In Spite of Everything

by Susan Gregory Thomas

  There was a lot that we didn’t understand.

  Although of course she must have, it seemed our mother never got out of bed the first year we lived back east. Being in bed has always been among her favorite occupations, but this was different. She wasn’t reading metaphysical poetry while half-watching Perry Mason. She was always sleeping, always in the same nightgown. “Just get up and come outside with us,” we would urge nervously. “Oh, okay—in a bit,” she would croak. But she never did.

  Dad hated it, too. He had always been the most popular guy on the block, the first to break the awkward first moments of a cocktail party with some fantastic story or outlandish observation that yielded laughter and looseness. But his charms were lost on the patriarchs of Main Line Philadelphia. “Goddamned stuffed shirts,” he would growl. “These guys are living off trust funds set up for them in the last century—not one of them has worked an honest day in his life.” More and more, Dad would come home after we were asleep and leave for work before we woke up. He drank more and more. On the nights he was at home, he would fall asleep in front of the TV, his fist still clenching a tumbler of scotch.

  But after the first year, Mom got out of bed and got a job as head of the English department at a posh private school. Dad all but vanished, away on business trips. The last time he materialized in the context of our family was for what would turn out to be our last vacation together. We drove up to the Pocono Mountains, where friends had lent us the use of their cabin. Dad brought no climbing gear. “These aren’t mountains,” he snarled. “They’re just shitty hills.” He did, however, bring his telescope; we planned to look at the stars that night. When we arrived, the sun was merciless. Mom went indoors to unpack groceries and read, and Dad sat on the unsheltered patio with a tumbler of scotch, squinting out into the lawn and the field of tall, dead grass that lay beyond it. Ian and I had decided to make a bushwhacking trek into the grass, having been instructed by our mother to pull up our socks to avoid “penetration by ticks.” As we were crossing the yard en route to the field, Ian stopped suddenly. “Look!” he cried. I stopped and scanned. Everywhere, it seemed, there were bunnies, nibbling on stalks of grass and dandelions. Bunnies—they were so little! Their tiny upside-down-Y-shaped mouths quivered with agonizing cuteness, their hops like miniature lopes. “Look, Dad, look!” we hooted. “Bunnies!” He smiled faintly. “Look at that,” he said. Ian and I bent down and watched them earnestly, as if in that instant we had become charged with their care. After five minutes or so, we heard the first shriek.

  It was unworldly, like the scream of the ghost of a murdered child. Ian and I looked at each other, panicked. What had happened? Then there was another shriek, and another. We screamed when we saw them: snakes. Tethers of black snakes were coasting through the grass. There were so many. Ian and I ran wildly, bawling, trying to rescue the bunnies, but our attempts scared them, forcing them into the tall grass, where they were killed. We screamed for our father. Dad ambled onto the lawn and stooped to pick up a twitching bunny, attacked but left behind in the melee. He placed it carefully in the backseat of the car, where it writhed in the sunlight. Ian and I sobbed. My dad folded his arms and looked at the little thing with a sad frown. We tried to feed it some grass, some water. After a few hours, it seemed revived, and Dad told us to set it loose. We did. Within minutes of its disappearing into the tall grass, we heard its shriek.

  A thunderstorm rolled in by dinnertime. No stars. That night, I am told, I sleepwalked. I flew from bedroom door to bedroom door, begging at each one: “Let me out! Let me out!”

  Room. Poems. Gash. Sleepwalking. Stars. Ice.

  Dad.

  One way in which my personal themes converge with my generation’s is in the primacy of Star Wars, which contains the archetypes of home, wounds, stars, ice, and fathers—dark and light. Since having my own children, I’ve thought a lot about Star Wars. It came out in 1977, and it is still a huge, huge deal to X. People my age take their preschoolers to see it—three-year-olds. Why are people my age so attached, in such a primal way, to it? Generation X people, including me, rarely hesitate when asked to name the defining cultural and developmental turning point of their childhood. Like you have to ask: Star Wars, man! It was huge. One day, you were a total babe in the woods, a Piagetian changeling. After Star Wars, you entered Life. It’s not just that Star Wars changed the toy industry, play patterns, the movie and fast-food industries. It was the galvanizing experience of our generation in the way that the anti–Vietnam War movement was for Baby Boomers. But why? Why is it still such a huge deal? How did Star Wars become a major milestone in our children’s lives, too?*

