When I was a junior or senior in high school our English teacher made us do dramatic readings from Julius Caesar and I got paired up with Matt Murphy, one of the most entertaining people in my class. We had lame-o roles, just basic countrymen, and we decided to get dressed up in togas - except that my parents had not one white sheet in the house, so I came in with a red satin toga. (My inner drag queen loved it.) Matt was totally pale - paler than me - and tall and skinny with sandy hair and he loved intoning "Beware the Ides of March!" as if he were some spectre from the ghost world come to warn humanity. He cracked me up. He also came over one day to my house to play Trivial Pursuit with me and my mom, and he played with our chinchillas and called Topa Inca (the first baby chinchilla) "Rat Man, Rat Man!"

Weird, the things you remember. Or, more specifically, that I remember. God only knows I don't have many fond memories of high school, but hey, that was a pretty good one.

Damn, and I just remembered that Matt also had a long standing joke - a non-sequitur, really - about the [my last name] family butt plugs. (I almost wish I publicized my last name, it makes the joke funnier.) Ironically enough, he didn't know of my parents' collection of sex toys, so he may have been more on the money than he thought.

And yes, I know how freaky it is that I know about my parents' collection of sex toys. Long story short, my uncle Rick (boo! hiss! - all my blood uncles are yucky uncles) befriended my brother when Marty was about 14, for the sole purpose of turning him against my dad, and Rick told Marty - one of many things - that he could find my parents' stash in a box in their closet. (Why Rick knew where they were is a whole different question, one I'm not too sure about and don't necessarily want to know. Of course, I realize, Marty knows where my sex toys are, but I think that's more a function of me flipping out and shrieking "NOOOOO!!! Don't go in there!!!!" when he went over to my nightstand and said, "hey, let's see what's in this drawer!")

Man oh man, I've got a weird family. My parents always say that they think I should write a book about us. Of course, they say this referring to Rick and Jeff and all the other oddities, thinking that they're not strange, when in fact they've got all sorts of things they don't necessarily know I know and wouldn't want me talking about.

Funny, all my life I was raised to believe that we - me, Marty, Mom, and Dad - were the eye of the hurricane. Stable and sane with a vortex of dysfunction whirling around us. In some ways, that's sort of accurate. My parents are still together after 30 years and still love each other. They didn't neglect or beat us, they weren't getting arrested, Marty and I turned out pretty okay - we're definitely better off than lots of my relatives.

But in more subtle ways, we've all got the taint, the marks from growing up in such an incredibly unstable family. My maternal grandmother was a raging alcoholic and pill popper, especially since my grandfather died when my mom was 11. Mimi - that's what we called her - was deeply neglectful and sometimes abusive toward my mom and her siblings. Ever since I was a little kid - maybe five, six? - Mom told us stories about how Mimi would drive home drunk and then pee in the driveway. Somehow she made these tremendously entertaining, and Marty and I would laugh and ask her to tell it again, but it took me a long time to realize how damn inappropriate it was to tell us that. She made us confidants a little too often. I don't think she intended any harm - she felt like an atmosphere of total disclosure would be honest; she didn't want to keep secrets.

But it also irreparably damaged any hope I had of having any kind of relationship with Mimi. Granted, she was not very maternal or very grandmotherly - when I was born, she told my mother, "better luck next time" - and then again, why did my mother tell me that? - and I don't think she wanted or knew how to have a relationship with me. But in terms of how I felt about her, there was little hope that I could have felt close to her. Because when I saw her, I was constantly filled with horror and shock and sadness at the grief she inflicted on my mother.

How protective I always felt toward my mom! I love her tremendously, and she's a magnificent mother in so many ways, but especially when I was young and at my most impressionable, she seemed so young and sometimes scared and vulnerable - as a woman and as the girl she used to be - and I remember wishing beyond hope that I could go back in time and be in school with her when she was a girl, so I could be friends with her and give her sandwiches in the cafeteria, because her mother almost always sent her to school without lunch. How I wanted to heal her hurts!

