THE 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.
• • •
MOM 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.
Our first house was outside of town—a large farmhouse with twenty acres of dogwood, sumac, goldenrod, and poison ivy; with frogs and fireflies and a feral cat with moon-colored eyes. I don’t remember the house so well as the barn, and remember the barn less than the creek, and the creek less than an apple tree my brother and sister would climb to get into or out of their bedrooms. I couldn’t climb up, because I couldn’t reach the first branch from the bottom, so about the time I turned four, I went upstairs and climbed down the tree instead. I broke my collarbone and you could have killed yourself, my mother said, which would have been true if I’d fallen from the upstairs. But I made it almost the whole way down, which no one seemed to notice. What have you learned? my father asked, and I didn’t have the words then, but, in retrospect, the lesson seemed to be that what you accomplish will never matter so much as where you fail.
About this same time, I made up a friend for myself. I gave her the half of my name I wasn’t using, the Mary part, and various bits of my personality I also didn’t immediately need. We spent a lot of time together, Mary and I, until the day I went off to school and Mother told me Mary couldn’t go. This was alarming. I felt I was being told I mustn’t be myself at school, not my whole self.
Fair warning, as it turned out—kindergarten is all about learning which parts of you are welcome at school and which are not. In kindergarten, to give you one example out of many, you are expected to spend much, much more of the day being quiet than talking, even if what you have to say is more interesting to everyone than anything your teacher is saying.
“Mary can stay here with me,” my mother offered.
Even more alarming and unexpectedly cunning of Mary. My mother didn’t like Mary much and that not-liking was a critical component of Mary’s appeal. Suddenly I saw that Mom’s opinion of Mary could improve, that it could all end with Mom liking Mary better than me. So Mary spent the time when I was at school sleeping in a culvert by our house, charming no one, until one day she simply didn’t come home and, in the family tradition, was never spoken of again.
We left that farmhouse the summer after I turned five. Eventually the town swept over it, carried it away in a tide of development so it’s all culs-de-sac now, with new houses and no fields or barns or orchards. Long before that, we were living in a saltbox by the university, ostensibly so that my father could walk to work. That’s the house I think of when I think of home, though for my brother it’s the earlier one; he pitched a fit when we moved.
The saltbox had a steep roof I was not allowed up on, a small backyard, and a shortage of extra rooms. My bedroom was a girly pink with gingham curtains that came from Sears until one day Grandpa Joe, my father’s father, painted it blue while I was at school, without even asking. When your room’s pink, you don’t sleep a wink. When your room’s blue, you sleep the night through, he told me when I protested, apparently under the misapprehension that I could be silenced with rhyme.
And now we were in this third house, all stone floors, high windows, recessed lights, and glass cabinets—an airy, geometric minimalism, with no bright colors, only oatmeal, sand, and ivory. And still, three years after the move, oddly bare, as if no one planned to be here long.
I recognized my rocks, but not the dresser beneath them, nor the bedspread, which was a quilted velvet-gray, nor the painting on the wall—something murky in blues and black—lilies and swans, or maybe seaweed and fish, or maybe planets and comets. The geodes did not look as if they belonged here and I wondered if they’d been brought out for my visit and would be boxed up as soon as I left. I had a momentary suspicion that the whole thing was an intricate charade. When I left, my parents would go back to their real house, the one with no room for me in it.
Mom sat on the bed and I put down my pencil. Surely there was preliminary, throat-clearing conversation, but I don’t remember. Probably, “It hurts your father when you don’t talk to him. You think he doesn’t notice, but he does.” This is a holiday classic—like It’s a Wonderful Life, we rarely get through the season without it.
Eventually she got to her point. “Dad and I have been talking about my old journals,” she said, “and what I ought to do with them. I still feel they’re sort of private, but your father thinks they should go to a library. Maybe one of those collections that can’t be opened until fifty years after your death, though I hear that libraries don’t really like that. Maybe we could make an exception for family.”
I’d been taken by surprise. My mother was almost, but not quite, talking about things we absolutely, resolutely did not talk about. The past. Heart clicking loudly, I answered by rote. “You should do whatever you want, Mom,” I said. “What Dad wants isn’t relevant.”
She gave me a quick, unhappy look. “I’m not asking for your advice, dear. I’ve decided to give them to you. Your dad is probably right that some library would take them, though I think he remembers them as more scientific than they are.
“Anyway. The choice is yours. Maybe you don’t want them. Maybe you’re still not ready. Toss them if you like, make paper hats. I promise never to ask.”
I struggled to say something to her, something that would acknowledge the gesture without opening the subject. Even now, even with years of forewarning, I can’t think just how I might have done that. I hope I said something graceful, something generous, but it doesn’t seem likely.
What I remember next is my father joining us in the guest room with a present, a fortune he’d gotten in a cookie months ago and saved in his wallet, because he said it was obviously for me. Don’t forget, you are always on our minds.
There are moments when history and memory seem like a mist, as if what really happened matters less than what should have happened. The mist lifts and suddenly there we are, my good parents and their good children, their grateful children who phone for no reason but to talk, say their good-nights with a kiss, and look forward to home on the holidays. I see how, in a family like mine, love doesn’t have to be earned and it can’t be lost. Just for a moment, I see us that way; I see us all. Restored and repaired. Reunited. Refulgent.