  I’ve come to think that the answer may be something like this: If our parents’ divorces were the wars we endured in private, Star Wars was the war that unified us culturally. Prompt a grown Gen-X guy, and it’s rarely long before he launches into a play-by-play recon of action scenes in Star Wars as though he were an actual veteran. Gen-X women look to Princess Leia as a Rosie the Riveter icon. But I believe that the narrative themes of Star Wars were what so deeply resonated with us. Luke Skywalker may have been conceived of by his creators as a prewar Clark Kent–type farm boy, but to 1970s children, he was one of us: the ultimate latchkey kid. He was on his own a lot; he had to handle a bunch of adult responsibilities so the household could function. Then: kaboom! His family was destroyed, charred beyond recognition. The mother and father figures were recast instantly, violently. The Oedipal mother figure was now a smart career woman on a serious mission, with no time for crybabies, who looked hot in a Linda Ronstadt kind of way (with the glistening, wine-colored lip gloss). Han Solo was Mom’s cool boyfriend, with his fast, junky-looking bachelor ride; Darth Vader, the terrifying half-human, half-robot Dad, hell-bent on either getting you on his side or destroying you. Star Wars might be the epic custody battle of all time.

  In our generation’s own, real-life Star Wars, though, the burning down of the Skywalker family farm was the Important Family Announcement. Ask anyone whose parents divorced, and they’ll cite the Important Family Announcement as being one of the most traumatic experiences of their childhoods. The Important Family Announcement was, essentially, the Genesis story for Generation X’s narcissistic wound. It’s like this: The family, pre-divorce, was its own sort of Eden—an imperfect and quotidian one, but an Eden nevertheless in its gestalt of permanence and predictability. And then came the Important Family Announcement. It began with the parents sitting the kids down in the den or family room. The dad, hollowed-out and remote—with the mom nearby, red-eyed and quivering—explained that “your mother and I do not love each other anymore” and “can’t live together as a family,” but that “we love you kids” and “feel that we’re all going to be happier in the long run.”

  The eerie formality, compounded with the stunning disclosure that one’s parents not only had separate lives but were empowered to dissolve the indissoluble, made the Important Family Announcement hallucinatory. Parents’ postmortem to themselves, their friends, that “the kids seemed to take it well” was delusional. The kids were in a fugue state. For years.

  With the nucleus of the family, once stable and prosaic, blown apart, the landscape became postapocalyptic. The father, heretofore a somewhat remote disciplinarian with whom you could occasionally roughhouse and be gross, was now trying to annihilate the mother with legal proceedings and character slander and was installed in some interim bachelor pad, absently spoiling the children with toys, junk food, and movies on the weekends. The mother, after about a year in depression during which she leaned terrifyingly on the children for emotional support, “reinvented” herself on a full-time career track, attending aerobics classes and dating a string of divorcés. Darth Vader, Princess Leia at war. There was no safe place to land.

  My high school was littered with such sad-eyed, bruised nomads. There were perennial migrant flocks of latchkey kids in the suburbs, wandering from used record shops, to behind the train station to get high, to th
e parks they used to play in as children; they trudged back and forth from their mothers’ houses during the week to their fathers’ apartments on the weekends. In one of the most egregious cases, the divorced parents of a teenage boy I knew installed him in his own apartment because neither wanted him at home post–Important Family Announcement. Naturally, we all descended on his place after school—sometimes during school—to drink and do drugs. He was always wasted no matter what time we arrived. A few years ago, a friend told me she had learned that he had drunk himself to death by age thirty. A very close friend of mine, at fifteen, managed both of her parents as they collapsed under the weight of their respective mental breakdowns in the wake of the Important Family Announcement, each of them clawing at her constantly; in the meantime, she did her best to keep her two younger siblings together. Now in her forties, she lives alone, ready to answer triage calls from her family.

  In my own family’s case, the Important Family Announcement landed on my little brother’s birthday. His tenth birthday. At this point, Ian and I did not grasp that our parents were estranged, much less getting divorced. We knew that things seemed terrible in a general sense and that Dad had been “on a business trip” when our mother was away in England. On this day, what we understood was that, for some reason we did not understand, our father was not there on Ian’s birthday. Where was Dad? Mom didn’t know, but she reassured us that Dad was certainly on his way. Morning gave way to noon, then afternoon. My brother, my mother, and I wandered in and out of the house, sometimes intersecting. At some point in midafternoon, my wanderings had taken me into the kitchen, where I had just opened the freezer to reach for a Swanson’s chicken pot pie. Suddenly, Dad was there.

