Part IV is here with a link to Part III and the other links
After a diversion to Tennessee and Texas, our young-but-suddenly-larger family found itself back in Florida, preparing to move back into our home beside Wanda and Darryl. It was the summer of 1992. Here’s where I left off last time:
Unfortunately, things were not quite as we left them. Things were not left in a condition that was possible to move babies into. The house didn’t look like an episode of Hoarders or anything—but it was pretty dirty and gross. I can remember Carol coming over, wonderful steadfast friend that she is, and cleaning one of the bathrooms. I remember her calling out “It looks like someone had diarrhea out the back of this toilet and never bothered to clean it up.” I think that captures it more accurately than anything other than photos. Aren’t you glad I have no photos to share with you?
Guess who was nowhere to be seen when we returned? Oddly enough, Wanda decided to make herself scarce. For about a week.
As we crossed the border into Florida, our things were several weeks behind us. Friends very graciously agreed to let us stay with them for a few weeks while we got the house fit for preemie babies and an almost-three-year-old. I remember being sidelined for several days by the worst headache of my life and a general feeling of wanting to be put out of my misery, and I think my poor friend, who was never sick no matter what, must have thought I was dodging newborn twin care duties. She, unlike me, had very nice next-door neighbors including some older kids, and I remember particularly the boy would come over and help take care of the babies while I was miserable, and thinking I was literally going to die in the guest bedroom.
Eventually the movers came with our stuff, our house had been cleaned up to remove all biological traces of the fun family who paid our mortgage for a year or so, and we moved back into our house. They moved a few streets over and isn’t it odd that I never met them? Nope, they never came by, never showed their faces on my doorstep while I was there. The last I heard was that one tried to run the other one over at the bus stop while their children were watching, and ultimately I believe the husband died of a heart-related problem not too long after that. My mother, who was with us in Texas, had been sent up north to stay with her sisters because she does not deal well with chaos. Not well at all.
With two newborns and a toddler, the going was slow. Our stuff was in boxes all through the house, and the tiniest twin was even fussier than usual. I remember sitting on the floor in the kitchen, surrounded by boxes and packing paper, with her in my lap when I noticed she seemed a little warm. I called the doctor’s office and said, “Hey, I’m just checking here. I have this little 7-pound person and she has a temperature and is only about 6 weeks old. Oh and by the way, she was also almost six weeks premature, is a twin, and spent 3 weeks in the NICU. Is this normal?” Apparently not. Her dad took her off to the doctor’s office while I stayed home with the (relatively) well baby. Shortly after that, the phone rang and it was my husband, telling me that Twin B was going into the hospital yet again. The diagnosis? They suspected meningitis.
I ended up calling my oldest sister, who is a physician, and asking her about this once we discovered that in fact Twin B did have meningitis. In one of the more amazing acts of family devotion our family has ever experienced, my sister dropped her life in Pennsylvania and drove down to Florida to check on Twin B. She visited her in the hospital, talked to the doctors, assured herself that Twin B would survive, then drove back to Pennsylvania. The same day. That’s really pretty amazing, yes? There is a bit of a haunting backstory to that and I only found out about it later when her husband told me what had happened with one of her patients, but it’s not my backstory and so I will leave it there.
Fortunately for Twin B and all of us who love her, the meningitis was viral and not bacterial, and she was out of the hospital and on the mend in fairly short order and with no lasting problems. I am convinced to this day that she got it from me, that I contracted it somewhere on the long drive from Texas to Florida, as we were being bombarded by people at every rest stop and restaurant, all of whom were fascinated with the babies and wanted to touch them, tell us stories about all the twins they knew, and no doubt also generously shared some of their personal germs. It explains me being down with the awful headache and wanting to die to escape feeling so bad, and since little Twin B came down with it a few days later, the timing seems just about right.
So with the hospital stay behind us, we were all back in the house once again. About a week had passed since the movers showed up and offloaded our flotsam prized possessions. Wanda and Darryl? Very quiet. Oddly absent. This was very uncharacteristic of Wanda. I don’t believe we even saw much of their children that first week. It could be because we were just too busy to notice. It could be because they actually had something to do that kept them occupied. What it most certainly could not be? Some sort of decency or shame on the part of Wanda at the way things were left back before Colin Powell and his thousands of shoulder turned Operation Desert Shield into Operation Desert Storm and made quick work of the heretofore much-vaunted Iraqi Republican Guard. By this point, nearly two years had passed since I had called the police to report Wanda’s thieving ways and left for Tennessee.
