Tara Silva — continued. p1
She was a fragile and frail-looking child with long, stringy blond hair in braids, freckles on her face, fierce grey-blue eyes, and teeth like sharp razors.
All of her baby teeth were sharp and feral and yellow and pointed.
I remember asking my mother why her teeth were like that, and she told me sugar and soda.
We would play together on the beach, all the kids, but we never went to her house cause of the monkey.
Chi Chi the monkey lived with her family during the summers and eventually in the winters when they moved up year-round.
They were from Sommerville, Portuguese, I know now, same as my great grandfather and his daughters, but they were very poor, sort of like gypsies.
Chi Chi was a vicious little spider monkey and only would allow Tara’s mother to care for him. He was often tied on a long chain in the yard and had a little hut he would live in during the day. Screaming and throwing his bowls at passersby.
Chi Chi got loose a few times over the years, much to the chagrin of the other adults in the neighborhood.
We went to their house once, that I can recall, for a birthday party for Tara.
Her mother was a loud, large, and very tan woman with a blond bouffant, and her boyfriend was always shirtless and deeply tanned with a beer belly and cut-off jeans.
Years after they moved up year-round, I caught the boyfriend sunbathing naked between the neighbors' closed cottages and my grandmother’s cottage, laying in the sun in the early spring on the sand, stroking his penis, with his eyes closed in complete repose.
My first glimpse of a naked adult male.
Our families never got on. That is my father’s family and Tara’s.
After my parent's divorce, her mother was always very nice to me and my sister and mother, but she hated my father’s family.
They would hang toilet seats to the back of their cottage to plague my grandmother with the unsightliness of it.
My father’s family had many wars on that bit of land. I fought as well.
Last ten years, I fought their fight, the fight of people that weren’t even good to me or each other.
I like to think my great-grandfather would have been proud of my fight, but then he raised a family scattered to the wind, so what kind of man was he, this man whose war I fought for ten years?
What kind of man was he? His daughters stayed close, but their families were decimated.
My great-aunt is dead, and 3 of her children are still alive. She sold before they could all fight over the leavings.
Her sister, my grandmother, who died a decade before her, and her children fought like banshees against each other: my father and his two sisters.
There is one daughter left, my only living aunt and godmother, who is seemingly crazier than they all were put together.
I had to fight this godmother this past decade to get her off deeds, rail down her asking price, and keep her out of our father’s estate.
The funny thing is, I was working on cutting her in a bit on his leavings, but she lied about selling his car.
She sold it off, and then when I asked for the sales receipt for accounting, she told me she couldn’t find it, and the man who sold it for them had moved to Florida.
I got in touch with the NH state police via email, copied my aunt in, and told them my aunt had been taken advantage of, and we were looking for a car that was sold.
Suddenly via email, she sent me a scan of a crazy handwritten declaration of sale, with some crazy lowball numbers, by some random dude.
I told her that while I could press on and perhaps press charges, I would just let it go. That it had never been about money but that her lies and tantrums were beyond the pale.
That day I put my spreadsheet aside of my father’s estate that would have left her around ten grand and told her she was dead to me and that I would never communicate with her again.
That is the family that my great-grandfather put into motion, petty, greedy, spoiled, thieves, backstabbers, and neurotics.
I can’t exempt myself from this lot. Their tendencies are the same as mine. I am much more straightforward about it, an honest thief, if you will, a neurotic with my heart on my sleeve.
I kept hoping that there would be a healing in the family rift, and I would play out games of redemption, and I paid my pound of flesh.
No one else did, though, not my father, not his sisters, not my sister, and now it is all done, and all are dead, and my only sister has banished me.
I cut the cord before she could plummet me, but I held on to the rock cliff for a long while, begging her to mend the rope or throw another down before I gave up and traversed my way back to earth, exhausted.
She planned to decimate me, the same as my father, similar to my mother.
But in the end, I watched over my dying mother, ensured my father was safe in his final days and let my sister home without question when the pandemic hit.
Tara’s family was loud and crazy and brash and awful and drunken, but there at least, she knew straight out what she was dealing with, what she was up against.
My family, from a distance, seemed, if not sound, certainly not cutthroat. But they were more severe in their mind games and underhanded dealings than most other families I have witnessed.
I realized my sister’s intent in March 2021 when she called drunk and told me I was a loser, that she felt sorry for me, and that I was a joke.
It was as if my recently departed father had risen from the dead to torment me. It pushed me over a psychic edge that if I had an ounce of self-confidence, I could have survived, but I didn’t, and I still don’t.
When I think of the last blast from my drunken sister that night in March, almost two full years now. . .I am still at a loss, I still get weepy, and my heart aches. It aches as a real pain, not just metaphorically.
Tara’s family destroyed her as well, but she knew what she was dealing with.
Years later, after we were grown, each of us was renting from our mothers, who had moved or were back in the city—each of us was now a guardian over the family homesteads.
She was dating a local boy, and they both were drinking too much, too often. I would hear their fights as I had heard her parents decades ago.
One morning, I saw her running out of the house as her boyfriend ran around the back. She smashed his headlights with a stick of firewood and then ran back in as he came round the other side again.
It was a comedy.
Finally, he left and drove off, and while I hadn’t spoken to her in years, I went out to her drive and called up to her deck, and she came out and started apologizing for the racket, and I said, don’t worry, want some tea?
To be continued. . .