All Happy Families

by Jeanne McCulloch

  “I can’t let him go, I can’t let him!” she wrote one day before all her children were due to return home for Christmas. “All I care about is him!” Then, “I hate myself like this,” she wrote the next.

  “How’s it going?” Catherine asked, calling halfway into the Jackson family dinner. She called from our mother’s apartment, where they were having the annual Christmas Eve gathering. I dragged the kitchen phone cord around the corner and hunched on the back stairs.

  “So far, so good. But the shit’s about to hit the fan, I think.”

  “Well, you hang in there. We’ll call later, after the Wall family have taken their sugared-up children and gone home. Lou Anne Wall hit the bourbon pretty hard tonight, before it went into the milk punch, and now she’s singing that song about beans and rice and coconut oil again.”

  The phone cord swayed back and forth, a silent pendulum. My mother picked up on another extension.

  “Dearie, is it you? Jesus, that girl has got to stop.”

  “Who?”

  “Lou Anne. Lou Anne Wall. She’s my dear friend, but she has no voice. I daresay she’s terrifying Johanna in the kitchen.

  “Ma, everything terrifies Johanna,” I said.

  “Never you mind. You’re not here. So. Tell all. How’s by you?”

  “Nothing to tell. We’re having dinner.”

  “I see.”

  “And so far, that’s about it.”

  “Un-hum. I see.”

  She waited.

  “Ma?” said Catherine. “They’re having dinner. Shouldn’t we get off?”

  “Whatever.” She sighed. It was the wistful sigh that often preceded the nostalgia cigarette, and promptly I could hear her lighting up.

  In the dining room, they were calling my name. “Yoo-hoo,” Helen called out. “No dessert without the daughter-in-law!”

  “Ugh, I heard that, dearie.” The first exhale of the cigarette ended up not being her nostalgic/wistful slow one but her scoffing/indignant fast one. “Jesus.”

  There was a loud trill in the background. “Jesus, someone shut that girl off,” my mother said into the extension. “Catherine, be a dear and unplug Mrs. Wall so there can be Peace on Earth this holiday season, will you please? Tell her I have something to show her in the library. That will distract her.”

  When Catherine rang off the line, my mother said to me, “I don’t like it, dearie. I don’t like it one bit. That family is trying to pretend everything is nice and normal when that father is cascading, in full view of you all, into a midlife crisis.”

  I thought of Nonnie’s Cossacks on the Christmas tree, hanging by a thread to a branch. Raymond Jackson, hanging from the family tree, willing himself to let go.

  Only Nonnie didn’t know what was going on. She knew a bit of it. She knew that Helen and Raymond had been having some problems. Helen had alluded to it on the phone. No one had yet told her the full extent: that Raymond had rented an apartment in town and that for the entire autumn, until he returned a few days earlier with a pillowcase of laundry and another filled with presents, Helen had been living in the house alone. And only Nonnie had no idea about the other woman, Cathleen, whom he thought he might be in love with. No one had met her yet, this Cathleen, no one but Chris, who had returned a book years ago to his father’s office when she was the receptionist. They all agreed, all the kids, that didn’t count, because nothing was going on yet, and besides, Chris couldn’t remember a thing about her except dark hair.

  What Raymond and Helen didn’t know was that after dinner, after Nonnie had been put to bed, the kids would call a family powwow and demand that the air be cleared. “I will not spend a week up there pretending we are one big happy family,” Dean’s sister, Jessica, had insisted, “when we’re not. When that’s just about the last damn thing we are.”

  “So thank you all,” Helen said, finishing her toast. “Thank you for coming home.”

  Raymond Jr. and his fiancée, Claire, were flying east from Seattle, where he had been living for ten years and where they met in a group house on Lopez Island. In October, he’d given her an ultimatum: marry me, or that’s it.

  Raymond Jr. was a nester, he kept telling Claire, kept telling everyone else. “Look,” he’d say, “you’re not getting any younger. You know?”

