Gilbert's New Girl

So the next day Gilbert began his weekly ritual of driving Tally over to visit with her father. All through that winter he sat in his truck, freezing his butt off for two hours every Sunday because he wanted to be sure that if things got too strained, then Tally could make a quick getaway. It was going to take time, but Tally was working on getting her father to accept Gilbert, and as I’ve said before, Tally’s no quitter. But if the new, improved Gilbert Grape was a constant source of amazement to me, he just about floored our sister Ellen when she came to visit us that Christmas. Ellen and Gilbert had never had an easy relationship; they just seemed to get under each other’s skin. They brought out the worst in each other and they both knew it, so they tended to avoid being in each other’s company any more than was strictly necessary. Still, Christmas is Christmas, the season of goodwill and all that stuff, so Ellen came to visit. I suppose she was curious to meet the girl I told her about every time we talked on the phone, but I guess I never really prepared Ellen for the change in Gilbert.

Thankfully, Ellen and Tally seemed to hit it off instantly, and I could see the relief in Tally’s eyes that she wasn’t going to have to work as hard on Ellen as she’d had to with me. Gilbert seemed pleased that things were going well between them, and that softened his normal defensive approach to Ellen. Poor Ellen was completely dumbfounded by how nice Gilbert was to her. ‘Tell me I’m dreaming this’ Ellen whispered to me when we were alone in the kitchen. ‘I really like Tally, but I don’t think I can cope with Gilbert being Mr Nice Guy. Where’s the old Gilbert? I want the sullen, sarcastic Gilbert I’ve known and hated all my life, I want Gilbert the Grouch back!’ I smiled at her and whispered, ‘He’s gone; he just evaporated into thin air, and all it took was a smile and a wink from Tally.’ Despite her melodramatic pleas for the return of the old Gilbert, I knew Ellen was genuinely pleased to see him happy. However, she was worried by the reaction of the townsfolk to the relationship between Gilbert and Tally.

Ellen was horrified that Lamson’s Grocery had closed down, and furious when I told her people we had known all our lives now crossed the street to avoid us. ‘How can they be such hypocrites? I mean, no one batted an eyelid when Gilbert was messing around with Sally Morrow, but he has the nerve to fall in love with a young girl and suddenly he’s some kind of sex monster!’ It seemed strange to hear Ellen defending Gilbert but I guess it proved that blood is thicker than water after all. It felt good that she cared enough to get mad, but at the same time her anger made me feel ashamed of my own embarrassment over my brothers’ love life. It didn’t make any sense, you know? I really liked Tally and there was no doubt that she was the best thing that had ever happened to Gilbert, but there was still this part of me that felt like I had to apologise for his happiness.

Tucker said it was because deep down inside I felt that none of the Grapes deserved to be happy. ‘You still won’t accept that your family is just as good as any other family in this town’ he said as he poured me another glass of wine. ‘Okay, so your Dad topped himself, and your Mom ate herself to death. Arnie was retarded and Larry was just a shit. Ellen was a selfish, lazy brat and Janice was….Janice is a slut, and that leaves you and Gilbert as the only two blameless members of this family. You and him were the only two who stuck around, and you let everyone dump their anger and their shame all over you.’ I tried to ignore what Tucker was telling me, but it struck a chord. It reminded me of Gilbert saying that as a family, our only purpose was to make every other family feel good about themselves. Gilbert could see it, Tucker could see it and Ellen’s outrage at our recent banishment told me she could see it, so why had it taken so long for me to see it?

Could our family have been so terrible? Were we bad people? No, no we weren’t! Perhaps we were more unlucky than most of the folks around here, but that didn’t make us bad. Oh, all of what Tucker said was true; my Dad killed himself, and none of us really knows why, but his death set in motion a chain of events that resulted in us becoming the focus of the towns’ fear and derision. If tragedy could rip our family apart, then the same thing could happen to them, unless they could turn us into something that denied the randomness of fate and made our sorrow a just punishment. So they blamed my fathers’ lack of ambition and my mothers’ beauty for all our bad luck. If my parents hadn’t spent so much time making babies then they might have avoided the poverty that singled them out in this town. And no doubt they saw my mothers’ increasing weight problems as a fitting reward for a woman once deemed to be the county beauty.

Who knows how Larry might have turned out if he hadn’t had to deal with the pain of being the one who discovered my father hanging in the basement? And would Janice have been so free and easy with her affections if she wasn’t terrified of turning into our mother? How do you explain Ellen? Was she loud and aggressive because from the moment she was born she had to scream for every bit of attention she got? It must have been tough for her, trying to compete with Arnie for Moms’ attention. Is it any wonder that Larry and Janice jumped ship at the first opportunity and left me and Gilbert to take care of Momma and Arnie? And what choice did we have? Me and Gilbert, we did what we had to do, and for the most part I pretended I didn’t mind, but Gilbert was more honest. His resentment simmered just below the surface, always threatening to boil over, and sometimes it did. Like the night he totally lost it and slapped Arnie around. We were all shocked he could have done that to Arnie, but none of us were quite as shocked as Gilbert; he was devastated. I don’t think he’s ever forgiven himself for that.

Tucker was right when he said that none of us really appreciated everything that Gilbert did for the family. When I look back it seems like Momma, Ellen and me were just continually loading him down with more and more things he had to do. Oh sure, I did the laundry, the cooking and the cleaning with a little help from Ellen, but Gilbert had to hold down a job, do the shopping, keep up the maintenance on the house and the garden, and he had to do it all with Arnie hindering his every move. Gilbert was saddled with the responsibility of looking after Arnie and that was a full time job in itself. He never complained, but if he showed his resentment by being mean or moody, we were quick enough to lecture him about him having to do better. But what more could he have done? He was forced into being the man of the house when Larry up and left. Gilbert was only thirteen years old, he was still just a little boy. Janice and I were older, but we were as bad as Momma in telling him that we were depending on him. What did we think we were doing? Did we think that weighing him down with all that responsibility was somehow making him feel needed? Dear God! All it did was almost crush the life out of him