Cousins
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Honestly, I can’t believe I have managed to get this far without discussing my cousin because he was such a huge part of my childhood. I’ll call him B. B was born in late 1982, so he’s close to three years younger than I. Despite that age difference, we were practically inseparable when we were little. When his parents went out for a “date night” they would leave B with my grandmother. Before it was time for them to pick him up, we would hide behind the living room sofa, with our childish hopes that when they couldn’t find B, they would just give up and leave. When they did find us, we would both beg for B to be able to spend the night. I can’t remember a time they said no, so he and I could “camp” on the living room floor. When his mother went back to work, and also during the summer when school was out, B was over at our house all day, every day. I loved it because he also brought some of his toys with him. He had play-doh sets, like the one where you could play barber and cut play-doh hair and he also had lots of board games. Later on, we both got into baseball cards and spent summer days organizing and reorganizing our collections into binders.
His parents also lived in our neighborhood. They were closer to my mother’s house than ours, but it was still about a half mile away. If he wasn’t at our house, I was over at his house. Mostly that was due to his mother’s work schedule and my grandmother’s schedule and them needing each other for childcare. His father was also a long-haul truck driver and was gone for days at a time. I don’t think his mother returned to work until B was in middle school or around that time. I know she was still taking and picking us up from our neighborhood elementary school at least until I was in 5th grade. Some days my grandmother dropped me off at their house very early in the morning. My aunt would let me in the front door and go back to bed. I’d lie on their couch with a box of dry cereal, waiting for everyone to get up.
Then my aunt was there in the car line in the afternoons, to take me back to their house until my grandmother could pick me up after work. I wasn’t allowed to have a Nintendo, but B had one and we’d play the original Mario Brothers and occasionally Donkey Kong or Duck Hunt. His mother was usually napping in the afternoons on the living room sofa, so we had to entertain ourselves quietly in the den. We would play video games and snack on chips from the kitchen cabinets. Once, I ate too many of their chips, I guess. My aunt would often call my grandmother after we got home to talk, and would tell my grandmother everything I had done wrong while at their house, including how many chips I had eaten. After that, I tried to be more careful, even when I was hungry. I also learned to play more cautiously after an incident where I got silly putty on their den carpet.
B had boardgames like Monopoly that we played for days on end. When he was at my house, the official game rules were bent because he was the “guest” and when we played at his house, the favor went to him because we were at his house. No matter which house we were at, it was up to me to supervise him and if anything happened, it was my fault. I was “older and should know better”. Leading up to one Christmas, my aunt was hosting a “Joy to the World” catalog party in her living room while he and I played in one of B’s bedrooms. Their house had three bedrooms and two of them belonged to B, but we were playing in the one where he slept and B began jumping on his bed. I don’t remember if I was also jumping on the bed, or just watching him. Either way, I didn’t make him stop and he fell off the side of the bed and hit his head hard enough to crack the electrical outlet on the wall. His head was fine, but the electrical outlet wasn’t, and I was in trouble again for letting B jump on his bed.
I think it was my 4th grade year that B and I weren’t getting along as well and I became a latchkey kid. My aunt would pick me up from school, take me back to my grandmother’s house, and leave me alone for a couple of hours until my grandmother got home from her work. Bob was still having health issues, but he wasn’t home full-time yet, I guess. I would snack and watch whatever cartoons I could get on our old tv.
It must have been when I was in 5th grade, because I vaguely recall that B was a couple of years behind me in about 3rd grade when he got chickenpox. My grandmother felt really sorry for him and we went to the store, perhaps it was K-Mart, to get him some toys to distract him from the itching. I admit I was jealous at the time because he was getting all this attention and new toys when it wasn’t a holiday or his birthday. I was told I never had chickenpox as a child, which seems impossible given the amount of time B and I spent together. By then I wasn’t spending as many afternoons at his house, but his parents were still driving us to school and picking us up, so it seems unlikely I didn’t catch chickenpox from him. In any case, I either had a mild bout or no one noticed I also had chickenpox. It wasn’t until I had children of my own and the doctors did blood work that I learned I had chickenpox at some point in my childhood.
B’s family did well-enough that he was never hurting for toys. He had so much stuff that their third bedroom was his overflow room. In the bedroom where he slept, he eventually had a waterbed and I think it was even one of the heated ones. His old bed went to the third bedroom, as did some of his books and extra toys. In his main room, he got a tv and when the new Nintendo was released, that went in his room. He later added an aquarium stocked with his own little fish.
