Tag Archives: Artis

We have a sense that our story now needs to devote a bit of attention to Flo.  There is no better place to start than to state simply that she was the oddball among the five Islenests of La Jolla, San Diego County, California.

Flo’s coppery complexion and kinky hair made her look more like a friend or neighbor than one of the Islenest girls.  Open any of the stiff, plastic covers of the family photo albums, look at the second kid in any of them or in the videos that came in later, and you will ask yourself, who is this adopted kid, the dark-skinned foundling with the kinky hair?  In most of the pictures the dense frizz is bound in the back by one of the many barrettes given to her as gifts.

The other sisters preened in their fair skin, off-white like the soft shell that forms on the top of cream left out.

The foundling then, whose genes are these?

Which came first for Flo?  Was it the “Elroy nappiness,” as Scilla termed it that night in early April as our story was just getting underway?  Or was Flo’s oddball sense already in place before she came into awareness of her different looks?

Well, certainly, if the psychological sense of difference did precede the awareness of her physical difference, having a childhood tease from her big sister Scilla about her bushy hair on one particular Saturday brought in the physical as a major factor.

Their mother was listening to the Texaco radio broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera while she sorted out dried flowers for an autumn arrangement.  Rossini’s “Barber of Seville” turned the den into a rousing home theater. The two older girls came in from their play, went silly and giggled and laughed as they spun in ever-faster rotations that soon added dizzy to exuberant, dervishes in the moment without knowing they were.

At the repetition of the hero’s name, Scilla picked up her sister’s thick, wooly, we cannot say pony tail, for no pony has hair that texture, in such abundance, that it spread like a mini-shawl over Flo’s shoulders, and, bouncing to the singer^‘s “Figaro” cadence, Scilla sang, “‘Nee-ger-ooo, Nee-ger-ooo, neegeroo” then collapsed into a heap, laughing beyond constraint, more in delight at her rare effort at original “wit” than at the derision she had just heaped upon her sister.

So, chicken first, or egg?  A question rendered banal by the time Flo had a BS in Biochem from Burleigh-Harald, and with it a firm grasp of the competition between anomalies of mutation, a concept that explains far more clearly how the sea brewed life forms, how the land and climate created eggs and chickens and a lot more.  In the course of her education, she also learned how “pretty” is constructed and how the invisible shackles of racism are forged.

In order to assure you that it is not our mission to limn Scilla as some kind of creepy idiot savant who torments her kids and husband as she tormented her sibs, we need at the very least to make a passing comment or two about how Flo teased her big sister when she had the opportunity.  Not so much about Scilla’s looks which, smooth skin and silky hair aside, would not cause a magazine to jump off a newsstand shelf; Flo ribbed her more about her flagrant social deficits, already apparent in childhood.  Tit for tat.

So let us get back to the role Flo played in the Islenest dramas, the odd girl among the three.  But what about poor, neglected Artis?  Who among you craves knowledge of the youngest of the Islenest sisters?  Your patience, in good time, will bring you that story.

Meanwhile, we will offer a little piece here to help balance the triad of the sibling constellation:  Scilla could be seen as Darryl’s science mind married to Francesca’s practical and frugal household manager.  Flo was Darryl’s alienation as the orphaned kid of a Tulsa preacher, now fronting as a worldly academic, mingled then with Francesca’s outrage at injustice.  Artis had Darryl’s indefatigable good cheer, his talent for explaining difficult constructs to young people (and old people, given the opportunity) and her mom’s gift for finding clever, even simple solutions to seemingly complex problems.

We will revisit Artis.  She and her husband Mitchell will move the story in new directions when their time has come.

But for now Flo’s story.  The odd kid out.

While it was universally understood that all three of Darryl and Francesca’s children were intelligent, Priscilla-the-oldest added a near-sleepless ambition.  It could be argued that Artis was the wisest in approaching her obligations with the placid confidence that a good outcome was her destiny.  She was not fevered in her pursuit of honors and not particularly bummed when they did not fall her way.  “That’s OK, someone else was probably more deserving.”  What would be an insincere cliché from the mouths of most people sounded real when Artis spoke it.

But the two elder sisters fed off one another’s victories and gloated, at times cruelly, over their rival’s failures.

Here is where the more complex family dynamics get played out.  Darryl saw in his older child the “boy” traits he hoped to have in a male child.  To give him credit, he did not impose extraordinary imperatives on little Priscilla to perform in ways that fulfilled these needs of his.  Just ordinary imperatives laid down by a successful academic who sees with great clarity the aptitude of his kid.  No more, no less.  And Scilla did perform.

