All Families Are Psychotic

by Douglas Coupland

  She unsuspectingly caught sight of herself in a floor-length mirror by the sink and the sight 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 nightie, as if she were once again young and this image had been delivered to her from the future as a warning – If I squint 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 modified those traces of time’s passage on her face that she could.

  There. I’m not so bad after all. A man might still rob a bank for me, and men still do flirt – not too frequently – and older men perhaps – but the look in the eyes never changes.

  She dressed, and five minutes later she was a block away sitting 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 Seattle to Alaska. Outside the restaurant window the sun on the parking lot made the area seem like a science experiment. She realized she no longer cared about 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 point that speech was painful, and it hurt to exhale. Her pill buzzer buzzed; she sat up. She reached into her purse and removed a prescription bottle. She turned on the TV, and there was Sarah being interviewed on CNN. As always, her daughter looked glowingly pretty on TV, like a nun who’d never touched makeup.

  – Do you think you and children like you, born with damage caused by thalidomide, have other messages to tell the world?

  – Of course. We were the canaries in the coal mine. We were the first children born in which it was proved that chemicals from the outside world – in our case thalidomide – could severely damage the human embryo. These days, most mothers don’t smoke or drink during pregnancy. They know that the outer world can enter their babies and cause damage. But in my mother’s generation, they didn’t know this. They smoked and drank and took any number of medications without thinking twice. Now we know better, and as a species we’re smarter as a result – we’re aware of teratogens.

  – Teratogens?

  – Yes. It means ‘monster forming’. A horrible word, but then the world can be a horrible place. They’re the chemicals that cross the placenta and affect a child’s growth in utero.

  The host turned to the camera: ‘Time for a quick break. I’ve been speaking with Sarah Drummond-Fournier, a one-handed woman, and one heck of a fighter, who’ll be on Friday’s shuttle flight. We’ll be right back.’

  How on earth did I give birth to such a child? I understand nothing about her life. Nothing. And yet she’s the spitting 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 polite-but-resigned invitations to come do so when Janet popped her head into Sarah’s doorway. Invariably Janet would look down at the papers that might as well have been in Chinese. Janet would ask a few concerned questions about Sarah’s teachers, and then plead kitchen duty, beating a hasty retreat.

  She turned off the TV.

  She once cared about everything, and if she couldn’t muster genuine concern, she could easily fake it: too much rain stunting the petunias; her children’s scrapes; stick figure Africans; the plight of marine mammals. She considered herself one of the surviving members of a lost generation, the last generation raised to care about appearances or doing the right thing – to care about caring. She had been born in 1934 in Toronto, a city then much like Chicago or Rochester or Detroit – bland, methodical, thrifty and rules-playing. Her father, William Truro, managed the furniture and household appliance department of the downtown Eaton’s department store. William’s wife, Kaye, was, well … William’s wife.

  The two raised Janet and her older brother, Gerald, on $29.50 a week until 1938, when a salary decrease lowered William’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 life seemed to have been an ongoing reduction – things that had once been essential vanishing without discussion, or even worse, with too much discussion.

  Seasons changed. Sweaters became ragged, were patched up and became ragged again, and were grudgingly thrown out. A few flowers were grown in the thin band of dirt in front of the brick row house, species scavenged by Kaye for their value as dried flowers, which scrimped an extra few months’ worth of utility from them. Life seemed to be entirely about 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 kitchen 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 glimpse 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 life as a continuous 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 Florida seeing her own daughter launched into outer space? Tiny little Sarah, who was set to circle the Earth hundreds 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 ‘laryngitis’ 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.

  02

  Wade sat on the lock-up’s sunburnt concrete stoop sifting through the grab bag of possessions returned to him from his overnight captors: sunglasses a size too small so they never fell from his head – a wallet containing four IDs (two real: Nevada and British Columbia; two fakes: Missouri and Quebec) along with a badly photocopied U.S. hundred; a Pittsburgh Steelers Bic lighter (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 cotton shirt into a skin of beef jerky.

  This is not a state in which one defends God lightly.

  Where’s Howie?

  Wade removed a smooth rock he’d found a decade before while hitchhiking on a Kansas freeway – his good luck charm; three minutes 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 thirties.

