CHAPTER 28: The Opera: Act III; Pt. 4 [cont. 5]
From "The Saga of One F**ked Mother
In this section of Chapter 28, Legion discovers Herry took her boys 5 states away to the south and east—far enough so she cannot easily sneak and visit them, as she had been doing, while maintaining a job—which was exactly his plan. This absolute revenge of depriving Legion completely of her boys was surely to “Deviant Herry’s delight” which “utterly pleased the socially pathologic pathologist”.
Herry knew the people of Central West Virginia would be so desperate for doctors that they would overlook the fact that he was a disgraced physician from Iowa who had kidnapped the boys from their mother—another well-thought out aspect of his plan. Not to mention bringing on a homely, repugnant new wife/stepmother into the mix who would be enthusiastically willing to conspire with him every step of the vengeful subterfuge.
In the last section of Chapter 28, Legion is upset that Herry would take the kids away without even telling them where they were going. She ponders how the “not knowing is the worst” and how so many mothers and children have to live not knowing, because Family Court allows men to take and alienate their children from them. She calls directory service in every state in an effort to find where he’s taken them. And it’s worse than she feared…
CHAPTER 28 of Mother-Fucking: The Saga of One Fucked Mother begins with Act III, Part 4 of “The Opera” from Book 3. The Opera has three Acts with five Parts—one for each of the three Family Court and two Appellate Court trials. Chapter 28 covers all of Act III: Part 4: the third Family Court trial and Part 5: the second Appellate trial. [This is a long chapter and will be published in newsletter-sized bites.]
Dr. Blue’s novel is based on her own experience of the Custody Crisis. It uniquely conveys how Family Court judges are “mother-fucking” women—a form of systemic oppression—as protagonist Legion is systematically and methodically deprived of her children and money and reduced to “one fucked mother”.
Chapters are stand-alone interesting so you can begin reading anywhere. A Cast of Characters follows to help readers at any point [on the web page]. All published chapters are included in the Section: “Saga of One F**ked Mother” accessible on the top bar of the home page of Women’s Coalition News & Views. Sequential chapters are published every Wednesday so make sure to subscribe if you haven’t yet!
TEASERS
No surprise, though…Only saddened and disappointed me soooo––to finally learn where Jesse, Mirzah and Zane actually were.
…he knew all along what it was that he was doing with West Virginia and how he was playing so dirtily with all of … my Boys’ brains. He was hiding Zane, Jesse and Mirzah from me while, at the same time, sacrificing the wonderment they’d already had with me––and, most assuredly, … purposefully and perfectly punishing us all. Rabid … lethal … revenge.
I truly, truly missed my Boys, which of course I believed was to Deviant Herry’s delight. All of one’s ordinary human emotions and any of those of DEhumans for damned sure, so ‘outlandishly irrelevant’ and purposefully alien to this man, I know that my yearning for my Children … hourly … utterly pleased the socially pathologic pathologist.
BOOK 3: Dr. True's Opera in Three Acts—with Five Parts
CHAPTER 28: The Opera: Act III; Part 4 [cont. 5]
I finished the United Parcel Service helper job around 11:15 p.m. christmas eve 1991. It had been great, and I actually have fond memories of that particular post. Not always, by any means, no, no, no! has that corporation done well by DEhumans. Uh-uh. Sexual discrimination and harassment lawsuits, as a matter of fact, abound against the company nationwide; and in Iowa alone rather recently—1998, one such jury awarded $80,700,000 to a Des Moines woman so justifiably charging both harassment and discrimination for years and years against a UPS center just a little over an hour away from me. Yes, that’s quite correct! I am stating … … that amount: 80.7 million dollars. Thank goodness and, most certainly! no frigging gaaaawds, for moral jury persons.
But back up here out of the Ames center I was treated with nothing but respect and honor—and the expectations on managers’, overseers’ and drivers’ behalves that I could—and would—actually do the job. It certainly was work, all right. Run, run, run. Haul, haul, haul. Lift, lift, lift. Smile, smile, O remember to smile at the customers, Legion! Although all of the drivers for whom I rode shotgun I truly liked and we went everywhere including the remotest rural homesteads of Storm County and beyond, I especially enjoyed the shopping mall assignment wherein early every morning for about two weeks the sorters loaded me up a colossal fifth‑wheel and parked it out at the mall’s back lot to the service entrances of the biggest shops and stores. With brown suit and flatbed and hand truck and appropriate clipboard and paperwork and lots and lots of walking back and forth to the trailer then, I kept stocked the stores for the holidays.
