By Corinne Patrice de Palma
It was a blustery day in November. The wind whipped across the front steps of Avon Road as I made my way toward the front door of my house. I walked in chilled to the bone. The frost had set in. I just wore a light windbreaker that day. I underdressed like I always did since I was a child. I never liked feeling confined by clothes – I think this harkens back to the time when I was a baby and my mother, who had always gotten cold easily herself, had dressed me in two sleeping blankets instead of one in my crib – at least from what she told me.
Yelps sounded in the background from the family room, from what I could discern. I took a few steps towards the voices. It was my mother, pinned by my brother Matt against the wood- paneled wall. This had taken place right next to our piano. Mom was a virtuoso on the piano. She even learned how to play the flute when she was young. My grandmother Nana, my mother’s strict Italian immigrant mother, who literally come here on the boat when she was a baby, had made her become proficient in two instruments growing up. My associations of Mom at that piano – measured and skilled, juxtaposed against the mayhem in the room – brought more attention to the chaos it seemed, amid her loss of control: She stood there like a puppet, suspended, defenseless, as my brother kept his elbow on her neck, to keep her from moving.
“Stop,” she squealed.
“Screw you,” my brother replied as his hand pressed down harder on her neck keeping her captive on the wall. This was new behavior. Or was it? I never saw him fight with my mother. He shouted, “You’re a whore.”
I just transferred to public school – Moores Junior High. I was in seventh grade. Two years older than me, my brother Matt was in ninth grade there. Being in the same school had been a first for us. Had he always been this way? Maybe he had, but I hadn’t noticed since, in different schools the year before, and on different schedules, we weren’t around each other as much.
Either way, prior to that day, I had only thought always of Matt as my fierce protector, my big brother who had always defended me and my sister Janine – the sister who was one year older than me – against the bullies on our block, and my mother of course, against our wicked stepmother, Rita, who had regularly harassed her since I was seven years old after my father left home.
Once, Rita had come calling at our front door, pretending she was the Avon lady before she was married to my father, really just to get a good look at my mother to see what her competition was, and to threaten her, I discovered. Before that, I didn’t even know who she was. I answered the door after hearing the doorbell ring. It was right near our upstairs staircase, and I was right near it as I was headed to my bedroom on our second floor. “Is your mother home?” she asked, with Skin So Soft in her hands. After calling my mother and she came to the door, Rita yawped, “I’m Rita. He’s never going to go back to you. He’s with me now, forever.” My mother stood there stunned as Rita besieged her. My father at the time had refused to marry Rita after he had moved in with her at her house in the South Bronx. Our lives were something out of a movie even then. Nothing had ever been ordinary. That’s when Matt who was upstairs in his room, in hearing the noise, came downstairs, and after figuring out what was going on, stomped into the bathroom, filled up a glass of water, and threw it in her face. Then he shouted, “Get out of here you whore.” My brother had always done the fighting for us. Not with us.
As for now, as he held my mother up against the wall, I walked towards him. “Get the hell off of her,” I screeched, doing what I only felt was instinctual to protect my mom. He came back at me hard. He just learned karate, put me in a headlock, and threw me onto the floor.
It wasn’t long before Matt struck again. Years later, my therapist, Dr. Klein, would attribute Matt’s treatment of women as whores to Rita and his bad experiences with her. “Matt’s encounters with Rita led to the generalized perception that all women are now whores,” she told me. In some ways, Matt’s rage towards Rita wasn’t a stretch. She’d been atrocious, the classic evil stepmother for sure. Years later, Grandma de Palma would tell me that she heard from one of the doctor’s wives in my father’s medical practice that Rita had showed up at his office pretending she was sick to lure him away. My father was a cardiologist. Grandma told me she heard that Rita had been married three times before and that she was heard announcing to a friend who was a secretary at my father’s office that she was going to get a doctor now. That was her next goal.
But soon, Matt’s outbursts became a pattern.
Once, he had become so rebellious towards my mother that she threatened to run away.
I was lying on a couch in our family room in my sweatpants in front of our TV. It was December. Along with the indoor grill in our kitchen, the couches there had been a popular destination. When I was young, my older sister, Janine, Matt, and I, and my younger sister Regina (when she was old enough since she was six years younger than me), would fight for one of them. “I call that couch,” one of us would say, pointing. Then, whoever got to one first, laid claim.
On this one day, sprawled out on the couch, relaxing, I watched Lost in Space, my favorite show. Janine and Matt must have been upstairs. It was eight in the evening. Regina wasn’t at home. She took dance class almost every night of the week and was probably going to be home shortly.
