Who’s Listening To Whom? –

 This is fictional piece that just “materialized” on my computer screen this morning, and yes, I had something, like everything, to do with it!

            “Are you listening to me?” my mother used to threaten when she was angry. Her hands would be glued to her hips, her black eyes shining with intent, and her dull, pink lips pursed.

            “Yes, mam!”

            “Well, you’d better be, young lady!” she’d warn.

            When I was younger, it seemed all I did was listen – to my parents, my bossy brother, my teachers, the Baptist minister, and the neighbor, Mr. Gill, who didn’t like me riding my bike over his lawn.

            “You’d better stay off this yard, you little brat!” he’d yell. Mr. Gill was a cranky, old man who didn’t seem to like anyone. My mother caught wind that his wife had left him all of a sudden one day with a taxi cab driver. It had been a year. Maybe that was why he was so pissed off all the time, and maybe that’s why he didn’t like girls like me. I have long, blond hair like she did.

            Although I heard Mr. Gill every time he hollered at me, I don’t believe I listened for a split second. For some reason, time after time, I kept riding, and he kept shrieking. Somehow the cyclical nature of our odd, antagonist relationship lent normalcy to my life, and I must have liked the attention.

            At home, no one, aside from me, seemed to listen to anyone. My mother’s pleas for my brother, Bud, to turn down his music, or straighten his room fell on deaf ears. He was a slob from the beginning, but went on later to become a guitarist who gained a modicum of attention before he went off the deep end. Still today he’s crazy as a loon, locked up in a state mental facility in upstate New York. I don’t even know the name of it. My mother said he lost his good sense because of the rock music he listened to nonstop. I think it might have been the acid. He loved that stuff. My father argued that Bud inherited the issue of being a bit off kilter from my mother’s side of the family. I don’t believe that for one second. No. Another problem in my household was the likely culprit, if you ask me.

            The truth is I think it was my dad who sent my brother to the loony bin. He was demanding, threatening, and downright mean. Poor Bud never did one thing right in my daddy’s eyes. I didn’t either, but for some reason, I took Daddy’s criticism and shed it like water off a duck’s back. After awhile I just didn’t give a shit.

“You’re a damned fool,” he’d tell poor Bud on a daily basis. “You’re not worth the salt that could be siphoned out of you.” Bud’s face would redden and his fists would clinch, but he said nothing. For years he was silent. Daddy wouldn’t have listened to a thing he said anyway.

Such conflicts were typical, and Bud did what he had to do. He shut his mouth and turned to the other cheek until one day, he outgrew Daddy. Then he turned away completely. It was a conscious choice that removed Bud from what I feel safe to say had been the “root of all evil” all along.

For our lifetime Daddy was drunk from morning ‘til night. He’d suck down anything he could get ahold of that contained alcohol. When the beer was gone and the vodka drained, he took to sipping cough syrup.

“A cheap drunk is better than no drunk,” he’d slur.

Exasperated, my mother admonished him time and again. “Jasper, you drink too much! It’s going to be the death of you.”

“Shut up, bitch,” Daddy replied just as often. Sometimes he said worse.

Mother put up with his abuse for a few years, but when I was grown up enough to stand on my own, she stopped listening too. Instead she decided not to wake up one morning. It was the only way to make someone pay attention.

On the day it happened Daddy screamed louder than ever before, “Your mother’s cold, Bud. I can’t hear her breathe.”

Bud was gone though and my name was left out of the conversation.

I can only remember one thing -- Daddy’s cry -- and I can hear it still after all these years.

                                                                       

                                                            A scene by Judith DeChesere-Boyle