Later, long after the girls were grown, during his one year in therapy, Darryl would come to some understanding of how, while raising his girls, he expected, upon no rational basis, that Scilla’s social impairments were similar to his withdrawal when he was first taken in by his aunt and uncle, the year his parents died.  The narrative he told himself likened the explosion of personality that followed that hibernation to an inflated ball held under water, released, then, to shoot up in liberated glory.

Scilla would do the same, he told himself, many times, till he grew weary of waiting and abandoned this expectation.  Her personality was not going to explode like his had.  She was going to remain locked into her geeky brilliance.

Flo needed no such explosion.  Nor did Artis.  Flo liked to explore the best, most ethical course to take.  She loved the game Scruples.  The more complicated the ethical conundrum, the better.  If a lifeboat can only support five people and there are six, who goes overboard?  The mad genius who, if he gets cured of his madness, might cure cancer?  Or one of the pregnant women?  That kind of puzzle.

From ethical quandary to dialog to debate, as she matured, at each stage her mom took delight in the exhilarated rapport she enjoyed with her number-two child.  They were as linked as Darryl had been to Scilla.  Francesca’s mind, with its anthropologically-trained openness to thinking outside one’s cultural parameters, found a clear mirror in Flo.

As he abandoned his expectations for Scilla, Darryl moved in on this rapport like an alpha pup nudging a littermate from the wettest teat.  Flo, in turn, pushed her science aptitude to its maximum efficiency to increase daddy’s new, possessive, approval of her.

The sad thing here is that science was not her best talent. She could never compete successfully with Scilla as long as they both pursued the hard sciences.

Flo took a BS from Burleigh-Harald University in Biochemistry, a serious accomplishment, true, but with a GPA too low to draw attention from the med schools she applied to.  When her MCAT scores inched only a few notches higher on her third try, she abandoned medicine as a goal.

Seemingly unrelated to this change of course, Flo found a salon in Campolinda’s little black district where ten nimble fingers cornrowed her hair and where the sweet disposition that moved the fingers settled her into the chair as if she had been going there all her life.

She entered the master’s program in Biochem at BHU, but qualified only for provisional status due to her anemic GPA.  She found part-time work with Laz Prognath, a professor who seemed to like her and sort of believed in her, though he had not graced her transcripts with grades any better than anyone else she had studied with.

She spent most of her work-time sitting in front of a monitor running new data through programs designed by other grad students, the real ones, not the provisionals.  She took classes selected for the right profs and for the not-8:00 AM start times.  She picked the minds of the more approachable of the better students, looking for any edge she could get, anything that could pull her grades up high enough to clear off that “provisional” blemish.

She fought back dangerous yearnings.  She knew people, roommates, people she had partied with, skied with, laughed and wept with… and when she ran down the list in her mind, they all seemed freer than she.

At least she had her cornrows.

Fourth of July, 1993, a Sunday, too, Laz had asked her, pleaded with his squeaky voice, could she puh-leeze come in and enter a batch of data that had just come in from an allied group at Berkeley, as it might make or break the grant’s required progress report due the following Tuesday?

So, late that holiday, that Sunday afternoon, with the rest of the world at barbecues or picnics, her family up at the Tahoe cabin, Flo felt alone and irrelevant, nothing but a brilliant man’s assistant.  Her slumped shoulders narrowed her breathing on the walk to the parking lot.

The path that led there from the Biological Sciences Building ran alongside the low fence that marked the boundary of the Theater Arts Quad.  She heard declamatory voices, laughter, clapping, the beating of a drum and the strident pinch of a bad trumpet note that sent more laughter up from the crowd.  A group of theater arts students were performing a skit to an audience of about 50, a celebration, with irony, of the patriotic holiday.

Flo’s pulmonary function tightened further.  A panicky feeling she did not recognize came over her.  She stopped and went over to the low fence.  One of the actors was costumed to represent Lady Liberty, in a gown and papier-mâché mask. From the mouth of the mask came, “yearning to breathe…” with a histrionic trill on the “r” of “breathe.”

Flo was barely able to reflect that, yes, in fact, these words described her perfectly. She was, at that very moment, gasping little gulps of anxious air through her constricted windpipe, the air hot and still, her mouth like cotton, her consciousness turning dark at the periphery.

Then the darkness grew till it enclosed her like the zipper closing a body bag.  She crumpled to the path like a new-made corpse.

© All content copyright 2011 Serial Jones. All rights reserved.

Darryl and Francesca had always planned to have two children.  With luck, a boy and a girl.  It is not that the talk turned that way just because a grootmoeder in Rotterdam had acted on pangs of conscience reflecting on how she had mis-mothered her son Jakob.

The very bright young people accomplishing their grad school goals had dreamed about the kind of lives they would live if things worked out, if Francesca got a job, maybe teaching Intro to Anthro at a community college, while Darryl ascended the academic ladder.

