All Families Are Psychotic (14 page)

The off icers spoke to Helena: 'If we could just step inside, ma'am—' Helena didn ' t reply.

' Ma'am? Please.'

'No. I like it out here. I'm going to sit on this stoop and enjoy the day.'

The Kim family's teenage boys were out on their deck watching things develop. Binoculars were quickly produ ced. The Paynes weren' t going to budge from their perch, either.

Helena said, 'If sitt ing in the sun and enjoying nature is a crime, I stand accused. Arrest me. Otherwise, leave me alone. Janet — please ask these people to leave your property.'

Janet and Nickie sipped their drink s. Janet continued, 'The cops tried being rational, but of course it wasn' t a rational situation, and things went nowhere. The Kim kids, meanwhile, had called their pals on their cell phones, so out of nowhere there were maybe a dozen teenage boys across the street staring at my fron t stoop. One of them was taping the episode on a camcorder. It felt so —
underwater and

dreamy.
The woman off icer told Helena she was going to have to arrest her, and Helena said, " Fine." I mean, the off icers bent backwards giving her every chance to save face, but no.'

'Yikes.'

'I kno w. So the woman off icer tried to handcuff Helena, and Helena went nuts and tried biting her, so the other one came to help her, and her boobs were flying around and suddenly she was screaming
" Rape! "
I could only stand there aghast. Then Helena noticed that I wasn' t trying to stop the police, and she began screaming just the vilest names at me. Have teenage boys and you get used to being called names — but

then she started talking abou t . . .' 'Abou t what?'

'She started talking abou t how she'd been having an affair with my father — for decades, it turns out. I didn ' t believe her, but it 's amazing how many names, dates and places a madwoman can scream out

while evading arrest — a huge list of wheres and whens — as well as where my mother had been while the trysts were occurring — worst of all, she screamed out things my father had said abou t me.'

'Oh, Christ.'

'There aren' t words to describe the feeling. There just aren' t. Then the teenage boys joined in on the bull herding — like Pamplon a. It was October — there was still dew on the lawn. Such a
mess.'

It 's all your fault, Janet Drummond . " You're a traitor to your sex. You're a traitor to your family and to me, your only true friend in the world. You're a scab. You're dried up. That's what your father said about you — you're a dried-up goody two-shoes party-pooper scab.

'It took a few minu tes to get Helena into the cruiser, and I was so relieved the windo ws were rolled up so I couldn ' t hear her fil th any more. The cops drove away, the neighbor s evaporated, and there I was at my fron t doorstep. My li fe could never be the same again, and I was just standing at my door. I got cramps it was so awf ul.'

Janet finished her drink . 'Very shor tly I'm going to be over-the-top drunk . We should go back to the hotel.' She got out her card to pay. 'You kno w, after Helena went nuts, the divorce was a complete

anticlimax. I never minded the divorce as much as it seemed on the outside. We probably shouldn ' t have married to begin with. Live and learn.' She paid the bill . 'Shall we go?'

They went back to the hotel and both fell asleep on the king-size bed. Around sunset, they were awakened from their sligh tly drunk en sleeps by fireworks neatly framed by their windo w: blisteringl y pink and white chrysanthemums blooming and dying.

Nickie said, 'I bet this is how rich people get to wake up -with fireworks displays. I bet they probably have rich-people-only fireworks that we'll never get to see — ones that work during dayligh t.'

Janet briefly couldn ' t remember where she was, or why, but then the morning 's events came back to her.
My childr en, where are they?
She made her usual waking tally: The boys hadn' t yet returned from Disney World . Sarah was in Cape Canaveral.

The tw o women remained sligh tly shell-shocked from the morning 's holdup . They also watched as the ever-present fire ants, plump and stupid, batted themselves against the twenty-sixth-floor windo ws.
What do they want?

'How do you think it changed you?' Nickie asked. The robbery?'

'No — when you found out you had . . .
it.'

'It?
Oh — don ' t
you
pussyfoot around me, Nickie. Say hiv.' Janet touched the scar of the bullet hole on her rib cage. 'What was it like? There was the usual stuff:
It can' t be true. There has to be a mistake.