They always had dogs, inside and outside. In the early days, Tasha was their inside dog and there were several dogs that lived outside in their backyard. I think one was a black lab named Duke. He was a sweet dog that sadly got cancer inside his nose, if I recall correctly. They also had a brother and sister pair named Candice and Alex that they got as puppies from someone related to my mother’s third husband, Eddie. After Tasha died, my aunt found a beautiful stray cat that she named Samantha. We mostly called her “Mancy”, among other nicknames. I don’t know what breed she was but she was shades of grey and white and had long hair. Not just some random stray cat because she looked like a purebred and I think was declawed. Mancy was the kind of cat that only allowed you to pet her on her head, but only for a bit because she quickly had enough. But my aunt was attached from day one.
One day in the school cafeteria I was talking about the new cat to a boy in my class named Malcolm. I told him about how my aunt had just found this cat and when I described Mancy, he told me his family had lost their cat that fit that description. Since we all lived in the same neighborhood, it’s fairly plausible that my aunt had found his cat. But she had already gotten attached and was not interested in finding out if her Mancy was actually a stray, or belonged to my classmate. I stupidly told my grandmother about this and told me that if I wanted to keep my cat, I needed to convince Malcolm that this cat hadn’t been his lost cat. I didn’t want to have to give my cat to my aunt if Mancy had to be returned, and so I submitted to my grandmother’s threat. I suppose I told him I didn’t think it could be his cat, after all, and never mentioned Mancy again.
Toward the summer of my 5th grade year, B’s family got a three foot deep above-ground pool. I can’t recall a time when any adults ever swam with us. My grandmother claimed that the moving water made her dizzy so she didn’t even want to stay outside to watch us in the pool. My aunt was usually inside napping or taking care of things inside the house. I suppose she could have seen us out the window, but if she was watching us, we weren’t aware of it. If my uncle was home, he had just gotten home from a long-haul trip and was sleeping. So it was up to us to play in the pool quietly and my responsibility to supervise the both of us. That summer, I would ride my bike to their house and knew I was supposed to be home by dark. If we swam in the morning, I’d be starving by lunchtime. Again, I knew I had to be careful not to eat a lot, so when B offered me a sandwich made of two slices of bread and a single slice of sandwich meat, I gladly accepted it.
Thinking about it now, this whole thing with the scarcity of food is strange. I wasn’t supposed to eat their food and yet my aunt had a habit of “making too much” food and giving it to my grandmother and I for a meal. I especially remember when they would cook out on the grill, she would “make too much” barbeque chicken. And there were some times when I was still there in the evenings when they ate dinner so my aunt would include me in the meal. Oh, and when they had cookouts where they made ice cream they would bring us some. That was the most delicious ice cream ever. I made ice cream this past summer and it reminded me of that.
Anyway, back the the story. We were generally unsupervised by adults inside and outside since I was considered “old enough to know better”. One afternoon we were playing on B’s swingset and we spied some wild onions growing in his backyard. I don’t know if I was hungry, or if it was a dare, but we, or at least I, dug up those wild onions and ate them. My aunt found out and must have told my grandmother when she picked me up. All I remember is that on the ride home my grandmother yelled at me about how dangerous it was and that I could die.
Another time, my grandmother and my aunt were chatting in another part of the house while B and I played in their den. I was in their rocking chair and B was standing behind me, I think in his beanbag chair. Either way, he was pushing the rocking chair with me in it. Somehow I hit my head on the corner of the desk that was beside the rocking chair. I don’t remember or understand now how it happened, but I was bleeding pretty badly and went crying down the hallway to find my grandmother. I got in trouble for getting blood on my aunt’s white walls and was threatened with stitches after we hastily made our departure. The idea of stitches as described by my grandmother didn’t appeal to me so she put a bandaid on the hole in my head and eventually it stopped bleeding. I still have the hole in my left temple, just an inch or so from my eye, which is weird because the desk would have been on the right of the rocking chair.
When B was a bit older, maybe around 9 or 10 years old, his parents bought him a BB gun. I was over at their house one afternoon while B was shooting paper targets or something in their backyard. We went inside and B thought he had emptied the gun of all the BB pellets. I don’t know why, but he went back outside with the BB gun after he supposedly emptied the gun. By then his dad was outside mowing the yard and B somehow shot his father in the neck. It didn’t do much damage, but my uncle’s neck was bleeding a bit. It could have been an accident, but now I wonder what the odds were of B shooting what he claimed was an unloaded gun and just happening to hit his father in the neck.
His parents were strict but also forgiving, often spoiling their only child. His mother tended more toward “what’s done is done” with B while his father was more likely to threaten a beating. I don’t think I ever saw my uncle spank B, but the threats are etched in my memory. If B and I were bickering in the car, my uncles would threaten to pull the car over. If we were at a family gathering at a restaurant, my uncle and my grandmother would point out the location of the bathrooms, just in case we acted up and they needed to spank us.
