A Field Guide to the North American Family Read online

  Without Mythology, what would protect the Family from the elements? Experiments designed to answer this question have so far proved disastrous.

  SEE ALSO:

  •INNOCENCE •YOUTH

  NATURE VS. NURTURE

  ❧

  It’s tough to say in retrospect whether it was the divorce that made him reckless. He can remember tightrope-walking the third-story beams of a house under construction in the neighborhood years ago. He can remember Lacey yelling at him to come down, and Lying Tommy standing yards behind her, just watching, as though waiting for him to fall. Maybe it was genetic, although if anyone was a by-the-book player it was his dad. But maybe he got it from his mom. Maybe the divorce had just drawn out his latent tendencies in that direction, sent him spinning out past the point of acceptable risk. But then there was Lacey. So maybe it was when he got mugged that time at the LIRR station. There’s something liberating about realizing that you can stare into the black hole of a handgun and still feel nothing. Because it was only afterward that he began to court disaster in earnest. That he began to turn off the headlights in the middle of the highway. That he graduated from bombing municipal walls around the county to sneaking into city trainyards in the dead of night. It was easy, with his mom and dad not talking. You just told each parent you were with the other. It was almost like freedom, except that nothing gave him pleasure anymore, except the trains. So maybe it was that, the incident with the gun. Whatever the case, he doesn’t feel fearless anymore. Because it’s not death you ultimately have to worry about. It’s pain.

  The exact character of this unlikely hybrid, Nature vs. Nurture, has puzzled Family-watchers for years.

  SEE ALSO:

  •ADOLESCENCE •ANGST •COMMITMENT•DIVORCE •FREEDOM •HABITS, BAD•HEIRLOOM •QUESTIONS, NAGGING •REBELLION•RESIGNATION •SECRET •TENDERNESS •YOUTH

  OPTIMISM

  ❧

  Marnie pads barefoot into a cold kitchen and lights the burner underneath some water. Her first few attempts have been disasters: whites dissolving, little wisps of yolk reaching out for the walls of the pot. Frank’s away on a golfing junket, and last night, on the phone, she almost gave in and told him. His teaspoon of vinegar hasn’t helped. This is the way we talk when he’s on the road, she thinks. I confess my failings, and he gets to tell me everything I’m missing, everything I’m doing wrong. She cracks the egg into a small bowl, careful not to break the yolk. Even two years later, he won’t talk about it. The burner’s blue crown hums in the predawn dim. She reaches for a wooden spoon. Bubbles rise like loosed balloons toward the surface as she stirs. A pang in her abdomen. When Frank used that word, centripetal, it made her think at first of her father’s desk chair, the leather one that revolved on casters. As a little girl, on trips to his office downtown, she had climbed into it with her dolls. She had spun around and around, her shoe scuffing the wall. The G-force made her feel like an astronaut. But hadn’t it pulled her outward, until she felt she would, at any second, fly off? “Trust me,” Frank said. He calmly explained that that had been an illusion. It was just centripetal force, he said, combining with the first law of motion to create the feeling you were being pulled away from the center. Now Marnie tips the egg into the centrifuge of water. She takes a breath. She reaches beneath her nightgown and places a hand on the taut space beneath her navel, where their first child, finally, is growing. “Trust me,” he said. Centripetal literally means center-seeking. She is slightly disappointed to discover that he’s right. The center does hold. In the midst of all that boiling water, the egg’s innards spin like a tiny, soft sun. So why does her universe feel smaller today? It might have been their little boy’s birthday, had she carried him to term. Blue balloons. You weren’t supposed to tell anyone until three months in. She had broken that rule then, but now she knows better. Another month will pass before she’ll tell Frank. She wants to be certain. But she already has a name picked out. Funny, she thinks (though he undoubtedly would have reminded her that funny wasn’t what she meant, exactly). Here I’ve been telling myself everything was falling apart, when I just didn’t realize what I was falling toward was the center.

  Optimism lives so long as to seem, to the human observer, practically immortal—but unlike that of other creatures, the development of Optimism proceeds in reverse. That is, Optimism is enormous at birth, and gradually shrinks to its adult size.

  SEE ALSO:

  •ADULTHOOD •CONSENSUS •DEPRESSION•FRIEND OF THE FAMILY •HIERARCHY •HOME•IRONY •MATERIAL •SECURITY

  PARTINGS (AMICABLE AND ACRIMONIOUS)

  ❧

  The look on his face, his beautiful face that beneath the bandages was now yellow, green, and gray, a raw scar. The high-pitched sound that came from his mouth when she entered his field of vision. The closing of his eyes, the tightening of the mouth. The nurse had to give him another shot of Demerol so that he would relax his face. This was how any mother would feel. She should never have encouraged the graffiti. Inside, she was collapsing, like a sail split from top to bottom, but she told herself she couldn’t show weakness. Instead she placed her hand on top of his bandaged head, with no more weight than a thought. She said, “Oh, honey.” She said, “I love you. I’m here. I love you.” She willed him to hear it, to take to heart these words, a depth of feeling she hadn’t experienced since his birth. She hadn’t noticed Jack come in, and jumped a little when she felt his arm around her shoulder. She didn’t open her eyes or cease her murmuring or shake him off. She could feel his chest rising and falling against her upper arm, and she leaned her head against it, lightly, willing to believe, for a moment at least, that this was what it was there for.