A commercial break had come on TV for Fruit Loops with the bird, Toucan Sam. As he smelled the Fruit Loops from far away and flew towards it hastily because it smelled so good, suddenly, I heard the loud roar of Matt that I had become familiar with by now as he defied my mother. I found out later that he attempted to go to the house of Peter Fischer, a bad drug user, but Matt left anyway despite my mother’s desire to keep him at home.
I heard my mother’s car keys jingling. I looked up. There she was rushing to our front door, acting like a crazy woman. She’s 78 now, and she still has crazy bouts like this if my daughter, niece, or nephew are visiting with her and one of them wipes their noses on a piece of furniture, or spills something on the rug. She still lives in the house where I grew up. “Damn it,” she’ll explode, shaking. “How dare they come and mess up my house,” she’ll say, knowing she loves her grandchildren dearly, but she can’t cope with disorganization. This is residual I think now, from the mayhem in our home then.
Acting like a crazy woman as she rushed to our front door, she yelped, “What’s my name” in a baby’s voice. “I’m Jean de Palma,” she answered back. “That’s who I am. Where do I live?” Then she broke into fits of laughter. “I’m leaving and I’m never coming back.” Again, instinctively, I got up from the couch and ran out the door toward her as she rushed down the front steps to our house and to her car. Janine was upstairs in her bedroom. She must have heard the commotion. She followed me outside. As my mother got into her car and turned on the engine, I sat in the passenger’s seat. Janine scurried into the back. My mother began swerving down Avon Road as she drove in starts and stops, accelerating on the gas pedal each time she swerved.
“Mom. Stop. Now,” I yelled. I must have known how to drive from the bumper cars at Playland Amusement Park where I visited as a child in the summers. I surprised even myself when I was able to drive the car and get my mother to calm down.
Even Janine, the sister who kept secrets, marveled at me. “Wow, Corinne, you’re amazing,” she said – a testament to her good heart.
My mother had many implosions around that time. I hate to think what might have happened if I hadn’t restrained her or tried to defend her against Matt – what might have happened had I not kept her from driving recklessly down Avon Road. But either way, we never talked about that day again. She didn’t remember what happened. That wasn’t the story I came to realize she had heard: “Matt doesn’t mean any harm. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Just ignore him,” she responded and after each of his outbursts from then on. This would become a common refrain, even after I had been forced to call the cops multiple times, after he started turning his attention toward me in struggling to defend my mother. “You’re too sensitive,” she would tell me. “Just ignore him. He doesn’t mean any harm.” I had always been the sensitive one in the family, but in my eyes, Matt was wrong.
Matt began belittling me in front of my friends if he passed me in the hall. “You idiot,” he would say in a low voice. I played it down to avoid the humiliation I felt. “Oh, he’s nuts,” I remarked to my friends, then I suddenly pretended to get some books from my locker as an attempt to get away. What was I to think? My big brother calling me an idiot? How was I to know on some level if Matt’s savage outbursts weren’t going to sway my friends’ opinions of me.
Sometimes, it was worse if Matt didn’t say anything and just walked by with a cynical look, leaving me to guess whether he was going to explode right then and there. Thankfully, he never got the chance to do this in front of my boyfriend, Joey, my first love. Matt never saw us together at school, and it was at this point when he started to turn on me rather than my mother that I had stopped inviting Joey to my house to hang out with me. For the most part, I didn’t tell Joey about Matt. I didn’t know if he too was going to believe what Matt had said about me.
At the time Matt had put me in a headlock, I felt certain I was going to die. It was March of that same year when Matt had pushed my mother up against the wood-paneled wall in our family room. I came home directly after school to study for a science test. My mother was sitting on a couch in our family room as she graded homework assignments for her students. I was in the kitchen eating a can of green beans I pulled out from one of the cabinets and had mixed them with ketchup for a snack.
“What time did you get home?” he asked, as he abruptly walked into the room.
“I don’t know.”
“Was it five?”
“I don’t know.”
Was it my pitch, my glance, the look of fear under my breath that had given him license to attack?
“Look at me when I’m talking to you,” he demanded. “It’s rude not to look at someone directly in their eyes when they’re speaking. Haven’t you learned this by now?”
I kept eating. Carefully. As I lifted the beans onto my fork to put them in my mouth, the juices from the can when I poured the beans into a bowl had left a splat of water on my chin. I didn’t bother to wipe it as Matt stood there glaring – I was so frightened to move. Suddenly, he lunged towards me and put his arm against my throat while he held me in a headlock to keep me from getting away. He tightened his grip. I began to choke.