I so relished the smiles. The most difficult wasn’t the physical labor although true it was: I could consume whatever the hell I pleased because of its exercise. The hardest was, of course, watching the little kiddos dart about happy as clams. O, that was hard––incredibly so! Seeing mama after mama after mama stroll children by my carts as I rolled and unloaded, I knew I had to hold back on the waterworks in order to keep professional the outward countenance––and so … I just did.
AmTaham as well as domestic violence and battered women’s shelter workers and sexual abuse counselors all called that––this utility which I practiced … splitting: the adept ability to split into two people, two personalities … at the least. The one who does the work simply because the job needs doing in order to survive, and the person who splits off of the first Legion and floats up somewhere around the ceiling, safe there, protected and comforted for the time being, by the distance and the warmth up there in the darkened recesses of my brain. AmTaham had explained repeatedly to me––in the last few months of my and the Truemaier Boys’ turmoil––about this phenomenon which he himself still performed some 4½ decades later since the return from his Pacific battles of World War II. “But above all, you must keep this to yourself, Kitty. You just don’t know whom you can trust with this information. You know, that you split off––in order to manage. I think it’s fine. As a matter of fact, I believe it necessary to the psyche, but you just can never know what other people are going to believe about you––and, an’, aaaah, they might hold it out against you. As proof you’re whacko. You know what I’m saying? So just be truly, truly careful with whom you admit this about yourself, Kitty. This cleaving thing. Hear? ‘Specially under no circumstances to any court or judge! Verstehen?!” And, O, had I! This ‘protection’ advice from an old warrior and the adroit True tribal chieftain to his 44‑year‑old adult daughter! Only Grace knew. I kept this skill so secret, that is, about my ability to become two Legions. And most certainly nowhere near that custody evaluator, Ms. Carrie Canard, had I ever let on. Same survival mechanism as within my condominium’s raw and so frosty glaciation when showering, lo, those many years’ worth of no heat. A system so honed that within moments of my being socked with something shocking or difficult or tragic or holocaustic to the flash of generating and accomplishing the schism, I could split in seconds––if there be need to do so.
On the 24th of December then, we were particularly swamped as had the entire week been before, naturally. But this exceptional Tuesday, I’d received an early morning notice from an Iowa State University human resources official that if I wanted an interview for a secretarial position, then I had better get on over to its Forestry Department just as soon as possible since at noon they were all closing up shop there and everywhere else within the University for the holiday. I asked for an hour off is all––explaining straight up front to my UPS bossman that if I didn’t get on out at the University or somewhere else after that night, why I’d be evicted from the condo in less than two weeks’ time––with the beginning of 1992––because I simply did not have January’s rent money. “One hour! Then I need you right back at the Mall. Got that?!”
O JYeah, that? That … I had gotten all right.
“Says here, Dr. True, that you have a lot of degrees. What about that? What’s the story with that? Why are you applying to be a secretary? Maybe you won’t be staying very long? Would I have that about right?” asked a very tall, lissome man wearing the Malcolm X‑browline and FBI agent Carl Hanratty‑style of eyeglasses which Actor Tom Hanks modeled in Catch Me If You Can and who appeared to be about my age. He stretched out his right hand to me and identified himself as Dr. Joplin presently then Chair of Iowa State University’s Forestry Department. I had already taken to the woman, also my age, perhaps up to a decade older it was hard to tell, who was Dr. Joplin’s chief administrative assistant when she remarked how nice it was to see me liveried for a job interview in the chocolate browns of the UPS uniform, the one I was to entirely relinquish later on that very night––instead of, of course, in the ‘standard’ two‑piece navy wool with matching pumps. She genuinely meant it.