  Ever since Dean had gotten married, it had been weighing on Raymond Jr.’s mind, marriage. He hated it when Dean achieved any developmental milestone before he did. On the way east on the plane, Claire and Raymond Jr. had had a fight. “Look, I’m not saying I don’t want to be with you,” Claire said. “It’s all so public, getting married, though. All these people I don’t even know asking me what kind of china pattern I want. Who says I want china at all in my life?”

  “Okay,” said Raymond Jr. “Forget the announcement, forget the china.” But Raymond Jr. never knew when to stop. “Let’s forget the whole thing,” he said next, and for the rest of the trip, the plane ride, renting the car in Portland, the ride up Route 1 to Camden, Raymond Jr. thought about it. Bringing his fiancée home after years of imagining it. First he was excited; then he was furious. All this time he’d been telling himself, telling Claire, what a perfect marriage his parents had. “Marriage doesn’t work,” Claire would say. “It’s not a natural situation.”

  “No,” Raymond Jr. would tell her, “wait ’til you meet my parents. Thirty-five years, and still happy.” Goddamn Dad, Raymond Jr. was thinking, driving up the dark roads along the coast. Asshole.

  Raymond Jr. and Claire arrived at the house a little after 8 p.m. Everyone rushed out to greet them at once, warm and smelling of fire smoke and wine. Only Nonnie remained at the table, spooning extra sugar into her teacup, blinking in the candlelight.

  “You’re just in time,” Jessica told her brother. “We’re calling a powwow as soon as Mom puts Nonnie to bed.”

  “You have beautiful eyebrows,” Nonnie told Claire when she was brought to the table to meet her.

  “Come on now, Mother,” Helen said, grabbing Nonnie by the elbow and helping her up. “Bedtime.”

  Nonnie’s legs were like thin matchsticks, poking out from her kilted skirt. Every Christmas someone in the family would give her a pair of running shoes for support, but she never wore them. She insisted on her patent leather pumps with square heels like blocks. She walked up the stairs in small steps, her hand gripping her daughter’s arm. “That’s it, Mother,” Helen said, pushing her lightly from behind.

  The family settled into the den, arranging pillows, carrying mugs of tea and kindling for the woodstove. Helen brought in a glass platter filled with Christmas cookies. There were all her traditional ones: the coconut-rolled rum balls, the almond macaroons, the jelly wafers, and the chocolate bark, plus a few dried-out marzipan whales with long eyelashes and red lips.

  “Hey, Mom, slide those rum balls over here,” Jessica said. She was lying on the floor by the fire, one leg resting on a knee.

  “I’m having one of these delicious whales,” said Helen, plucking one with a forefinger and thumb. She chewed. “Cute,” she said.

  “These your whales?” Chris asked me.

  “They’re marzipan. You have to like marzipan.”

  “Take ’em,” said Dean. He took a handful of chocolate bark off the platter. “I’m not much of a marzipan man myself.”

  For a week, Helen had been baking Christmas cookies. They sat in tins and boxes in the storage nook by the back staircase. All week, she worked at it in the kitchen alone, filling the empty house with the smells of baking. “It will be like any other Christmas,” she told herself, told her “hard core” friends Nelly James and Jan Brice.

  “Be careful, Helen,” they’d warn her, but Helen, with the holiday music already playing on the stereo, hardly seemed to hear her friends.

  “I’m so excited!” she told me over the phone. “Waiting for everyone to come home. So busy.”

  So busy, just waiting.

  “I guess I better start this thing off,” Raymond said
. He sat in his plaid La-Z-Boy by the fire. He tipped the chair back and forth softly. Usually, after dinner on Christmas Eve, the Jacksons were in separate bedrooms or in the basement, busy wrapping presents. Chris and Dean would sit in their childhood room, still covered in basketball pictures and banners, and pick out songs on the guitar. Jessica liked to rummage through boxes of old letters and books she stored in the attic. She liked to take a glass of wine up there and get softly tipsy as she unpacked her past. Then, at 10:30, everyone put on scarves and coats and drove down to the candlelight service at the Congregational church. “Hitting the Congo” was a Jackson family tradition.

  “So, start things off,” Raymond Jr. said. “Let’s hear what you have to say, Dad.” He crossed his arms. In Seattle, Raymond Jr. had almost completed his training to be a family therapist, and this was his big chance to show off to the family. “So, Dad, let’s hear it.” His hands tucked deeper into his armpits.

