Get Me Out of Here

by Rachel Reiland

  She rolled her eyes, “I thought you might get my kids some juice. It's your house.”

  I retrieved the juice and continued to prepare the meal, the turkey almost ready. As I fumbled with the roaster, Nancy was mocking Sally's fastidious supermom attitude about her kids. All of us were used to this exchange. Nancy and Sally had been cold to each other for years, both unceasing in their attempts to sway the rest of us to one side or another of a feud that had lasted for so long no one could remember its origin.

  Finally all of the food was ready to be served. The third generation took their places in the kitchen, Sally's kids swiping sips from their cousins' sodas when their mom wasn't watching, all of them giggling at the bodily function noises that so obsess kids of that age. Unaware of the feuds and envy that so bitterly separated their aunts and uncles, the kids were just having a good time. At least someone is, I thought.

  The rest of us crowded around the dining room table, supplemented by a foldout card table disguised with a tablecloth and centerpiece. It was a tense scene indeed. The wrong seating arrangements had been known to provoke a holiday civil war. Sally and Nancy, of course, had to be at separate ends of the table. I hadn't assigned specific places, and yet all of us scrambled to accommodate the two of them, adhering to the unspoken rule that had been a part of family gatherings for as long as I could remember.

  Joe's wife, Jackie, had, like Tim, failed to meet my mother's standards of wealth and education, and the hostility wasn't helped by the fact that their marriage was on the rocks. In addition, Jackie, in the throes of clinical depression, had chosen to leave Joe for a while and had just moved back in. If it was difficult for my mother to accept Tim, who was beneath her unspoken standards of marriage material for her daughter, Jackie was in a worse position. She was a woman, vying for the affection of one of my mother's precious sons.

  Ever since Joe and Jackie began to date seriously, my mother, along with my sister Nancy, had spared no effort in trying to break their relationship apart. Joe was bitter about it and, regardless of the problems that the two may have had, was defensive about jabs taken at his wife.

  Thus began the awkward game of musical chairs. Everyone in my immediate family knew the rules by heart, but Tim's parents and the spouses were confused, sensing the tension and following our lead. Jackie's presence added a further complication. Neither Nancy nor my mother could be seated too close to Jackie and Joe if there were to be any peaceful enjoyment of the meal whatsoever.

  While my sisters headed for the polar ends of the dining room table, husbands in tow, Joe decided to be seated with his wife right in the middle, refusing to be banished to the card table. Whereupon my mother, sulking, took her place apart from my father and sat alone at the card table. Nancy soon got up and joined her, dragging Frank along. Finally we were all seated, and dinner was served.

  Thanks to Tim's mom, who had provided recipes and cooking tips for me, the food was excellent. The turkey was still hot and cooked to perfection, the baked-from-scratch yeast rolls were golden brown, and their aroma filled the room. The casseroles were mouthwatering, the fresh vegetables and salad just right. Tim smiled at me as both of us attempted to relax for a moment and simply enjoy the feast.

  “Did you use saturated fat for this casserole?” Sally asked, inspecting it as if it were toxic.

  “I don't know,” I sighed. “I think I used butter. Plain old butter.”

  Sally spooned her helping back into the serving dish as Nancy flashed Bruce a knowing look as if to say, “Here she goes again.” Sally simply scowled at Nancy, rolled her eyes, and reached for the turkey platter.

  My father, as usual, dominated the dinner conversation, a blessing thus far as he could be very witty when he was in the mood. It didn't seem to matter to him that his wife was sitting, veritably pouting, apart from him at the card table. He was used to such displays. They never made him angry; he either patronized or ignored them. Women, after all, were that way.

  Meanwhile my mother picked at the food on her plate, refusing to join in the general conversation. She sat quietly, resentment clouding her face as she occasionally stared at Jackie.

  Jackie was, simply put, a wreck.

  Trembling, fully aware of the unspoken dynamics that filled the room, she sat, head down, focusing on her plate, picking at the food, and consuming as much wine as she could without drawing attention to herself.