  Locked in Sibling Rivalry, the two subspecies of Parting are unable to coexist peacefully. However, despite the characteristics that distinguish the two, each is capable of mutating into the other over time.

  SEE ALSO:

  •DIVORCE •FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY •GRIEF•LOVE •MATERNAL INSTINCT •PRIVACY•SECURITY •TRADITION

  PHASE

  ❧

  With their keen senses, Youth are more apt to recognize that they have encountered a wild Phase than are adults.

  SEE ALSO:

  •BOREDOM •FREEDOM •INNOCENCE•RECONCILIATION •SIBLING RIVALRY

  PRIVACY

  ❧

  When the nurse came in at the end of her shift to change the bedpan and replace the IV bags, the girl had vanished like a night spirit, leaving behind only a chair pulled close to the bed, a welter of crumpled tissues, and an unfinished crossword puzzle. The patient, for his part, was still asleep. The hand on top of the blanket was unburned, a child’s hand. She turned it gingerly over to check that the needle was secure and was surprised to find, inked on the palm, a messy blue heart, the Valentine’s kind. The next afternoon, during his sponge bath, she would be careful to avoid this area, as it seemed to mean something to the patient.

  Experts disagree about whether the fragile Privacy is vanishing from the landscape or merely evolving into a hardier species.

  SEE ALSO:

  •COMMITMENT •FIDELITY •GRAVITY•GRIEF •HABITS, GOOD •INTIMACY•LOVE •MATURITY •TENDERNESS

  PROVIDENCE

  ❧

  That winter, shortly before the string of break-ins in the big shoreside houses came to its abrupt end, The Honorable Robert Perlmutter was awakened from a nap on the leather couch in his study by more barking and the creak of the kitchen doors below. Had he been more alert, he might not have shouted “Hello?” but in his half-waking state some part of him was convinced it must have been one of the neighbor boys returning home from school. Hearing nothing else, he rose. His arthritis spiked as he crossed the room to the window. He remembered that his own boys were grown, and gone, and that his only daughter still lay where he’d said goodbye to her twenty-eight years earlier, in a graveyard under the flight paths to LaGuardia. He remembered that one of the neighbor boys was in intensive care. He remembered the crime report
in the paper. And he was surprised when he saw the flash of pale neck on the figure sprinting toward his hedge. Justice was blind and so forth, but he’d just assumed that the prowler would be a Negro.

  Skeptics have long dismissed Providence as a figment of Mythology, and yet sightings—always in the wilderness, always uncorroborated—persist.

  SEE ALSO:

  •DEPRESSION •FRIEND OF THE FAMILY •GUILT•HABITS, BAD •MATERIAL •MEANING, SEARCH FOR•RECOGNITION •SECRET •WHATEVER

  QUESTIONS, NAGGING

  ❧

  Who did Elizabeth sleep with?

  What does Lacey see in that boy?

  Why “Casper”?

  Is there life after death?

  What is Jackie doing in this story?

  Why does anyone smoke cigarettes?

  The Nagging Question is a household pest that has plagued the Family throughout its history, proving impervious to radiation and other forms of Security.

  SEE ALSO:

  •COMMITMENT •DIVORCE •FREEDOM•HABITS, BAD •INFIDELITY •MATERNAL INSTINCT•RESIGNATION •VULNERABILITY

  REBELLION

  ❧

  A lark at first, squirreling through the opening where the storm fence didn’t quite reach the ground. Telling myself I only wanted to know I could do it if I wanted to, just like when I had Michelle DuPlessis flirting in the parking lot outside the gym instead of inside cheering with Lacey. I didn’t really mean for anything to happen. But then why had I cased the perimeter four times before, looking for a way in? Why had I brought my backpack and the pocketful of good caps? Why did I let her go down on me in the dark behind the windshield? No one ever tells you there’s such a thing as a sad blowjob. And the truth is it’s never enough, nothing’s ever enough, except bombing my name in wet red letters onto the side of a side-railed car, top-to-bottom burning, when everything evaporates but the hiss and the smell of paint. Everything but myself, all alone out here where the arcs of the nearest security lights don’t quite overlap.

  Rebellion, common to every habitat, aids the long-term functioning of the Family by clearing out the dead and dying.

