“You can’t just invite yourself over”

”You can’t just invite yourself over,” came the words over the phone. “It’s not 1980 – you’re not five years old anymore.”

It didn’t even seem real.  This couldn’t be happening.  Granpop wouldn’t let this happen. 

It wasn’t that Carla was so shocked to hear those words coming from Stan.  He had always been strange.  Carla had just come to take it as a fact of life that he was a bit off.  Most of the time he just sat there with the gravest of tones and expressions, and skulked in and out of rooms with a strange frailty which contradicted his fine-tuned physical condition.  He was a superb runner and had actually fueled Carla’s inspiration to start running herself when she was only 12.

Stan had other good points too – he could tell maniacally funny jokes.  Jokes that would have everyone around the table roaring with laughter.  But these jokes were in stark contrast to Stan’s usual grim demeanor.  It was a startling sense of humor – almost like a gun being fired out of the darkness.

And Stan could do something which Carla truly treasured.  He would harness his bizarre sense of humor into wacky puppet shows using the kids’ stuffed animals.  Never had the animals been so uproarious as they were with Stan at the helm of their personalities.

But sometimes his anger emerged just as explosively as his bizarre mirth but made the fright all the more intense and the impact all the more devastating.  When Stan’s anger struck, it was truly as though a monster was in the room.  He had lost it one time while babysitting Carla and Ethan.  Carla felt like a werewolf were standing in front of her as he launched into a terrifying rant.

And the way Stan rebuked Carla for opening the door of her grandparents’ fridge and searching for a snack – “You don’t just walk into other people’s houses and start going through their refrigerators.”  The words were chilling.  He hadn’t raised his voice at all.  But the words filled Carla with shame and dread.  She felt shamed and punished for just having wanted a snack.

And it was this same chilling scathing voice which spoke to Carla now, erecting a cold, terrible fortress between Carla and the sanctuary of love and security which she had always felt with her grandparents, and which she still felt with just Granpop alone.

Carla tried to fight back, for the first time in her life, condemning the cruelty for what it was.  But even as she did so she knew how fruitless her efforts were.  Somewhere, at some point in time they had put her on trial.  Carla would never know when or where this took place.  How easily the indictments must have come against her.  And backed by a Harvard-trained lawyer too.  What chance did she have?

Carla never suspected that she was in danger of being ejected from the family.  If she had, she would have done something.  Just what that was, she wasn’t sure.  But she had always been a member of the family and nothing had ever changed that. 

What could Carla have done – what could have made it right anyway?  Carla had the sinking feeling that somehow, there was nothing she could have done.  Or at least, in no way did she deserve what they had done which ultimately blindsided her.  It was like being fired from a job where they just wanted any excuse to get rid of you, where they didn’t warn you beforehand because they didn’t want to give you a chance of proving them wrong.

The sad truth was, Carla came to realize, is that her family needed to believe she was somehow worthless and a loser.  They needed to believe she was flawed and defective.  And this went back a lot further than the day on which Carla thought she had doomed herself.

Carla would never understand what really happened.  Why her mother would just “forget” her in some coatroom.  Did her mother place the blame squarely on Carla for the fact that her husband left her on the day that Carla was born?  Well, there was no way that Carla could ever live that down, if so.