6. The Famous Flying Wedding Cake

I know little girls are supposed to daydream about their wedding.  They’re supposed to love Barbie dolls and frilly dresses and pink. Little girls are really supposed to love pink.  I was not that kind of little girl. I was not pink. I was not frilly.  I was a tomboy, an explorer of alleys and creek beds, a catcher of crawdads, a softball team captain and a part-time garage vaudeville act.  My daydreams were about living in a tree house, visiting the pyramids or inventing a new fangled contraption. I loved gadgets and inventors.  I loved Betty Boop because her Grandpa invented elaborate contraptions.  I loved Clutch Cargo because he went on adventures and I loved Rocky and Bullwinkle because of Fractured Fairy Tales and the Wayback Machine.  I thought Olive Oyle was stupid and Betty and Veronica were lame. 

My first real experience with weddings was when my half-a-sister Rayleen got married.  When I think of weddings, it’s her fancy church wedding I think about.  I think of rows and rows of embroidered virgin white tulle ruffles over a hoop skirt hiding the very pregnant bride. When I think of wedding cake, I think tiered rows of stale white cake covered in stiff, sickeningly sweet, white frosting.  I think of the Tom Petty video slicing up the girl cake and naked girls popping out of a cake.  But most of all I think of my half-a-sister’s wedding and my mother’s pitching arm.  I think of the Famous Flying Wedding Cake 

Considering the soap opera that is my family, it may seem odd that my earliest memories are good ones.  We may have been poor but we didn’t know it.  I didn’t know we lived in the ghetto because I’d never lived anywhere else. I thought all three of us sharing a single bed just made it easier to tell ghost stories. One thing for sure, we knew we had each other.  My mother had hammered that lesson into our little brains.  In the middle of reenacting the latest three stooges’ fight, she would scold us for hurting each other. We didn’t really hurt each other in our play acting but to her, even the pretense was wrong.  “You better be good to each other!” she’d warn, “because no one’s closer than family.”  Once Kitty and I ganged up on Eddie and accidentally gave him a bloody nose.  Eddie tickled me till I threw up.  Kitty hid in corners and scared the tar out of both of us.  We fought, we laughed and we made up. But at the end of the day we loved each other and took care of each other. My mother insisted on that. That is until the half-a-sister came to our house to stay.     

The year I turned six Rayleen came up from down south to spend the summer. She was my mother’s first child and lived with her father’s parents in North Carolina. I always thought that she was the lucky one.  I imagined her life was safe and happy.  She not only had grandparents, and probably a father too, but in the summertime she got us as well.  She had two families to choose from.  We didn’t have choices, we only had each other.  No grandparents, no father, no extended family. The truth is no one else wanted us.  My Mother was right; it was just the three of us against the world.
 
When Rayleen came to visit, it was like the bonus sibling.  Kitty and I were fascinated with Rayleen.  She was seven years older and seemed to know a little something about everything. She was a teenager!  She wore lipstick and knew all about American Bandstand and Elvis.  She kept copies of True Confessions under her mattress and knew how to pop her fingers and her gum.  She was the coolest girl I ever met and I was amazed that she could be related to me. Once when I asked what a “half-sister” was, my brother quickly informed me that there was no such thing as half a person.  She was just a sister with a different father.  He was very stern with me and I never forgot the lesson.  I never ever called her “half” or even thought of her in those terms. I embraced her without question.  We all did. She was one of us.

I realized much later that she didn’t feel the same way about us. To her we were just her mothers’ “other children”.  We were the children of that half-breed Cherokee and no relation to her. No kin to her.  Too late I realized that no matter what my brother said Rayleen was really only half-a-sister and half-a-sister is worse than none at all. 

After she graduated from high school Rayleen came to live with us year round.  My mother had remarried and we moved to the suburbs with my brand new step-father.  We lived in a little house on a cul-de-sac with copy cat houses all around and a park on every corner.  My mother was discovering the joys of homemaking.  Kitty and I were discovering the joys of suburbia in the 1960’s and my brother was busily becoming a teenage heartbreaker.  It almost felt like “Father Knows Best” with Kitty, Bud and me playing our respective roles posing on the stairway for the cameras. 

Then Rayleen came.  The house had always been small – only three bedrooms to fit two adults and three kids.  But with Rayleen it seems unbearably small.   Not long ago the three of us happily shared one bed and now we complained about having to share a room.  My brother was moving quickly into puberty and needed his privacy.  Kitty and I fought constantly about clothes and chores.  Our house was crowded but it was about more than square footage. People started getting in each other’s way.  Bruised feelings and injured pride became a daily event.  We all became a bit more defensive.  I guess we all thought it was just a matter of time until we got accustomed to each other.  Now I’m not so sure that’s what happened.  Now, I think the arguments had an instigator.  I think that someone was telling tales.