I looked at Dr. Joplin; I looked over at his assistant, Ms. Rosalind Franklin. I looked down at the floor. To be honest––which I so wanted to be with these two people––I needed another byte about the size of this book and the time that that would take … to explain the mother‑fucking. And just how matters such as one, that is, how matters such as a mother‑fucking, result in DEhumans like me darkening their doorstep seeking employment. Long‑term employment, as a matter of fact, and a situation that came with belovéd benefits, too! It did strike me though––Dr. Joplin’s very initial questioning––as soooo, so different than what would have been Dr. Herod Edinsmaier’s dissing at such as would be my introduction in this type of conversation. Hell, Herry would not have believed me to even own those earned degrees! I would have been––right off! ––accused of lying on my résumé–– –– as he himself does––to this day!––upon his own! Fuck! Herry would soooo not have addressed me by any name, let alone, by a titled one in accordance with correct, professionally respectful etiquette!
I answered him, “Dr. Joplin, it’s the Forestry Department. The Forestry Department. You and everyone here, I am certain that every day you are here, you do … worthy … work. And my degrees? About my education? Dr. Joplin, I use my education … every day.”
I don’t know what it was that got me the job. Were they inundated under mountains of work? Had they been strapped and hard‑pressed for weeks to months trying to find someone? Was I the first one off the top of the pile and out of the gate? Was I to pay back for all of the trees I’d personally felt accountable for killing over at the junk mail factory? Was Ms. Phillipa Chance’s guiding and generous spirit invisibly orchestrating from an office corner? Or was hiring me only a case of Winter Solstice and seasonal charity? Well, because of––whatever, thus began … again … for my first time since graduating there, 6½ months’ pregnant with Jesse as I was conferred the doctorate in veterinary medicine, that is, the DVM degree May 1978, a simple relationship with Iowa State University that works today. The start date was set for the Monday morning of 06 January 1992. I could get through the next two weeks without turkey and pie nor certainly any decorated cookies or New Year’s bubbly, for that matter. After all … I, Dr. Legion True, had secured a truly worthy job, only 3/4‑time, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. then and only the nine academic‑year months without the summer income at all–– ––but a job, nonetheless, with, again, the promise of permanency! … And since American civil court judges soooo do not count mothering as a job whatsoever at all, then … according to daMan, the first genuine––paying––one since Kansas.
As I left the Biology Building’s second floor and hurried right back up to the Mall trailer to there finish out the 24th with the United Parcel Service before ending the season and the year of 1991, for that matter, as Save‑U‑More’s 6 a.m. breakfast cook that upcoming weekend, a holocaustic and terrorizing scene from the Othello Drive’s pornography den returned to my mind’s eye. From that walnut‑walled playroom with the walnut, console piano, the space Herry’d said that had, in addition to the gymnasium‑sized picture window to the Brookside Forest in its living room, caused him to buy the house from his newest alcoholics anonymous idiot‑pal, Cornball––without my input. Dr. Herod Edinsmaier had brought back to me the Truemaier Boys after first retrieving Mirzah, Jesse and Zane from their weekend at AmTaham’s and Mehitable’s. It was a Sunday evening, 02 October 1988; and strapped within their seatbelts and, thus, captured and inescapably imprisoned in this way on Interstate‑80 while traveling back, Still‑Husband Herry, alone, had told the Boys that he was divorcing me––and before telling me he was divorcing me! Inside that den, then, he proceeded to––while the Boys witnessed from their hallway glances through its doorframe. Horrid Herry blathered forth with yet another … exhibition.
Still‐Husband Herry picked up an object that just happened to be sitting on the top‑down, built‑in escritoire, a stainless steel teaspoon which had been left lying there by who knows who. Herry held it between his thumb and left index finger and, with the last three fingers slightly crooked, began swinging the spoon back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, it swaying in front of my eyes in that procedural‑like hypnotizing pendulum mode as The Sperm Source of MY three Truemaier Boys sneered at me, “I don’t have my ‘doctor‑doctor wife’ any more, my ornament to dangle in front of my family and friends. You’re nothing now. You’re nothin’ but a regular, old housewife now. You’re nothing.”
This … from the good and wonderful man who was later to tell several different judges several different times how it was that he, even at this point in his life, had had ten years of alcoholics anonymous ‘recovery’!
This … from the man who was later to tell several different judges several different times how it was that he, at the time he married Ms. Fannie Issicran McLive on 02 June 1990, a most incredible shrew and even more like Mehitable than I could have ever imagined possible in another, that he, at the point when he married her, had had 13 years of alcoholics anonymous ‘recovery’!