  SEE ALSO:

  •ADOLESCENCE •COMMITMENT •FREEDOM•MIDLIFE CRISIS •NATURE VS. NURTURE •PARTINGS•RESIGNATION •TANTRUM •YOUTH

  RECOGNITION

  ❧

  Tommy had been a straight-A kid when the boy two doors down was making his way methodically through his parents’ neglected liquor cabinet, drinking the bottles down halfway and filling them back up with water. And when, in the summer after his eighth-grade year, he tried once more to ingratiate himself with the older boy, the idol of his youth, Gabriel saw right through Tommy’s stories about summer camp, about smoking weed, about eating some mushrooms once—not a lot, but enough that he thought he might have started to see visuals. It began to seem to Tommy that he, who worked harder at school and was bigger and stronger and, at least on paper, smarter, deserved some acknowledgment, and so what if he bent the truth sometimes? But poor, troubled Gabe was the older one and got the girls and the attention, which beat trophies and grades as soundly as rock beats scissors. And when their families fell apart, within a season of each other, it was Gabe who got the sympathy, and the bribes from his oblivious mom and dad: the car, for example, and the applause for how well he was taking everything. When Tommy made up a little white lie about how his late father had discovered the Supremes, people recoiled in disgust. When Gabe wanted to vandalize walls, they built him a wall to vandalize. And when he broke into a trainyard and got what he had coming, he was tragic, romantic, a victim. And if he had died that night, Tommy knew, the dead kid would still have been the winner in the great attention sweepstakes, even if the living one had nailed himself to a cross. By that point, Tommy had nearly stopped going to class, and whatever time wasn’t spent testing the locks of neighborhood backdoors and the credulity of pawnshop owners was wasted hotboxing cars in the lot behind the C-Store…as though his real life were nothing more than an attempt to catch up with his fictional one. Pot, at least, would have been something the two boys had in common, except that Gabe had already said goodbye to all that, and moved on to somewhere further out of reach.

  Recognition and Sibling Rivalry seldom share territory.

  SEE ALSO:

  •ANGST •FAMILY VALUES •FRIEND OF THE FAMILY•GUILT •HIERARCHY •MEANING, SEARCH FOR•RUMOR •SECRET •WHATEVER

  RECONCILIATION

  ❧

  Jackie’s in the waiting area with her lion, rubbing his fur, frowning to herself, when her dad appears at the end of the hall. They haven’t spoken in a week and a half. That’s not out of the ordinary these days, but bears mentioning because otherwise Jack might not feel so peculiarly moved by the sight of his daughter stroking a toy he’d picked out for her so many Christmases earlier, might not feel a fist forming in his chest. Immediately the awkwardness of seeing each other again after so long a silence evaporates. He’s never felt more like a father than he does now, striding down the corridor toward her, folding her into his body with one crooked arm, kissing the top of her head, calling her “sweetie.” “Hi, sweetie,” he says. She says her mom’s in there already.

  Reconciliation migrates to landscapes ravaged by Grief and Partings. By feeding on the carrion these predators leave behind, it encourages the regeneration of fauna.

  SEE ALSO:

  •BOREDOM •CUSTODY BATTLE •DISCRETION•LOVE •MATURITY •MORTGAGE•PHASE •TRADITION

  RESIGNATION

  ❧

  The sole source of Gabe’s charisma was that he’d never much cared what anyone thought, one way or the other. About his car, for example, the little piece-of-shit Geo they would have laughed out of the parking lot at school if they thought it would have bothered him. About his unlikely conversion to sobriety. Or about the threadbare clothes from before the divorce, which he continued to wear even after a growth spurt had put an inch between the cuffs of his pants and the tops of his shoes. But when, having stumbled onto the third rail, he felt the electricity light up his body in a flash of something as close to rapture as to pain, it occurred to him in a strange moment of detachment that, if God granted him life beyond this interminable burning, he would care a great deal about how he looked to other people.

  Thriving in climates too damp for its cousin Rebellion, Resignation is of uncertain value for the Family: neither predator nor prey, Resignation drains resources without contributing anything definite to the food chain.

  SEE ALSO:

  •ADOLESCENCE •ANGST •CHEMISTRY•DIVORCE •GRAVITY •PARTINGS•REBELLION •WHATEVER

  RUMOR

  ❧

  Supposedly Lying Tommy heard it from Sketchy Dan one afternoon behind the C-Store. For a liar, Tommy tended to take what other people said pretty much at face value. They were chasing down handfuls of Jaz-X Junior ephedrine pills with rum and Mountain Dew and waiting for a buzz to hit. School had just let out, and they were watching kids pass in and out of the smudgy glass doors through the windows of the Sketchmobile. Lying Tommy had turned old enough to drive a year ago but still didn’t have a car, I heard because his mom didn’t trust him behind the wheel. Who would have? Anyway, Tommy said sort of wistfully, hey, there goes my neighbor. And Sketchy Dan said dude, that’s the dude I saw getting his knob polished by Michelle DuPlessis outside the basketball game last week. Sounds like a freak coincidence if you ask me, but then, these things usually are.