  “Howdy, old pal,” he said. He was wearing a jeans jacket. A jeans jacket. He clapped me on the shoulder like a man, strode into the pantry, and poured himself a scotch.

  “Well, Suze,” he said, “as you’ve probably surmised, your mother and I are splitting.” He oriented his empty tumbler on the rippled tile counter, sauntered around the kitchen table, and stopped at the window to regard the vegetable garden he had planted. “The basic idea is this: I’ve reached a point in my life where I realize that I’ve done nothing for me, and I’ll be goddamned if I’m not going to do it.” He went on to explain that he was sick and tired of doing things for “the kids” and “your goddamned mother”—it was time for Dugal to do what Dugal wanted to do. Life here was just plain shitty. Why should he have to put up with “all kinds of ingratitude” as his reward for working “for those cocksuckers”? He was done. He poured himself another scotch and spat out details about the unsatisfactory complexion of my mother’s and his sexual relations. He then announced that he had met “just a terrific woman” who he was sure I’d think was terrific, too, and he leaned back and ruminated rosily about the woman’s virtues and the quality of the connection that he had with her. He put down his drink.

  “So, that’s the story, old Suze,” he said, thumping me on the back. “It’ll take some getting used to, but you’ll be fine. You’re tough.” And he left.

  Recently, my brother and I were on the phone, talking about Ian’s newly born second child and my newly born third. We started talking about Dad, and that moment came up. “Yeah,” he said, in a prolonged drawl. “Did you know that Dad never even said hello to me that day—my birthday?” I had not. I don’t know which was worse.

  Many of the years following the Important Family Announcement are best left forgotten. Which is why it is impossible to do so. Our mother was feral in her grief, which often found an outlet in cursing me and cosseting Ian. My defensive maneuver was either to fight back or to flee in operatic style; Ian’s was to withdraw, either in paralysis or in fury. Ian and I rarely saw our father after that; were it not for my parents’ divorce agreement specifying four visits annually, we probably would not have seen him at all. When we visited him in Massachusetts, he was either not there or passed out. His wife, a clenching fury, never seemed to sleep. Terrible things happened.

  Ian tried. There was still the idea of mountain climbing, and every so often, it would seem to take form. Once, when Ian was in high school, Dad told him he would take him on a weekend expedition in the Adirondacks. With the climbing and camping gear packed up in the trunk, Dad drove them to a motel in the foothills. He left as soon as they opened the door to the room and returned with a case of vodka. Ian watched television while Dad drank. “When are we going to go climbing, Dad?” Ian would ask. Dad didn’t respond. They never left the motel room. After two days of Dad drinking straight from the bottle and Ian watching TV, Dad drove Ian back to boarding school.

  When I was a teenager, I received a bunch of giant boxes in the mail. They were filled with polar camping equipment: sleeping bags, parkas, boots, pitons, crampons. There was a note: “Get ready.—Dad.” The Ellesmere Island trip—it was on. Noodle-in-chief and deputy noodler. Then, without a word, he took his wife’s daughter. He sent me a hand-carved Inuit statue of a howling golem: half man, half monster.

  “There was something terrible in me sometimes at night I could see it grinning at me I could see it through them grinning at me through their faces it’s gone now and I’m sick,” said Caddy Compson in The Sound and the Fury. In my senior year of high school, I was put in a psychiatric ward. After a battery of tests and medications produced no diagnosable results, my mother pled with the head psychiatrist to offer some pathology that would supply explanation. “Your daughter,” he said, “is suffering from deep terror.”

  After my parents divorced, one of the sad, weird things that happened was that I completely lost my bearings in the night sky. As a kid, I was the undisputed Pleiades and Little Dipper finder. I can still find them, but it takes me forever. I can’t see Orion unless it is pointed out to me.

  * On Inauguration Day 2009, The New York Times ran a front-page story featuring a photograph of just-about-to-be President Barack Obama holding a beaming ten-month-old infant wearing a seventies-style rainbow T-shirt. The baby’s name was Jedi Scott. Jedi.

