All Families Are Psychotic (2 page)

— back during the World Trade Organization rio ts. They were separated, then a few mon ths ago they met again destroying a test facili ty gro wing genetically modi fied runner beans.'

Janet could sense Sarah changing gears; she was finished discussing the family. Next would come business- like matters: 'Well, good for Bryan. You're OK for today's NASA gig?'

'Still.'

'Howie will pick you up at 9:30, after he picks up my darling bro ther. By the way, Dad's broke.' 'That doesn' t surpri se me. I'd heard he'd lost his job.'

'I tried to loan him some money, but he, of course, said no. Not that there's much to loan. Howie lost the bulk of our savings in some website that sells produ cts for pets. I could strangle him.'

'Oh dear.'
It 's so easy to fall into the mother mode.

'Tell me abou t it. Hey, when was the last time you even saw Dad?' 'Half a year ago. By accident at Super-Valu.'

Tense?'

'I can handle him.' 'Good. See you there.' 'Yes, dear.'

Click

On the walkway outside her room, Janet heard childr en mewling as they set off to Walt Disney World with their families. She walked to the bathroom across a floor made lunar from eons of cigarette burns and various stains better left uninvestigated. She though t of serial murderers using acids to dissolve the teeth and jawbones of their victims.

She unsuspectingly caugh t sigh t of herself in a floor-length mirror by the sink and the sigh t stopped her cold.
Yes, Janet, that's correct: you are shrinking — sinew by sinew, protein molecule by protein molecule you are turning into an ... an elf, yes, you, Janet Drummond , once voted 'Girl We'd Rob a Bank For:

She was transfixed by the view of herself in a blue nigh tie, as if she were once again young and this image had been delivered to her from the future as a warning —
If I squin t I can still see the cool

immaculate housewife I once dreamed of becoming. I'm Elizabeth Montgomery starring in
Bewitched.
I'm Dina Merrill lunching at the Museum of Modern Art with Christina Ford.

Oh forget it.
She peed, showered, dried and then modi fied those traces of time's passage on her face that she could.

There. I'm not so bad after all. A man migh t still rob a bank for me, and men still do flir t — not too frequently — and older men perhaps — but the look in the eyes never changes.

She dressed, and five minu tes later she was a block away sitt ing in a Denny's reading a paper. The North American weather map on the rear page was a rich, unhealthy crimson, with only a small strip of cool

green running up the coast from Seatt le to Alaska. Outside the restaurant windo w the sun on the parking lot made the area seem like a science experiment. She realized she no longer cared abou t the weather.

Next.

Back in her motel room, she lay down on the bed haunted by a thousand sex acts.
OK — this place is creepy but at least I'm not throwing away money.
Her lips were sore to the poin t that speech was painful, and it hur t to exhale. Her pill buzzer buzzed; she sat up. She reached into her purse and removed a

prescrip tion bott le. She turned on the TV, and there was Sarah being interviewed on CNN. As always, her daugh ter looked glo wingly pretty on TV, like a nun who'd never touched makeup.

• Do you think you and childr en like you, born with damage caused by thalidomid e, have other messages to tell the world?
  

• Of course. We were the canaries in the coal mine. We were the first childr en born in which it was
  

  proved that chemicals from the outside world — in our case thalidomid e — could severely damage the human embryo. These days, most mothers don ' t smoke or drink during pregnancy. They kno w that the outer world can enter their babies and cause damage. But in my mother's generation, they didn ' t kno w
  

  this. They smoked and drank and took any number of medications withou t thinking tw ice. Now we kno w better, and as a species we're smarter as a result — we're aware of teratogens.
  

• Teratogens?
  

• Yes. It means 'monster forming '. A horribl e word, but then the world can be a horribl e place. They're the chemicals that cross the placenta and affect a child 's gro wt h in utero.
  

The host turned to the camera: 'Time for a quick break. I've been speaking with Sarah Drummond -

Fourni er, a one-handed woman, and one heck of a figh ter, who'll be on Friday's shutt le fligh t. We'll be righ t back.'

How on earth did I give bir th to such a child? I understand nothing about her li fe. Nothing. And yet she's the spitt ing image of me, and she's gallivanting up into space.
Janet remembered how much she'd

wanted to help the young Sarah with her homework, and Sarah's poli te-but-resigned invitations to come do so when Janet popped her head into Sarah's door way. Invariably Janet would look down at the papers that migh t as well have been in Chinese. Janet would ask a few concerned questions abou t Sarah's teachers, and then plead ki tchen duty, beating a hasty retreat.

