We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (3 page)

T
HE IDEA THAT
we would spend the holiday talking about anything as potentially explosive as my arrest
was a fiction, and we all knew this even as I was being made to promise to do so.
My parents persisted in pretending we were a close-knit family, a family who enjoyed
a good heart-to-heart, a family who turned to each other in times of trial. In light
of my two missing siblings, this was an astonishing triumph of wishful thinking; I
could almost admire it. At the same time, I am very clear in my own mind. We were
never
that family.

Random example: sex. My parents believed in themselves as scientists, dealers in the
hard facts of life, and also as children of the openly orgasmic sixties. Yet whatever
it is I think I know, I learned mostly from PBS’s wildlife and nature programming,
novels whose authors were probably no experts, and the occasional cold-blooded experiment
in which more questions are raised than answers found. One day, a package of junior-sized
tampons was left on my bed along with a pamphlet that looked technical and boring,
so I didn’t read it. Nothing was ever said to me about the tampons. It was just blind
luck I didn’t smoke them.

I grew up in Bloomington, Indiana, which is where my parents still lived in 1996,
so it wasn’t easy to get back for a weekend and I didn’t manage the four days I’d
promised. Already the cheap seats were gone on Wednesday and Sunday, so I arrived
in Indianapolis on Thursday morning and flew back Saturday night.

Except for Thanksgiving dinner, I hardly saw my father. He had a grant from the NIH
and was happily sidelined by inspiration. He spent most of my visit in his study,
filling his personal blackboard with equations like _0' = [0 0 1] and P(S1n+1) = (P(S1n)(1–e)q
+ P(S2n)(1–s) + P(S0n)cq. He barely ate. I’m not sure he slept. He didn’t shave, and
he usually shaved twice a day; he had an exuberant beard. Grandma Donna used to say
his four-o’clock shadow was just like Nixon’s, pretending that was a compliment but
knowing it irritated the hell out of him. He emerged only for coffee or to take his
fly-fishing rod out to the front yard. Mom and I would stand at the kitchen window,
washing and drying the dishes, watching him lay out his line, the fly flicking over
the icy borders of the lawn. This was the meditative activity he favored and there
were too many trees in the back. The neighbors were still getting used to it.

When he worked like this, he didn’t drink, which we all appreciated. He’d been diagnosed
with diabetes a few years back and shouldn’t have been drinking at any time. Instead
he’d become a secret drinker. It kept Mom on high alert and I worried sometimes that
their marriage had become the sort Inspector Javert might have had with Jean Valjean.

It was my grandma Donna’s turn to have us for Thanksgiving, along with my uncle Bob,
his wife, and my two younger cousins. We alternated between grandparents on holidays,
because fair is fair and why should one side of the family have all the delight? Grandma
Donna is my mother’s mother, Grandma Fredericka my father’s.

At Grandma Fredericka’s, the food had a moist carbohydrate heft. A little went a long
way, and there was never only a little. Her house was strewn with cheap Asian tchotchkes—painted
fans, jade figurines, lacquered chopsticks. There was a pair of matching lamps—red
silk shades and stone bases carved into the shapes of two old sages. The men had long,
skinny beards and real human fingernails inset creepily into their stony hands. A
few years ago, Grandma Fredericka told me that the third level of the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame was the most beautiful place she had ever seen. It just makes you want
to be a better person, she said.

Grandma Fredericka was the sort of hostess who believed that bullying guests into
second and third helpings was only being polite. Yet we all ate more at Grandma Donna’s,
where we were left alone to fill our plates or not, where the piecrusts were flaky
and the orange-cranberry muffins light as clouds; where there were silver candles
in silver candlesticks, a centerpiece of autumn leaves, and everything was done with
unassailable taste.

Grandma Donna passed the oyster stuffing and asked my father straight out what he
was working on, it being so obvious his thoughts were not with us. She meant it as
a reprimand. He was the only one at the table who didn’t know this, or else he was
ignoring it. He told her he was running a Markov chain analysis of avoidance conditioning.
He cleared his throat. He was going to tell us more.

We moved to close off the opportunity. Wheeled like a school of fish, practiced, synchronized.
It was beautiful. It was Pavlovian. It was a goddamn dance of avoidance conditioning.