  TWO

  KISS THEM FOR ME:

  FIRST LOVE

  One of the books in the Star Wars prequel series is called Rogue Planet. The plot runs something like this: The rogue, or orphan, planet where the action takes place is actually sentient and can travel anywhere it wants to in space. There is a vibe of Neoplatonism on the planet, because its earliest inhabitants believed that the Force is inherently light; ergo, there is no Dark Side, but only twisted, selfish practitioners who manipulate the Force for ill—a philosophy known in Star Wars terms as “Potentium.” In the story, Obi-Wan Kenobi and the future Darth Vader, Anakin Skywalker, go to the rogue planet to track down a missing Jedi knight who turns out, in spite of her adherence to Potentium, to sacrifice herself to save the “good” guys. But ultimately the bad guys attack the rogue planet anyway, which consequently hoofs it to what the Star Wars lexicon calls “Unknown Regions”—parts of space that are unnavigable to all but those who are supersensitive to the Force.

  Although the narrative, like many of the Star Wars prequels, is pretty thin and crappy, I find the themes presented in Rogue Planet irresistibly suited to X metaphors. There is something very moving to me about the way in which the Star Wars ontology recasts an orphan planet as a rogue entity that is not only the master of its own mind and destiny, but also maintains a very clear-eyed, karmic perspective on all the hyperbolic goings-on in its warring universe. And when it all gets too hostile and confusing, the rogue planet retreats to uncharted territory. There is something fundamentally Xish about this rogue planet’s configuration—or at least the way in which X has often been depicted, and has depicted itself, in popular culture.

  Think, for example, of the 1980s hard-core punk song “Institutionalized” by Suicidal Tendencies (immortalized via the soundtrack of the 1984 X movie classic Repo Man), in which the protagonist recounts that his efforts to sit quietly and meditate on his decisions and goals are relentlessly interrupted by shrill
and ultimately malevolent authority figures who misinterpret his introspective affect as dangerously unhinged and corral him into a psych ward, over his objection that all he “wanted was a Pepsi,” rendering the song itself his retreat. Fast-forward to Eminem’s X anthem and the title of his 2008 autobiography, The Way I Am, partly a diatribe against the opposing sociological characterizations of him as either a bigoted hatemonger (conservative blabbermouth Bill O’Reilly declared that Eminem was “as harmful to America as any al-Qaeda fanatic”) or the messenger of a lost generation (as a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution wrote in an article entitled “Eminem Is Right,” “If yesterday’s rock was the music of abandon, today’s is that of abandonment”) and partly a Zen-like acquiescence to it: “I am whatever you say I am.” Potentium, in a nutshell.

  But really, take your pick. From the Circle Jerks to The Breakfast Club and everything in between, virtually every X hero is drawn as a maverick who sees through society’s machinations and therefore refuses to conform: We never wanted to be in your orbit anyway, assholes! Like the Star Wars rogue planet, X makes a virtue of rejection. And actually we can be pretty funny about it. Indeed, some of the most gut-splitting exchanges I’ve ever had have been series of one-upmanship about bad incidents from parental-abandonment, split-family, latchkey childhood. If you’re not of this generation, it sounds sick. It is a little sick. But it’s funny. One friend told me that once, at a boozy seventies family party, she and the other parents’ kids were jumping on a bed when she catapulted off and suffered a bleeding head wound. She ran to her mother, who, with one hand swirling a glass of Chablis, reached into her purse with the free one, yanked out a Maxi pad, stuck it on her daughter’s head, and said: “You’re fine—now, go back and play!” Another friend (call her Emily) recounts stories of her single mother doing all manner of inappropriate things in front of her children: going out on dates in miniskirts and stilettos; drinking an entire bottle of wine herself as she recalled all the good times she’d had with her many boyfriends in high school; flirting with Emily’s own high-school boyfriends. Whenever Emily and her siblings bring these stories up with their mother now, she will sigh, shake her head, and simply say: “Well, that was a very difficult period for me.” This begs for sketch comedy. “Hey, Mom—remember the time you smoked crack, put on pasties, and did a lap dance for my tenth-grade AP chemistry teacher on parents’ night?” “Yes, well, honey, that was a very difficult period for me.”