  It was a minefield just waiting to explode, the tension palpable. Tim and I tried to steer the conversation to polite small talk, any innocuous topic, anything safe that would not trigger the imminent powder keg.

  Dad, however, bolstered by a few glasses of wine, was not much for small talk. In fact I often wondered if his tendency to be tactless was intentional. No matter how many times my mother had told me how terribly Dad felt after one of his tactless tirades, it had never seemed to bother him. Yet another case of family revisionism, delicately shaded by Mom.

  “So did you pass the real estate exam?” he asked Jackie as he reached for another roll.

  Damnit, Dad. You already know she didn't. Why are you asking?

  “No,” she answered, embarrassed. “Just missed it by a few points.”

  Let it drop, Dad!

  “How many times is that for you now, Jackie? How many times did you try?”

  “It was her third try, Dad,” Joe retorted angrily, answering for her. “Okay?”

  It was hard to judge whether he was defending his wife or himself.

  Dad ignored his son's attitude and continued his questions as if they were innocuous small talk.

  “So,” he continued, “are you two back together now or what?”

  Nancy and Mom were beaming, Joe seething, Jackie staring at her plate, the tears welling in her eyes while the rest of us squirmed uncomfortably. None of us had the guts to tell the man it was none of his business and not the sort of thing you discuss at Christmas dinner. Silence hung over the table as I fervently wished the conversation would drift elsewhere.

  Dad, however, was not one to pick up on such nonverbal cues, nor was he one to let a question go unanswered.

  “Are you married,” he went on, “or just playing house? It's hard to keep up with you two.”

  Finally Tim got up the gumption to intervene, albeit as diplomatically as possible.

  “Did you hear we're supposed to get a foot of snow tomorrow?” he asked.

  Dad ignored Tim as his tone became even more forceful. “I just don't see how anyone can call themselves married and live in two separate places. She isn't working? She can't even pass a real estate exam for chrissakes. She calls herself his wife and lives off his money, but she doesn't even see fit to stay under the same roof with him. And I just have to wonder what kind of a son I raised that would let her take off, keep paying all the bills, and not set his foot down.”

  Jackie, unable to stand any more, left the room.

  Joe, after flashing an angry look at my father, followed her.

  Nancy was smiling, eating all of this up. Sally continued to eat her turkey, as if nothing had been said. Mom was still pouting in the corner as if all of this stress somehow hurt her more than it did anyone else, not minding the jabs at Jackie but miffed that Dad had brought her son into it.

  The rest of us nervously swallowed our dinner in silence, the sounds of the kids in the kitchen a soothing background music. Tim's parents were simply stunned, although politely concealing it.

  And I'm the one in therapy, I thought. If that wasn't ironic, I didn't know what was.

  Thankfully, by ten o'clock the house was peaceful again, just Tim, his parents, the kids, and me.

  As we had waved good-bye to the last of them, only my parents bothered to say thank you, as if the bitterness of the whole experience had somehow been my doing. No wonder my mother no longer wanted to host these Christmas gatherings.

  But it hadn't been the worst Christmas ever. It had been a typical Christmas dinner, much calmer, in fact, than some others. Like the rest
of my family, I had become accustomed to it. It was life for us, the definition of the family gathering.

  And yet I was devastated by this dinner, witnessing it through a new lens of reality. It wasn't as if such scenes had been confined to the holiday season. What had transpired before my eyes was not only a replay of a dozen Christmas pasts but also a mellowed-out replay of family dinners nearly every night of my childhood. It was a picture of just how screwed up, just how dysfunctional our “all-American family” had always been. It was yet another portrait of life and truth I wished I didn't have to see but knew I had to accept.

  Jeffrey and Melissa, in their flannel pajamas, had finally begun to settle down after all the hyperenergized excitement of a house full of cousins. Barely able to keep their eyes open as they sat under the Christmas tree, reacquainting themselves with new toys, they were obviously content and sleepy. Somehow they'd escaped all the toxic words and interplay of the evening. They'd had the time of their lives.