At any rate, fate being what it is, and neighbors being what they are, eventually Wanda made contact again. I don’t recall exactly how it happened that first time, but it was not long before she was standing in our driveway on a regular basis, regaling me with tales of our former tenants. That’s how I found out about the assignations across the bridge on the riverboat. Yay. Once you know a thing, it’s impossible to un-know it. I decided to try to put the mattress switching, property stealing incident in the past and move on.
As it turns out, this was a big mistake.
Summer wore on and we got the house into a semblance of order. Soon enough, it was time for my mom to return from her summer trip. We had to set the babies up in the family room and put my mom in one of the spare bedrooms. Things were a little cramped and it soon became clear that the living situation would not be tenable for the long term. We needed to build an addition to the house. By this time, I had gotten a job working in the ER at the hospital in Daytona Beach. I worked the night shift. My husband was enrolling in school full-time. Things were loud and tumultuous almost all the time.
I can’t recall the precise timing of the rapid decline of Wanda and Darryl’s personal fortunes, but I believe that not too long before we returned to Florida, Darryl’s job as a window/glass man had either completely gone kaput or he had had his hours cut. As a result, he sought part-time work and ended up running one of those machines that sweeps parking lots and other large expanses of pavement. I’m also not clear of those details, but I do know part of the machine was large enough to allow one to stick one’s entire head inside it. You can probably already guess how I know this. Yes, one night Darryl stuck his head inside the machine. I think I can state with relative certainty that there is a large sign on those machines now, words to the effect of: “WE SHOULDN’T HAVE TO TELL YOU THIS BUT FOR GOD’S SAKE DO NOT STICK YOUR HEAD IN THE MACHINE.” Even then, for most people it would have been obvious that one’s head did not belong in the machine. Unfortunately, Darryl was not most people. Something happened, and not all of Darryl’s head came back out of the machine.
Fortunately, human beings can survive with just one ear. Those who found themselves one ear down in the 90s faced the embarrassment of not being able to quite pull off the quintessential hairstyle of the era: The Mullet. Darryl, though, Darryl came up with what I recall as a sort of Modified Mullet, and for all I know he wears that hairstyle to this day. Most of my memories of Darryl include him with his own signature hair. And a cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth. Yeah, that or him coming at me with murder in his eyes. Anyway. Good times, the 90s.
Because Darryl truly was injured, he found a lawyer and instituted a lawsuit against various people. I probably knew those details at some point but they are largely lost to history. What I do remember is that his lawyer urged him not to seek employment of any kind while the lawsuits were pending, claiming that this put Darryl in a better position to prevail. Unfortunately, it also put Darryl’s family in a bad way, and I am quite certain there were times they didn’t know where their next meal was coming from. For some reason, Wanda didn’t do much about getting a job of her own to keep them afloat, I suspect in part because Darryl felt that raising children was “wimmin’s work,” and in part because Wanda seemed to really prefer any option other than actually doing a day’s work for a day’s pay.
As all of this was happening next door, we were fully immersed in our very first “mother-in-law suite” project. This, to date, was the grandest of the three MIL apartments we have fashioned for my mother. We hired a residential designer, and he put together a plan for a 950 square foot addition, including an expansion of our master bedroom as well. My mother’s place was to have a bedroom, a full bath with an oversized tub, a full kitchen and a living room. We would move the washer and dryer inside from its garage location, and she would share it with our family through her bathroom. French doors would separate her house from ours, and as luck would have it, there was a sort of alley that ran behind our street that was fully paved and functional and that she could use to access her house, so a “parking pad” was added to the plans. This gave my mother full independence from us but also the security of living under the same roof as one of her children. My mother is kind of a loner but also kind of dependent and does not do well completely by herself. The plan kept her out of the utter chaos that reigned in our house as a rule, with 3 children ages 3 and under. It was a good deal.
However, we were on a fairly tight budget and needed to do it as inexpensively as we could. My husband found a man who did most of the work along with his sons. I remember they charged us each $100 a day for their labor. They were very nice guys, but their expertise was limited to the basic construction and they were not interested in doing the finish work. By this time it was 1993.
As the men were constructing the addition, they drew more and more interest from Wanda and Darryl. My husband, being a friendly and gregarious man, talked to them often about the plans and the progress. I believe that’s how he ended up hiring Darryl to do some of the finish work, notably the tile work.