“Mom,” I gasped. “Matt is going to kill me.”
She looked up. “He’s not going to kill you,” she replied. “He’s not capable of that.”
I learned that it’s not the actual pain of physical harm that’s so bad in of itself – it’s not knowing how far someone is going to go. After all, when Matt was in the red zone, like a pit bull in a full-blown attack, he had no control. I guess what I was saying to my mother is that I was in trouble, and I needed help. And of course, accidents happen. I heard about a woman once who, at a stop sign, hit her temple on the stick shift of her car and died instantly. She was one of Joey’s friend’s mothers. Why was it outlandish to consider that he could accidentally kill me even if he didn’t intend for me to die?
Thankfully, I managed to escape from his grasp and run out the front door to get away. This helped until the next time he approached me, at which time I hid in a closet of our house if he were home until my mother’s boyfriend Joel would come over. When Joel was there, Matt was less likely to attack me. Relying on Joel, of course, was only a stopgap solution to keeping safe.
My mother, a professional seamstress, was born in the Bronx. As one of her colorful stories, my mother had always told us when were kids that as part of her upbringing, my grandfather was a train engineer for the New York Central. As I got older, every time she had mentioned this, I would ask, “What type of engineer? You mean civil?”
She would nod. “An engineer. That’s what they called them in those days. Grandpa wasn’t educated. He fixed trains. A train engineer. That’s all I know.”
Years later, after starting my career, I would ask, “And by New York Central, do you mean Metro North?” By then, this was the only train I knew of that I took from Westchester County, which borders the Bronx, to work in New York City. Recently, I looked it up. The New York Central was the railroad company since 1832 that owned the commuter lines in the New York Metropolitan area up until Grandpa retired from work. After that, the company was acquired by Penn Central, then Conrail when Penn Central went bankrupt. When MTA (New York Transit Authority) took over Conrail’s commuter operations in the northern portion of the New York metropolitan area, the line I took was dubbed Metro North.
I think clarifying these small details had come to matter to get to truth in my life.
Nana had a hard life. As an immigrant, she came to America with her father and four sisters after her mother died following birth to her. (I wonder what kind of guilt Nana had felt from this – her mother dying after she gave birth?) She was the youngest child of five girls. Her father came to this country to start a new life. Yet they were so poor, Nana had often talked about how she had to wait in line around Christmas in Mount Vernon in Westchester County, where they’d settled, to get presents from the town.
Because of this, Nana, as the breadwinner in the family, vowed to provide her children with the life that she didn’t have growing up. As a professional seamstress, she made a new outfit for my mother every weekend. She gave her dance lessons for fifteen years. Making it mandatory for my mother to become proficient in two instruments had fit into Nana’s dream to give my mother the culture her father couldn’t afford to give to her. Yet, as adoring as Nana was of my mother, my mother had always told me that Nana was so strict, she had never been allowed to speak. She was instructed to address Nana as Mother Dear, and if she didn’t, Nana would pout for days as if my mother didn’t love her by not addressing her in that way.
I often wondered if not being allowed to speak up is what led to my mother’s tendency to not call Matt out on his wrongdoings, as his violent outbursts besieged our home. Ignoring was all she knew in terms of how to cope with adversity in her life. “I know. I’m pathetic,” she always said. “I never learned how to fight back,” but why didn’t she try?
“Mom, Matt has got to see a therapist,” I’d insist each time he went into a rage.
She said nothing in response.
Matt had taken on many faces to Mom (as well as King – not uncommon in Italian families). He was also a genius. This became evident in his twenties when he trekked out to Long Island to work on a missile at Grumman Aerospace.
He was recruited by the company following his graduation from college. The job was so important he had to go through clearance with the FBI. I soon learned about my selection as one of the people interviewed. I discovered this when one morning a man who called himself Thor introduced himself to me while I was boarding the Metro North on my way into work. By then I landed my first career job in book publishing at Charles Scribner’s Sons on Fifth Avenue. Thor invited me out to lunch and asked me about my siblings. When it came to Matt, he stayed on him for a while. “Are you close? What was he like?” Thor asked. Later that afternoon I walked into Human Resources to pick up a form in which I accidentally omitted information when I was hired and had been asked to complete. Thor was walking out the office of the woman who’d hired me. I’m still not sure what he wanted to know about me – maybe verify that I was indeed Matt’s brother, and he had the right person by cross referencing my home address. I don’t know how he knew who I was when he met me at the train station, and that I was even going to the train. Maybe he followed me from my house. None of this had made sense.