Not that my mother needed to be invincible, closed off, secretive. Perhaps I am being too hard on her. It's just that her easy pain, so close to the surface, was scary as a kid. I remember one time when I was maybe five, telling her that her nose looked like a strawberry because it was a little red, and the pores on her nose reminded me of strawberry seeds, and I meant it nicely, because in my kid brain, I liked strawberries, and it was neat to have a strawberry nose. I wanted to make her happy by telling her that, but it made her cry - she was really hurt by that. Such a small thing, but how often she cried, and how responsible I felt.

I'm the oldest in our small family, and I am the oldest in my generation. The first child, the first grandchild, the first great-grandchild, on all sides. Sometimes I feel such a weight, as if I somehow carry the mantle of our family's past in a way that the rest of my generation might not. I feel so tied, so obligated - not that these aren't completely infused with a great deal of love - but I feel so inseparable sometimes and I just want some breathing room.

As I mentioned, my maternal grandfather died when my mother was 11, and I of course never met him, but he seemed as much a figure in my childhood as Mimi was. We had no name for him, he was just my mother's father, he didn't even really seem like a grandfather when I thought about his relation to me. I certainly idealized him.

My mother's childhood stories of Mimi's cruelty were tempered with her fond memories of her dad, who gently teased her when she burnt his favorite cookies, who drank Bristol Creme, which my mom thought was somehow related to the shaving cream lather leftover in the sink, studded with his heavy black beard stubble - he would shave in the morning and still had heavy five o'clock shadow in the evening, and he would rub the bristles against her cheek. He always told her how pretty she was, how smart she was - he cherished her. Where her mother never wanted a daughter - Mimi told my mother that if she'd been a boy, she would have been an only child; as it was, she had three girls before she got her boy - my mother's father lavished her with attention and affection.

Even more romantic was his profession. My grandfather was a deep sea diver - he would be away for months at a time, and would come back with amazing finds from the ocean floor - rocks and small marine creatures and a magnificent gleaming pink conch shell that still sits on my mother's bedroom dresser.

It was the diving that killed him. He had been in the North Sea, off the coast of England, and in those days they used those huge diving suits that looked like lumbering astronaut gear, it was attached to a pipe, aboard the ship, that pumped oxygen to the helmet. That day on the North Sea the pipe malfunctioned and pumped down carbon dioxide instead to my grandfather deep on the sea floor.

When the news came to my mother's door back in Seymour, CT - such a plain town compared to the glamour of the open sea! - Mom knew instantly the minute she opened the door. She had dreamed of his death in a fire just two nights earlier - he stood in their living room, immobile, as burning flaming beams fell around him, and told her "go, Susie, go - I have to stay" - and when the news came she wasn't surprised. She'd been waiting.

My mother named my brother after him - Martin - and I always secretly coveted the two framed letters from presidents, Truman and Johnson, commmending his service in the Navy and sending condolences at his death, that Marty hung in his room with pride. Marty had a piece of him, a connection to him, that I was not a part of. My living grandfather, my dad's father, was a frequent presence in my life - we visited often - but he was distant and gruff and sometimes hostile and very uninvolved. At night I fantasized about my other grandfather, about how much he would have loved me and how proud he would have been of me. How he would have talked to me and cared about my opinions, how impressed he would have been by my intelligence and precociousness, how he would have adored me. When I was young my mother told me that after we die, we get to meet all our loved ones in heaven, even the ones we never knew, and at night in bed I would fall asleep dreaming about the day I would finally get to meet the grandfather I'd been denied.

Of course now I realize how impossible this all was, this dichotomy of the monster grandmother and the angelic grandfather. I was just a little girl, and that's how kids think, in absolutes. But sometimes I uncharitably resent my mother for fostering this in me - for setting up my dead grandfather as a source of love I would always long for, and for preventing my living grandmother from having a place of respect in my life.

I don't know that I ever would have thought about this much at all if it weren't for the inadvertent (although I wonder about that) slip my aunt Bev made one year during my Christmas break from college, ten or eleven years ago. Bev was sitting at the kitchen table with me and Mom and Marty a few days after Christmas - I'm sure she was drunk as she usually was (and sadly often still is) - telling us about her and Mom's stepfather, Crock. My grandmother remarried the same year my parents married - 1974, the year I was born. Crockett was his last name, but everyone called him Crock, and he was a hillbilly type from the backwoods of Maine who prided himself on his uncouth, repellent behavior - how pretentious, snobby, wanting to rise above her peasant roots Mimi wound up with him is still a mystery to me.

