Insults on the Rocks

Now she has my attention.

She set the stage. A table full of career drinkers who are happy to see each other after a long time apart. (Party.)

She makes it clear that she was not drunk. (Thank you, Queen Gertrude, for protesting too much.)

No. Of course she was not drunk. Never is. Not even when she threw up in my kitchen sink at the shore house I shared with friends in college after a night out at the bars. That was just a bad clam.

But anyway, she was not drunk, but admittedly has no recollection when Babs left.

A table of four people and you don’t notice when one of you leaves?

We might be able to “blame it on the a-a-a-a-alcohol” but it may have been that she was in a blind rage in her argument with Frank. She sheepishly admits to having said something heinous about Holly.

“Holly who? His wife?” I ask.

“No, his first wife.”

Oh. I’d forgotten all about her. Our spouse to relative ratio is unusually high in this family and identities don’t always sink too deeply into my gray matter.

“You said something about Holly? Isn’t she dead?”

“Oh. Yeah. She died years ago. Bitch that she was. Everyone thought so.”

Even so. It is generally considered bad policy to disparage the dead. People have a tendency to soften toward them. Even if their divorce was epically acrimonious. She was his sons’ mother. That tends to mean something in most social circles. Evidently Mom is a square peg, socially.

Then she remarks that Holly left her boys pounds of money when she died. Almost like she suspects she robbed a bank.

Frank must have mentioned this in Holly’s defense in the argument that ensued. Because evidently, Mom’s hideous comment went over like a fart in church. And you know that she doesn’t voluntarily back down from an argument. Must have been quite a scene.

And at some point, Babs must have jumped from the plane before it crashed into the side of a mountain. I will assume that Mom either argued to the death and then either stormed out herself or was asked to leave.

And here is where her story gets fuzzy.

She was walking back to Babs’ house in the dark. Enter the birds. They, being gulls, grab clams and drop them midflight to break them open to get the clam out. (Somehow Mother Nature is getting blamed for this) And you know, Babs doesn’t sweep very often, (there is HER culpability) and Mom says a clam got caught in her sandal and she fell (yet another bad clam story).

I am looking at her incredulously as she says that she fell hard, breaking her fall with her face on Babs’ front steps. Ouch.

She broke her dentures. Didn’t realize she did until the next day when she noticed her front tooth was missing. (I would think a sober person would have noticed that right away…) She has a fat lip, and a bruised hand and her shiners have developed into Technicolor.

It is hard to know how to respond. The adolescent in me wants to scream at her that she is full of S-H-I-T. That I am not buying that clam story for one minute. That she may have slipped on the garnish from her Road Coke that flew from the glass when she staggered across the property, but it was not the birds or Babs’ housekeeping inadequacies that caused the fall. It was her misguided, inebriated, jet fueled, post-argument exit and nothing more.

She seems satisfied that she’s made a convincing argument. And I don’t call her on it for the sake of peace. I know the truth and that is all that matters. And maybe that Mom has once more taken me for an idiot. Some things never change. And never will.