Thoughts for the curious: I was to meet Erin at my home at 6 pm and proceed to my sister V’s as my other nephew is in from California. At 6:30 I wrote Erin a note explaining that I had to leave, but she arrived before I could depart. She brought the phone and my spices, but after making a show of looking in her bag for her billfold, “I’m painting my room at home, I have everything pilled in the center and I haven’t been able to find my checkbook, I guess it’s in a box. I’ll write you the check tomorrow when I find it, but could I see the bills?” We go through all the bills and I explain them when she has questions. The big surprise is that her parent’s home in Chesterfield is long distance. She gets out a notebook and writes down all the amounts of the phone calls to them, which according to her they are going to pay her for. She is going to charge her parents for the calls she made to them, now that she is living for free in their home. I gave her the one piece of mail that had come for her, a bill from school, and I asked her if she’d done the post office thing to have her mail forwarded to her parent’s house. “No, school is the only place I gave this address to, all my other mail already goes to my parents house.” Ah. I wonder if her parents will be able to find their checkbook? I of course had to ask, after we resolved what she planned to pay on the morrow, “Why did you move out? I mean I assume it was a lot of things…”
“It always is a lot of things isn’t it. I sort of don’t see the point in getting into it, this being after the fact and all.”
“Right well, that’s fine, please send the check tomorrow as I can afford to pay the rent and the past due on the gas, but that leaves me with no money for food etc. and no money for the rest of the utilities.”
I read Jen’s blog before Erin came over, interesting that I noticed in my own blog that at some point Erin had stopped talking to me, stopped saying hello and goodbye, was very rude to my girlfriend Angela when she was here. If I had to pick a moment when I backed away from communicating with her, if in fact I unconsciously did, it would be the day I came home from work and was trying to make small talk and Erin said dramatically, “ I don’t give a fuck about parking spaces, my Grandfather is dying” (I had been giving some detail of the work day) and I remember thinking, “Yes and my…well you know where that’s going, suffice it to say Erin did not have the monopoly on empathic pain and suffering, she apologized for biting my head off maybe fifteen minutes later, “Sorry I bit your head off, it’s just a quirk of my personality,” but that interaction put the kybosh on small talk from my end. Well, one good fight would have cleared the air until the next fight – so forget it, not much point as she rightly observed, until the check doesn’t come and I have to play pick the lawyer. Though it’s hard to get money from people who don’t want to pay you, if they don’t want to pay you, if they don’t sign a lease etc. Ah well, have hope in human nature and speculate on how her signed note promising to pay me would hold up in court. “Is this your signature?” “Yes” “Check Please.”

As to the center of attention that Jen talks about, I really think that the center of Erin’s world is her mother. All of what passes for rebellion is aimed at her. Mom becomes a born again Christian, Erin becomes an atheist. Dad seems to matter very little, he’s a non-entity in the equation. If he functions at all in their dynamic it’s as a currency – something to communicate about. My friend Kate was like that for years, every other relationship in her life was a dim spark compared to the blazing sun of the mother daughter struggle – and it was a struggle for acceptance and identity. Eventually Kate’s mother moved away and she was devastated, the feelings of abandonment etc. were the mud of her wallow. Erin’s selfishness stems, at least in part, from this singular focus. Erin’s boys, and there were many through the house, are not real in the way that her father is not real. She moved out of her parent’s house when she and her mother couldn’t stand one another. Their fighting is how she ended up here. As they began to spend more and more time together, suddenly all was well. She moved home – our little drama here is infinite periphery, having run its course in a few short months and I – we – are not the intended audience. I’ll get a check in the mail, but mom will sign it.