This? From a ‘recovering’, much less, ‘recovered’ … man? From one who still did not speak my name––not even to tell me that he was divorcing the “nothing,” the “regular, old housewife” … behind that name!
What would this ‘recovered’ man, admittedly snide and licentiously elitist, who had not only completely hidden my children from their mother but had also spirited them halfway away across the nation into an aristocratic milquetoast’s and his termagant’s territory, think about one Legion True, BSN, DVM, PhD and present Deli Grill Queen‑Secretary?
Never one to have been a human doing instead of a DEhuman being, it will take far, far more than a spoon, Herry’s sneering and those standard snide remarks of his in front of my babies to humiliate me now. Detail‐ and precision‑oriented person that I am, I was thrilled––and proud––to be worthily working for the University; and since from my Latin of previous years’ education I already knew the root of the occupation and its title, I just knew then, too, that I’d make one helluva damn mighty fine, secret‑keeping secretary.
This ‘recovered’ man’s slung‑at‑me snidery? Classically, such … says a colossally passel more about Swill‑Spewing Herry than it will ever accurately describe any of The Sexist Pig’s cuntable liaisons, much less me, Dr. Legion True, Secretary!
Some 1991 year it had been. Fabulous finale that finding both the Boys and the Forestry secretariat position almost back‑to‑back was, and this fortune most assuredly was fantastic, one matter had not ended that November and December well. As soon as I knew where the Boys were––central West Virginia––a small port there called Grubtrop of less than 7,000 persons which was contiguous with one of 24,000 … at where a medical center was located, Montclank, I telephoned the cops there and its community’s public school officials. I wanted, of course, to secure for the Boys by long‑distance as much safety as I could possibly manage; but either Herry or Ms. Fannie Issicran McLive or, more likely the both of them together just a‑folie‑à‑deuxing yet again! had already covered those two distinct bases in that town. And thoroughly! I wasn’t even accorded the time of day by anyone at either outfit. Even receptionists and clerical workers, not to mention teachers, school counselors and detectives, as well as the principals and its fuzz’s chief––all echelons all the way up and down––again already knew who I was when first I called. And they were not on the telephone anyhow, to say the very least, at all … cordial. Kinda like how far toooo, too many persons frostily (ab)use impersonal emailing of their basest sentiments … now. Pillared Edinsmaier, a doctor after all, had just graced their community with his moving‑in presence; and all of its locals were apparently fawning and falling all over themselves to make him and his little, stay‑at‑home, possibly homeschooling missus just as welcome as possible––even if that meant dissin’, on his behalf of course, the certainly‑now‑so‑pointless‑and‑most‑redundant ex‑missus. Ms. McLive, after all and witnessed there in Herry’s Own Opprobrious Eight Pages, had cuntingly cooed during Herry’s ‘courtship of sorts’ how it was that she could “work at McDonald’s and she didn’t care where.” And the lawmen and this port’s school personnel? Smack in line they were. Androcentrically, these folks all lined right up, one by one there in central West Virginia, too, to carry out the sexist backlash for daMan––the one with which Rachel and I and all of us other Mothers on Trial are always everywhere … so smashingly clobbered.
Mirzah Truemaier enrolled in one of the two Grubtrop elementaries which, in physical space, was approximately a mile or more from the middle and high schools, both of those buildings and sports fields, side by side. That is, a mile or more away every day from his brothers, too, of course. The police station was situated on the far northwest side of town next to a mixmaster‑like infrastructure which was the confluence of two major intersecting interstates; and from the Edinsmaier‑McLive residence or either school complexes not at all easily accessible by a child walking there. If need be.
Mehitable, right away, sent me a newspaper clipping about how six out of every 10 males in the entire state of West Virginia, from his age of 10 years old or older chewed tobacco––60 percent of its young boys and men. This did not surprise me. In fact, nothing about the state from its public schools’ quality and conditions to the vast extent of its handgun ownership to its feverish, snake-handling religiosity-fervor to its US Senator Byrd-antics shocked me. Nor, now either, … with its present-day leader: Governor Robert Wise recently stated to the New York Times that he wholeheartedly believes in “accountability” but also knows that “forgiveness” has “to be earned”––in light of his lately revealed “unfaithfulness” to his family … infidelity by way of flying off with the overseer of the European operations for West Virginia’s Development Office, a woman not his wife with whom he flung a bit about Spain and whose estranged husband outed her. And subsequently too, that state’s Chief, the man whose office states that not only has the governor no intention of resigning but also that it is certain that none of his little adventures will affect Mr. Wise’s chance for re‑election! How wise was Wise? Don’t know yet. Guess we’ll all find out, huh?