  Honk-honk

  ‘Hey there, brother-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.’

  ‘Right, pardner. Hey, I see a bit of mess on your shirt.’

  ‘Blood, Howie. It’s harmless. And it’s not mine – it’s from the meathead who hassled me last night.’

  Inside the vehicle, hot like a bakery, Howie turned on the ignition. The air-conditioning blasted on full, shooting a freezing moldy fist into the car interior. Wade slapped the button down. ‘Christ, Howie, I don’t want to get Legionnaire’s disease from your bloody 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 about driving you to the Brunswicks.’

  ‘You have a problem?’

  ‘Problem? No. Not at all.’ Howie looked panged.

  ‘Howie, just take me there, I’ll shower, I’ll borrow 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 night in jail, Howie?’

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

  ‘Drive, Howie.’

  They drove for fifteen minutes and arrived at the subdivision home of the Brunswick family – an astronaut clan as different from the Drummond family as heaven is from earth. Children in NASA T-shirts were on the front lawn looking at the moon, visible in the daytime, through a telescope. The front door had a window shaped like a crescent moon. Behind the door stood Alanna Brunswick, wife of Mission Commander Gordon Brunswick, in a Star Trek T-shirt and holding a platter of Tollhouse cookies, smiling like a perfume counter saleswoman. The doorbell was still playing the Close Encounters theme song as she spoke, with a trace of tightly concealed surprise in her voice: ‘Howie, this must be your … brother-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 window during which she would be immobilized by his looks, slightly enhanced by rakish night-in-jail stubble. He turned on the smile (add another five seconds), then bounded up the stairs.

  ‘Uh – you just make yourself at home,’ she shouted after him.

  ‘Yeah, thanks. Howie, find me some duds, okay?’

  ‘Okey dokey.’

  Wade saw photos of planes and jets. Training certificates. Black and white 1960s celebrity pilot photos. Saturn 5 rocket models – even the ceiling was peppered with glow-in-the-dark stars, a yellow margarine color in the daylight. Wade could understand why Howie would want to stay here instead of a hotel. These people lived for the program; the Drummond family, comparatively, treated Sarah’s imminent flight 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 counter, 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’ rooms’ No. Over there? Den. Wait – over there – an indisputably adult bedroom. He walked into the room, bright with fluttery morning sun passing through the surrounding oaks. He turned a corner to where he supposed the cupboard might be, to find Howie and Alanna barnacled together in an embrace. They didn’t see him at first. ‘Shit. Sorry.’ Wade retreated to the bathroom.

  ‘Wade—’

  ‘The clothes are too small, Howie. I need stretchy stuff – sweats maybe. And a big T-shirt. And flip-flops for my feet.’

  ‘I can explain.’

  ‘Just find me clothes, Howie.’ Wade slammed the bathroom door. Outside there was a freighted silence, followed by the sound of shuffling feet. Wade wasn’t quite sure what to think. His breathing was underwater-like, his thinking fogged.

  There was a rap on the door: ‘Clothes for you, pardner.’

  Wade grabbed them and slammed the door.

  ‘We can talk on the way to pick up your car,’ said Howie through the door.

  Wade got dressed. He looked like a gym teacher on his day off. He opened the door and barreled down to the car. He had no interest in seeing Alanna. Howie trailed behind him.

  ‘Wade—’

  Wade looked out the window.

  ‘If you’d just let me explain, Wade. Alanna and I understand each other – the pressure of being married to—’

  Wade turned to look at him: ‘There’s always an explanation, Howie, and I wrote most of them – which in turn makes me understand all too well that there’s never an explanation. So shut the fuck up and drive.’

  Surprisingly soon they were at the bar.

  ‘That’s my car over there.’

  ‘Nice car.’

  ‘Shut the fuck up, Howie.’

  ‘I only meant to say—’

  Wade unleashed the cloud of hornets inside his head: ‘If you think for one second that I’m going to even breathe a word of this to my baby sister, you’re off your fucking rocker. Ditto Commander Brunswick. Nothing on this planet is going to fuck up their mission in even the slightest way. This is between you and me, Howie, and I have no idea where it’s going to go. In the meantime we have to sit together at this frigging banquet tonight. You piss me off in any way, and I’ll make your life a goddamn living hell for as long as I breathe.’