It wasn’t until Rayleen came that I knew that my baby sister was the favorite. Until then, I didn’t even know she was spoiled.  I never thought that I did all the work.  Rayleen told me these things.  She said that she was on my side and that she was my true sister.  I began to feel that she was the only one I could trust. I believed her when she told me that everyone else took advantage of me.  I believed that I was her favorite.  I believed other things too as the years went by.  I never once doubted her. I never questioned her honesty or her motives.  When she told me things about my brother and sister that made me my skin crawl, I never questioned her truthfulness.  No never, not even once.  I didn’t love my brother and sister any less, but I always looked at them differently.

About a year after Rayleen moved in, the real trouble started.  My step father had been injured in an explosion and hospitalized for a month. He suffered brain damage and his recovery was slow. He never did get back the vibrant, good-natured man that he was.  At the same time, my mother had a baby sized tumor removed along with her uterus in a complete hysterectomy. Since neither one of them had health insurance, the medical bills were forcing us into bankruptcy.  We had to make a lot of adjustments to survive. 

We had to move from the little copy cat house on the cul-de-sac with all the parks.  We moved to the other side of the tracks in a place called “CorkTown”.  We moved with my French step-father to the only few blocks where the Irish lived in a town full of French descendants. We sold the fancy new car and my mother went back to working nights.

Money wasn’t the only problem but the lack of it made everything worse.  Instead of facing the problems together, they both lashed out in well worn bad habits.  My step-father drank to dull the pain of failure.  My mother went through early menopause without hormone therapy.  She became prone to fits of temper and hysterics.  I started cooking dinner and breakfast.  My brother went in the Army.   

My brother, who had always been a grounding force, was gone.  He was caught stealing a leather jacket from a dry cleaner with his best friend.  The best friend’s parents talked to the police chief, my mother and step-father got in an argument at the police station.  The best friend went on to graduate and go to college.  My brother went to the Army and was sent to Vietnam. 

Add to this toxic mix, my half-a-sister’s drunken Polish boyfriend who would appear in the middle of the night calling out to Rayleen like a character in some Tennessee Williams’s novel. On a regular basis, he woke up the entire neighborhood and would beg and cry until Rayleen let him in.  This happened every weekend until he married the pregnant Rayleen. 

The cost of this wedding was the topic of constant conflict between my mother and step-father. My mother could not do enough for the daughter she had abandoned and Rayleen did not hesitate to collect her due.  My mother, in her hormone starved state, was competing with the drunken boyfriend’s own mother in an early version of the Bridezilla wars.  We all made due in order to get Rayleen everything she needed for her Catholic Church wedding.  Rayleen needed three bridesmaids and a maid of honor, a flower girl and a ring bearer.  We sold my mother’s car and she drove on old clunker without a heater.  In the middle of the night she’d arrive home from work with legs so frozen she could barely walk.  Rayleen needed to invite all the drunken Polish boyfriend's drinking buddies and his entire extended family.  And they all needed a sit down meal.  That year, Kitty needed a new bike but she made due (not without a great deal of foot stomping) with a used bike for her birthday.  

Funny thing is that after all this making due and sacrificing, all Kitty and I saw of the wedding was the back of Rayleen’s underpants as the hoop skirt flipped up getting in the car. Not only weren’t we invited to be part of the wedding – not flower girls, or bridesmaids – nothing.  We didn't even get to go to the wedding.  We weren't invited to the reception either.  On that day we were not related to Rayleen, we were just her mother's "other children". We sat at home watching television while my mother and step-father played the parents of the bride.  We had no idea what happened so it was long after the wedding that I heard the stories of my mother's strong right arm and the Famous Flying Wedding Cake that nearly hit the drunken boyfriend's mother.   

After that Rayleen remembered us or me at least.  I was her favorite babysitter.  I’d spend weekends at her house cleaning and taking care of the babies.  My mother gave her our washer and dryer and so I spent school nights in the basement of our house with a wringer washer and a clothes line.  Did you know that clothes will freeze on a clothes line?  It was a cold winter.

No matter how cruel she was, I always remembered what my brother had taught me and never treated Rayleen like she was not a real sister. I never doubted her honesty or her motives.  At least not until my brother died many years later.  When he died, I finally understood the real damage the half-a –sister had done. 