No surprise, though. Only saddened and disappointed me soooo––to finally learn where Jesse, Mirzah and Zane actually were. “Poverty with a view,” Octogenarian Frieda Chicken Guthrie outright branded West Virginia when she, too, found out my Truemaier Boys’ probable whereabouts.
This man who had “sworn an oath” to Judge Sol Wacotler Seizor … “legally promising” him … JYeeaah!!!! … that my three Boys would conclude their elementary and secondary educations in Ames, Iowa, the school system ranked that Act I year of 1989, and at least the next four consecutive years, which included then Acts Two and Three, as number nine among all of the community school systems within the entire nation had just taken them all to a state––considering the positives and negatives of the overall conditions and categories (such as education, economics, safety, employment and community opportunity, housing, climate and environment, transportation and health)––that fuckingly ranked down in the frickin’, flushing toilet! Today West Virginia is 49th of the 50 states in quality of folks’ health, freedom from crime and persons’ overall general livability––one of the least livable states and second only to Mississippi, that is. In 1991, it could not have been in the top ten even––which is where Iowa was; and in the first couple years of the newest millennium, Iowa ranked #2 in livability on most ratings’ indices and second only to Minnesota … next door to the north! The Ames Public Library? Our sweet APL ranked in the year 2000, as number nine among the country’s best community libraries. Just in the quality and taste of its drinking water alone? Ames frequently ranks as #1 in the entire state and within the top ten in national competitions overall!
The worst of it though? This was …this is … common knowledge! Folks knew this going in––it wasn’t like it came as a major astonishment nor even as a minor unknown to Dr. Herod Edinsmaier; he knew all along what it was that he was doing with West Virginia and how he was playing so dirtily with all of … my Boys’ brains. He was hiding Zane, Jesse and Mirzah from me while, at the same time, sacrificing the wonderment they had already had with me––and, most assuredly, … purposefully and perfectly punishing us all. Rabid … lethal … revenge.
* * * *
Only a couple of months into the Forestry position a handful of professors came to me and asked if I might want more hours’ work––which was awesome! Their department was, in a year and a half’s time hence, to play host to 400 of the World’s finest agroforesters. An international conference was coming into town; and for its preparation then, the faculty needed an individual contact person and coordinator inside the department proper to start to work now, ahead of time, alongside the University’s overall, general conferencing service which performed the more universal coordinating endeavors. Again I was thrilled––and took to it immediately––including evenings and some several, late Saturday afternoons, after first finishing my delicatessen shift. A nicer, more spiritually elevated group of persons to ever walk the natural World over … I have yet to meet and know.
I truly, truly missed my Boys, which of course I believed was to Deviant Herry’s delight. All of one’s ordinary human emotions and any of those of DEhumans for damned sure, so ‘outlandishly irrelevant’ and purposefully alien to this man, I know that my yearning for my Children … hourly … utterly pleased the socially pathologic pathologist.
But I threw myself into this job and into these people and learned again to smile once in a great, long while. While blue jeans and the loveliest of simple, gray heather departmental sweatshirts was more than acceptable apparel, from time to time I actually languished in hosiery and high heels––just for a vintage, retro genre of secretarial attiring adventure! I also enjoyed the other persons of the position––the college students themselves, that is, the forestry majors emphasizing in their four‑year degree programs either sustainable agricultural practices or all of the knowledge surrounding human beings’ use of products made from or involving anything … wooden! I was the “undergraduate advising secretary,” my official title, so those folks are whom I was privileged to mostly serve! The undergrads and their forestry professors. Once in a while some graduate students as well––although another superb individual handled their secretarial matters.