You're confusing me with somebody else.
And then I though t,
Wait! Science will save me!
And science did

-sort of. And now I think science is how the disease started in the first place. Some geeks from UNESCO making vaccines out of mashed monkey brains in Africa. We'll never really kno w. I mean, aids just isn' t a disease a sixtysomething Canadian housewife
gets.
In my head I don ' t even call it aids; I call it Congol ese Monkey Brain Particles.'

The ants made sounds as they batted against the windo ws — like kitten paws. 'And after I recovered from the ini tial shock, I began to think,
Ooh — maybe I'm one of those one-in-a-hundred people with a natural
hiv
antigen in their DNA —
if such people even exist.'

'Go on.'

'Oh
pish —
I don ' t kno w. I tried to be scientific. I learned abou t vaccine trails and cocktail therapies — on the Internet mostly.'

' My mother used to say " pish " .' 'She's my vintage, I imagine.' 'Yeah.'

Janet smiled. 'I even went down to Mexico once — with a friend, Betty, from my book club. She had Hashimo to's disease and a form of throat cancer. We were trying to find Laetrile — this drug from the 1970s made from peach pits.'

'I remember that — sort of.'

'What a hoax. It killed Steve McQueen. Betty's gone. The only option I haven' t tried yet is crystals. The moment you start plopping crystals on your sternum, the game's over.'

'But I don ' t think you answered my question. How did you change
insideì'

Janet sighed. 'Let me think. Nobody's ever asked me that.'
How have I changed?
'You kno w what? The

biggest change is that I stopped believing in the future — which is to say, I stopped thinking of the future as being a place, like Paris or Australia — a place you can go to. I started believing that we're all going ,

going , going all the time, but there's no city or place at the end. We're just going . That's all.' 'Do you ever blame Wade? Or me?'

'Wade? He stood in fron t of me to pro tect me from Ted. How could I blame him? Do I blame you? No.

Ted's the idio t. Lately I've started to think that blame is just a lazy person's way of making sense of chaos.' 'What do you mean?'

'Suppose a weird or random event happens to you, like a falling cedar tree crushes your pet cat, or you get held as a hostage in the hold-up of some cut rate diner — or Mrs. Drummond gets aids from a bullet that passed through her son's liver — I could blame the tree trimmers for not recommending I top that cedar. I could blame the Florid a legal system for — I don ' t kno w — something. Or I could say that the

bullet was divine retribu tion for not trying hard enough to make my marriage work. Or — you see what I mean. It 's nobod y's fault. It 's chaos. Just chaos. Random numbers popping up in a cosmic Lott o draw.'

'You really think so?'

' More and more. How abou t you? You're only on Day Four of having gotten the news. What's going on inside of
you?

' Me? I always figured I'd get it — that I deserved it — if not aids then syphili s or some kind of superherpes that turned my body into one big walking canker. It 's a relief, actually. No more waiting. The jury is in.' 'You really think it was Wade?'

'I do. My reputation makes people think I'm some vacuous slut, but Wade was my first stray in years. It was something in his eyes, some kind of gaze he inherited from Ted, and it was the Ted inside of Wade that was so seductive. I could theorize all nigh t.'

The tw o women dozed fitf ully. Janet pictured a trillion particles of an African monkey brain virus blipping abou t in her veins like toxic soda water bubbl es.
I once believed that people never change, that they only become more like themselves. Now I think that people do nothing but change.
Janet though t of her

father the philanderer, and of her mother who
must
have kno wn all those years.
Time erases both the best and the worst of us.
She though t it strange how memory is erased in li tt le bits withou t regard to memory as a whole.

'What are you thinking abou t?' Nickie asked.

'Abou t this time in London ,' Janet replied. 'In Piccadilly. I didn ' t have a watch and I needed to kno w the time. There was a Rolex store with hundr eds of watches in the windo w. I assumed they'd be collectively

precise to the second. But when I looked, each watch displayed a completely different time, and for a few seconds there I felt as if I'd passed into the other side of the mirror where there was no time at all.'

The door knocked and Nickie shou ted out, 'What! '

It was turn down service, to which Nickie shou ted, 'No, thank you.' She turned to Janet and asked, 'What was the angriest you've ever been with Ted?'

Janet smiled. 'You won' t believe me.' 'Yes, I will.'

'We were out in the fron t garden talking abou t buying manure for the azaleas. Ted asked me if I had any Kleenex and I said no, so he grabbed one of my beautiful pink peonies -so soft, with skin like a baby's eyelids — and he plucked it from the shrub and honked away and then threw the used flower

underneath the sequoia.' Nickie horse-laughed at this.

