A Field Guide to the North American Family Read online

  Rumor, a resilient parasite, feeds on the Secret until its host is destroyed. In agricultural areas, Discretion is sometimes employed as a check on the Rumor population.

  SEE ALSO:

  •FIDELITY •GRIEF •GUILT•INFIDELITY •REBELLION •RECOGNITION•TANTRUM

  SACRIFICE

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  Jack found it one day among the ailing tomato plants, probably as long as a man’s arm…probably someone’s pet, escaped or abandoned. It had hollowed out a hole several feet deep beneath the groundcover gone wild at the end of the backyard. Strangely, he didn’t find himself repulsed. He kneeled, transfixed by the jade-colored body breathing slowly beneath the green. Later, he investigated on the Internet. Uromastyx aegyptus. It got to where, on sunny days when he sat on the back porch drinking domestic beer and pondering the wreck his life had become, the lizard would come near enough to be touched. It would dart away if he moved to hold it, but somehow just touching the ridge along its spine was enough. The lizard’s little claws were oddly like human hands. Winter came, and the pallor of the belly began to spread across the jade-green body. Knowing the lizard wouldn’t make it through December, he called animal control. A gloved arm reached into the hole and pulled the desperately scrabbling Uromastyx out. He thought of Gabriel, of the delivery room. He found himself holding the lizard, finally, making awkward little talk with the woman from animal control. And he found himself sobbing when the truck pulled away. He wasn’t quite sure why. It was only a lizard, after all.

  In its rare appearances, Sacrifice may dazzle observers with the delicacy and beauty of its coloration.

  SEE ALSO:

  •COMMITMENT •DISCRETION •HOME•LOVE •MIDLIFE CRISIS •MORTGAGE•OPTIMISM •RESIGNATION

  SECRET

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  Lacey’s was that she knew. Not immediately, but well before Tommy came to her with the story he’d heard from a, quote, reliable source. She knew as soon as she said it was a lie that it wasn’t. Moreover, she knew why Gabe did it, and that she still wouldn’t let him go. She kept it hidden, smothered the grenade with her body until the night he himself confessed, half undressed on the edge of her bed with its pink dust-ruffle, with its canopy. “I know,” she told him. That, more than anything, she knows now, is what sent him running off that night, when he would end up in the hospital.

  Secrets breed rapidly. In concentration, they are the host organisms for Rumor.

  SEE ALSO:

  •ANGST •GRAVITY •NATURE VS. NURTURE•PRIVACY •REBELLION •TENDERNESS

  SECURITY

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  In light of all that’s happened to these poor folks in little over a year, you have to be feeling pretty good looking around the dinner table at your own loved ones. Divorce and estrangement have never entered your home, nor has the misery of a prolonged hospitalization. And if death has touched you, well, you’ve all moved on. You can sit here in the dimmerswitch quiet long after the last sun has fled from the windows and enjoy a meal together, just the three of you. You can gaze on their faces, peaceably chewing, free from all but minor blemishes. Your son has slimmed down, you notice, and your daughter still looks healthy despite flaking on her cheerleading. And if their eyes are a little dark, it’s because they worry, too, about the misfortune that can visit good people. After all, you’ve raised them right, cultivated in them the compassion so missing from everything these days. Or so you think, until your son opens his mouth.

  Security is prized by breeders for its handsome coat and protective disposition. When confined to small spaces, however, Security has been known to turn on its master.

  SEE ALSO:

  •CONSENSUS •DEPRESSION •HOLIDAY•IRONY •MYTHOLOGY •OPTIMISM•TANTRUM •UNCERTAINTY

  SIBLING RIVALRY

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  Moms say they’re supposed to take care of you, but this big brother is just not like that. He’s mean. Like when I was in the living room and my mom was listening to her headphones and then my dad asked her if she had something she wanted to tell him and all of a sudden they were fighting, I went to the basement where my brother was. I was in second grade and he was in eleventh but he said go away. The lights were off. He was just sitting there. I could just hear his voice over the music, like a monster’s in a cave. “I said go away,” he said. So I went up to my room to say prayers, but I still remember that night, so anytime anybody tells me how lucky I am to have a big brother, I just think to myself no way. I’m the only one who cares about me. Well, and Alphonse, too, if you count Alphonse.

  The Sibling Rivalry hunts in groups of two or more. With its tremendous longevity, it may hibernate for years between periods of activity, though like species on other continents, this Rivalry tends to lose some of its vitality with age.

  SEE ALSO:

  •ANGST •BOREDOM •DIVORCE•ENTERTAINMENT •MATURITY •PHASE•RECONCILIATION •YOUTH

  TANTRUM

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  In an obscure way, I knew, it was my fault. If I hadn’t told Lacey what I heard about Gabe, they wouldn’t have fought. If they hadn’t fought, he wouldn’t have run out of her room, past my room, where I had been lying high with the lights off, trying to pretend not to exist. It was as though all of that garbage I had told that shrink after my dad died had suddenly and strangely come true. Of course, awareness didn’t dawn on me immediately. It waited until the night just before New Year’s when I made my mom cry by telling her that if she kept trying to ply us with turkey, to stuff us with ham, to silence us with roast beef, we would all end up like my dad. Walking through the frozen streets of the subdivision after that, I knew that the guilt was going to eat me alive, and from the inside. I knew, all of a sudden, that it would never stop as long as I stayed there, on the island where I’d invented my destiny.

