A Field Guide to the North American Family

by Garth Risk Hallberg

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2007, 2011, 2017 by Garth Risk Hallberg

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in slightly different form by Mark Batty Publisher, New York, in 2007 and 2011.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hallberg, Garth Risk, author.

  Title: A field guide to the North American family : concerning chiefly the Hungates and Harrisons, with accounts of their habits, nesting, dispersion, etc., and full description of the plumage of both adult and young, within a taxonomic survey of several aspects of domestic life / by Garth Risk Hallberg ; with sixty-three illustrations done by various artists.

  Description: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016055642 (print) | LCCN 2017001844 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101874950 (softcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781101874967 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Surburban life—Fiction. | Families—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | Experimental fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3608.A54827 F54 2017 (print) | LCC PS3608.A54827 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov.2016055642

  The author is grateful to Buzz Poole, Christopher D. Salyers, Cassandra J. Pappas, Oliver Munday, and all the artists who generously contributed their time and talents—and especially to Sean Peterson.

  Cover design and endpaper art by Oliver Munday

  Ebook ISBN 9781101874967

  v4.1

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Garth Risk Hallberg

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Two Representative Families

  How to Use This Book

  Adolescence

  Adulthood

  Angst

  Boredom

  Chemistry

  Commitment

  Consensus

  Custody Battle

  Depression

  Discretion

  Divorce

  Entertainment

  Family Values

  Fidelity

  Fiscal Responsibility

  Freedom

  Friend of The Family

  Gravity

  Grief

  Guilt

  Habits, Bad

  Habits, Good

  Heirloom

  Hierarchy

  Holiday

  Home

  Infidelity

  Innocence

  Integrity

  Intimacy

  Irony

  Love

  Material

  Maternal Instinct

  Maturity

  Meaning, Search For

  Midlife Crisis

  Moment of Clarity

  Mortgage

  Mythology

  Nature vs. Nurture

  Optimism

  Partings (Amicable and Acrimonious)

  Phase

  Privacy

  Providence

  Questions, Nagging

  Rebellion

  Recognition

  Reconciliation

  Resignation

  Rumor

  Sacrifice

  Secret

  Security

  Sibling Rivalry

  Tantrum

  Tenderness

  Tradition

  Uncertainty

  Vulnerability

  Whatever

  Youth

  About the Photographers

  A Note About the Author

  “A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point.”

  —James Agee

  HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

  It is sincerely hoped that this field guide will prove to be of value for all readers. To that end, several methods have been provided for navigation.

  A CAPITALIZED GUIDE WORD appears at the top of each alphabetized entry. The reader may choose to move through these entries in sequential order—which is to say, alphabetically.

  PRIMARY CROSS-REFERENCES at the end of each entry link the reader to related entries. The reader may wish to follow these cross-references until all entries have been read and the narrative is complete.

  Secondary cross-references appear in roman type within the italicized photo captions, and alert the curious reader to further entries of interest. As with the primary cross-references, these may be used to move through the narrative in a non-sequential fashion. The TABLE OF CONTENTS offers further room to explore.

  The photographs in this edition are the work of a number of artists, whose names and accomplishments are charted in the end matter. Each photograph is meant to illuminate the preceding entry, and the North American Family as a whole.

  ADOLESCENCE

  ❧

  It’s the boltcutters that open up a hole in the storm fence just big enough for a skinny boy to slip through. It’s the backpack in which spraycans are rattling. One knows what one is doing, weaving back and forth among the dark hulks of traincars; it’s the rails one must be careful to avoid. It’s the memory of batteries blown up in earlier, smaller instances of life beyond the law. Or beyond the row of junked cars, the newer ones the mayor has pronounced paint-resistant. It’s the rush of blood in the ears. The image on the backs of the eyes. It’s the sky over the city sprayed violet, like the inside of one’s heart—cloudy, brooding, still aglow after distant explosions.

  Though often identified with Freedom, the wild Adolescence more closely resembles a Search for Meaning.

  SEE ALSO:

