings on campus...