  An offshoot of the Rebellion phylum, Tantrum is often kept as a toy breed and has difficulty sustaining itself in the wild.

  SEE ALSO:

  •DEPRESSION •FIDELITY •FRIEND OF THE FAMILY•NATURE VS. NURTURE •RECOGNITION •RUMOR•WHATEVER

  TENDERNESS

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  They went to the museum that year mainly for the pleasure to be had coming out of the museum, when the world would return for a few minutes to what it was for the kids running up and down the steps: line and color, yellow spattering the oak branches even in winter, the lurid red of a subway globe thrust like a lollipop into the spittle-pale sky. Later they’d cross the park to catch a B or C down to Penn Station, and once, at some point somewhere in the middle where the buildings all but disappeared, he showed her how to see like an impressionist. “You’ve got to squint, Lacey,” he said. “No, like this.” There was a point (Frank insisted) at which the green would pop out. Are you there? Do you see it? Because having a daughter had made him feel for a while like it was possible to be restored, to see the world without the edges he’d grown accustomed to imagining were there. Because he knew they both needed to believe in restoration, in the days when they still went to museums.

  The wild Tenderness is less resilient than Love; without meaningful intervention, it will likely be extinct by the year 2030.

  SEE ALSO:

  •COMMITMENT •GRAVITY •INTIMACY•MIDLIFE CRISIS •PRIVACY •RECONCILIATION

  TRADITION

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  Every year when the kids were small we allowed them to open one gift on Christmas Eve. I’d almost forgotten, until Jack stirred from his seat by the door and announced he’d be right back. He always was a sentimentalist—it was his idea that Gabe might like one of the frosted plastic Christmas trees they sold at the Walgreens across the highway; it was his string of colored lights waxing and waning in the sterile glass of the window. While Jackie continued to half-watch TV and half-watch her sleeping brother, I went to the window to follow Jack’s progress across the parking lot. From the fourth floor, the grid of arc lights looked like netted pearls. Each time the Christmas tree dimmed, I could see the winter’s first snow drifted around the curbs, clutter
ed with rocks and twigs but still faintly aglow. I could see the flicker of the highway through the barricade of trees, and beyond, the violet horizon, the lonely distant glimmer of an airplane climbing toward the clouds, a long-distance liner bound for Europe or California. When he reappeared in the doorway, he was holding the star. It had been his mother’s before it had passed to us. Now for the last time it would top the family tree. Then it would pass to our son, if he lived to have a family of his own.

  It is common to find Traditions of many different shapes and sizes coexisting in a single habitat.

  SEE ALSO:

  •HOLIDAY •MIDLIFE CRISIS •MOMENT OF CLARITY•PHASE •RECONCILIATION •YOUTH

  UNCERTAINTY

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  The carpet of the upstairs hallway is ghostly silent beneath my shoes, as if that were its purpose, not to make noise. Or maybe I’m still stoned and can’t hear the fall of my own feet over the blah blah blah spilling from the TV in the kitchen, the barking dog next door. Behind the third door on the left is the bedroom where Gabe either is or isn’t fucking my sister. I picture him giving it to her blankly, her head lolling back on the pillows. I picture Michelle DuPlessis with his dick in her mouth. I picture putting a pistol to his temple and saying, lie to someone now, motherfucker. The track lighting here has been waiting all its life to be this empty, this clinical, this distant. Lacey’s room is quiet. Maybe they’re sleeping. Maybe Gabe’s not even here. Maybe she’s not either; maybe the room is empty, and then what will I do with what I found out today? Will my big fat mouth stay shut? I have only to open the door to find out.

  The single most populous species on the North American continent, Uncertainty roams restlessly across the land, but in search of what, we cannot say.

  SEE ALSO:

  •DEPRESSION •FRIEND OF THE FAMILY •INFIDELITY•MEANING, SEARCH FOR •REBELLION •SECRET•TANTRUM

  VULNERABILITY

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  Though Jackie and her father had gone to see The Lion King on Broadway and Gabe was sleeping over at a friend’s house, Elizabeth hadn’t bothered to draw the blinds across the big sliding door at the back of the living room. The fluorescent light from the kitchen doorway made a white smear on the glass, beyond which everything was black rain. As she stood there, she imagined a murderer, a rapist staring back at her from the shadows of the backyard. She tried to tell herself she wouldn’t care, that it didn’t matter what happened. Still, she jumped a little when the doorbell rang.