She herself did not want to go the important-school tenure-route any more than she wanted to dig up and brush off chipped stones in the Olduvai Gorge.  But she did want kids.  Two.  One each.

When Francesca’s Dutch disbursements started to appear in the mailbox the third week of every month, pretty much without fail, this goal moved quickly to the top.  Yes, if the money was a mix of blessing and curse, this was the blessing side.

From the long perspective, though, it would also attract the taint of curse.

We use these notions here not without a certain self-consciousness.  Some people who do not believe in blessings and curses still talk about them as if they did.  This is curious, is it not?  It does not prove that there are blessings and curses any more than an astronomer, who tells his friends he will meet them at “sunrise” for the hike up to the stunning cataract, proves that the earth is a fixed rock that the sun travels over each day.

Or perhaps you have heard an atheist proclaim, “Thank God he didn’t break his neck in that home-plate collision.”

Neither Darryl nor Francesca believed in blessings or curses, from gods or from people.  Francesca, being an anthropologist, held in greater respect the relativity of truth than did her scientist husband, though the deeper he plunged into the mysteries of the universe, the shakier did absolute truth begin to appear to him, too.

And, not unlike many people, they would both be more inclined to incorporate the notion of blessings over that of curses, while not believing in either.  Again, is this not curious?

We are mostly concerned here with what kind of parents they were and what kind of parents they became, as the family grew, a kid every two years, planned according to things Francesca had read about ideal sibling order and relative ages.  Two, one each.

But the first two were girls.  One more try for a boy.  Another girl, and a decision to stop adding to the progeny.  That was the plan.  That was how it happened.  Only blessings, no curses.  Healthy and happy, that is all they asked for.

Could these be supplications from the metaphysically skeptical?  Let us not embarrass them, or we will become embarrassed for them.  We are only trying to point out that the psyche does these kinds of things, even as the rational mind has relegated this kind of thinking to the fringes of mature reasoning.  Atavistic, you might call this wishful and magical thinking, these irrational, regressive mental habits.

Let us leave them there, with their unreflected-upon superstitions, and see what kind of parents they became with the arrival of their three little blessings.

We may have done the young couple a disservice by presenting in such a telegraphic manner their struggles to manage the new wealth coming to them.  While we can find nothing said that was not the truth, the deeper version includes Francesca, early on, asserting her rights as the named recipient of the Dutch fortune and insisting on making some investments on the recommendation of a cousin of hers, an investment counselor.  Darryl (surprise!) did not care for the man.  He thought the counselor lacked imagination.

The monthly disbursement checks began to show up in their mailbox in summer of 1967.  Vietnam, the burgeoning counter-culture movement, draft status for Darryl and appeals to the Selective Service System and all of the heightened nervous energy that seemed ready to explode from the culture, particularly its youth, colored the thinking of many a young person.  Darryl was not an exception.  And then there was old Ernst Schiller, investment advisor.

The first proposals Ernst made were for things that Darryl did not feel were ethical, like arms manufacturers, big agribusiness interests fighting the new farmworkers’ unions, other corporations perhaps not doing egregiously evil things, but whose boards, for example, were likely open to southern men with Klan connections.

Darryl was far from a radical.  He claimed only to be a rationalist.  Supporting a fair society was rational; spraying deadly poisons on forests inhabited by peasant cultures was not rational; excluding a race of humans from full participation in their society created volatile tensions and cost more than integration, and thus it, too, was irrational.

As are many women educated in the liberal arts, Francesca had progressive views.  Darryl found that he was able to sway her to his way of thinking by appealing to these ideological inclinations.  He also found that he was able to make solid friends in academic circles by expressing similar views.

The couple settled, as an investment strategy, on a string of new, middlebrow hotels in the Midwest, a parking lot concern in New York City, and a mutual fund that supposedly catered to liberal biases.  In short order, the investments, in a word, tanked.

Darryl used these failures to justify his need for a lavish lifestyle.  A Jaguar, and then a Ferrari, soon appeared beside the new Ford Country Squire station wagon.  Darryl bent his views to support the true need, to reward himself for all the hard work.  Whenever the couple quarreled about how they could better use the money, he was quick to enlist the topics of unethical corporate values, failed investments, and poor, benighted Ernst Schiller.

Darryl also made good use of his formidable personality.  Though he could debate with surgical precision, he nearly always did so with his face on the verge of breaking into a grin.  A playful intellectual.  He laughed big, more joyous than derisive, but nonetheless calculated to dominate.  Francesca got worn down by the big personality.  She did her best to get even during the times when they partnered in bridge and he blew a golden opportunity.  She would rake him over in the post-mortem.