Thor had told me he’d like to call me again. We exchanged telephone numbers. He told me he lived in the new condos that had just been built in town where the old Hotel Gramatan was torn down. Two weeks went by and I didn’t hear from him. When I called the number Thor gave me, there was no answer. I never saw Thor again. Not long after this, Matt found out that our neighbors had been approached by the FBI. That’s when we figured out that Thor must have been with the FBI.
Matt was cleared and got the job. This whole experience of Matt getting a job working on a covert project on a missile was exciting. FBI? Secret. There was a real mystique attached to it, like we had just been drawn into full-blown espionage. This experience had diverted attention away from Matt’s bad behavior in my mother’s eyes as she touted the fact that he was a genius, she claimed – how else could he have gotten the job?
In his early thirties, Matt moved into the basement apartment in our house to work on a product he invented. By then, I had my own apartment and was gone. Matt invented a sun patch, technically a sun dosimeter, which monitors the sun’s rays to determine a person’s exposure. This one was designed to wear on the arm while in the sun. He was quite successful initially. Sometimes when I visited his house, I would see him in a HAZMAT suit, goggles and all, as it protected him from exposure to toxic chemicals with which he was experimenting for his invention in the backyard. This was amusing as I spotted him in his white gear conducting experiments, sometimes in puddles of water if it had rained, and tinkering around — whatever reason that was for. He traversed back and forth into the basement at the same time where he chanted and stomped on the ground when he was working, to what he claimed help clear his head. That was fine. It was even somewhat entertaining when he did this. To my mother, now Matt was an Eccentric when she saw him outside in his protective gear. “This goes along with being a genius. All geniuses act a little bizarre,” she said.
In my late thirties, Matt moved out of the house at age 40 and had an apartment funded by one of his investors for his sun product. The apartment was set in a drug-filled, crime-ridden area of the Bronx. He got held up with a knife three times. When that happened, he took to the streets and became homeless for long periods of time.
He rode the subways in the day during his homeless bouts, and then he’d find a small piece of land in Central Park and camp out. When he did this, he would lock up his cell phone in a safe to keep it from getting stolen if he were asleep, and my mother wouldn’t hear from him for days. While visiting my mother during these times, I often found her crying. “Is he okay?” she pleaded. I felt badly for her. I sympathized with him. But I always knew Matt’s differences between right and wrong.
Recently, I stopped by the house. Mom was watching one of her favorite shows on TV, Little People, Big World. Matt called just after I arrived. While they talked, I grabbed some lunch from the refrigerator. She turned to me when she got off the phone and looked puzzled. “Do you think Matt is bipolar?” she asked. She grimaced painfully as if she held onto this theory to deal with his outbursts as a youth – that Matt had suffered from a clear-cut mental disorder – and now out of the house, had gone through homeless bouts. It was clear he couldn’t function on his own – at long last, she was going to get to the bottom of this, for once and for all.
Baffled, I sighed, yet was slightly amused. “Bipolar? Manic Depressive? OCD? What difference does it make?” I replied. By now, we’d been through a lifetime of pain.
I admit, Matt had a hard life. He did the fighting for us. By standing up to Rita on behalf of my mother that day at our house, Rita had proceeded to take any chance she could get to antagonize him. I can’t imagine any boy not growing up unscathed. But still, did my mother think that attaching a label to his violent outbursts made them okay?
There was always that fine line with Matt – erratic versus a person with a mental illness; narcissist or amateur. Matt had been like a pied piper. Despite his abuse, he had a charismatic personality. He seemed to attract women easily – always women who were smart, the intellectual type, and beautiful too. He always knew how to laugh at himself and had a doting nature – the way he praised people, sometimes even putting them on a pedestal at the expense of himself – that drew women to him. He grew up in the liberal ‘60s and ‘70s when rebelling was the norm and anything goes. I wondered myself where he had fit in exactly. But I always knew that his behavior was wrong.
That’s the thing with labels. In today’s society, labels for everything, even a medical diagnosis for a child rebelling against a parent – ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder) – makes it easy to avoid dealing with what you might already know.
Corinne Patrice de Palma teaches writing at SUNY Purchase College and holds an M.F.A. in nonfiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College in New York state. She is published in Entropy, Mom Egg Review, the Washington Post and numerous USA Today media outlets. Ms. de Palma recently completed her memoir titled In Full Bloom.