  WHATEVER

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  Last I heard, the Harrison boy next door was headed toward the expressway in a blue subcompact sedan. This was around the time the Hungate boy’s little Geo disappeared from their driveway. (That eyesore graffiti next to their pool should have disappeared with it.) My Tiffany was the only witness to what happened to the Geo on the day it vanished, but what I heard was, the Harrison boy took it. There were a couple scenarios circulating at last month’s Friends of the Library meeting, when Marnie Harrison didn’t show up: first, that her son stole that car as some parting shot at the one in the ICU, whom he’d always felt mistreated by. Second, that he went to visit his friend at the hospital and confessed that he’d been the one to tell the girl the truth, and that the Hungate boy, no doubt heavily drugged, gave the Harrison one the car, after which the little turkey fled toward the city or points west, where for all I know he still is today.

  This peculiar breed combines characteristics of Irony and Resignation in a more compact frame. Impact studies on Whatever have yet to be undertaken.

  SEE ALSO:

  •ANGST •DEPRESSION •FIDELITY•FREEDOM •GUILT •MATERIAL•MATURITY •RECOGNITION

  YOUTH

  ❧

  If you’re listening, please make my brother get better. Whatever he did to deserve this, I bet it wasn’t on purpose, and if you make him better I promise to go to church every Sunday from now on. Please take care of my mom and dad. Even if they’re not in love anymore, if you would at least make them not mad at each other I will try to be better about visiting Dad. And Lacey has been really nice to my brother, nicer than I could be because it’s hard for me to be nice and mad at the same time, so if you would make sure that something good happens to her then I will try to get all A’s and B’s on every report card left this year, which is only three but still, you’ve seen the other ones, you know. And look out for her family, while you’re at it, or her mom and Tommy anyway—I don’t know what happens to dead people. And everyone in our neighborhood and their pets. And all of the fish in the Sound. And all of Long Island and New York. And plus the kids in the Middle East on the news, and in Africa (the grown-ups, too). And everyone in hospitals all over the world, because, you might as well know, hospitals suck and smell bad. And everyone who lives where there’s war or no money. And everyone who ever got hurt. Actually I guess you might as well bless all of the people, and the plants and animals, and Alphonse and all of the imaginary creatures and if there is life on Mars then the Martians, too. You keep your end of the deal, and I promise I will do my very best to be good at all times and also to make my bed every day (except when I forget), Creator Redeemer Sustainer Amen.

  Youth in full flight is a once-in-a-lifetime sighting; one can only hope rumors of its extinction are untrue.

  SEE ALSO:

  •HOLIDAY •INNOCENCE •LOVE •MYTHOLOGY•NATURE VS. NURTURE •SIBLING RIVALRY•TRADITION

  ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHERS

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  Jordan Alport (“Mythology”) is an American director working in commercials, short films, and documentaries. www.thecolormachine.com/​jordan-alport.

  Timothy Briner (“Secret”), born in 1981, is an American photographer living in Brooklyn, New York. He is a member of the photography collective Piece of Cake. www.timothybriner.com.

  Jessica Bruah (“Grief”) grew up in Illinois and currently resides in Queens, New York. She received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2009. www.jessicabruah.com.

  Kara Canal (“Divorce”) is an artist and educator living in Brooklyn. www.openstudiobrooklyn.com.

  Sandy Carson (“Meaning, Search for”) is a Scottish-born photographer and professional cyclist based in Austin, Texas. He has exhibited nationally and internationally and has published the monographs Paradise Has Relocated (2010) and We Were There (2016). His work has been published in The New York Times, Aperture, The Guardian, Oxford American, and Juxtapoz. www.sandycarson.com.

  Alana Celii (“Uncertainty,” “Youth”) is a photo editor and photographer living in Brooklyn. She graduated in 2009 from Parsons School of Design, and has exhibited her work in the United States and abroad. www.alanacelii.com.

  Janice Clark (“Hierarchy”), author of the novel The Rathbones, is a writer and designer living in Chicago.

  Jason Curtis (“Intimacy”) is an art director and photographer who resides in Portland, Oregon, after spending much of his life in New York City. He holds a degree in photography from the Pratt Institute. www.jasoncurtis.net.

  John Paul Davis (“Reconciliation”) is a poet, musician, designer, and programmer living in New York City. You can find out more about him, including publications and samples of his work, at johnpauldavis.org.

  Chris Eichler (“Discretion,” “Gravity,” “Home,” “Maturity,” “Mortgage,” “Privacy,” “Security”) has been photographing for more than fifteen years and has had documentary and fine-art work featured in a number of periodicals and galleries. www.chriseichler.com.

  Amy Elkins (“Partings [Amicable and Acrimonious]”) was born in New Orleans in 1979 and is now based in Greater Los Angeles. She received her BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts, has published widely, and has had work exhibited at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; and the Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, among other museums. Her awards include a Light Work residency, the Aperture Portfolio Prize, the Villa Waldberta International Artist residency in Munich, and a Peter S. Reed Foundation G
rant. www.amyelkins.com.

  Jason Falchook (“Irony”) is a Brooklyn-based photographer and a graduate of the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design. His photographs examine how we organize, live with, and experience the built environment. His work is in the permanent collections of the National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. Department of State, as well as in numerous private collections. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, including in group exhibitions at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Katonah Museum of Art, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. www.jasonfalchook.com.