B had a nice childhood though, at least from what I knew at the time. Both of his parents supported his interests and were involved. When he was young, B was on a baseball team and we all went to see his games. I had always wanted dance lessons so this made me a bit jealous as a kid, having to watch B get to play baseball while I didn’t get the same opportunities. When B was interested in basketball, his parents had part of their backyard paved so B could have space to have a basketball goal of his own. When B was interested in hockey, they bought him everything he wanted for that — a goal, rollerblades, hockey sticks, street pucks, and all the padding. When my uncle took an interest in golf, B also had his own set of clubs to play alongside his father. Later on, B played football for a year in middle school. In high school they bought him an electric guitar and paid for him to take lessons. When he wanted to play drums, they bought him a set and he probably had lessons for that, as well. I think they also paid for tutors when B was struggling academically
I’ll be completely honest — I was jealous of my cousin. He had both of his parents, who supported everything he showed any interest in. He had every toy he wanted, even the Nintendo I wasn’t allowed to have. They went on vacations pretty much every summer. I was included in several of these — a couple trips to Myrtle Beach, Disneyworld, and even an Alaska cruise when I was 15. I was incredibly lucky they invited me on some of their vacations, though some of that might have been to keep B entertained. When I didn’t go with them on their vacations, my grandmother and I took care of their house. I was in charge of watering my aunt’s impatiens while my grandmother fed the animals and I think my aunt may have even paid me for watering her flowers. Either way, I’m grateful when I did get to go with them some since my grandmother and Bob couldn’t afford it and had no interest in traveling. I was jealous that B’s family was well-off compared to us, while we were struggling.
After my grandmother began working, she made it a weekly event, on Friday afternoons, to give B and I an allowance. We each got $5 and while I saved mine, eventually opening a savings account. Meanwhile, B’s allowance burned a hole in his pocket. He had almost always spent it by Saturday, begging his parents to take him to the store to buy a new toy. I remember one time, I saved for a couple of weeks and bought us matching red, white, and blue Koosh balls. Once I had saved $200 in my savings account, I remember thinking I probably had enough to buy my own waterbed, if I had really wanted to.
I was also jealous that our family celebrated B’s birthdays while mine were not celebrated on the same level. This is petty, but I remember when he turned 9, I think it was, and had a party at Chuck E. Cheese. I don’t think I really wanted a Chuck E. Cheese party, but I wished we could have been treated more equally. I wished that I had both parents, or even one parent, and was able to be spoiled by my grandmother like he was. Instead I had no parents and a magnet from B on our fridge as a reminder that for him it was “If Mom says no, just as Grandma”. I didn’t have “mom” and “dad”. I had “Granny” but our relationship wasn’t nearly as cozy as the name I called her.
Maybe it was because of our age difference and my jealousy when I started to see how differently we were being raised, but B and I grew apart a bit in middle school. He was still at the neighborhood elementary school while I went to a middle school farther away. I was riding the bus and making new friends. When I was in 8th grade, he attended the same middle school once he was in 6th grade. I had my own friend group and we rarely saw one another. I either rode the bus home or stayed after school until my grandmother could pick me up after work. I couldn’t tell you now how B got to and from middle school or why we stopped carpooling.
When I was in 9th grade, B and I were close again. The summer after I finished in the 9th grade was the one where we organized and obsessed over baseball cards. B got interested in comic books and I was able to by a few. I even remember the time his mother took us to Heroes Aren’t Hard to Find — a comic book store here. That was also the summer that my grandmother went up in the attic and brought down my grandfather’s coin collection. She split the collection in half for B and I to share. With that influx into our coin collections, we spent hours guessing how much each coin was worth, along with each baseball card. One summer afternoon, my grandmother took us to the gun and coin shop near our house. We only went once but I remember buying a penny that had been mis-struck duging production. I still have the cards and coins with the price stickers B and I made that summer. I think that was also the year that my grandmother took us to Eastland Mall to ice skate. After we finished skating, we would wander up to the kiosk that sold pogs. We both picked through baskets of colorful cardboard discs to add to our collection, along with a slammer or two when we could afford a new one.
B and I remained pretty close throughout high school. We shared the same taste in music and when his family bought him an electric guitar and lessons, I wanted to play, too. The summer after I turned 16 and had just started my first job, I was impatient so I asked my mother if I could use the credit card she had given my grandmother in my name. I went and bought an inexpensive guitar and amp, in hopes that as B learned to play, he would teach me some of what he learned. But in order to pay off my newly incurred debt, I had to make sure I worked enough hours at the grocery store. B taught me a couple bits and pieces of songs, but I rarely played and eventually gave the guitar to my other cousin*.
Once I got my driver’s license, I drove B to and from school. This was my junior year, so B would have been a freshman, and his parents didn’t want him riding the bus. So I picked him up at his house in the morning and dropped him off again on my way to work after school. After I graduated, there was at least one time when I was a freshman in college that his mother asked me to pick him up after school so he wouldn’t have to ride the bus home.