She turned off the TV.

She once cared abou t everything, and if she couldn ' t muster genuine concern, she could easily fake it: too much rain stunting the petunias; her childr en's scrapes; stick figure Africans; the pligh t of marine

mammals. She considered herself one of the surviving members of a lost generation, the last generation raised to care abou t appearances or doing the righ t thing -to care abou t caring. She had been born in 1934 in Toron to, a city then much like Chicago or Rochester or Detroi t — bland, methodical, thri fty and

rules-playing. Her father, Willi am Truro, managed the furni ture and household appliance department of the downtown Eaton's department store. Willi am's wife, Kaye, was, well . . . Willi am's wife.

The tw o raised Janet and her older bro ther, Gerald, on $29.50 a week until 1938, when a salary decrease lowered Willi am's pay to $27 a week, and jam vanished from the Truro breakfast table, the absence of which became Janet's first memory. After the jam, the rest of Janet's li fe seemed to have been an

ongoing reduction — things that had once been essential vanishing withou t discussion, or even worse, with too much discussion.

Seasons changed. Sweaters became ragged, were patched up and became ragged again, and were grudgingl y thro wn out. A few flowers were gro wn in the thin band of dir t in fron t of the brick row

house, species scavenged by Kaye for their value as dried flowers, which scrimped an extra few mon ths' worth of utili ty from them. Life seemed to be entirely abou t
scrimping .
In fall of 1938, Gerald died of

polio . In 1939 the war began and Canada was in it from the start, and scrimping kicked into overdrive: bacon fat, tin cans, rubber — all material objects -were scrimp-worthy. Janet's most enjoyable childhood memories were of sorting neighborhood trash in the alleys, in search of crown jewels, metal fragments and love notes from dying princes. During the war, houses in her neighborhood grew dingy — paint became a luxury. When she was six, Janet walked into the ki tchen and found her father kissing her

mother passionately. They saw Janet standing there, a small, chubby, fuddled Campbell's Soup kid, and they broke apart, blushed, and the incident was never spoken of again. The glimp se was her only

evidence of passion until womanhood .

An hour passed and Janet looked at the bedside clock: almost 9:30, and Howie would have already picked up Wade by now. Janet walked down to the hotel's covered breezeway to wait for her son-in-law. A day of boredom loomed.

Then,
pow!
she was angry all of a sudden. She was angry because she was unable to remember and reexperience her li fe as a continuou s movie-like event. There were only bits of punctuation here and

there — the kiss, the jam, the dried flowers — which, when assembled, made Janet who she was — yet there seemed to be no divine logic behind the assemblage. Or any flow. All those bits were merely . . .

bits. But there had to be logic. How could the small, chubby child of 1940 imagine that one day she'd be in Florid a seeing her own daugh ter launched into outer space? Tiny li tt le Sarah, who was set to circle the Earth hundr eds of times.
We didn ' t even think about outer space in 1939. Space didn ' t exist yet.

She removed a black felt Sharpie pen from her purse, and wrote the word 'laryngi tis' on a folded piece of paper. For the remainder of the day she wouldn ' t have to speak to anybody she didn ' t want to.

I
wonder if Howie is going to be late? No — Howie's not the late type.

Wade sat on the lock-up's sunburn t concrete stoop sift ing through the grab bag of possessions returned to him from his overnigh t captors: sunglasses a size too small so they never fell from his head — a wallet

containing four IDs (tw o real: Nevada and British Columbi a; tw o fakes: Missouri and Quebec) along with a badly pho tocopied U.S. hundr ed; a Pittsburgh Steelers Bic ligh ter (
Where did that come from?)
and the

keys to a rental Pontiac Sunfire, still in the lot of the previous evening 's bar. His clothes were more blood - splattered than not. At first the blood had been syrupy and had made his clothes turn clammy, rubbery.

Then, when Wade was asleep in his cell, the blood converted his denim pants and cott on shir t into a skin of beef jerky.

This is not a state in which one defends God ligh tly. Where's Howie?

Wade removed a smoo th rock he'd found a decade before while hitchhiking on a Kansas freeway — his

good luck charm; three minu tes after he'd found it he was picked up by the disenchanted wife of a major league baseball player, who went on to be his meal ticket for the latter years of his thir ties.