  Dear God, I prayed, please never let our family turn into what my family was. Please let our family be like Tim's and not mine.

  Ever since I had started therapy, visits with my family had disturbed me. During a visit and in its immediate aftermath I was convinced that I had prepared myself for it, that I was immune, that I had come to understand them for who they were. But it almost never failed; by the next day a deep depression would set in.

  Only after several occurrences did I see the connection between family gatherings and my horribly down moods. Apparently, as much as I consciously tried not to let things bother me, my subconscious was greedily absorbing every nuance of the dysfunctional family dynamics.

  I had dreaded Christmas for precisely this reason, knowing it would literally take days to get over such a dose of family exposure. And Dr. Padgett was on vacation and could not be reached, not even by emergency call. It had given me a real bah-humbug attitude about Christmas.

  My dark mood of despair after Christmas dinner had lasted a few days and seemed only to worsen as the week went on. Thoughts of running and of suicide overwhelmed me. I was beginning to panic, as was Tim, fearing that this incident might be the one that pushed me over the edge permanently.

  Undoubtedly, had such feelings arisen at any other time, I'd have called Dr. Padgett right away. All I had, however, was a slip of paper with the name of another psychiatrist to call if there were medication problems or a serious crisis. I wasn't sure whether my feelings constituted a bona fide crisis, but I was sure I had no interest whatsoever in talking to some doctor I'd never met before who couldn't possibly understand what I was going through.

  It was a bitterly cold night three days after Christmas when I was consumed with the desire to go on a midnight run. As suicidal as I may have been, however, death by freezing was not what I wanted. And deep down I knew that if I engaged in such an impulsive act of self-destruction, Dr. Padgett wouldn't be around to pick up the pieces. Instead I picked up the car keys and decided to go for a drive, claiming the need for milk and bread to appease Tim, who wasn't at all convinced but let me go anyway. He, too, had run out of ideas to lift my spirits.

  Passing the church, I decided to pull into the rectory parking lot. Although I'd seen the pastor frequently since the initial hospitalization incident and would occasionally update him on the progress of my therapy, I hadn't gone to him for help for fear that doing so might have confused the issues.

  Alas, Dr. Padgett was unavailable, and I desperately needed someone. I sat in the car with the heat on and the engine running, deciding whether or not I should bother Father Rick, uncertain whether I was up to facing the priest, who, from all my upbeat accounts, probably thought all was going well.

  I compromised.

  I picked up the car phone and dialed the rectory number. I could see his silhouette through the second-story window as he answered the phone.

  We exchanged pleasantries and Christmas greetings and were about ready to hang up on what appeared to be a trivial call when I finally mustered the gumption to tell him that, once again, I was in trouble.

  “Let me check my appointment book and give you a call back,” he offered. “Are you at home?”

  “No. Actually I'm on the car phone.”

  I heard a barely audible gasp on the other end of the line. The man had seen me at my worst. He probably figured I was parked on the shoulder of a bridge somewhere.

  “Where are you?” he asked anxiously.

  “In the rectory parking lot,” I admitted.

  What kind of an idiot drives three blocks to make a phone call? I wondered.

  “I'll meet you at the front door in just a minute.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  Father Rick smiled as he opened the door, his Roman collar peeking from underneath a vintage Notre Dame sweatshirt. A cherub of a man, no taller than me, his rounded belly and soft, puffy features belied the toughness required of an urban pastor.

  Looking down at the cuffs of his black trousers, I noticed he was wearing slippers. Obviously I'd interrupted an evening of relaxation. How many times had I done that to Dr. Padgett?

  In his office the priest lit up a cigarette and offered me one, which I readily accepted.

