Korê in New York

What happens when a kid refuses to leave the past behind? What happens when the past won't go away? Read on and don't worry about the emotional damage.

1. Prunes in the Relish Tray

   Sunday night for supper, I put the pitted prunes that Nervy picked out in one section of the dividered dish which serves a kind of relish tray my little sister, Minerva (aka Nervy or Nervy Worm)  likes better than deli salads. There was no more Hungry Man at supper. I think RoAnn gave the box of instant potatoes to the boys who came as a raiding party to pick up Kyril’s things.

   RoAnn glanced at the relish tray with distrust. This was for Nervy and me. It was half fresh stuff and half pickles, and one compartment pitted prunes. There was a container of Thousand Island on the table for me and also some picallily which is good on everything.

   From her place in the food fortress under the strip of fake sunny sky in our kitchen, Nervy asked: “When is Kyril coming back?”

   “It depends what his parents decide,” RoAnn was thankfully unfazed. “I’m not really his stepmother. I was just watching you two until Sammy got back. He has rights.”

   “Mommy has rights!” Nervy corrected us.

   “Technically Sammy and your mom have joint custody of you.”

   “Everyone has joint custody,” groaned a rather bored Ivanna.

   “If people are civilized and want to do as little in court as possible. Neither Anthony nor I had money for big lawyer fees. We hired one lawyer to draw up the agreement and the judge signed it. Bingo…divorce. And as long as we were both in Ithaca, he was in your life. He paid his child support as babysitting. That was fine with me. And it lasted the first semester after the divorce, but your father was flat broke. Ithaca, New York is not an easy place to earn a living. He had to move on and no child support, no babysitting, no Anthony, and a bunch of younger and older siblings all feeling very sorry for poor Ro-Ro, so book smart and so stupid,” RoAnn lapsed into sing-song.

   The story did not really have a happy ending until a year or two ago when Anthony began sending support, presents, and asking for contact with his daughter. Ivanna got her father back. RoAnn got some needed cash which she set aside for Ivanna’s education, and RoAnn had long ago been vindicated with a PhD and a tenure track job at Teacher’s College at Columbia University. ECBAS was another issue as far as this story was concerned.

   Nervy’s story was not nearly as happy when I thought about it. Her parents which were also my parents got divorced before she was a year old, much as RoAnn and Anthony had done, but even while the little Nervy Worm grew in our mother’s womb, the fireworks were starting to explode. The fights between the parents made any fights between Kyril and me look positively minor league and any attempt to tell us kids to stop “bickering” utterly laughable.

   The adults capacity not just for fighting, but for drama was formidable. I was old enough to appreciate both the irony and hypocrisy that went with adult battles. Kyril wasn’t. As with kid fights, both my parents were equally at fault. Both were screwing around. No, they weren’t screwing around. They were both in love. Mom pretty much explained it that way as did Dad. It made sense. Grownups fell in love. Falling in love then excused behavior no adult would ever tolerate in a kid.

   Mom’s boyfriend was Barry. I didn’t really care for him because he did not know what to do with a girl who wasn’t a tomboy and who liked to eat vegetables. He also did not know what to do with a pregnant girlfriend, but his exwife had had kids so he put up with Mom’s pregnancy with the kid who would be Nervy.

   Dad’s girlfriend was RoAnn. She taught at the university and lectured to a huge pit full of grownup students who understood the strange language she spoke. She tried to explain what she did for a living. She had a daughter, Ivanna, a year younger than Kyril.

   Dad and RoAnn made a go of it and married. Mom and Barry broke up and there was a second set of fireworks. Mom took her anger at Barry out on Dad in the divorce. Barry dumped Mom and ill used her. If I am mad at any of the adults, it is at Barry. Kyril and Barry by the way got along beautifully and Kyril is not angry at Barry. Kyril never speaks of Barry, though I’m not quite sure why. Was Mom jealous of Dad? Probably. Hey, adults are worse than kids remember. Please keep that in mind.