  •ANGST •BOREDOM •CHEMISTRY•GRAVITY •NATURE VS. NURTURE •REBELLION•TENDERNESS •WHATEVER

  ADULTHOOD

  ❧

  Funerals weren’t so different from elementary school. There were rules you learned sooner or later, the easy way or the hard way. Sit still. Listen. Offer your wife or daughter a hand to hold, as though holding hands were something your family still did. Squeeze to signify you might cry at what seem to be the appropriate moments. If you think you might actually cry, wear sunglasses. It was grim but true: like school and work and everything else in Jack Hungate’s life, the funeral had eventually lost its novelty and become just another thing to plug into the day-planner, and by the end of his forties, he was averaging one or two every year: coworkers, fraternity brothers, relatives he’d forgotten he had. Neighbors. The sun was shining on the day they committed Frank Harrison to the earth, for example, and as Jack gazed through tinted lenses at the glowing blond hair on his own wife’s and daughter’s heads and at his son’s nascent sideburns, he realized he’d never really known the man, despite having seen him at least once a week for the last decade—a total of hundreds of neighborly interactions. Several times each summer, Frank had brought his family over to barbecue and swim. Their kids were the same age, roughly. A memory floated up out of the haze: Frank Harrison emerging from the backyard pool, half-naked and hulking, his booming voice advertising his kingdom for a towel and a beer. And it dawned on Jack that it could just as easily have been his own blood vessels bursting. It could have been his heart. He struggled to remain somber. He looked out across the sea of stricken faces toward the faraway silver Sound. Incense was on the air. An eerie silence obtained, as after snowfall, broken only by the priest’s litany and the drone of incoming planes and th
e widow’s choked breathing. It could have been me, Jack thought, but it wasn’t. A month later, when he and Elizabeth separated, he would find himself cursing the empty decorum of the country club set. But it served him well that day; no one could tell that inside he was rejoicing. Or that, although his heart now went out to Marnie and the two Harrison kids, Lacey and whatshisname—Tommy—he’d never really cared for the dead man anyway.

  Adulthood can be distinguished from Maturity by its tendency to cling to the chrysalis. On occasion, Adulthood has even been known to disappear back into Adolescence following an unsettling foray into the world.

  SEE ALSO:

  •DISCRETION •DIVORCE •FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY•FREEDOM •MIDLIFE CRISIS •MORTGAGE•SACRIFICE •TRADITION

  ANGST

  ❧

  Gabriel Hungate began to experiment at age thirteen, without the knowledge of his father or mother or younger sister. Described variously as “headstrong,” “hard to peg,” and “persuasive,” he had long been an object of interest among the neighborhood males two to three years his senior. When in a local backyard one offered him a modified aluminum can and the remnants of a “dime bag,” he accepted immediately. It might just as easily have started with a Mini-Thin or a dose of Ritalin or a drink of tequila; in the blurred tumble of months that followed Gabriel speculated that, contrary to the rigid verticality of the “gateway hypothesis,” stimulants and sedatives were networked horizontally, each linked to every other. Alcohol, nicotine, and cannabis, because the most readily available, were the intoxicants most often used among his cohort and by the subject himself. Typical symptoms of substance abuse (sullenness, academic underachievement, social withdrawal) were masked in Gabriel by a simultaneous disturbance in his domestic situation. His appetite for “downers” was well within the statistical mean for his sex and age; his tendencies to ingest in solitude and to keep the frequency and intensity of his intoxication secret even from his peers were outliers. Gabriel tended to conduct his experiments in his bedroom or the basement recreation room, and to further gauge his limits by playing music at high volume and sitting for hours in the dark in a state of self-recrimination. Even in the “kegger” setting, he drifted toward seclusion, where, he believed, anyone who cared to find him would come looking. No one came looking. Also notable, given the pattern of abuse over several years, was the abrupt cessation of these behaviors. Following the construction of a “graffiti wall” in the backyard of his mother’s house, Gabriel Hungate, for reasons beyond the explanatory power of this study, gave up narcotics at an age (17) when most of his peers were intensifying their explorations. He began, instead, to paint (although, significantly, the patterns of withdrawal and self-reproach and heavy tobacco use would continue right up until his accident).

  The fossil record shows the juvenile strain of Angst to be a relative newcomer. Possibly the product of crossbreeding between Boredom and Depression, it made its first documented appearance fewer than five hundred years ago.

  SEE ALSO:

  •ADOLESCENCE •CHEMISTRY •DIVORCE•GRIEF •LOVE •MEANING, SEARCH FOR•PHASE •QUESTIONS, NAGGING

  BOREDOM

  ❧

  Jackie roams the near-empty lower field with a handheld video camera, chasing the electrons in the broody gray air, the mist so fine it might be imaginary. Brakelights stream beyond the chainlink fence. On the next field over, the varsity football team is practicing, and the war chants of teenagers puncture the pressurized quiet. A flock of graywhite birds is flushed from the hedge that separates the two fields. She chases them, her ponytail whipping around, her skirt and shirt too thin for the weather. She is narrating. “Today I lost a tooth.” She captures the birds as they tumble in a dizzying fractal into the air, colors shifting light to dark. They churn over a swimming pool that’s been covered for winter and dwindle to dots in the sky. “They’re running away. They don’t like me,” Jackie says. Trees scatter in the lens as she gallops away from the bushes. “The grass is brown.” She spots a mudpuddle. “This is from when the trucks come across the field for a delivery.” Now she lies down in the dry grass and aims the camera toward her face. “This is what it’s like to be a bug. Not very exciting.” She turns the camera around and positions her stuffed lion in front of the lens. It flops over. She reaches out to make an adjustment, but it flops again. An empty sandbox forms a backdrop. “This is Alphonse,” she says. “Say hello, Alphonse. Hello! Behind him, that’s the sandbox where I played at lunch today. I made a castle. Tomorrow I’m going to play kickball. That’s my video journal for today. The end.” The microphone drones dimly with white noise, and the camera continues to run, capturing the sandbox and the procession of blurry taillights far behind the flopped lion, whose mane is accreting fine raindrops. The voice cuts in again. “Oh, and also today, my parents got divorced. The end.” The footage ends abruptly.