And, over time, Francesca would punish him for the errors he made in how he favored their children, a punishment so subtle, passive-aggressive and incremental that he would never notice it had been meted out.

Priscilla was the first-born.  It was clear by the time she was a toddler that she was gifted with a precision-insistent intellect.  By this we mean that if things did not feel right to her, she had to do them again.  And again.  Schoolwork and homework had to be right.  Darryl saw himself in her furious pursuit of the perfect outcome.

When Florence, their second born, came into her personality, she seemed the opposite in temperament.  She was concerned with doing the right thing for people.  Fairness and justice were the driving notions.  Francesca noted that Flo sometimes would sabotage her own work so someone she liked would not feel bad, and similarly saw herself in their second daughter.

Francesca leaned on Darryl to help her put a cap on this extreme.  He was too busy, at first, so she leaned harder.  Eventually she convinced Darryl that Flo was carefully settling in beneath the standards of her bigger sister, purposely dumbing herself down so her big sister would not react to the footsteps of her sibling rival stepping closer to her heels.  Measures were employed.  Flo responded but it was a struggle for her.

Francesca felt culpable.  It was clear that Flo had modeled her mom’s behavior.  She had seen her mom feign inferiority to forge peace when her dad was bent on dominance.

A perfect two years younger was Artis.  She hung out behind all of this drama and had a good time with whatever she could find.  It was clear that she had the happy gene, the big smile like daddy, the drive to make jokes or to bring in an amusing anecdote, the compulsion, really, to brighten the social tone whenever she could.  And she seemed to love to make other people feel at ease in her presence, if not outright entertained.

Francesca felt that her job on earth was to mother these three little girls the best she could.  She studied them the way her academic discipline had taught her to study people of other cultures.  What are their assumptions?  What drives them to work, to socialize, to achieve, to celebrate?

She had no favorite, but she saw early on that Darryl had a special affinity for Priscilla, though he did his best to conceal it.  He just had easier rapport with Scilla.  She was going to be a scientist.  This was never questioned, by any of the five of them.  But what kind of scientist?  That was her choice.

In Flo, Francesca saw a mind a lot like hers.  Not the science-and-math whiz that her older sister was, not the amber personality of Artis, but a crusader with a fixation on social justice.  In this, Flo was, in fact, a lot like her mom.  Keen on finding the right thing for the greatest number of people, insightful with policies that brought social change.  Unlike her mother, however, she also bore a tremendous anger at the wrongs she observed, the injustice.

Flo would eventually turn her anger toward her mother in protest of her opting for passivity.  Francesca was habituated to her role in her marriage, a complex interplay of power reversals and subtle controls intended to rein in the extravagant father.  Idealistic feminist platitudes were not the liberating solvent.

But then something happened while the two older girls were at Trengove Park Prep and Artis was in middle school.  It might be better to say something did not happen.  Darryl had expected, with the unequivocal stamp of absolute truth, that Scilla’s shell, that which still keeps people from feeling a natural warmth toward her, would dissolve in early adolescence as it had for her father, who’d always thought she was so much like him.

Priscilla was his clone child.  She was supposed to blossom with personality.  It had happened to him, seemingly out of nowhere.  He was not psychologically swift enough to understand that his personality had been suppressed by a god-drunk dominant father, and then by an unrelenting grip on a plow of grief and confusion.

And then Dick, his new Dad, and the exculpation of being told, “No blame, son; get on with life, now.”  Out of that, a robust, joyous personality emerged.

But he did not know this.  All he knew was that Priscilla was like him, and why was she not opening up, jumping into the fun, like he had at that age?

Meanwhile, he discovered that Flo could engage in friendly debate, and that he could find with his second daughter some mutual accord on certain issues in the progressive agenda.

But when he learned that he could make money by investing in the kinds of things that Ernst Schiller had proposed and that Darryl had rejected, two decades before, he did not hesitate.  His lifestyle had, by then, become his religion.  He would do anything not to desecrate it.

Darryl was largely successful in keeping secret from Flo the nature of the investments that had saved the family’s lifestyle.  But bit by bit, clues were carelessly dropped and a true picture was formed from the hazy half-truths that he had bandied about, and, over the years, there accumulated all the passive-aggressive hints Francesca had dropped over coffee on the mornings when she was alone with Flo.

At the annual Fourth of July barbecue at the cabin, 2001, it all came out, the ugly reality, dripping like pus from a boil that Flo had lanced with unrelenting queries.

She simmered till Labor Day.  Then she and her almost-husband Hank cut themselves off from her family.  After that, a few phone calls, but no real news for nearly ten years.

One of their blessings had cursed them.

But no one likes to use that word.  Curious, no?

© All content copyright 2011 Serial Jones. All rights reserved.