  Raymond Sr. glided two fingers over the empty ring finger on his left hand. He glided over and over, looking at the fire in the woodstove. “I guess Mom has kept you all pretty up to date on what’s been happening here,” he started out. “And I’m grateful for that.” He looked in her direction and she nodded back. “For the past few months, Mom and I have been living separately. But we both wanted me home for Christmas, with you all. We both very much wanted that.” Raymond looked over at Helen’s face, and she nodded again. The logs hissed and sparked as they burned.

  “To: One and All,” Helen’s letter had said. “From: the Old Squaw of Camden.”

  She had written the letter to her children the day after Thanksgiving, right after Raymond had told her he wanted to think about a divorce. She had written it and gone directly to MacBride’s on Harbor Avenue to have it xeroxed four times. “Daddy and I are talking about Xmas plans!” the letter had started out. “We’re both so thrilled to think of all our young people making the big trip home!” Then the letter had a smiling face, followed by, “Just today, they put the wreaths up on Main Street!”

  The second paragraph went, “Daddy and I haven’t seen each other much this fall, but every day, I feel his presence in me more and more. What we have together is very strong. I think he knows that, and I want all of you to know it too. We will always be a family!”

  “Oh, family policy,” the final paragraph read. “Everyone bring home five little presents for the giant stocking. And no duds, Chris!” The family stocking was a large red wool sock the length of a leg and the width of a torso that Helen had knit back when the kids were in grade school. It was passed around on Christmas morning and one by one the family took presents out, only replacing them if they had been the ones to put it in. The stocking was passed until it was empty, and everyone had a collection of little presents and wads of discarded wrapping by their sides. The last time the Jacksons had all been home for Christmas together, all Chris had put in the stocking were matchbooks and rubber bands, all neatly wrapped in emerald green tissue. “I love you all!” Helen concluded. “From, a very excited Mom!”

  On the bottom of each individual copy, Helen had added personal extras. “Chris, honey,” she had written to her youngest, “no matter what happens, I will always be your mother.” On Raymond Jr.’s she had written, “I look forward to having Claire in our family group.” She added nothing to her daughter Jessica’s copy. I imagine she tried, that she stood in the copy shop holding her pen high over the letter, but that no words came. “Jessica’s such a grown-up girl,” she often told me with a sigh. “I don’t even know how to talk to her anymore.” In the copy shop, she might have thought that and then wondered, Have I ever known how to talk to her? Dean’s copy had one simple word in small letters across the bottom. “Help” is what Helen wrote.

  “Well, Dad, I’ve just got to ask you,” Dean said. “You’ve been married thirty-five years, and you think you can just walk out on it?” He looked up and caught his father’s eye. Raymond Sr. nodded at him to go on. “I think you’re a real wimp.”

  “I think you’re a jerk,” Jessica said. “And I’m damn pissed.”

  Helen and Raymond had always encouraged honesty in their children. “My kids call a spade a spade,” Helen had boasted to her friends Nelly and Jan again and again. “Raymond and I are always so astounded at how much they pick up.”

  “A total ass-wipe,” Jessica added.

  “I have a question for you,” Raymond Jr. leaned back in his chair, his arms still tight against his chest. “Have you two considered a marriage counselor?”

  “No,” said Raymond Sr. to Raymond Jr. “No, kiddo. There just doesn’t seem to be any point.”

  “But there is a point, honey,” Helen said. “I mean, we could look back, reexamine.” As she spoke, her hands began to move, rising in circles around her. “Find out what went wrong, what we could do better. Plenty of people have great success with the new techniques.” She looked at her eldest son. “Don’t they, Raymond Jr., honey?”

  “No. I guess that’s not what I want right now,” Raymond Sr. said.

  “Now?” Raymond Jr. asked. “Or ever?”

  “I don’t think so.” Raymond Sr. bowed his head. “Wow, that’s not so easy to admit,” he told the floor. “Wow.”

  “Think so, what?” Helen asked.