“Pass the turkey, Mother,” my uncle Bob said, sliding smoothly into his traditional
rant about the way turkeys are being bred for more white meat and less dark. “The
poor birds can hardly walk. Miserable freaks.” This, too, was intended as a dig at
my father, the enterprise being another of science’s excesses, like cloning or whisking
up a bunch of genes to make your own animal. Antagonism in my family comes wrapped
in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability.

I believe the same can be said of many families.

Bob helped himself ostentatiously to a slice of dark meat. “They stagger around with
these huge ungodly breasts.”

My father made a crude joke. He made the same joke or some variation of it every time
Bob gave him the opening, which was every other year. If the joke were witty, I’d
include it, but it wasn’t. You’d think less of him and thinking less of him is my
job, not yours.

The silence that followed was filled with pity for my mother, who could have married
Will Barker if she hadn’t lost her mind and chosen my father, a chain-smoking, hard-drinking,
fly-fishing atheist from Indianapolis, instead. The Barker family owned a stationery
store downtown and Will was an estate lawyer, which didn’t matter nearly so much as
what he wasn’t. What he wasn’t was a psychologist like my father.

In Bloomington, to someone my grandma’s age, the word
psychologist
evoked Kinsey and his prurient studies, Skinner and his preposterous baby boxes.
Psychologists didn’t leave their work at the office. They brought it home. They conducted
experiments around the breakfast table, made freak shows of their own families, and
all to answer questions nice people wouldn’t even think to ask.

Will Barker thought your mother hung the moon, Grandma Donna used to tell me, and
I often wondered if she ever stopped to think that there would be no me if this advantageous
marriage had taken place. Did Grandma Donna think the no-me part was a bug or a feature?

I think now that she was one of those women who loved her children so much there was
really no room for anyone else. Her grandchildren mattered greatly to her, but only
because they mattered so greatly to her children. I don’t mean that as a criticism.
I’m glad my mother grew up so loved.

Tryptophan: a chemical in turkey meat rumored to make you sleepy and careless. One
of the many minefields in the landscape of the family Thanksgiving.

Minefield #2: the good china. When I was five, I bit a tooth-sized chunk out of one
of Grandma Donna’s Waterford goblets for no other reason than to see if I could. Ever
since, I’d been served my milk in a plastic tumbler with Ronald McDonald (though less
and less of him each year) imprinted on it. By 1996 I was old enough for wine, but
the tumbler was the same, it being the sort of joke that never gets old.

I don’t remember most of what we talked about that year. But I can, with confidence,
provide a partial list of things not talked about:

Missing family members. Gone was gone.

Clinton’s reelection. Two years back, the day had been ruined by my father’s reaction
to my uncle Bob’s assertion that Clinton had raped a woman or probably several women
in Arkansas. My uncle Bob sees the whole world in a fun-house mirror,
TRUST NO ONE
lipsticked luridly across its bowed face. No more politics, Grandma Donna had said
as a permanent new rule, since we wouldn’t agree to disagree and all of us had access
to cutlery.

My own legal troubles, about which no one but my mother and father knew. My relatives
had been waiting a long time to see me come to no good; it did them no harm to keep
waiting. In fact, it kept them in fighting trim.

My cousin Peter’s tragic SAT scores, about which we all knew but were pretending we
didn’t. 1996 was the year Peter turned eighteen, but the day he was born he was more
of a grown-up than I’ll ever be. His mother, my aunt Vivi, fit into our family about
as well as my father—we’re a hard club to join, it seems. Vivi has mysterious flutters,
weeps, and frets, so by the time Peter was ten, he could come home from school, look
in the refrigerator, and cook a dinner for four from whatever he found there. He could
make a white sauce when he was six years old, a fact often impressed upon me by one
adult or another, with an obvious and iniquitous agenda.

Peter was also probably the only all-city cellist in the history of the world to be
voted Best-Looking at his high school. He had brown hair and the shadows of freckles
dusted like snow over his cheekbones, an old scar curving across the bridge of his
nose and ending way too close to his eye.

