For Liza, a girl who had never been out on a single date all through high school, that last insult had been the final straw. A few hours later, shortly after sunrise, Liza had quietly packed her bag to leave and had tiptoed to the door, hoping that her mother was still asleep. Unfortunately, Selma had been wide awake and still furious. She had hurled invectives after her departing daughter as Liza walked across the front porch and down the steps. The porch had still had steps back then.
Liza walked briskly away with her head unbowed beneath Selma’s barrage of insults. At the time, Liza’s only consolation was that there were no neighbors nearby to witness her mother’s final tirade. Walking away from the house, Liza had realized that she was literally following in her older brother’s footsteps and doing the same thing Guy had done five years earlier. He too had walked away, taking only what he could carry, and he hadn’t looked back.
Liza had been thirteen years old and in eighth grade on the day Guy left home for college. A friend had stopped by shortly after he graduated and given him a lift and a life. During the summer he had waited tables in the Poconos. Then, armed with a full-ride scholarship, he had enrolled at Harvard, which was only a little over a hundred miles away. As far as Liza was concerned, however, Harvard could just as well have been on another planet. Guy had never come back—not over Christmas that first year nor for any of the Christmases that followed, and not for summer vacations, either. From Harvard he had gone on to Maryland for medical school at Johns Hopkins. Unlike Guy, all Liza had to show for enduring years of her mother’s torment was a high school diploma and a severe case of low self-esteem.
Did Liza resent her brother’s seemingly charmed existence? You bet! It was perfectly understandable that he had turned his back on their mother. Who wouldn’t? Liza remembered all too well the blazing battles between the two of them in the months and weeks before Guy left home. She also recalled her brother’s departing words, flung over his shoulder as he walked out the door. “You’re not my real mother.”
Those words had been true for him, and that was his out—Selma was Guy’s stepmother. Unfortunately, she was Liza’s “real” mother. Half brother or not, however, Guy had always been Liza’s big brother. In walking away from Selma, he had also walked away from Liza. He had left her alone to cope with a mentally damaged, self-centered woman who was incapable of loving or caring for anyone, including herself.
All the while Liza had been growing up, there had been no accounting for Selma’s many difficulties, both mental and physical, real and imagined. There had been wild mood swings that most likely indicated Selma was bipolar—not that she’d ever gone to a doctor or a counselor to be given an official diagnosis. There had been episodes of paranoia in which Selma had spent days convinced that people from the government were spying on her. There was the time she had taken a pair of pliers to her own mouth and removed all the filled teeth because she was convinced the fillings were poisoning her. It wasn’t until long after Liza left home that there was a name for the most visible of Selma’s mental difficulties. She was a hoarder. Liza found it disquieting that hoarding was now something that could be spoken of aloud in polite company and that, in fact, there was even a reality television show devoted to the problem.
Liza had watched the show occasionally, with a weird combination of horror and relief, but she had never found a way to say to any of the people who knew her now, “That was my life when I was growing up.” Instead, like a voyeur driving past a terrible car wreck, she watched the various dysfunctional families on the small screen struggling with issues she knew intimately, from the inside out. In the well-ordered neatness of her own living room, she could compare what she remembered of her mother’s house with the messes and horrors in other people’s lives, all the while imagining what Selma’s place must be like now after another decade of unchecked decline.
Sometimes what she saw on one of the shows moved her to tears. Occasionally the televised efforts of loved ones and therapists seemed to pay off and damaged people seemed to find ways to begin confronting what was wrong with their lives and perhaps make some necessary changes. With others, however, it was hopeless, and all the painful efforts came to naught. The people trying to help would throw things in the trash—broken toys, wrecked furniture, nonworking appliances—only to have the hoarder drag the garbage back into the house because it was too precious to be tossed out.