every so often i think of an argument i heard as a kid when halfway down the stairs one afternoon. my parents were always screaming, so usually i tuned it out unless it sounded like i might get caught up in the whirlwind, or it might get redirected toward me. that time i stopped.
my father was seething, as he would do, hissing his anger through his teeth, so you could hear the spittle better than you could make out the words. who knows what set him off this time, but clearly this had been going on for a while and he was moving in for the kill, as it were.
"the only good thing to come from this marriage was jenny," he spat.
jenny was my significantly older sister, who had run the first chance she got and never looked back. i have no relationship with her; she came out of the mess determined to police what she considered "normal."
(this was never me, of course—ergo the lack of relationship.)
both of us had been accidents, and neither of my parents made a secret how unwanted we were and how much they blamed us both for ruining their lives—but there was a difference of ten years and the degree of mutually thwarted ambitions and festering hatred between the two births.
she was 21, the first time; he four years older. both in college. i think she had just gotten her undergrad degree and was about to go for a masters, while i think he was finishing his masters and about to go for a ph.d—not from passion but because it's what he felt was expected.
i don't get the sense either had much luck or experience romantically—i know that his frat bros once hired him a sex worker to "break his virginity"—and like his blindered attitude toward credentials, i don't think there was much in the way of passion between them at any time.
they met in (i presume) 1967 through an early computerized dating service—the sort of thing that his dad would have worked on at ibm, where you punched the cards and fed them in and it used some simple symbolic logic to pair off any subjects whose parameters didn't conflict.
aside from being bookish introverts with no sense that other people were actually real, they had basically nothing in common. i don't, and don't wish to, know all the details, but gather that in their mutual naivety he got her pregnant almost immediately then felt an obligation.
with me, to contrast, it had been long enough since pregnancy that he had been pressuring her for a while to drop the artsy stay-home mother act since she clearly didn't care about the kid and her art had never been profitable. and then, suddenly they both had another accident.
of course in his mind the accident was entirely her doing and was in fact no accident but rather a conspiracy to keep her out of the workforce for another indefinite number of years—because clearly she loved the mother gig, and loved her body getting torn up, and well, solipsism.
so back on the stairs, i don't know how old i was. maybe middle school? old enough to process what i was hearing, if i made the regrettable choice to tune in.
none of this was new. i'm told my sister won a high school competition with a poem about when the screaming might end.
and yet, "the only good thing to come from this marriage was jenny."
"what about [azure]," she asked, less from concern than from personal offense—her words a sort of targeted probe for quotes that would help to prove her moral superiority in the argument and over him generally.
at this his fury leapt up a notch and his words shot out slowly, each with its implied punctuation.
"[azure] was 'i-don't-want-to-get-a-job," he said, his voice by the end drifting to a mocking sing-song falsetto. "[she's] a total wash, all this time and money down the toilet."
the implication here being, however old i was at the time—ten, thirteen, maybe—that i was a waste of flesh, time, and resources who only existed for and after so many years still held no meaning to him beyond frustrating his attempts to control her behavior back in december 1977.
as i say, neither of them skipped a chance to underline how unwanted i was as a person and a presence; how lucky i was that they didn't treat me worse than they did. how the worst thing i could do was remind them that i existed, and had basic physical needs of my own to survive.
my mother called me an interloper, and would complain to all her friends about how horrible i was. my father would just... leave me, in random public places, all day and night, so that he didn't have to think about me or do any sort of parenting. and again, the fury was constant.
what was new, to me, was hearing that for all his neglect and disregard, at least one of my parents saw a value in having brought my sister into the world.
later he would disown her and call her a pig for following her legal obligations in managing his mother's estate, but hey.
to me that was such an interesting detail, as far as any part of this mess could be interesting. there was one good thing to come out of the marriage, and it was my sister. confronted straight on, he doubled down on the truth usually left unsaid, and underlined my worthlessness.
her life was of redeeming value. my existence was a damnation.
i mean. these were the messages they both lived by and imparted day after day after day. hearing it in so many words, though—well.
it does tend to stick in the memory.