Everyone loved Peter. My dad loved him because they were fishing buddies and often
escaped to Lake Lemon to menace the bass there. My mom loved him because he loved
my dad when no one else in her family could manage it.

I loved him because of the way he treated his sister. In 1996, Janice was fourteen,
sullen, peppered with zits, and no weirder than anyone else (which is to say, weird
on stilts). But Peter drove her to school every morning and picked her up every afternoon
that he didn’t have orchestra. When she made a joke, he laughed. When she was unhappy,
he listened. He bought her jewelry or perfume for her birthdays, defended her from
their parents or her classmates, as needed. He was so nice, it hurt to watch.

He saw something in her, and who knows you better than your own brother? If your brother
loves you, I say it counts for something.

Just before dessert, Vivi asked my father what he thought of standardized testing.
He didn’t answer. He was staring into his yams, his fork making little circles and
stabs as if he were writing in the air.

“Vince!” my mother said. She gave him a prompt. “Standardized tests.”

“Very imprecise.”

Which was just the answer Vivi wanted. Peter had such excellent grades. He worked
so hard. His SAT scores were a terrible injustice. There was a moment of congenial
conspiracy and the end of Grandma Donna’s wonderful dinner. Pie was served—pumpkin,
apple, and pecan.

Then my dad spoiled things. “Rosie had such good SATs,” he said, as if we weren’t
all carefully
not
talking about the SATs, as if Peter wanted to hear how well I had done. My dad had
his pie shoved politely out of the way in one cheek, smiling at me proudly, visions
of Markov avoidance chains banging together like trash-can lids in his head. “She
wouldn’t open the envelope for two whole days and then she’d aced them. Especially
the verbal.” A little bow in my direction. “Of course.”

Uncle Bob’s fork came down on the edge of his plate with a click.

“It comes of being tested so often when she was little.” My mother spoke directly
to Bob. “She’s a good test-taker. She learned how to take a test, is all.” And then,
turning to me, as if I wouldn’t have heard the other, “We’re so proud of you, honey.”

“We expected great things,” my father said.

“Expect!” My mother’s smile never faltered; her tone was desperately gay. “We expect
great things!” Her eyes went from me to Peter to Janice. “From all of you!”

Aunt Vivi’s mouth was hidden behind her napkin. Uncle Bob stared over the table at
a still life on the wall—piles of shiny fruit and one limp pheasant. Breast unmodified,
just as God intended. Dead, but then that’s also part of God’s plan.

“Do you remember,” my father said, “how her class spent a rainy recess playing hangman
and when it was her turn the word she chose was
refulgent
? Seven years old. She came home crying because the teacher said she’d cheated by
inventing a word.”

(My father had misremembered this; no teacher at my grammar school would have ever
said that. What my teacher had said was that she was sure I hadn’t
meant
to cheat. Her tone generous, her face beatific.)

“I remember Rose’s scores.” Peter whistled appreciatively. “I didn’t know how impressed
I should have been. That’s a hard test, or at least I thought so.” Such a sweetheart.
But don’t get attached to him; he’s not really part of this story.

•   •   •

M
OM CAME INTO
my room on Friday, my last night at home. I was outlining a chapter in my text on
medieval economies. This was pure Kabuki—look how hard I’m working! Everyone on holiday
but me—until I’d gotten distracted by a cardinal outside the window. He was squabbling
with a twig, hankering after something I hadn’t yet figured out. There are no red
birds in California, and the state is the poorer for it.

The sound of my mother at the door made my pencil hop to.
Mercantilism.
Guild monopolies.
Thomas More’s
Utopia
.
“Did you know,” I asked her, “that there’s still war in Utopia? And slaves?”

She did not.

She floated about for a bit, straightening the bedding, picking up some of the stones
on the dresser, geodes mostly, split open to their crystal innards like Fabergé eggs.

Those rocks are mine. I found them on childhood trips to the quarries or the woods,
and I broke them open with hammers or by dropping them onto the driveway from a second-story
window, but this isn’t the house I grew up in and this room isn’t my room. We’ve moved
three times since I was born, and my parents landed here only after I took off for
college. The empty rooms in our old house, my mother said, made her sad. No looking
back. Our houses, like our family, grow smaller; each successive one would fit inside
the last.