As much as an episode of yearning cut so deeply, a couple of first-, second- or third-year students would come by my workstation and need help with the planning of their annually flung Wild Game and Honors Banquet or with how to fund each one of their summer requirements consisting of eight weeks’ Forestry Camp up north or out west to administering the department’s fine arts contest which I continuously oversaw so that students could win tickets on an event‑to‑event basis and actually attend then, free of charge to the student, local performances and concerts! (with grateful thanks to a very, very generous retired program benefactor and donating sponsor!) to worrying with them all about their upcoming midterm examinations. To––as well––the spring semesters’ midterm breaks when two of the undergraduates in particular spent those entire weeks annually all of the years of their educations not vacationing anywhere at all but, instead, hard at work in Ames filling out scholarship and grant applications with my help so as to secure for themselves their own funding sources for the next upcoming fall terms since these two women’s parents just didn’t have it for either one of them!
And … as far as my own education––as far as about that which Forestry Department Head Joplin had, at the very first, asked me?––––Well, with regard to life’s lessons, the ones a willing person learns when teachable … when she or he isn’t all of the time talking, talking, “teaching”–talking but is, instead, actually listening to others! … as well as with regard to my knowledge taken in from all of my formal, higher degrees––the ones behind diplomas which I actually earned and never make up lies about or fuckingly fake on any résumés’ biographical sketches … as does, still, the Wonderfully‑Good‑at‑Lying Dr. Edinsmaier? I was, indeed, using … my own education… every day.
I used it every single day all right … that is, up until one Monday morning––the most common day of any week for middle‑aged to elderly males to suffer heart attacks and die––when my telephone rang around 6:40 am on Havencourt just as I shuffled out of the shower still not terrifically refreshed for my upcoming work week. It had been a particularly trying weekend actually, and I was not quite recovered from it––yet had a hefty schedule facing me but, really, nothing more than the usual. In order to live and to keep current on all of the in‑full, on‑time child support payments, that ‘usual’ then meant weekday daytimes at the Forestry Department, two evenings per week and both Saturdays and Sundays every single weekend at the 6 am-to-2 pm delicatessen grill of the Save‑U‑More grocery store––except … for this very past weekend.
I had finally asked for the 28th and the 29th of March entirely off from the weekend deli work because of a special errand I wanted to run … one down in Des Moines , which AmTaham had requested of me actually. The Mercy Hospital’s continuing education complex there staged a two‑day regional conference and workshop on post‑polio syndrome, that which had plagued my father also since his days of poliomyelitis paralysis and those of when Great‑Grandma Ava Saffron had managed, struggling nearly alone with—then—no way to know if what she was doing would actually work to heal him, to salvage his entire life. She administered the two years’ worth of function‑saving physical therapy to her stricken 19‑year‑old child and, thusly, the then‑forced college dropout, AmTaham. AmTaham himself could not attend the medical center’s event and wondered if I could go––in order to learn on his behalf and, then, to report back to him.
I did both. I went and I reported back. Late that Sunday afternoon of 29 March––along around 5:00 p.m. or so. We exchanged a lovely discussion on the telephone, he and I, since the conference, while exhausting, was quite amazing and soooo, so eye‑opening; and I had had a profusive glut of information to tell him. AmTaham began the conversation, our last, by thanking me for doing this for him and then shocking the beYesus out of me with the fact that while I was driving to Des Moines he’d been insuring his latest Caddy, another Blue not even a couple of years old yet, a Sedan DeVille, and that if I wanted it when he was done with it, his having only just purchased and brought it home to Williamsburg from Iowa City “the day before yesterday,” why, simply to let him know that!
That said then! well, the conference and what I now knew from my having participated in it took up the remaining bulk of our chat. I remember telling him that I had never seen so much metallic evidence inside one room before––of human beings permanently brought low and almost entirely all the way down by a microbe … as I had seen that specific 1992 Saturday afternoon in Des Moines . Braces and wheelchairs and crutches and wilted and withered, literally fucked forms all over that place. AmTaham and a mama named Ava Saffron had simply done wonders back in 1939, back when there were no chemicals to prevent, let alone, to cure! My daddy, while afflicted somewhat had certainly not been cursed, life‑long, as had so many, many of these other Iowans.
Life‑long? How little I knew.