I believe that Bev was living temporarily with Mimi and Crock - I don't remember why, maybe her abusive boyfriend was still in the apartment and she needed a safe place to stay? - and she told us how in the middle of the night Crock would come into her bed and rape her (I can picture it so vividly now, him unwashed and redolent of grime and pipe tobacco and engine grease and that horrible leer and drawl and his gleeful cruelty). He told her "If you say anything to your mother, I'll tell her you seduced me, and she'll throw you out." He told her "you let your daddy do this to you, it's my turn."

Bev blithely continued to talk, and I sat stunned as Marty a few breaths later said casually, "hey, Aim, I want to show you something in my room" and I followed him numbly down the hall into the small blue room where those framed letters hung.

"Do you think that meant what it sounded like?"

"There's gotta be a reason, something we're not seeing, like maybe he meant backrubs or something, it had to be something else, right?" I racked my brain for an alternate explanation, but as Marty kept insisting, there really wasn't one.

After Bev left, my mom had us sit in the living room, I think, and she told us what I didn't want to hear - that we understood what Bev said, that our grandfather had molested her. That he had molested my mother. That it started when she was four or five, and lasted for years, until, my mom said, he focused mainly on Bev, treated her almost like a wife because my grandmother was sick and unavailble. But that he had loved them, he had never hurt them. And she never wanted us to know.

I remember crying when she told me and I cried all night. I sat on the counter in the kitchen, my favorite spot, the corner between the sink and the stovetop, and I sobbed and sobbed as my mother kept reassuring me that it was okay, she was fine, he never hurt her, he never hurt her, and she never wanted to hurt us by telling us, and how sorry she was we found out.

That night I remembered the correspondence course in writing children's literature my mom had taken when I was nine or ten. She always shared her stories with me, and bounced ideas off of me, and I loved it, it felt almost like collaboration, and I loved watching the stories form and she was good at it. (I was a voracious reader; I knew). One day she casually suggested a story about a girl whose father molested her, and then he died and maybe this is utterly blurred by interpretation and fuzzy memory, but I seem to remember liking the idea but somewhere inside being horribly upset, I must have known that she wasn't really talking about fiction but I didn't want to know - and I don't remember her writing any more after that.

And after that day right around Christmas ten or eleven years ago, we never spoke of it again. Ever. Marty and I never spoke about it either. Some nights at his apartment when we're stoned and my inhibitions are low I am itching to ask him, how do you deal with it, being named after the man who raped our mother as a child? How do you deal with it, the stories we grew up on, the idealization and romanticizing that feel like lies now? Because Marty is the only person in my sitation, who might feel it the way I do - he's the man's fucking namesake - and although he's not the oldest, the old guard like me, I suspect he feels some of the weight like I do. But I can never bring myself to do it.

And I want to confront my mother sometimes. Maybe not as antagonistically as it sounds, to confront. Intellectually, I understand. My grandmother was cold and unloving and my mother was only five. I'm sure his touch must have felt like love to her - he cherished her and was tender to her and gave her what her mother wouldn't - and she was five. I can't imagine being five and goddamn I feel ill imagining it - sometimes I feel unimaginative and then sometimes I feel cursed with too vivid an ability to feel and picture this - to be five and the only source of love in your life comes to your bed and night and does things to you and tells you he loves you and by the time you're old enough to really grasp the significance, the wrongness and betrayal, he's already dead and she must have missed him and idealized him and hated him and felt so goddamn alone.

I get it, I get it, yes, I do understand, but how could she have pulled me in, pulled Marty in, the way that she did? Made us love him too, when she could have just let him be distant and unimportant and not so much a presence in our lives? I feel cruel for being so angry at her. I don't know if I can ever talk to her about it. Somehow I need to make my peace with this alone, I think. But all I can think of is, she didn't want to keep secrets.