Something has marked my family.
My family has always been lucky. I don’t mean in the vague, general way people talk when they say they feel lucky or “blessed”. I mean my family, particularly my mother and grandmother, have always had a very wide and deep lucky streak.
Some of it is small stuff. My mother tends to win at cards or
bingo. She never has to sit in traffic or wait in lines. The rain
always seems to stop before she steps outside. The same is true for my
grandmother, who has lived a very full and interesting life full of much
adventure but no real personal mishaps.
But there are larger things as well. My family has always had a lot of money, mainly through some combination of the women’s business ventures and lucky occurrences. Most of it is would barely be noticeable from the outside, with the only flashy example I can think of being my grandmother winning fifty grand at Atlantic City before I was born. You would think people with this kind of luck would be diehard gamblers, but instead they strictly avoid betting and any serious games of chance where money is to be made. I used to think they just didn’t like gambling, but now I know better. They didn’t want to attract any attention.
It’s the same with how my grandmother dresses. I swear she puts on
makeup to make herself look older, not younger. If we are at her house,
she’s in workout clothes or jeans without any real makeup on, and she
doesn’t look over fifty. But if we go out, she wears high-waisted pants
and with dingy flowered blouses tucked into the elastic waistband, and
she has so much powder and blush on she looks like an eighty-year old
clown. The strangest part is she’s actually 86. No health issues,
never been sick that I know of. Same for my mother, who at 58, people
mistake for my sister.
I don’t mention myself in any of that because I’ve never been especially lucky. I mean, I’ve always benefited from their luck in some ways, and I wouldn’t consider myself unlucky, but I’ve always joked I don’t have the Robinson women's luck, and that I must be adopted. I even remember when I was 10 or 11--upset at the time by some childhood misfortune—asking my father if I really was adopted. He picked me up and gave me a hug, telling me that I definitely wasn’t, and I’d get that special luck one day too, when I was older. He was smiling, but then he glanced up and his face fell. I looked around and my mother was standing in the doorway giving him a hard look. He never talked about luck around me again.
The other side of all this, which I’m coming to realize more now, is that other people around the women in my family have abnormally bad luck too. Growing up I didn’t really think about it this way, but when I sat down recently and made a list of every significantly bad thing I remembered happening to people that worked for or knew my mother or grandmother, the list was over thirty people.
Bear in mind I’m not counting people dying at an old age or getting into a light fender bender. I mean cancer, dying young in a freak accident, permanently crippling disease, insanity. And that’s just what I remember and was aware of in my 28 years of living. My grandmother, mother, and I are all only children, so we have no real extended family on that side, but I know that both of my father’s sisters were dead at relatively young ages before I was out of high school.
I say all of this because I want you to understand how strange my family is and why I didn’t see it as a bad thing growing up. They seemed special, and I wanted to be special too.
Three months ago, I was on the way to work when I saw a transfer truck jackknife in front of me. It was a four lane highway, and at just after 8 in the morning the road was filled with traffic, but the area immediately around the truck was empty. At first this seemed like a good thing, and I began slowing down, ready to brake or dodge as necessary. Then I saw the front of the cab turning toward me even as the rear of the tanker it was carrying did the same. Before I could react, the tanker swung at the side of my car, so close I could see the dirt on the chemical warning signs hanging above the taillights, and then it moved past and ahead of me as it completed some doomed arc. It had missed me by inches.
The truck began to roll at that point, and then I was past. This all took less than 10 seconds, but it seemed agonizingly slow, and I was so petrified that I didn’t slow down again or look back until I was half a mile down the road and I felt the car shimmy the tanker exploded behind me.
From what I later read, cars slammed into the truck and each other trying to avoid the growing accident, with later cars stacking up and crushing those in front. When the truck exploded, it set fire to over a dozen other vehicles, and this just made everything even more chaotic. All told, 9 people died and another 15 were badly injured.
I had just gotten one of those new flip phones, and I called 911. I thought about staying at the accident, but I didn’t know how I could help and I was scared, so I went on to work. I sat in the parking lot for several minutes, still in shock. Finally I went in and told my friend Beth what had happened, or at least I started to before I started crying. When I calmed down, Beth told me she had news. My position, which had been based on a temporary grant, had been made permanent with a significant raise.
It didn’t feel right to celebrate with what had happened that morning, but I did find my mind guiltily wandering back to my good luck, and by the time I left work, the accident and my own close call seemed more distant. I went to the grocery store before heading home, and I managed to get a parking place up front, get right through check out with a newly opened cashier, and somehow get home without any major traffic snarls.
All pretty pedestrian stuff, right? Which its why I didn’t think anything about it at first. But over the next couple of months, it kept happening. I got a random refund check from an insurance company I hadn’t used since college. I now always seem to time things right. I got the good waiter, the helpful phone customer service rep, and the honest plumber, who tightened one bolt for free and fixed a drip I had listened to for six months but couldn’t afford to fix until now. Everything just kept going my way. There were just two problems.
The first is that I kept noticing that bad stuff seemed to happen more often to those around me. Beth’s car got keyed. My neighbor’s mother broke her hip. My ex-boyfriend, who I had broken up with just a couple of weeks before this all started, suddenly lost his job of eight years. I had always been aware of my family’s luck, but now I was seeing more of the other side of it too.
The second problem is I feel like something is with me all the time, watching me. I started noticing it within a day or two of the accident, and the sensation had grown stronger over time. Some might be comforted by that feeling, even thinking it’s a sign of a guardian angel. And maybe that's what it is. But it doesn’t make me feel like that. It makes me feel like a bug under a microscope, and the eyes studying me aren’t necessarily kind.
It could be that this all in my head, but I don't think so. Either way, I need to get some answers.
I tried to call my grandmother, but she’s on a trip in Ireland at the moment and gets bad cell service in the small village she's staying in. So that leaves my mother. I don’t speak to her often any more. She’s always been a hard woman to know, and as I got older I realized she didn’t know her daughter very well either. She can’t understand why I wont take her money or the jobs she’s offered. And I do want to make my own path in life without her giving me everything. And if I'm honest, maybe I also like being the one thing she doesn’t get handed, the one thing she can't win.
Either way, I forced myself to call her, and we’re having lunch tomorrow. With any luck (haha), she can either tell me what's going on or, better yet, make me realize I’m just being silly and seeing a pattern that isn't there. In any case, I am writing this out to document what I’ve experienced and I’ll follow up once I know more.
One last thing. Yesterday morning I woke up to a brief but sharp pain just above my right ankle. Sitting up, I looked at my leg and saw a mark there—an inch-long wavy line with two dots nestled within the curves. Maybe it’s a scratch? I don’t know, but I don’t remember hurting my leg, and it looks too uniform to be accidental. Combined with the pervasive feeling of being the prisoner of some invisible gaze, the mark feels more like a livestock brand. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s see what mother dearest has to say.
I found this latest writing upon waking, and I can tell there will be more to this. I feel sleep stealing over me again, so I will stop here. I will post again when I can. As always, thank you.
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