My mom is a nut about Watergate. Knows every detail, every name, could probably recite the whole timeline. Has every book on the subject, including Maureen Dean’s memoirs, owns DVDs of All the President’s Men, Secret Honor and Nixon (but not Dick)…You get the picture.
So naturally, I called her as soon as I heard about Deep Throat. She’s visiting with my cousin “Debbie” right now, and Debbie’s husband. So I called RilchMom on her cell.
Oh yeah, she already knew about it. No, she’d never thought it was Diane Sawyer. She’d figured it was someone in the FBI…“Shut up.”…Someone had spelled Ben Bradlee’s name wrong…
“Hey, is that Debbie with you?”
“Yes. We’re at [store], getting some…”
“Why’d you tell her to shut up?”
“Because I can’t talk to her and talk to you at the same time! She wanted to know who it is…”
“Just tell her it’s Rilchie and I wanted to talk about Deep Throat.”
“Okay…It’s Rilchie and she wants to talk about Deep Throat…What? She says hi, and are you and Mr. Rilch still going to the Comic Con?”
“Yes, we are.”
“Yes, they are. So anyway, no, I never believed Deep Throat was a composite. Though I’m surprised it’s Felt; I guess they made the smoking thing up…”
See, the thing is, my mom can be very difficult sometimes. I don’t have time to tell all the stories right now, but some of you probably remember some of them. Suffice to say, she loses her shit over the tiniest thing. But when Debbie and “Gary” visited LA a few years ago, they went out to lunch while I was at work, and when I came back, my mom had this charming story about how they’d tried to find a certain place for lunch “but Mr. Rilch’s directions were terrible” and they’d had such a great time driving around and getting lost, and finally found another place to eat…
“So how come you can’t make the best of things when you’re with me?”
“Because you don’t.”
Now, at the time, I chalked that up to a phenomenon that someone once outlined on the boards. One poster had asked, “How come my three-year-old behaves so well for Grandma and Grandpa, but not for me?” The other poster had a theory about danger signals, and how when the kid’s mom noticed, say, a quaver in the kid’s voice, she immediately went on guard, the kid would respond, and it was off to the races.
So I figured that was what it was: Debbie’s not attuned to my mom’s danger signals, so she doesn’t respond as I do, and penis does not ensue. But now I think it might only be partly that. At the time I was talking about, RilchMom was just getting reacquainted with Debbie after not having seen her since she was a teenager. (She’s 6 or 7 years older than I am; I’m 35.) Now, though, she’s not on her best behavior any more, and she doesn’t exercise the same control she did earlier.
So that’s how it is. But I couldn’t let that go unaddressed. Debbie does not deserve to be told to shut up; she’s a terrific person, and she has enough to deal with from her own (mentally ill) mom. You can take a lot from a mom, but I don’t think you should have to take much from an aunt.