Estelle is Magically Stuck Watching Television

The show is “Hot Topics.” I do not know the personalities of the folks on the oversized screen of this breakfast room where we happen to be staying. They throw around the names of celebrities I never heard of and they tell their intimate family lives painting in broad strokes without any testimonial evidence. A “gossip” show, my mother would have called it.

My mother would have turned such shows off on the television. My grandmother of blessed memory, my “Bobie,” would have turned the channel back to the gossip show, and commented how my Mother, who seemed to think she was head of the household, ran the place in a way similar to Adolf Hitler.

“Gossip.” I never knew the whole story but it was a bad thing, a thing that hurt people, like guns and knives. I was given a lecture about it from Aunt Etta, the only person then or ever seen in public with a hairstyle identical to the “Bride of Frankenstein” in the flick.

She liked to repeat her speech about “gossip.” How things the Jewish women of Springfield said behind someone’s back told everything about them and it was false but other people knew it was true.

I remember how I heard that my mother’s mother died in an asylum. I heard it in Yiddish, that she had died in a “Michiganhoise,” from my grandmother, which meant “crazy-house,” not anything in Michigan.

Bobie had been folding laundry on the living room sofa, and was in the middle of one of her regular diatribes on how stupid and worthless my mother was.

I ran upstairs (I was seven) to ask my mother (who was folding her laundry on her bed) if grandmother was speaking truth. When mother started crying uncontrollably, I knew it was true.

Not that I cared back then. I was more curious about how one household could produce enough laundry to give two adult women what appeared to be full-time employment.

“Hot Topics” degenerates into informercials for overpriced makeup and candies. Gossip about celebrities and conspicuous consumption. This is dead wrong, but it seems to be what people want.

Nonnie said it had been all “Trumped up” before that expression was in style. Grandmother wanted to go to school. To work maybe in a doctor’s office, or to do something “good” for people. Somehow she had been rerouted into fund-raising and philanthropy. She had been frustrated and angry about that life.

As mother’s sobs went on to render her speech near-unintelligible, she told how it was the “style” then to space children not 2 years apart like my brother Harry and me but 13 years apart and sex was not encouraged during pregnancy, so somehow she had gone crazy because of lack of sex.

She had been so crazy because of not getting enough of something I had never had. That made even less sense than the things they tried to tell me at school.

Now the show has changed to “Wendy Williams,” and I do not think she is a real judge (although I suppose anything is possible.) At any rate, she puts on some kind of robe sometimes and tells people what they should do, and reads fan mail she receives because of doing that.

“Wendy” has the longest hair on her show and it seems this establishes her as “supreme.” in that venue.

The local news has the same sort of sycophantic feeble raise for the personalities of local government. It seems suspiciously like gossip.

Which reminds me of Aunt Etta, whom I rarely saw, but who was often grouped with me as one of the fashionable people of the family.

The next time I heard about her was when mother was trying to persuade me to wear a girdle. One in a while for dances, maybe, but daily? Since my mother’s mother was out of the picture (she had been singing songs and writing stories and that made her even crazier.) Aunt Etta was supposed to guide my mom in the ways of women which included being bound tightly (She wore a stiff corset which I had to hug her to feel) and my mother wanted me to “at least wear something” and I tried to convince her styles change and tastes change and Etta might be wrong.

I never convinced her.