I have mentioned that Darryl was strictly forbidden by his attorney to go back to work “on the books.” However, Darryl felt that working on our construction project would be acceptable, and soon my husband found himself paying cash to Darryl as Darryl ingratiated himself more and more into our lives. Along with Darryl, of course, came Wanda. This was one of the only times Wanda spent more than a few minutes in our house. She would stand in there and talk and talk as Darryl worked on one of the carpentry projects my husband assigned him, or as he laid the floor tile. Apparently my husband also supplied them with their cigarettes during that period of time. Yeah, just another wholesome day in the neighborhood.
Although I am quite certain that Darryl was paid every penny agreed upon—and then some--for the work he completed, he inexplicably came to feel as if the favor done that season was not done by us to help keep a family in crisis afloat and out of foreclosure, but rather done by Darryl. I believe he convinced himself that his craftsman skills were at such a high level that we were taking advantage of him. Mind you, he had laid exactly one room of tile before in his entire life and had no work history as a carpenter that I was aware of, but those are trivial details when you don’t feel the need to root yourself in reality.
The construction was finally complete, my mother (who bailed during the construction phase and left my poor husband to supervise what was basically a small house construction project and also take care of less-than-a-year-old twins and a three-year-old while I slept) came home and moved into her new place, and Darryl settled his lawsuits and decided to start his own handyman business with some of the proceeds. They also bought several (3 or 4) three-wheelers, a van, and a new coffee table. It was a bear on his back, and he balanced the glass tabletop on his four paws. Yeah, I was pretty jealous of that table. Not really.
Wanda also decided to embark upon a weight loss program where she needed someone to give her a shot of vitamin B in her ass once a week. I was pressed into service for this honor, so obviously we were friendly enough that she dropped her drawers once a week to let me plunge a hypodermic needle into the top of her butt. However, things were not as picture-perfect Wisteria Lane blissful as you might think, despite the mental picture you now have in your mind of idyllic suburban bliss what with me shooting up Wanda once a week. Wanda and Darryl decided to go out for New Year’s Eve that year and asked us to watch their three children. The kids came over and I recall them just absolutely tearing up the house. The younger boy stomped in my eldest’s dresser drawers and broke two of them. I also recall, very clearly, the two boys telling us, “Our parents are losers.” Oh, yes. They did. They were probably 8 and 10 years old at that point, but they knew.
Shortly after that, some minor incident happened and I was apparently visibly irritated because when Wanda came over for our date with the needle, she assumed the position and then turned and looked at me and said, “Wait. You’re not still mad, are you? Because I’m not ready if you’re mad.” Ha. Yeah. I was still mad. I wish I could remember what that little incident was about, but it probably involved the children somehow. Her children were not bad kids, but they were pretty much neglected to a pulp.
Over the ensuing months, things deteriorated to the point where I was back to my baseline of “I really wish we did not live next door to these people because I pretty much hate them.” My oldest was still fairly friendly with Wanda and Darryl’s daughter, though, so that perpetuated the contact.
I neglected to mention that when Darryl got his settlement, one of the first things he did was put in an above-ground pool. Only Darryl, crafty fella that he was, dug a hole in the ground and put the above ground pool in the ground. Yeah, this was as attractive as you’re picturing. Darryl also put up a fence. He built it himself. He also put it up right ON the property line. While I was happy about the fence, I was not too thrilled that it was right on the property line because this meant that any fence we decided to put up would have to tie into theirs. Not a good thought.
One day, I heard chainsaws going next door. By this point it was my husband who worked the third shift and slept during the day. The sound of the chainsaws did not even remotely wake him up even though they were being operated only feet away from where he slept.
A little while after I heard the chainsaws, I heard and felt a tremendous, ground shaking thump. I looked outside my mother’s window (the only window that faced that side of the house) but saw nothing except my children playing in our backyard. Then I heard the chainsaws start up again. I should mention that by this point, Wanda and Darryl and I were really not on good speaking terms any longer. I got outside just in time to see a pretty large tree had come down and was lying across the alley behind my house. Darryl and his brother were backing the brother’s truck back into Darryl’s yard. I couldn’t really see what was happening but I watched as they finished chaining it up to the back of Darryl’s brother’s truck and then heard the chainsaws start up again. I took the children inside and told them to stay over on the far side of the house and then went back outside. This time, I made it out just in time to see another large tree starting to topple. It teetered right toward my bedroom roof, and then a little the other way, until it came crashing down through a section of the back of Darryl’s fence. This was clearly not the intended result. It was at this point Darryl got himself up on whatever they put against their fence when they wanted to, uh, observe us and told me that I should get inside and stay away from their side of our house.
…and I will leave it here for now. Next up, I should get to The Pivotal Event. The thing that changed everything forever. The Incident. More police will be summoned; one will self-title himself for the occasion, which truly marked the Point of No Return.
