Another Name in the Agony Column

Lately the DRS bulletin board, which far too many of you do NOT visit but certainly should, has taken on the look of Dr. Phil’s green room. This week, for instance, the ostensible spotlight topic is supposed to be about Middle Eastern loopiness, in general, and Israel’s airstrikes on Lebanon, in particular, but a quick overview of the topics indicates that the real action is taking place on the thread devoted to Sugar’s latest missive on what an ass-hat her husband is . At the risk of stirring the pot, most of the posts on the thread are us other chicks on DRS encouraging her to quickly drop 200 pounds of ugly fat – by divorcing him.

All of this has hit pretty close to home for me. It’s a bit ironic that at a time when the political world, my ostensible raison d’etre on DRS, has been literally blowing up left and right, I’ve been pulled away from it by a domestic crisis in my own life. This crisis isn’t taking place in my home – aside from the ongoing mini-drama that goes with having a teenage girl living under your roof, this little place has been mercifully quiet lately – but mostly in my soul. Yeah, this is gonna be one of THOSE articles.

My sister is about two and a half years younger than me – a narrow enough margin of difference that the usual cliche rivalries and friendships have taken place, like clockwork, as expected. We outgrew the rivalries around the time my daughter was born, thirteen years ago, but have remained close.

Or I should say we remained close until my common-law brother-in-law came along, anyway.

A little history, here, for some perspective…  One area where my sister and I sharply diverted was with regards to relationships. She was always a “serial monogamist” – latching onto one guy, usually someone ridiculously jealous and prone to violence, for months or years at a time. I, as was been duly noted with tiresome thoroughness in my first article for this site, preferred a relatively high volume of anonymous or friendly, but unattached, sex with a lot of different people. She couldn’t bear to sleep alone; I couldn’t stand to sleep any other way. Even on those rare occasions when I liked a sex partner well enough to hang around in a “romantic capacity” for more than a couple of days, I would retreat back to my apartment and cut off communication at the first sign of any sort of drama. On the other hand, my sister seemed to seek it out. She was plagued with a vicious temper and a drinking habit that both served to throw fuel on any domestic fire that erupted between her and whatever guy was around. The situation with this brother-in-law is no deviation from this pattern. He is also a drunk with a bad temper, so I suppose to a point this article can pretty much write itself in terms of why this is all going so badly.

They’ve been together, more or less chaotically, for about ten years. When he was awarded emergency custody of his two sons from a previous marriage it seemed like they were really pulling it together, cutting back on the drinking and attempting to manage their anger and jealousy to provide a good home for the boys. Then when my sister herself got pregnant in early 2002 they seemed to settle into a permanent, mostly non-violent holding pattern.

For the first several months after my niece was born, I made a point of trying to reinforce the bond between my sister and me, swinging by to visit and give her a break from the baby for several hours every day after I got off work. What I saw during these visits was a happy, if slightly overextended, family. I can’t fix a date to when beer quietly began making regular appearances in the landscape of the household, but I do know that it wasn’t long after the first time I noticed both my sister and brother-in-law were putting on what we used to politely call “a little glow” one afternoon that things began to fall apart again. They would bicker, or my brother-in-law could be heard shouting at the boys and banging around, or my sister would have obviously been crying before I got there. My niece, while developing intellectually at an astonishing rate for such a young child, didn’t seem to be growing much, and when her teeth came in they were brown and porous from “bottle mouth”.

There was no defining moment when I consciously decided that I could no longer bear to visit them every day – rather, it happened incrementally, with increasingly flimsy excuses on my part for begging off. My daughter needed help with a school project. I had to go to the gym. My husband was annoyed at coming home to an empty house. I started showing up only once a week, then a couple of times a month, then not at all, as the emotional climate in their house plummeted. An ugly argument over the phone between my husband and my very drunk brother-in-law, a few days before our two families were due to have our annual joint party for Christmas, made the rift official.

One day a couple of months after this, my sister called me. As our communications had gotten fewer and further between, these phone calls had usually come to herald a request to “borrow” money. (She’d had a good job before the baby, but once she got pregnant my brother-in-law had insisted that she stay home full time, and his roofing business brought in income only spottily.) By this point in time I had “lent” them about three grand that I knew I’d never see again, but before I could offer up an excuse to say no, my sister asked me an unusual question: had either of the boys, who were now about 17 and 15, shown up at my house? It seemed that one had collected the other from school by posing as his father over the phone, and they had disappeared.

Why? I asked.