  “Mom, Jesus.” Jessica spoke from the carpet. “Get with the program. Listen to what the guy’s telling you. He wants out.” Jessica looked up at her father. “Doesn’t anyone understand English around here?”

  Jessica and her father had already had this discussion. “Jess, I’m calling to tell you, I’m going to divorce Mom,” he had said. He had called her at work the week after Thanksgiving—she was the only one. He’d tried to meet Dean when he’d been in New York for a sales meeting in early December, but Dean had been out of town and never returned the call. Raymond Jr. was too far away, and Chris—he and Helen wanted to spare Chris as long as they could.

  Jessica had just come back to her office from a lunchtime aerobics class. Her desk was piled high with messages and faxes. “I’m trying to quit smoking, and he goes right ahead and hits me with this,” she told all her siblings over the phone. “I mean, what the hell? Does he think calling me at work is a great way to tell me he’s fucking some chick and ruining our family?”

  “What do you have to say about it, Mom?” Dean asked. “No one ever thinks to ask Mom. Does anyone else see this besides me?”

  Everyone suddenly looked at Helen.

  “Go, Mom,” said Chris, “your turn,” as if it were her turn at charades.

  Helen drew a deep breath. “Raymond Jackson,” Helen started, because whenever she had something important to say about her husband, she always used his whole name. She folded her hands on her lap. “Raymond Jackson is at the very core of my existence.” She smiled weakly.

  “That is ridiculous,” Raymond Jr. said. He shook his head. “Sorry, Mom. Wrong answer. No one is the core of someone else’s existence.”

  “What a lot of horserot this is!” Jessica yelled. “I can’t stand it.”

  “See?” said Raymond Jr. “Feminist no-no. We’re talking feminist no-no here, Mom.”

  “Wait, I don’t think she said ‘the core,’” I said quietly to Raymond Jr. “I think she said ‘at the core.’ There’s a difference.”

  “That’s right!” Helen waved a finger at me. “Our city girl’s got it.”

  “It’s still ridiculous,” said Jessica. “He’s a dishrag, Mom. The guy’s a loser. Look what he’s doing to this fucking family.”

  From the La-Z-Boy, Raymond Sr. spoke. He rocked back and forth easily in his favorite chair. His fingers gripped the armrests. “I think we’ve done enough calling of names around here, folks,” he said.

  “Damn,” said Raymond Jr. It was one of the things he was trying to get on top of in family-therapy training: don’t let it digress to name-calling. “Did you just catch that?” he asked Claire. “I blew it.”

  Claire sat beside Raymond Jr. on the lovesea
t in silence. As she listened, she twirled the edges of her long ponytail between two fingers. Her silver-framed glasses made her look very wise, but also very distant. Raymond Jr. also wore his brown hair in a ponytail, though it was a short one that flipped back up in a curlicue around the base of his neck.

  “I don’t think,” she said to Raymond Jr. in slow, measured words, “you’re supposed to tell anyone they have the ‘wrong answer’ either, honey. And they’ve been name-calling this whole conversation. You only just heard it.”

  The phone rang and Chris grabbed it. “Jackson family psych ward,” he said. “We specialize in nuts in ruts.” He listened. “Oh, yeah. Hi. Of course. She’s right here.” He mouthed to me, “It’s your mom.”

  Helen put her head in her hands.

  “Saved by the fucking bell,” said Jessica. “Thank God. Let’s stop this nonsense and get out the eggnog. It’s almost time to hit the Congo.”

  “What now?” the familiar voice hissed into the telephone. In the background, carols played on the stereo in my mother’s living room. “O Holy Night.”

  Evidently Mrs. Wall had gotten into the bourbon again. “Night deeviiii-yun,” Mrs. Wall merrily wailed.

  “Are they holding their voodoo sessions again up there?” my mother wanted to know.

  “You got it,” I merrily replied.

  “I can’t stand it. I’ve said time and again, you don’t do these kinds of things without a professional present, dearie. You mark my words. Something is going to blow up.”

  “You just may have a point there, Ma.”

  “Something is going to blow sky-high. I just don’t like that a child of mine—”

  “I am a grown woman, you know, Ma.”

  “Not to me you’re not, you never will be, so there. Mark my words on this one.”