Our neighborhood had a lot of rowdy kids, most of whom rode the bus. In middle and high school, I knew which kids were trouble and tried to sit far away from them on the school bus, especially in the afternoons. Eventually B’s family put their house up for sale and moved to another county. They built a new house and were going to have more land in a nicer area. B was going to have a new room and they let him have the walls painted black. Before he even got his license, his parents bought him a brand-new black car so he could drive himself to and from school.
B’s parents didn’t want him to have to be uprooted, so in order for him to graduate from the same high school, they told the school that B lived with my grandmother. If they didn’t lie and say he lived somewhere in Mecklenburg county, he would have had to go to a different school in their county. But because B was able to drive himself, and my family was already at ease with lies to get what they wanted, no one ever knew he lived in a completely different school district.
B also worked a short stint at the same grocery store with his mother. I think he worked in the produce department. By that point, I had quit working at the store, but whichever job he had there, he didn’t last long. Since he was working in a different department, I doubt his mother was making his schedule, but she definitely had enough sway to make sure his hours didn’t interfere with his school work, lessons, or family gatherings. Even still, B didn’t work there for long.
The world was his oyster and he was allowed to apply to colleges in different states, whereas my option had been the local university or nothing. He was accepted to Berklee College of Music in Boston. The whole family was thrilled because their golden child was going to be a famous musician. My grandmother would always ask B when he was going to become a famous this or that — a famous hockey player, basketball player, etc. and if he was going to take care of her. Now it looked like her dream was going to come true. It looked like B was going to college to become a famous guitar player. The only problem was that B was terribly shy. At holiday family gatherings, when my aunt hosted at their new house, everyone would ask B to play. There was one time he was able to play, but only if he was able to be out of sight in his room.
There was much excitement and hubbub when B was moving to Boston to pursue his, and the family’s, dream of becoming a famous guitarist. Even my mother took a whole week off from work to help her sister and brother-in-law move B up to college in Boston. He had his own apartment because he didn’t want the hassle of sharing space with roommates. I don’t know what tuition to Berklee was back then, but him being an out-of-state student, plus the apartment couldn’t have been cheap. In addition to that, his parents would take off work, load up their minivan with groceries to drive up to Boston, with my mother also taking days off work to join them. When I asked if there weren’t grocery stores nearer to his apartment, my grandmother explained that B didn’t have his car up there. Because if you don’t have your own car, you can’t possibly buy groceries and you need someone to drive them to you from over 800 miles away, I guess. There was another trip, I can’t remember if it was before or after Berklee, but B traveled to Florida for something related to music. His parents and my mother took off work for a week for that one as well. (Thinking about this now as I’m editing, it’s wild to think how my mother could take off a week from work to drive 800 miles to Boston, but never could manage the 30 minutes or so to see our first house or meet her grandchild. And it wasn’t because of her health because she was still working and dating several men.)
By this point, B and I had drifted apart again, so I only picked up tidbits from my mother and grandmother about his life. To be honest, I was resentful of all the time my mother took to go to visit him when she could rarely be bothered to see me, her own daughter, because she was always too busy working or dating. I think there might have been a fire in his apartment building and perhaps something about rodents, but I do know that after his freshman year, B moved back home to live with his parents. I think he went to the local community college for a year before transferring to a different college.
I’m a curious person, I google B to see how he turned out. I knew from my family that he eventually went to a college near the coast of North Carolina and in my googling I found he went to another college in Virginia. It looks like he got his PhD and is back in North Carolina, a few hours away from home, doing post-doctoral work. I suppose my grandmother is proud of him since he was the only one of her grandchildren to get a PhD, but it doesn’t look like he’s rich or famous like she’d hoped. Even though he was the “golden child” in our family, I often wonder if he is alright.
It may look like the “golden child” has it made but I think in the long-run, they may be the worst off, in terms of their mental health and being stuck in a dysfunctional family dynamic. I consider myself the black sheep in that family dynamic and because I was the scapegoat, it was easier for me to detach myself from them. The golden child, because they got mostly positive reinforcement, it makes it harder for them to see what’s happening and to remove themselves.
*My other cousin, the son of my mother’s brother, I consider him to have been the “invisible child”. I rarely saw him since his father divorced his mother and she didn’t bring him around as much. He’d sometimes be around for Christmas but not always since I don’t think his father really pushed for it. (Funny how alike my mother and brother are, neither caring much about seeing their children) I remember he was a funny kid, always trying to get a laugh. When he got older, I remember him coming to some family stuff and that he wanted to be a truck driver like his father. I don’t think that worked out, but I always wonder how he turned out. I wonder if he made it out of the family or if he’s still trying to get acceptance from them. I hope he’s happy and doing well. I also think that my grandfather’s coin collection should have been split three ways so that each of his grandkids shared equally.
