But I'm actually feeling sorry for my sister right now. My mom's house is being sold at auction next month so Tina has decided to move into the apartment off the back of my grandmother's house that I was going to move into before my mom died. She hasn't even moved in yet, and my grandmother is already treating her the way I suspected she was going to treat me and would have treated my mother if she had gone through with her own plan to move in last year.First let me paint a picture of that apartment. It's a 1970's cave. Every wall is covered in dark, dark paneling. The floors are covered in a combination of just as dark, forest green, shag carpet and linoleum that is older than I am. Half of the apartment is sinking in due to, in everyone's opinion but my grandmother's, a water leak somewhere. My grandmother, however, won't fix the floor or the leak because she says there's nothing wrong with the floor. According to her, it's perfectly normal for one side of a house to be a good six inches lower than the other side and for the toilet to lean at a 45 degree angle. The apartment's rooms, meanwhile, are set up as a shrine to the con artist that stole most of my grandmother's money a couple of years ago. Even though she'll admit to everyone but us that the man was no good and was just using her, she refuses to get rid of his stuff and expects my sister to live around it.
My sister wants to do what I wanted to do to it--paint the walls and replace the carpet--but my grandmother is already putting her foot down. It has to stay the way it is, the 1970's Sammy shrine. She is also trying to stick my sister with all of her bills--not her half of the electricity, her share of the groceries, etc.--but the whole darn thing, even though, as I have already mentioned, she hasn't even stepped foot in the place yet. (Yes, it's technically my grandmother's house, but she didn't pay for that part of it; her mother and father did after they sold their farm and moved in with her and my grandfather.)
I wish my mother was here so I could say, "I told you so." For those of you who are new to this blog, check out this post I wrote last year: Don't Live with Nana: More Dysfunction on the Homefront. In it, I wrote about how I spent an entire weekend talking my mother out of moving in with my grandmother. The reasons that I listed are all coming true, only now they're happening to Tina, not my mother. I wish I could say, "I told you that's how she would behave. I told you that's what she would expect, " but I can't. Instead, all I can do is tell Tina the same.
I will be surprised if Tina lasts a month. I know I couldn't take the constant, "Pay this for me. Go get me this. Bring me that. Do, do, do for me," without getting anything in return. Heck, the entire reason I'm back in Atlanta now, or one of the reasons anyway, is that my mother's body was barely cold before my grandmother was telling me how I was going to spend my half of the insurance money to fix her house. No kidding, people. She was telling me that, as soon as I got the check, I was going to pay to have her 40 year old carpet ripped up, to redo her kitchen cabinets, and to fence in her backyard (her's, not the apartment's). In the words of Alicia Silverstone, "As if."
What makes me and my sister mad is that my grandmother would have money to do those things herself had she not shacked up with a con artist after my grandfather died and disowned anyone who told her that he was only after her money. For all we know, she still has the money now if the two new con artists she has circling around her haven't already taken it. They've taken her beach house--I use that term loosely to describe a trailer that Con Artist #1 had her buy a couple of miles from the beach in the Redneck Riviera--so why not everything else? I'm sure Tina's moving in has really thrown a wrench in their plan.
Just the same, it's not like my grandmother is destitute. She's just spoiled. My grandfather spent their entire marriage buying her whatever she wanted so he didn't have to listen to her. When, due to emphysema, he could no longer go to the store and buy her her every heart's desire himself, he had my mother do it. Consequently, my grandmother has never had to do anything for herself. She's never had to the grocery store. She's never had to pay bills. Sometimes I wonder if she's ever even had to wipe her own butt. Now that my mother is gone, she still won't step up, become an independent woman, and learn to do those things. She just continues to expect someone else to do them for her.
Like I said, I doubt Tina will last a month before she's out apartment hunting. Let's just hope she doesn't show up on my doorstep. As much as I feel sorry for her, I won't be opening the door. Ditto when Con Artists #2 and 3 sweep in in my sister's absence and take what little my grandmother has left. Maybe that makes me incredibly selfish, but sometimes you just have to be to survive, especially in my family.
