In Spite of Everything Read Online Free PDF

realized that the crew was phoning it in. The top layer was attended to, but the by-products of human detritus remained in perpetuum. Had the cleaning crew been headed up by a stern Russian or Caribbean woman telegraphing her disapproval, my brother and Imight have gotten the idea that someone was in charge. Even if we had felt a little embarrassed, we might have felt that even if there was no order in our home, Order itself did exist in Homes. As it was, I don’t think either one of us gave it a second thought. Home was where Mom metabolized books and daytime television simultaneously.
    In fact, it was also unclear to us who was in charge of the house. My mother’s penchant for outsourcing domestic life had always called for a pageant of live-in babysitters. They lived in the garage out back, which my dad had refurbished into a one-bedroom apartment; they were there when we came home from school and, often, were the ones to put us to bed. Some were warm, attentive, and interesting. Marilyn, for example, was a fellow graduate student of Mom’s, and she had a big gray cat named Luther, for Martin Luther, on whom she was writing her dissertation. I loved Marilyn; she was smart, snuggly, and reassuringly competent, and she called me her “little Susie” until she died when I was in my late twenties. Then there was Hilary, a choleric, overweight hippie who, when she wasn’t getting mad at Ian and me, wrote very interesting, thoughtful poetry. She wore long, bustling patchwork skirts and asked her fiancé’s daughter and me to be the “flower children” at her wedding, where we were supposed to leap around interpretively and fling flowers into the congregation (we were too embarrassed, so we ended up handing them out like canapés at a cocktail party).
    But some of the babysitters were abusive. The most egregiously so, Bonnie, was also the prettiest and most charming: a raven-haired, ruby-lipped fairy-tale wicked stepmother. Bonnie would take us to parties at which she and her loser, handlebar-mustachioed boyfriend left us to range around bedraggled Berkeley communes while they smoked weed and watched porn with their creepy friends. She used to thrash Ian with a wire hairbrush, threaten me with worse when I impotently tried to intervene, and terrorize both of us to protect her secret activities. This went on for more than a year before I summoned the courage to out her. Though it was hardly a moral awakening:
    The reason I outed her was that she offered me 25 cents to babysit my brother and myself one night, and by that time, we were so inured to her cruelty that my response was not to tell her how scared or hurt we were by her proposition but to demand that she up the ante by 15 cents. When she balked, I groused about her scroogeyness to my mom. I was six years old; my brother was four. Although she canned Bonnie posthaste, my mother was mystified. Not only had it never occurred to her that a “professional” would behave in such a way, but she had never had the slightest indication that anything was off.
    Off is, however, what things were, albeit not always in such harrowing ways—just in the weird ways particular to my family. Take weekly allowances. To earn theirs, my friends were charged with making their beds, setting the table, helping to weed the garden on the weekends. I had to memorize and recite poetry selected by my mother, as well as the entire lineage of the kings and queens of England. When friends did come over, my mother was not perkily interviewing them about what snacks they liked or what their favorite part of school was, but was propped up, robed and bespectacled, in her ancient four-poster bed—with
Hamlet
, various volumes of the
Oxford English Dictionary
, and the criticism of Harold Bloom layered in steppes.
Guiding Light
or
The Rockford Files
would be on in the background.
    We were the weirdos. There was no point in trying to convey this to my mother. She was so consummately, unequivocally