  ‘No need to be nasty.’

  Wade stepped out of the van, exhaling his disgust. ‘You just don’t understand, do you, you shitty little space martyr?’ He slammed the door.

  03

  In 1970, Sarah attended a summer science camp a hundred miles east of Vancouver, in a gently mountainous spot called Cultus Lake, a very lake-y looking lake, then in the high season of mosquitoes, stinging nettle and drunks manning noisy recreational crafts. Sarah had been looking forward to the camp, and Janet, who’d found it for her, was very pleased indeed, even though Ted shanghaied the event. He’d organized the preparation of supplies, the packing, bought numerous books on the wilds of British Columbia, and then drove Sarah out to the camp himself, rather than allowing her to take the minibus that picked up her fellow campers.

  What the Drummond family, Sarah included, hadn’t expected was that Sarah would become profoundly and violently homesick at the camp, paralyzed with fear, vomiting out in the reeds and the irises beside the bunkhouse, immobilized and unable to eat or sleep. The family might not have found out about the homesickness had Sarah not pried her way into the owner’s private area and made a tearful, pleading long-distance call home around dinnertime, a call Ted answered and which Wade eavesdropped on from the den extension.

  ‘Please, Daddy, I’m so homesick here I think I’m going to die. I can’t eat or sleep or concentrate or anything. I want to come home so badly.’

  ‘Hey, Sunshine, camp is good for you. You’ll meet smart n
ew kids – breathe fresh air – use that big brain of yours.’

  ‘Daddy, I don’t want any of that. I just want to be there in the kitchen with all of you. I feel so far away. I feel so … sick.’

  Wade could hear his mother standing beside his father, wondering aloud what was happening. ‘Ted? What’s wrong? Tell me.’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong, Jan. Sarah’s just becoming used to camp life.’

  ‘I’m not getting used to camp life, Daddy. I want to die. I don’t want to be here. I want to come home.’ More tears.

  ‘Ted,’ said Janet, ‘let me speak to her.’

  ‘Jan, calm down. She’s fine. Why should she hate camp? I loved camp when I was a kid.’

  ‘I’m not fine, Daddy.’

  ‘You’re going to love camp, sweetheart, I wouldn’t say that if I didn’t believe it. Camp was the best experience of my life.’

  There was a clicking on the other end of the line; a woman’s voice came on: ‘Hello? Hello? Young lady, who have you been calling?’ On the line was the camp’s director, a Mrs. Wallace.

  Ted said, ‘I’m sorry Sarah interrupted your dinner, Mrs. Wallace. This isn’t her typical behavior.’

  In the background, Sarah was wailing.

  ‘Some campers get homesick, Mr. Drummond. This is natural. Your Sarah will be fine.’

  Sarah’s crying in the background intensified. Ted signed off, yet again apologizing for his daughter’s out-of-character behavior. Wade innocently sashayed into the kitchen, where Janet said, ‘You have to go fetch her, Ted. She can barely even function, let alone learn about science. It’s cruel.’

  ‘It’s not. You’re overreacting. All kids love camp. She just needs to get used to it. She’ll love it there. Mrs. Wallace told me that tomorrow they’re studying jet propulsion and having Kentucky Fried Chicken for dinner.’

  ‘I don’t feel good about this, Ted.’

  ‘Stop mollycoddling her. She’s a trouper.’

  The next morning, Wade woke up early and sneaked out of the house. Such an absence was in no way unusual and attracted no attention. He took the bus to his bank and withdrew his savings, about $340.00, and hired a taxi, his first, by the stand near the bus loop’s Mexican fast-food place. The cab driver was a Crisco-complexioned fortysomething who Wade could tell, even at his early age, was well along life’s downward slope. When Wade told him he wanted to go to Cultus Lake and back, the driver made him pony up the money; Wade’s only worry was that the driver would be talkative, which proved not to be the case. After the driver blurted out, ‘I could use a drive in the country,’ he was silent the rest of the way.