The worst thing was . . . I was outnumbered, two to one, for every harebrained scheme I proposed.
“When do I get my own car?”
Mom: “Never.”
Dad: “When you can pay for it yourself.”
“Can I backpack this summer in Europe with (insert name of boyfriend of the month)?”
Mom: “Absolutely not.”
Dad: “No. And that’s final.”
Back then, arguments were settled quickly.
I had nobody to blame things on; nobody to divert my parents’ attention from my misdeeds; nobody to bicker with just for the hell of it. I had nobody to keep me company in the back seat of the car on tiresome family outings such as funerals, educational trips and visits to extremely old relatives who smelled like mothballs and lived in gloomy apartments full of antimacassars and fringed lampshades and scary taxidermy displays.
I never learned the give and take of living with a brother or a sister. Never experienced sibling rivalry until I had children of my own, when I got to witness it firsthand, in triplicate. At high volume. Daily.
When I was little, I prayed for a baby brother or sister. When I reached my teens, I changed my mind and prayed for an older brother who would invite his hunky friends to our house. I would even have settled for an older sister if she could have been counted on to invite some hunky boys to our house.
After hearing about the bitter family squabbles that grown up siblings experience while settling their parents’ estates, I have reconsidered my prayers. Maybe those long, lonely rides in the back seat of the family car weren’t so bad after all. At least I could stretch out and read.
When my parents died, I got everything. Their house. Their bank account. Their portfolio. Their insurance policies. An antique or two.
I also got an attic crammed with knick knacks, questionable treasures and extensive collections put aside by two people who lived through the Great Depression. I inherited balls of saved string, boxes of disintegrated rubber bands, dozens of empty jelly jars and plastic containers and enough 1970’s-style clothing to fill a Goodwill truck.
I got some nice art, but I also got my grandmother’s paint-by-number masterpieces and my aunt’s hand-painted ceramic ashtrays. I inherited framed photos of unknown people, some messy scrapbooks and lots of cheap, broken furniture.
I got everything – the good, the bad, the ugly and the broken. But at least I got to pick through the stuff and decide for myself whether to keep it, sell it, give it to somebody or throw it away.
One of my friends is still bickering with her brother over their deceased father’s collection of gold coins. Instead of the coins she was promised, she inherited her mother’s collection of holy cards. “Hundreds of holy cards,” she says. “What am I supposed to do with hundreds of holy cards?”
These are not baseball cards, she points out, which at least are worth something on eBay. She has shoeboxes filled with pictures of saints, the Holy Mother in dozens of dramatic situations, bad reproductions of Leonardo’s Last Supper, and more images of Jesus than you can shake a stick at: Baby Jesus in the manger, Jesus in the temple, Jesus giving sermons, Jesus performing miracles and raising the dead and curing lepers. More Jesus images than anybody needs.
She also got the remains of the mortgage deed to her parents’ house. Not the mortgage – thankfully -- just the deed. After 30 years, they paid it off. “They were so thrilled with that final payment,” she said, “they threw a big party and actually set the mortgage certificate on fire. For some reason, they couldn’t bear to throw the charred remains away, so they poured them into a mayonnaise jar and stashed it on the top shelf in the back of a kitchen cabinet.”
Her brother says the mortgage ashes are hers. The gold coins are his.
Another friend said after her parents died, she and her older sisters got together to divvy up their stuff. My friend inherited -- la mano del muerto -- the hand of death.
“It’s a plaster hand,” she says. “Just a hand. Back in the 30s, there was a Bela Lugosi movie called La Mano Del Muerto. My parents must have liked the movie, which was a horror film about a disembodied hand that crawled across the floor and strangled people.”
For some reason – who knows now -- maybe as a joke or a gag gift -- they came into possession of a plaster hand mounted on a wooden stand. Her sisters called it La Mano Del Muerto. The sisters didn’t want it. My friend ended up with the thing, which she keeps on top of a dresser in her bedroom because she can’t bear to throw away.
Perhaps being an only child wasn’t so awfully sad. It involved a lot of boring long rides in the back of the family car. But at least I could stretch out and read. I read a lot of good books.
Full disclosure: This is a reworked blog I published in 2009. I'm getting lazy.