 He was not even cold in the ground yet when she started telling me lies about him.  I called her about placing an obituary for him.  I was trying to remember important things in his life, to word them properly and remember the best in him.  She couldn’t bear it.  She hated when people got too high and mighty.  She loved to bring him down a notch.  She said, “You remember when he took Mom’s car and killed that old man?  Mom could have been sued and lost everything.” I was in shock. The story made me heartsick. I didn’t know my brother had killed someone with my mother’s car.  I didn’t remember it and for half a second, I heard myself say, “It must be true, why would Rayleen lie”?

The sound of the click as I hung up the phone was like the click of a key opening a Chinese puzzle box.  A little drawer opened and I heard Rayleen tell me that my step-father had raped my cousin.  A secret compartment opened and she told my brother caught my sister cheating on her husband.  Another opening and I heard her warn of my sister’s lying, my mother’s favoritism, my brother’s stealing.  At different times, she had accused us all of horrible crimes and perversions.  She claimed her stories were told to her by somebody else, somebody above reproach.  All lies so horrid you dare not question their truthfulness. 

I could hardly breathe, all these years of mistrust, all these doubts and fears, all planted by this snake of a woman.  In a flash of family photos, I saw her, year after year, smug and self-satisfied, a kind of Dick Cheney grin.  At every family crisis - she was in the center, standing back, popping her chewing gum and listening.  I never knew why she was there, she never offered to help, never felt the need to involve herself.  Now I know she’s like an arsonist - admiring her handiwork. 

I finally understand why my brother believed such awful lies about me.  I know now that the stories half-a sister said came from my brother about Kitty were lies too. The accusations about my step-father and my own father – lies, lies lies.   I saw the way her lies ripped the heart from our family. She was the teller of stories, the unquestioned expert labeling everyone else - liar, lazy, selfish, slut, and whore.

I tried to put myself in Rayleen’s shoes.  She was the bastard child abandoned in North Carolina, unwanted by both parents.  She hated the three of us because my mother took us with her.  We envied her. She always had a place to sleep and food on the table.  We didn't.  My mother kept us because no one else would take us.  She left us with foster parents a couple of times.  But Rayleen didn’t see that.  She only saw her own pain and probably spent years dreaming of "getting even" with us.  Taking from us the things we loved the way we took her mother. 

Then I think of that little girl - left behind in North Carolina.  I remember when she was a senior in High School; she needed a dress for her prom.  My mother had promised her a pretty dress for her prom.  It became her mission.  A prom dress is not in the budget of a waitress with three other children. So my mother took on extra shifts and saved every nickel she could.  Buying a dress for Rayleen became a family goal and we all pitched in.  Finally Mom found just the right dress, a beautiful dress with spaghetti straps and cascading rows of taffeta in a soft powder blue.  It cost more than she planned but she managed it.  Then she had to get it packed and mailed in time for the prom. I remember how happy my mother was that she had managed to keep her promise. 

Years later I heard from the half-a-sister the rest of the story.  It was a two-mile walk from her grandmother’s house up to the mailbox.  She made that walk every day waiting for the dress in the mail.  But she waited for something more.  The dress would be proof that she was loved. That she was not an abandoned bastard child.  Someone loved her enough to send her a fancy dress all the way from Detroit.  She could dance around the prom with pride and show them all. 

When the dress arrived, all those layers of taffeta that looked so good in the store looked horrible after being crammed into a box for a week.  It seemed permanently wrinkled.   Unwearable. 

When I think of it now, it’s not anger – its sorrow.  I think of Rayleen left behind and alone.  I think of her spending years planning her revenge and living on hatred.  I think of us – the three of us other kids – who envied Rayleen her safe home never knowing the price she paid for it.  I think of how different it all could have been.  We made room for her in our home but mostly in our hearts.  We cared for her and her babies, loved them, and sacrificed for them.  But when we expected the loyalty and love of a sister – she treated us like beggars looking for a handout and turned us away. 

So sometimes now, in the middle of the night, I think of all that we've lost because of her.  I remember all the unnecessary heartache. I lie awake and the mind goes over a hurt like a tongue on a broken tooth. You know you should leave it be but you just can’t.   Then you begin to plan a way to get even.  Only there is no such place as “Even” because time does not stand still.  Each action creates new victims, the wrong person gets hurt and the cycle starts again. Instead we have to learn to adjust to the ebb and flow of life.  In the end the evil you do will come back to you.  The goodness will find your heart.  I do believe this.  But most of all I believe in the power of forgiveness.