A Book of American Martyrs(92)
Though Darren and Naomi had come to hate Ann Arbor they did not want to move to Birmingham. Above all they did not want to enroll in Birmingham schools—new schools! Almost every year of their lives, new schools. Our mother had destroyed our family by refusing to move to Ohio with our father but we’d moved anyway, eventually—to the McMahans in Ann Arbor.
“You and Dad care a lot for women’s rights, children on welfare, abortions—what about your own children’s rights? Don’t we have any?”
We’d put this question to Mom more than once. Darren’s brainchild he wielded against her from time to time like a switchblade knife.
We’d never dared to ask Dad, not quite.
Mom had no reply to this rude question other than nervous laughter. It was her strategy (we supposed) to pretend that her dear clever children Darren and Naomi meant to be funny.
Later, after Dad was killed, and Darren had been reading about the killing online, as he’d been forbidden, Darren said with a smirk: “All those years, we were ‘collateral damage.’ We never knew.”
“ALL WE WANT for you children is to have normal-seeming lives. We will do what we can. We love you!”—our Voorhees grandfather welcomed us to the big old white Colonial house with a two-floor foyer and a glittering chandelier provoking the mad thought to skitter through Darren’s sick brain—Ideal for swinging like a monkey.
Grandma Adele hugged, kissed us. Melissa may have hugged in return, stiffly.
Yes, our grandfather did say normal-seeming. Grandpa Clem (as he hoped we would call him) did not say normal—he was not naive.
Grandma Adele was such a silly idea! Just because our grandfather had married this powdery-faced “chic” older woman with bright lipstick, hopeful eyes, and red-rinsed hair, and just because she was (we had to admit) very, very sweet, very nice, very patient, very kind, very considerate of us, her step-grandchildren, why would anyone expect us to be nice to her?
Well, of course—Melissa was nice to both our grandparents.
Perhaps because she was adopted, and not of our Voorhees bloodline, Melissa did not hate with quite the fervor we hated; or rather, Melissa did not seem to know hate at all.
Within a few days of moving into the elder Voorhees’s house Melissa snuggled with Grandma Adele watching 101 Dalmatians on the large-screen TV in the sumptuous walnut-wood-lined den while Darren and Naomi skulked in their respective rooms upstairs with doors shut.
(Eventually, Naomi went to knock softly on Darren’s door. Just could not stay away from her brother though his response—Yeh? What the fuck do you want?—was not encouraging.)
Shocking to us, that Grandpa Clem who’d always been such a forceful person, ready to contradict our father, genial, generous, very fit for a man of his age, seemed to have been visibly stricken by our father’s death. Grandpa was shorter than we recalled—shorter than Darren. His eyelids were tremulous and there was a tremor in his left hand which he tried to disguise by grasping it with the other hand; when he saw that we’d noticed he told us that the tremor was harmless—not to be confused with the tremor of Parkinson’s disease.
He’d cut back on his medical practice and no longer performed surgery. Yet he would not consider retiring as his wife wished; he could not bear a future, he said, in a retirement village in Florida.
He had followed the trial at a distance. But he had followed the trial fanatically. Our grandmother Adele chided him, when she thought we were out of earshot: “There’s nothing you can do about it, Clem! Your son is gone. But your grandchildren are here, you can love them.”
We were stricken with guilt hearing this. We had to laugh, hearing this. We thought—Nobody would love us, if they knew us.
It is Darren and Naomi of whom I speak. Our sweet little adopted Chinese-girl sister everyone adored was not one of us.
For mostly Darren and Naomi were hidden away upstairs in their rooms immersed in lurid fantasies of revenge as other adolescents are immersed in lurid fantasies of one another.
Darren cultivated a crude, zestful, funny sort of skill for drawing comics in imitation of R. Crumb and Zap Comix. Naomi interspersed fantasies of setting fires to houses with a renewed interest in math/algebra in which despite the distractions of her miserable life she could excel.
Elaborate plots poisoning the Dunphys’ dog. (We knew the Dunphys had to have a dog, the pictures we’d seen of the Dunphy family were of dog people.) Darren knew (thought he knew) how to acquire a gun in the city of Detroit (he’d take the Woodward Avenue bus south into the dangerous, depopulated, nearly-all-black city with three hundred dollars in cash hidden on his person) and with this gun someday soon he would shoot through the windows of the Luther Dunphy residence somewhere in Ohio, we had no idea where.
Naomi said, practically: We could just set some fires here. Some stupid Christian churches.
Darren said: That is such an asshole idea, I’ll pretend I never heard it. We are saving our revenge for the enemy.
Naomi: OK. but where is the enemy?
Darren: Shithole, Ohio. We’ll find ’em.
“JUST FOR YOU”
This is painful to recall. This is not easy.
We knew that our mother was not-well and that we should not have been judging her harshly. But (maybe) we had no one else close enough to us, to wound.
Oh your mother is such a remarkable woman! She has been so strong this past year, so brave . . .