   When the dust settled, Dad lived with RoAnn for about a year, and then RoAnn got work in New York City. Dad followed RoAnn to her new location, since he said he could work anywhere and there was bus service. I rode the bus with Kyril who hated the long trip. Nervy was still a baby then and too young to know anything of back and forth betwen Scranton and New York City.

   Minerva, has lived her whole life in New York. She can not remember Barry. She may know that my Mom insisted on a DNA test for Minerva when she was born to see if she was Dad’s or Barry’s biologically. Dad claimed paternity for her. The test proved that Dad is her biological father. Stuff like that has a way of getting out.

   Scranton does not exist for Nervy and never will. It is at best where the more distant grandparents live. Where the grandparents really live for Nervy is Miami Beach, Florida. Dad is a distant figure. There was an older sister who always got in trouble and finally ran away/moved out at the end of eighth grade and now went to school in Brooklyn and then there was Dad’s girlfriend who was now his wife and who was probably a second cousin or best school friend of the witch in the Hansel and Gretel story. Word had it that she had decorated the apartment at the Ardsley with treats but that she had the bread oven nice and not to make roast suckling Nervy to feed herself and her airhead daughter.

   I did not even write Kyril into Minerva’s story. At times Kyril was fiercely protective, a proper older sibling at least in his own eyes, to his younger sister since the real older sister had failed. Maybe he was the keeper of peace and order. Whatever it was, it was all bullshit and brown nosing if you asked me, not that I had been much of an older sister because I had troubles of my own. That too was probably true of Kyril when you thought of it.

   So Nervy was in many ways an only child with two squabbling, selfish, much older siblings who took only minimal interest in her, a mother who had a full plate, an absentee father, and a lot of ugly stories that she might well have believed. I would have felt sorry for Nervy except I really had had my own troubles at Houghton and I knew what Kyril was like and I did not want to lose either parent, as I have explained before. I took it for granted that Nervy Worm was probably very damaged.

   “I think I want Kyril to come back,” Nervy told us all.

   I stared down at my food.

   “When Sammy gets here on Wednesday, you’re going to have to tell him that. He’s the one who has to go get Kyril.”

   “What about Mommy?”

   “She’s in Herkimer County. That’s Upstate,” RoAnn was probably trying to stop the conversation which was definitely headed somewhere weird.

   “I can email her and talk on the phone.”

   “You can tell your mommie that you miss Kyril and want him back.”

   I took a prune. These definitely belonged in the relish tray, yes definitely.

   “Can I call her after dinner?” Minerva insisted.

   “Sure,” RoAnn even gave five year olds Noblesse Oblige.

   “Everybody’s gone away,” Nervy said instead of thankyou.

   “What do you mean?” asked Ivanna who should of known. I half knew. RoAnn who had grown up with seven siblings knew it instinctively. First Mom went to Herkimer County. Jesusa was too scaird to watch the house and the children so no housekeeper. And then no mom at more or less the same time. Now Kyril moved out/ran away, so no sibling. Dad was never in the picture really when you thought about it because when you really thought about it, Mom had screwed around with Nervy’s visitation and gotten away with it.

   “Everybody’s coming back,” I told my little sister. “Daddy’s only gone until Wednesday. Mommy’s in the same state and you can phone her every night. You can use my Blackberry for that if you want. Kyril even goes to the same school as me.”

   “And the big girls are all still here,” Minerva finished the story giving it a weirdly happy ending. “Living with the big girls is nice. They don’t yell and they let you eat all the pickles you want. You can read to them. They don’t try to boss you around. It’s only big girls here, big big girls, and no boys. The last boy was Kyril and he moved out.”

   “Do you want Kyril to come back?” I asked. This speech perplexed me. The thought of my younger brother bossing around and lording it over a much younger sibling made me ill. This was not just booting out a little sibling or telling her to keep quiet or sniffing her to make sure she wasn’t wearing a three day old undershirt in which she had slept because an undershirt under pajamas keeps you warmer at night.

   “He’s my brother. Everybody can’t go away forever. The big girls will still be here.”

   “Everybody is coming back,” I repeated.

   “And the big girls will still be here to take care of me,” Minerva replied. The ending to the story was of course totally her own.

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