The person on the telephone early on the very next morning––this particular Monday then––was my older sister, Ardys, calling me from her home in east central Michigan to say that she herself had just hung up the phone receiver with our mother, Mehitable. At 6:15 to 6:20 a.m., approximately 25 minutes’ time earlier and apparently … a lifetime’s length of measurement, it seems Mehitable had dialed 911 because she, alone and reading the day’s Gazette in their Williamsburg living room at the time, had heard a massive crashing noise coming to her ears from the main‑level bathroom. Ardys said that Mehitable had told her that our father, AmTaham, appeared to Mehitable to be dead.
“Wha’? What?! So you’re saying what exactly here, Ardys?!”
“Well now, I don’t quite know, I guess,” my eldest sibling, at the time then herself 47, had never been one to get from others facts and details coming at her pinned down … fast. She would have made, I am thinking now, just a horrid secretary.
“Is Daddy dead, Ardys?! ! ! Ardys, what do you know?! ! !”
“Well now, that’s what it sounds like Mother was trying to tell me, doesn’t it?!”
“How the !^*#&$@^$#&*&#! should I know! I’m hanging up and calling Wyman!” Shit! I loathed her dithering, same as I hated Mehitable’s!
And I did exactly that, “Wyman. It’s Legion. Say, Wyman, I, ah, um, I just received the strangest call from Ardys. From Michigan . She said Mehitable just called her, but between the two of them, they apparently don’t know if AmTaham’s suffered a heart attack and is or is not dead from it! It’s 6:45 right now. Can you please rush over there and check on things, Wyman? Dad and Mom’s line keeps coming back busy!”
Interminable it seemed but truly was only 15 minutes or less before Cousin Wyman telephoned me back. He must’ve flown over to the very west edge of town which, for him at the time, only meant about a mile by car but through several stop signs and block intersections in the Burg. His uncle, he told me, was, indeed, dead. “It’s true, Legion. He’s gone. AmTaham is dead.”
“O, m’god! ! ! O, m’god, O, m’god, O, m’god! ! !” I slumped over and dropped the receiver to my one hearing ear on the brown table in the Havencourt condominium’s kitchen in the darkness of the early morning and without its lamps on yet. This news came to me … 44¼ years old. Same birthday as AmTaham’s––but the two of us now separated. Separated forever. And I was … all alone. All alone. All alone.
“Yeah.”
It could’ve been a couple of minutes, a hundred seconds or so. Then I spoke again, still not weeping, “Aaaah, ah, Wyman?”
“Yeah.”
“I, um, I have to call some people. And, ah, um, … ah, get on the road then. Actually, no. No. Come to think on it some, Wyman, I bet … I bet I have to go over to the courthouse in Nevada first and, ah, … ah, talk to a judge about the Boys. About permission, ya’ know. About the judge’s letting the Boys come back here from West Virginia. Or … or not. Ah. Where can I call you back later?” We all didn’t have cell phones then yet so arrangements were made for me to catch Wyman in a couple of hours’ time at his home.
Life‑long? How long is that? … Just how long is life‑long? From my last hearing AmTaham, life‑long meant less than a full day. Barely more than a half day actually, not even 14 hours. From Sunday afternoon a bit after 5 p.m. until 6:45 – 7:00 a.m. the very next morning. And post‑polio? It had killed him, I am thinking. The heart, the cardiac muscle … shot, the result of polio’s viral destruction.
Now I cried. Forty‑four and, there alone in the darkened kitchen, I sank, “O Daddy, O Daddy, O Daddy, Om’Daddy. O O O O … O Daddy.”
The 30th day of March 1992, it struck me near to the very bottom of my core was the day when I was finally … all grown up. No part of me, nowhere within me, was little anymore. I was no one’s little girl anymore. Not in any wee, small way would I, could I ever, ever be … little again. O, I have to say: not since my bizarro eyeballs’ and mind’s mêlée with my actually trying to read clear through for myself, also all alone, daJudge’s decree after Act Two Part Two … forcibly loaded up––as soooo against my will the Bitch was commanded to be controlled––there at the SpaChezResort’s Sixth Floor Hotel on all of Drugging Daddee‑Herry’s manipulating dope had I been brought straight on down to my knees.
