It was while I was still in elementary school that I first started wondering about families. Not necessarily about all the different types like why one family has no dad and another has two or why some families live all bunched together with aunts and uncles and in-laws and out-laws, and others have been whittled down to just one or two. Well, not really one – since you need at least two human beings to make a “family,” or some semblance of it anyway. Because, it’s true. I could look around and see many different groups of people who call themselves family, when, I imagine, the first real way of having a family was with a mom and a dad and the children who came to them along the way. I didn’t start to wonder about this. What I started to wonder was, why? Why do people live together at all? Why live together in groups when really, it just seems to result in a whole lot of pain.
For instance, take that traditional family – you know, the mom and dad and the children they created together. I could see easily why all families aren’t that way. I could see it in my own house. People live together and first it’s just little things like the absence of being nice to each other and then they start doing little mean things and pretty soon they aren’t just little mean things – they’re giant mean things. The longer people live together the more time they have to really build up momentum and just drown each other in meanness. That’s when people have to separate and go start over with someone else, so they can start over with the niceness and then have a little bit of time to enjoy little meanness before they drown in the big meanness again.
Which brings me to my first question, Why do people live together as families in the first place? I can see us all living in individual apartments. That would work, don’t you think? They could see one another at school or work and then go back to their own place and do their own thing and not be mean to anyone at all.
I hold this image in my mind and I concentrate and I try to think of all the details that it needs to make it very, very real. But always, before I can quite cement it into my head, I remember.
I remember a day at the beach. The sky was blue from horizon to horizon and the sun sparkled on the waves as they first crashed into the water and sped forward before running slowly backward leaving bubbles where the sand crabs furrowed deeper into their homes. I had gotten new sand toys for our vacation and had built a mammoth castle at the water’s edge. I had made flags out of toothpicks and the leftover foil from our picnic lunch and was just putting a flag on the top of each tower when a giant wave came and washed out half of my castle. I was only six. I raged and screamed at that wave and then – oh ,horrors! – even to a six-year-old boy -- I started to cry. That was when my mom came over to me. She hugged me and said she would help me to build it again.
“What you need is help from a master builder!” I turned around in surprise to see my dad picking up a bucket. My mom laughed and splashed my dad. He laughed and splashed us both. I remember being happy that they were both being so silly – like a kid – like me. After a truly drenching water fight, we rebuilt the whole castle better than before and I have a picture of me in front of it proudly displaying my new sand toys. I’m alone in the picture, but the castle was made with more hands than mine alone.
It’s a great memory – warm and happy and even, dare I say it, sun-kissed.
But I hate that memory. It hurts me every time I think of it. It’s the reason my system doesn’t work.
**
The car sped down the highway. Nothing but miles and miles of fields on either side. It was just after noon, but the storm clouds darkened everything flashing by my window so that it seemed almost night. Normally, I would have entertained myself by poking my sister or making her crazy by playing with one of her toys. Afterall, I have to practice my own meanness for when I have a family of my own. Instead, the car was dreadfully quiet except for the sound of the thunder in the distance and the tires speeding down the road. Speeding down the road the wrong way. Not wrong as in the left side of the road as opposed to the right. No, wrong as in taking us away from home instead of toward it. I ask myself for the hundredth time, “He wouldn’t have left us, would he?”
**
Family reunions are interesting things, don’t you think? You drive for an hour to go to a park with nothing but pit toilets and a few scraggly trees in order to be surrounded by people you don’t know and see just once a year at best. Your mom introduces you to a skinny kid about your age, tells you his name (which you’ve already forgotten), and says, “He’s your cousin!” as if that makes it guaranteed that you will get along and have loads in common. As it is, he looks at you (after your mom has left), nods, and then goes off to find kids that he already knows – you know, the ones he sees more than once a year. Whatever. I’d probably do the same if I had the option.
Brittney comes over to the pavilion where I am sitting on a table and sits down by my feet. She doesn’t say anything. I already had to chase her away once. Just because the only people we know in this whole place is one another does not mean that we can be friends. I’ll let her sit by me as long as she doesn’t make it look like I’m allowing it. Anyway, although I’d never admit it, it’s kind of nice to not be completely alone.
Across from us, we can see “the royal entourage” as I like to call it – where Grandma and Grandpa sit and the relatives flock around, some stopping for only a minute and others getting the place of honor at either Grandma or Grandpa’s side while they smile at them and place a hand on their knee. Right now, my uncle Clyde was in the place of honor at Grandma’s side and had been there for over an hour. Clyde was rich. He hadn’t even gone to college. He started his own business out of high school and watched it do fabulously well. Now he hardly worked at all – just watched the money roll in while he sat by Grandma’s side and she patted his knee. It made me want to vomit.
While I watched, Clyde stood up. Maybe one of his kids needed help or maybe he needed to use the marvelously fragrant pit toilets. Whatever it was, he got up and his chair was empty. I caught my breath as I watched my dad walk over and sit down in the chair Clyde had just vacated. I nudged my sister. “Check this out,” I whispered.
“Oh no,” Brittney shook her head in disbelief.
My dad went to college. He got a degree in computer programming and was Grandma’s best friend when her computer went down. But she was not at all pleased when he suffered periods of unemployment before finding a new company who needed more programming done. Now was one of those unemployment times. Maybe she would understand this time. Afterall, Dad had proved that he could always find a new job and he had always provided for his family. The workplace wasn’t the same place it had been when Grandpa took care of her family.
I watched as Grandma turned to talk with dad. She smiled at him, but it was clearly a different kind of smile. She touched him on the shoulder and then quickly took her hand away. Then she pursed her lips in response to something Dad had just said, stared at him for a long minute, and then slowly turned away. It was clearly a dismissal.
I felt horrible. He sat staring at her for long minutes. From the look on his face, I thought he might pick up her high and mighty chair and stuff it down the pit toilet.
He stood. I watched as he searched his pockets. There was something there he couldn’t find. Suddenly, he was striding across the park toward where Mom was sitting with some of the women. That was when my heart started thumping.
He stopped in front of Mom and demanded, “Why didn’t you give me back my keys?”
“Y-your keys?” Mom faltered seeing at once the anger in his face.
“Yes! My keys! You borrowed them to put your dish back in the car. Is it so hard to just bring such a simple thing back to me when you are done?”
“Sorry, Sam,” Mom started fumbling around in her pockets. “I thought . . .”
“What does it matter what you thought???” he snapped as he snatched the keys out of her hands. “Next time bring your own keys! In fact, next time, bring your own car!”
Meanness. Humiliation in front of all those women she only sees once a year and was trying so bravely to befriend anyway. It is hard to feel humiliation and rage for two people you are supposed to love. I was paralyzed for a moment by these emotions and didn’t notice that my father was striding toward the car with my mother hurrying behind him keening out her apologies. Brittney jumped to her feet. “Tom! They’re going to leave without us!” Fear lanced through her words as she started to sprint for all she was worth toward the car. Suddenly that was all I could feel too – fear. Fear that they would leave us here, with all these people we didn’t know, too far from home to make our way back.
I ran, too, and barely made it to the car as the engine roared to life and jumped in as my dad threw the car into reverse. I slammed the door as he squealed out of the parking lot. At the highway, where we should have turned left, he stopped. His breathing slowed as he stared down the open road to the left. What was he thinking? What was he going to do? Then the wheels had squealed again as he jammed his foot on the gas and flipped the steering wheel hard right.
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