  I told him my story, the stress of the family gathering, the steady decline into the depths of depression, the fact that Dr. Padgett was on vacation and I was completely lost without him. They were the same things I'd written on the ledger pads over the past few days, the same things I would have told Dr. Padgett had he been accessible. But somehow, in this context, it didn't seem to be enough. Self-disclosure in the presence of a man with a Roman collar had a way of becoming a confession, complete with all the guilt.

  “Fact is,” I confessed, “I can't stand the sight of them. My own family. Right now I'd like to kill them. I hate their guts. Not exactly a Christian attitude, is it?”

  “Perhaps not. But it doesn't sound like they were acting very Christian either. Or that they did when you were growing up.”

  “But aren't I supposed to love my enemies? Turn the other cheek? Forgive? The whole thing? Somehow I just can't do that.”

  “Maybe you just aren't ready for that yet. It sounds like you still have a lot to work out on your own.”

  Was this a priest saying these things? Surely my words deserved some punishment, some penance—ten rosaries, fifty Our Fathers—anything. I was confused, which obviously did not escape him.

  “You know,” he said, extinguishing one cigarette and promptly lighting another, “there's an interesting theory on original sin I'd like to share with you.”

  I nodded.

  “Some theologians believe that the true original sin wasn't about Adam and Eve eating the forbidden apple but about child abuse.”

  “Child abuse?”

  “Yes. Can you think of any other sin that passes its legacy down through generations? Child abuse spans generations. The abused children, hurt and damaged, become abusive parents—who in turn abuse their children, who become abusive parents themselves. So the abusive sins of a parent can have a ripple effect to descendants twenty or thirty generations removed.”

  “Interesting theory.”

  “With real-life implications. The message of Adam and Eve is that all of us, somehow, are interrelated—even amongst relative strangers. When we act in a hurtful way to another person, the hurt doesn't stop there. The pain is spread. Maybe someone gets told off by a customer or a boss in the workplace. And that person comes home angry and says or does something hurtful to his spouse. Who may, in turn, inflict the anger and hurt on the children. It goes on and on and on. A chain effect.”

  “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers …”

  “… that you do unto someone else,” he finished for me.

  “Scary thought. What ends the chain?”

  “As Jesus said, love ends the chain. Acts of kindness end the chain. Had the boss or the customer given words of kind encouragement rather than cynical criticism, that same person probably
would have come home and spread the kindness to his spouse, who would have spread it to the children.”

  It was astoundingly similar to Dr. Padgett's analysis of the power of love versus the power of hate—the tiny drops of love we give to the most casual of acquaintances that feed our souls and keep us going. Perhaps, despite his refusal to directly discuss his religious views or notion of God, Dr. Padgett was a more spiritual man than I had thought. As a priest, Father Rick was obviously going to be quite open in his references to Jesus and scriptures, yet the underlying themes were almost identical.

  “It makes sense.”

  “I would guess that your own parents were abused, weren't they, Rachel?”

  The truth was that I had been so consumed with coming to grips with the legacy of my own abuse and filled with anger toward my parents with every new discovery that I hadn't much given this question much thought.

  But … yes. Dad's half-joking references to his own childhood, becoming the fastest kid on the block to dodge his father who had come home drunk once again. Mom's refusal to talk much about her childhood at all, the telltale signs of an awkward and cold relationship with her mother that persisted into adulthood. Both of them had told tales of rising from the roots of poverty, the same kind of family folklore that surrounded my own childhood, much of it, when I considered it, also abusive.

  They were at a point now where I had been before I had come to face the truth in therapy, still recalling their childhoods through the rose-colored lenses that spared them from the pain of reality. But, like mine, it was a pain that could not ever be avoided, only submerged—with destructive results.

  I had long since come to recognize myself as a victim. But now I could see them as victims too. They were the legacy of abusive parents who had been the legacy of abusive parents themselves. And on and on and on. Nancy, Sally, Bruce, and Joe—all of them were victims as well. I still hadn't reached a point where I could excuse my family's behavior, but at least I was beginning to find a basis to understand it. It was easy to accept Father Rick's theory of the ripple effects of child abuse.