After a bit of back and forth and a lot of hemming and hawing on my sister’s part, it came out - their father had been beating them.

They tried moving back in for a while, but it ultimately failed to work. As their mother had been declared unfit when their father had been awarded custody, they were allowed to move into the older boy’s girlfriend’s house. This woman was 22, but it wasn’t long before the 17 year old got her pregnant and had his own kid to worry about.

After the boys moved out, my brother-in-law’s possessiveness towards my sister went into overdrive. If he agreed to “let” her run to the store for groceries, diapers, or beer, he would begin calling everyone they knew after fifteen minutes, wanting to know if they’d seen her. “She’s been gone a long time,” he’d say. My sister, who had to purchase beer due to the fact that my brother-in-law was on house arrest and later parole for drunk driving and couldn’t buy it himself, learned to make the fastest beer runs in the history of mankind in order to avoid a round of these calls and the bitter argument that would result upon her return.

Then came the time about a year ago when my sister asked me to do something she never had before – could I babysit my niece for a day? An old friend was moving her things from Plattsburgh, New York, to a place here in town and needed help. Knowing that the potential for an ugly scene lurked in this seemingly innocent request, I asked cautiously, “What about Joe?”

“Joe’s in jail,” came the hesitant reply.

“What’s he in jail for?” I pressed.

“Just some parole violation,” she replied vaguely.

“What?” I asked. “Did he beat you up, have a dirty UA, what?”

“Yeah, a dirty UA,” she agreed quickly.

“Sure, fine, I’ll come get her,” I said.

When I arrived at her house a guy who’s lived across the street from them for several years told me the full story – my brother-in-law had tried to strangle my sister while they were both blasted on cocaine, and a concerned neighbor had called the police upon hearing my sister’s near-death rattles. I confronted my sister about this, advising her to get a permanent restraining order so he wouldn’t be allowed back into her house after his release from jail, which at least wouldn’t be for another thirty days because of our state laws regarding parole violation. I begged her to press new charges that could keep him there indefinitely.

That’s bullshit, she scoffed. Mo is full of shit. He didn’t try to choke me. Oh, by the way – we have our long distance disabled on the phone, so I told Joe it was okay to call you collect and you could give me the messages. But whatever you do, don’t let him know you’ve got Kayla there. He’d kill me if he knew I went out and left her with somebody else.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Had she really just baldly lied to me about this, then begged me to help her sneak around until she lied to the cops some more so the psycho could come home?

Of course she had. After reluctantly agreeing to watch the baby and field Joe’s phone calls, I relayed the day’s events to my husband.

“If she lets him come back after this, we’re not having anything more to do with them,” my husband said.

Well, of course she lied to the police about the strangling incident, and the rift between us widened. I did a lot of worrying about my niece – by this point, my patience and sympathy for my sister were at a very low ebb, so I didn’t worry so much about her, even after hearing that she’d nearly been choked to death.

I made the briefest of stops at her house to drop off Kayla’s birthday present in September. When I arrived nobody was home so I left the gift on the porch. There was no communication about Christmas, and when relatives asked me why my sister was so difficult to contact lately, I no longer lied for her. I told anyone who would listen the plain truth – she was being beaten and refusing to help herself or her daughter out of the situation. I had finally run out of tolerance for the drama of it all.

But the story isn’t really over. It never will be. A couple of weeks ago she called me late at night, already well beyond drunk and frightened. Could she come down and crash at my house? Over extreme protests from my husband, I said yes.

She arrived, on foot, about an hour later, staggering into my front lily garden on the way. The next morning when I surveyed the damages it looked like two deer had slept in there. I put her up in my daughter’s room and she smoked in there, stinking up the room for days. My husband lectured her and photographed some bruises she had on her arms, threatening to go to the police until her sniveling shut him up. In short, it was something of a disaster. But it was enough to pull me back in again.

I stopped by there about a week ago, on my way home from bringing my daughter to Tae Kwon Do class. Somebody had left some cigarettes at my house and I figured they could use them. She wasn’t home, so I waited with the across-the-street neighbor for her to show up. I asked him where my brother-in-law was.

“Oh, probably chasing after her,” he sighed. “They were going at it again today, hollering at each other and breaking stuff. I swear to Christ, I’ve lived across from them for five years and I think in that whole time there’s been ten days where they haven’t fought.” He leaned in close to me and looked over his shoulder, as though afraid some invisible lurking busybody might hear him. “He’s gonna end up killing her one of these days, you know,” he said softly.

You don’t say, pal.

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