'You laugh ! I suppose I could have seen it as funny, but instead I didn ' t talk to him for a week. That

simmering thing I used to do. I just . . .
couldn ' t
bring myself to speak to a man who'd done what he'd just done.'

The tw o stared at the ceiling some more. Janet said, 'Let's go visit Kevin in the hospital.' Nickie though t this over. 'Yes, let's.'

Janet had never had much luck with friends. She had always hoped Ted would be her pal, like characters in the lyrics of a song, but Ted was more of the distanced boss in her li fe and got bored easily with any family matters save those involving Sarah. Of her childr en, Wade was the only one with whom she felt a camaraderie. Sarah was too cool a cucumber, and while she never gave Janet a moment of grief, neither did she give her any moments of bliss. And Bryan — Bryan was always a child. Even as an adul t trying to kill himself, he remained in Janet's eyes a child.

When Ted left her and she had the house to herself, she though t she was going insane, in the medical

sense, with boredom and loneliness. She could put a good face on it -she knew
that —
but her days became quests to find someone,
anyone,
to connect with: checkou t clerks, auto repairmen, carpet cleaners or fello w course takers at the communi ty center (Celtic calligr aphy; 'Slim and Sixty'; 'The Eternal Essence of Feng Shui '; CPR; lacemaking). Ultimately it was on the Internet where she could meet with people and not have them instantly spooked away by the look of near-surrender in her eyes, or the taint of Probably Never Being Loved by Anyone New Ever Again. On the Internet people wouldn ' t kno w that she went for days eating only pimiento cream cheese with English water biscuits, or that she obsessively fondled her crow's feet.

At least when she'd been shot there had been a brief and shamefully gratifying burst of attention, but that went away quickly enough . But then, with her viral diagnosis came a deluge of people from a

surpri singly broad and emotional slice of the culture. The accelerated perception of death quickly eroded many of the traditional barriers between her and others, and she found she had a talent for organizing group discussion dinners. Abou t a year into her diagnosis, Sarah had phoned and asked her mother what she'd been up to lately. Janet found herself, for the first time in recent memory, with plenty to talk

abou t. She described a seropositivity potluck dinner at the house the nigh t previously. Sarah asked who'd been there, and Janet said, 'Well, there was Mahir. He's twenty and Persian and his family will no longer ackno wledge his existence. He brough t falafel. There was Max — he's seventy-one, and a cardiac

transfusion case. He overheard his ex-friends talking abou t him at the Legion, and now he's having a crisis along the lines of " Oh-my-God-what-have-I-done-with-my-life?" He has a heart of pure butter, and he

brough t along tw o-day-old donu ts. Sheila's my age, and she's a lesbian whose lover of eigh teen years left her after her diagnosis. She shaved her hair off yesterday and was in a foul mood. She brough t along

those American laxative potato chips, and we all had a good laugh. Wally is our " off icial compassionate gay guy". He wanted us to go downtown afterwards to dispense condom s on street corners, but I don ' t think I'm evolved to that poin t yet.'

'What did you make?'

'Everything as usual — lasagna, salad and garlic bread.' 'Was it fun?'

'Fun? I never think of it that way, but yes, it was very intense. Our get-togethers always are. We have to pretend we're brave, but then one of us explodes, and another one gets weepy, and suddenly we're all on the same raft. It makes me feel alive. How's
that
for irony?'

But she was still lonely, and she wouldn ' t discuss this with her daugh ter or anybody else. To even speak the word would somehow finalize her situation, and she knew there had to be more than just this.

Wade first met Beth in the Las Vegas hospital's diabetes clinic during its off-hours, at his first visit to a

Think Positive! seropositivity workshop. The first thing he noticed abou t Beth was that she was wearing a

...
muumuu ?
He wasn' t sure what her garment was — some sort of floral schoolm arm dress fresh from a high-school produ ction of
Oklahoma!
And yet the woman inside the dress was anything other than an apple-cheeked farm girl . She was bony and strangely used-up-looking , as if she'd done her share of time strung out on crystal meth. Beth's out-of-date dress seemed to Wade to be the outer veneer of an inner conversion. She'd been where Wade was, but she'd found a way out.