Honk-honk
'Hey there, bro ther-in-law! '

Howie called from across the lot where he'd parked his orange VW microbus beside a chain-link fence and a flowering pink oleander hedge.

Christ. Howie's going to be chipper. I hate chipper.
Wade walked toward him. 'Yeah, hi, Howie. Get me out of this dump.'

'Righ t, pardner. Hey, I see a bit of mess on your shir t.'

'Blood, Howie. It 's harmless. And it 's not mine — it 's from the meathead who hassled me last nigh t.' Inside the vehicle, hot like a bakery, Howie turned on the igni tion. The air-condi tioning blasted on full,

shoo ting a freezing moldy fist into the car interior. Wade slapped the butt on down. 'Christ, Howie, I don ' t want to get Legionn aire's disease from your blood y
van.'

'Just trying to help,
mon frère, mon frère.
Nothing lurking in the vents of this baby.'

'Also, Howie, I'm not going to walk into some swank hotel looking like a tampon. I have to clean up first. Drive me to the Brunswicks' place.' Howie was staying with the family of Sarah's Mission Commander,

Gordon Brunswick.

'I can wash up there and you can lend me some clothes.'

Howie was taken aback. 'The Brunswicks' — what? Sarah didn ' t say anything abou t driving you to the Brunswicks.'

'You have a probl em?'

'Problem? No. Not at all.' Howie looked panged.

'Howie, just take me there, I'll shower, I'll borro w some clothes, then you can drop me off at my car. You have to pick up my mother at 9:30.'

'No need to be testy, Wade.'

'Have you ever spent a nigh t in jail, Howie?'

Howie seemed almost flattered to be asked this. 'Well, I can' t say that I . . .'

'Drive,
Howie.'

They drove for fifteen minu tes and arrived at the subdivision home of the Brunswick family — an

astronaut clan as different from the Drummond family as heaven is from earth. Childr en in NASA T-shir ts were on the fron t lawn looking at the moon, visible in the daytime, through a telescope. The fron t door had a windo w shaped like a crescent moon. Behind the door stood Alanna Brunswick, wife of Mission

Commander Gordon Brunswick, in a
Star Trek
T-shir t and holding a platter of Tollhou se cookies, smiling like a perfume coun ter saleswoman.

The doorb ell was still playing the
Close Encounters
theme song as she spoke, with a trace of tigh tly concealed surpri se in her voice: 'Howie, this must be your . . . bro ther-in-law, Wade.'

'In the flesh.'

Wade sensed he'd been much discussed. 'Hi. I'm just going to wash up before I head to the Peabody. Upstairs?'

Alanna's face betrayed deep misgivings, but Wade knew he had a fifteen-second windo w during which she would be immobili zed by his looks, sligh tly enhanced by rakish nigh t-in-jail stubble. He turned on the smile
(add another five seconds),
then bound ed up the stairs.

'Uh — you just make yourself at home,' she shou ted after him. 'Yeah, thanks. Howie, find me some duds, okay?'

'Okey dokey.'

Wade saw pho tos of planes and jets. Training certificates. Black and white 1960s celebri ty pilo t pho tos. Saturn 5 rocket models — even the ceiling was peppered with glo w-in-the-dark stars, a yello w margarine color in the dayligh t. Wade could understand why Howie would want to stay here instead of a hotel.

These people
lived
for the progr am; the Drummond family, comparatively, treated Sarah's immin ent fligh t like a display at a local science fair.

He located the bathroom and stripped. His clothing was a write-off; even his shoes were leathery with blood . He wrapped up the garments as best he could and squished them into the trashcan. Once in the shower, yesterday's crud rinsed off and he began to feel new again. Howie stuck his arm through the door and placed some clothes on the coun ter, and through the water and steam, Wade heard him say, 'Try these on. Take your time.'

Wade toweled dry and inspected the clothing, clownishly small. Only the socks fit.
What the
—
?
Then Wade remembered Sarah explaining that astronauts are always tiny, chosen for their lack of body mass; there's no such thing as a beefy astronaut.
Trust Howie not to loan me some of his own clothes. Weasel
With the towel wrapped around his waist, he stepped into the hallway, the carpet thick and bouncy. He tried various doors.
Gotta find some better adult clothing. What's that — kids' room? No. Over there?