In less than just five years’ total time, I had suffered Loss with a capital L––there had become, now, established for me! ! !my very own Bureau of Loss––the likes of which most folks, even if it all is spread out over their entire lifetimes of seven, eight, nine decades in length, will never, never experience. About Loss? They all––comparatively––know bupkus . The belovéd clinical and teaching professorship in Kansas, the marriage and spouse, my three precious children which loss ALONE changed them and me forever, the career as a veterinary anything, any accumulation or semblance of home permanency or estate stability and, now, my very own father to death. From June 1987 to March 1992. The man with a mind and a manner that I have never known in another––gone. How unfair. How so unfair that, now, this Loss, too, and that I would have to grow all the way the fuck up. Instantly. Like right, right now. This morning. This very Monday morning. Here on Havencourt. And changed me yet again … forever. All alone.
[to be continued…]
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Dr. Legion True: One Fucked Mother
Dr. Herod (Herry) Edinsmaier: Legion’s husband/Sperm Source [“re: I am snide” backwards]
Jesse Truemaier: Legion’s son
Mirzah Truemaier: Legion’s son
Zane Truemaier: Legion’s son
AmTaham True: Legion’s father [Mahatma backwards]
Mehitable True: Legion’s mother [Me hit-able—i.e. she was abusive]
Ardys and Endys: Legion’s sisters [names backwards]
Sterling: Legion’s brother [her mother’s planned name of next son (who never came)]
Mi Sprision O'Revinnoco: Herry’s sister [misprision: concealing knowledge of treason/O'Revinnoco = O'Connivero backwards]
Juggern Aut Misein Edinsmaier: Legion’s father-in-law [juggernaut; aut = 0; misein = “to hate (misogyny)”]
Detanimod Edinsmaier: Legion’s mother-in-law [dominated backwards]
Ava Saffron True and Zebulon True: respectively, Legion's paternal grandmother and her husband, Legion's paternal grandfather
Rowland and Wyman Natures: respectively, Legion's most favored uncle and most favored male first cousin
Fannie Issicran McLive: fawning enabler of ex [narcissi(st) and Mc(Evil) backwards]
Mary Jane: daughter of Fannie Issicran McLive; stepsister of Zane, Jesse, and Mirzah
Legion’s Friends: Margaret, Mona, Yanira, Stormy, Lynda, László, Jane, Kincaid, Joseph, Sheryl, Abraham (Quaker elder), Frieda
Legion’s Best Friends: Ms Grace and Dr Lionel Portia and Rachel
Wende: = Legion's friend after divorce [committed suicide due to Custody Crisis]
Jim Cornball: Herry’s acquaintance from AA and realtor
Loser Lorn: Insurance agent referred by Cornball
Judge Harley Butcher: Family Court judge
Judge Sol Wacotler Seizor: Family Court judge
Judge Barry Crowrook: Appellate Court judge
Judge Pansy Shawshank: Appellate Court judge
Jazzy Jinx: Legion’s first Family Court lawyer
Carlotta Klutz: Legion’s second Family Court attorney
Shindy Scheisser: Herry’s lawyer [shindy = noisy; scheisser = German for shithead]
Li Zhang: Herry’s Aussie affair
Dr Freddie Goldstein & Ella: Herry’s colleague and wife
Mick: = Herry's acquaintance from high school; best man [not in Herry’s life after that as he had no true friends]
Varry Wussamai: Herry's AA sponsor (not a real friend) [I am a wuss backwards]
David Humes: nursing student; classmate of Legion's, y1968 - y1971, New York City
Edmund Silver: Legion's boyfriend pre-Herry
Braemore St: where Legion and her family lived, y1983 - y1986
Havencourt condominium: Legion's Ames apartment; after separation
Zephyr: tabby cat of Zane's, Mirzah's, Jesse's [pronounced “Zay – fear”]
Rex: Jesse’s pet Eastern Florida Kingsnake, female
Lady: Zane's pet Zebra Finch, female
Madonna: realtor
Larry Brouhaha: court-mandated marriage counselor
Judge Sol Wacotler Seizor: District Court judge on first two trials
Judge Harley Butcher: District Court judge for third trial
Dr. Shark: Herry’s residency supervisor who fired him
Carrie Canard: twice judge-mandated custody evaluator
Author: Dr. Blue, aka Ofherod, BSN, DVM, PhD = Commander Edinsmaier's Handmaid (Commander reiamsnidE's Handmaid)
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