Once Around the Carousel

Chapter Twenty

Eliza had long believed her sister would be able to escape a life in their little beach town. The only thing that could hold her back was the undertow of their mother's negativity. Once in college, Eliza assumed Linda would free herself of Gloria's festering. Yet, as the weeks after Gloria's accident went by, she saw Linda getting worse, not better. Their mother and Arthur's deaths hung like a stone around Linda's neck, one she didn't have the strength to unyoke herself from.

"They're gone, Linny," Eliza said as Linda, her hair still wet from the shower, walked into the kitchen, "and ain't nothing gonna bring 'em back. And if it makes you feel sad or relieved, or if you think they're in a better place or whatever, there's one thing I know. You gotta get over it."

Linda looked around, acting as if she couldn't imagine why Eliza would say anything of the sort. Then, opening her mouth to protest, her feelings escaped under their own power. "It's just; I don't know, I want to feel something. I want to feel something for them."

"Why?" Eliza asked, handing Linda a plate of slightly burnt eggs and toast. "I mean, you can only feel what you feel, right? And messing up your life cuz you miss Mom and Artie is stupid. Linny, I ain't smart like you, but I think you're trying to feel worse than you do cuz you think you should or something."

Linda tried and couldn't answer. Her sister had already reconciled their mother's life and death down to its simplest terms, and she could manage nothing more complex than pushing eggs and ketchup around on her plate.

"Just promise me you'll try to get over it. If I can deal with her dying, you should be able to. She's the only real parent I had." Eliza said it so matter-of-factly that Linda nearly choked on the first bite of eggs she'd managed to take. Eliza looked at her sister's reaction laughing. "Don't tell me you've never figured this one out. It's not like when they met is some big secret. Dad's only told us the story like every day for our entire life."

"Well, I... I guess I just kinda figured it out. I didn't really think about it before," Linda said, shocked they were talking about it. "Have you ever, you know, told dad that you know?"

"Not in so many words; he'd probably flip out. But yeah, he's known that I knew for a long time; since I was like ten, I guess."

Sitting at the kitchen table where their mother played hand after hand of solitaire as her depression ebbed and flowed, they talked about growing up and how it had affected them: As they recounted the good and bad of being the children of Ed and Gloria Stapelton, Linda could see the invisible clouds of denial, guilt, and shame begin to dissipate. The simple act of acknowledging the taboos Gloria used to hold the family hostage placed them in individual boxes. Once safely contained, the forbidden topics lost their power. Eliza allowed Linda to see the Stapelton family demons as nothing more than ideas, showing her that once she looked at them, she could just shut the boxes, and the contents wouldn't pollute the rest of her life.

"Mom was an alcoholic," Linda said, not understanding as she said it, why it spilled out. Minutes before, she would've expected the walls to come down around her for merely mentioning it. Now it amounted to nothing more than the contents of one of the boxes, and she could look into it without fear.

"Yeah...," Eliza said, wondering why her genius sister would state the obvious. The extent to which Linda misunderstood her mother appeared enormous, and Eliza felt compelled to set her sister straight. "Linny, Mom had big problems. She blamed me for a most of 'em. She blamed Dad and her family, and yeah, she blamed you and Artie too. The one person she couldn't blame was herself. Let's face it, Linny, Mom was fucked up. But if you think of it like she was sick or something, it's not as bad."

Linda could still do little more than nod. She knew Eliza made sense. And the idea that her mother suffered from a disease made her feel better. It allowed her to look at the picture Eliza painted, sad as was, without the clouds that had dominated her life rolling back through the house.