  Boredom, a harmless parasite once thought to be nonexistent where there was Entertainment, is now known to abide to some degree in every ecosystem.

  SEE ALSO:

  •ANGST •DEPRESSION •INNOCENCE•MATURITY •MYTHOLOGY •RESIGNATION•SIBLING RIVALRY •WHATEVER

  CHEMISTRY

  ❧

  Sugar. Sweet & Low. Caffeine to start the day. To unwind, alcohol: a beer or two, a glass of wine. Sherry or gin or a dry martini, by the chair by the pool, a glass or a bottle. Then Tylenol. Or, for headaches, ibuprofen. For asthma, albuterol. Sniffles, sneezes, post-nasal drip: Robitussin, Nyquil, Dimetapp. The pantheon of name-brand pharmaceuticals, like poets of a dead tongue: Valium, Lithium, Xanax and Zoloft, Paxil and Prozac. Allegra, Viagra. Claritin, Clarinex, Retsin and Ritalin. The shelf in the medicine chest stuffed with Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca. The horizons huffing opens up: gasoline, whipped cream, permanent markers, airplane glue, and airbrush propellant. And then nicotine. Marijuana. Hashish. Opium. Amyl nitrates. Lysergic acid diethylamide. Psilocybin. Mescaline. Methamphetamines and amphetamines. Cocaine to kill pain. No different than a codeine pill. No different than Demerol, or Percocet. The baby aspirin doctors recommend most. The epidural, even before the birth.

  Chemistry is an order of the phylum Entertainment.

  SEE ALSO:

  •ADULTHOOD •ANGST •BOREDOM•DEPRESSION •HABITS, BAD •MEANING, SEARCH FOR•MOMENT OF CLARITY •PARTINGS •SECRET•UNCERTAINTY

  COMMITMENT

  ❧

  At first the black lady behind the desk said visiting hours were over. I could understand where she was coming from—she could have lost her job for breaking hospital regulations—so I tried to keep smiling, because I didn’t want her to feel bad about what was, after all, just doing her job. But like my dad used to say back when he was still alive, I have a lousy poker face, and after a few seconds, she sighed. “All right. Tell me what’s going on.” Her face was businesslike, but her eyes were kind, I noticed. And it just started spilling out of me, about cheerleading running over and Tommy being late with the car and how it would be so hard for me to get across town to the hospital by eight on Tuesdays and Thursdays to see my boyfriend, the patient. She asked his name and I told her, Hungate. Gabriel. She found his chart and studied it for a minute. “Like the archangel,” she said, pronouncing the h. Then she told me that she was in charge on weeknights and, so long as I didn’t tell anyone, she’d take me back to see him whenever I could get here. That’s how I started going every night to the burn unit. It was kind of nice, actually, after all the visitors were gone, even his family, and it could be just him and me. I could talk to him and read to him and sometimes just sit quietly with my hand resting on his one unbandaged hand and try to feel him talking to me through his skin. I could cry and nobody would know. That’s another thing my dad had told me: I led a charmed life, everything would always work out for me. His voice was staticky when he said it; we must have had a bad connection. And on Christmas Eve morning I made sugar cookies from scratch. It started snowing as I drove over to the hospital to leave them at the front desk for the
nurse who’d bent the rules for me. It turned out she was on vacation. Still, I left them for whoever was scheduled to work that night.

  Though sightings of Commitment are rare, this ancestor of Fidelity can be observed in the wild to this day.

  SEE ALSO:

  •GRAVITY •INTEGRITY •PRIVACY•TENDERNESS

  CONSENSUS

  ❧

  We can all agree on this much, Marnie thought: nobody saw the Hungate divorce coming. Of course she’d heard through her daughter that Jack and Elizabeth had been having some difficulties, but what couple didn’t? Lord knows Frank had sometimes gone for months without touching her and had sometimes worked late and had sometimes retreated to his study with his Wall Street Journal without so much as asking about anyone else’s day. But at those times, Marnie had looked to the Hungates. In the privacy of her own mind, she saw them as the last of a dying breed, the Great American Family. She’d actually found herself wondering: WWED? What Would Elizabeth Do? Other times, she even felt a little jealous of her slender, blond neighbor with her sensitive husband and her popular son and her still-small daughter and her big, kidney-shaped swimming pool. It was by that swimming pool, in fact, on the first warm day after Frank died, that Marnie found herself eyeing a paring knife as Elizabeth lounged nearby in a two-piece, not really listening to the answers to her questions. But Marnie’d had years of experience smiling and swallowing, and she reminded herself that some people had all the luck. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, that’s just the way it was. So she was shocked when Lacey announced at breakfast a few weeks later that Gabe’s parents were separating. No one at the Friends of the Library cookout could agree on what caused it. Some people insinuated Jack Hungate was having an affair, but personally, Marnie didn’t buy it. Jack had always been a stand-up guy, and she didn’t approve of scuttlebutt. Nonetheless, she found herself wanting to know more about the divorce, and every time the subject came up she felt a little flutter of something like gratitude, for which on Sundays she always confessed.