We Are All Such Humans Here

Ambivalence is the middle name of family, isn’t it? Fambivalence. Ask anyone, especially during the holiday season. Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s. We expect unalloyed joy, and then start scrolling for therapists.

Take my name or names, as the case may be, since they reflect my parents’ ambivalence toward me if not mine toward them.

Still, as ambivalent as I might have been where my parents were concerned, about the Greenhavens, I was single-minded and certain until I wasn’t. Even with them.

“Put your noses where they belong,” I shouted to Mary-the-matriarch as Constance and her partner closed the ambulance door. “There’s nothing to see here, after all, just my parents’ dead bodies, not that you’d care one way or another.”

Mary Greenhaven, she of the blonde helmet hairstyle and a side table filled with religious memorabilia of the Anglo-Jesus variety, huffed and said something as original as “Well, I never.”

She was fifteen years younger than my parents and fifteen years older than I, and I couldn’t resist a return of fire.

I said, “I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think ‘never’ even begins to describe you. I think you have. Over and over again.”

Both of us were being as ridiculous as we could manage without prompting. Once their bodies were covered, I might have taken a few hits off the dusty Scotch my father kept in the cupboard above the refrigerator, but no matter; there was too much history between her and my parents for either of us to be very smart no matter what my blood alcohol level might have been.

The Greenhavens had their own habits; self-uneducated lowbrows given the religious décor that cluttered their living room windows, they were fond of keeping Westies, those mean little dogs that bark incessantly when their people are not around and then bark some more when they are, and the Greenhavens were in the habit of leaving for days at a time and leaving the dogs in the backyard without anyone to keep them company except for an automatic feeder and a Licks-It spout for water. When the weather was fine and my parents tried to use their back patio, the dogs would yip and bark and snarl, so the backyard became unlivable, given the horrible racket. They raced along the shared fence line, and they created a dirt track between the fence and the shrubbery that lined it. Back and forth, snarling all the while. Their rut in the dirt dipped low enough that they began to dig the rest of the way, and then underneath the fence they went, and all four of them began to run wild underneath my parents’ kitchen window, barking and barking, and making a blur of white. What did they want or expect? Treats? Or, did they want to bite the ankles of tottering senior citizens?

My father went out the front door and opened the side gate and let the little monsters run, and then he turned his attention to extending the fence below ground with some aluminum sheeting he had leftover in the garage. Which was when Mary Greenhaven began yelling over the fence at him, that by opening the side gate he had committed an act of domestic terrorism, not to mention the act of a small and petty man. Her fury was further inflamed by the fact that all four Westies had rocketed into the street where the largest of the four, Gordo, had been flattened by an oncoming mail truck. The other three whimpered near their fallen brother until Mary came out to see what the fuss was about. And that’s when she really began to yell at my stony-eyed father, cursing him in the only way a hard-shell Baptist woman could: “You’re a beast,” she wept, “and a servant of the devil.” At which point, Joe Greenhaven limped around the corner of the house with his cane and his bald head to see what the commotion was all about. My mother had likewise emerged in her house coat and said to my father, “Now, dear, who are you?”

Trust the dementia sufferer to be the most adept peacemaker, she made them so embarrassed of their own uncivil behavior.

I got calls from at least three other neighbors, who were only too happy to share the news of the day in their street.

When I heard about my parents’ encounter with Mary Greenhaven, my first impulse was to knock on the Greenhaven door and give her what for, expletives included, and my second impulse was to do the same with my father.

Children, I thought. They’re nothing but children with wrinkles and bad breath.

“Dad,” I said, “did you really have to open the gate? Was that the best you could think to do?”

He shoved his scraps of aluminum into the hole created by what was once a force of four dogs, and the thought occurred to me that we are all just little boys with our fingers in the dike. Like the cancer that was, even then, gaining strength and eating at his bones, nothing is ever really fixed.

“What were you thinking?”

“I’m going to need some cement,” he said, “if I really want this to hold.”

“Cement? Really?” I couldn’t believe he was so out of tune. “One dog is a pancake and the rest are in mourning. They shouldn’t have been in the yard, I’ll grant you that, but maybe you should say something to Queen Mary out there. Apologize for letting them out into the street.”

“Huh,” he said.

And then I said, “I need to find a home for both of you.”

I couldn’t have been more insensitive or unkind.

Or unforgiveable.

Now that my parents were dead, and they were soon to be on their way to Yoder’s, there was no one but Mary Greenhaven to scold. I insulted her, but even as I did so, I was aware of Constance and her partner witnessing the scene. How embarrassing! I could hear my Inner Voice tsk-tsking all the while. What an ass. My father’s son.

“My parents are dead, and I’m sorry about your dog however many weeks ago that was,” I told her now after the bodies had gone by. “There was no need of that. Even my father would have agreed if he’d been in better health.” And a little more quietly this time. “My parents are dead, and there’s nothing more you need to know.”

Of this conversation, the cop took note of it all.