All Families Are Psychotic

by Douglas Coupland

‘Your honeyed speech moves my soul.’

  Shw got into the car and slammed the door.

  Bryan said, ‘Thanks, Dad – there goes our ride,’ but to the surprise of all three, Shw ground the car into reverse and zoomed towards them, making them jump. She popped a button and the trunk lid came open. Through a crack in the window she said, ‘You have ten seconds to get in. 10. 9. 8. 7. 6 …’

  The three climbed in; for whatever reason the trunk smelled of fish and harsh chemicals. As they pulled onto the road, they were squished like puppies in a basket. Wade, on the right side, pulled his head up and vomited over the tail light, making Ted, on the left side, try to squeeze himself as far away as possible. Bryan began to speak to Shw through the wooden panel behind the rear seats, ‘I love you, Shw. I don’t care what you do with the kid. I love you. I love you.’ Shw replied by cranking up a Gloria Estefan dance song to full volume. Minutes later they pulled into a Citgo gas station where Shw screamed at them to get out. Ted and Wade complied, but Bryan refused.

  ‘Bryan, it’s over, OK? Now get out of my car.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have it your way.’ She did a spectacular reverse donut, and then thrust the sedan at considerable speed into a concrete billboard piling out behind the station, one touting a Universal Studios tour. Bryan catapulted out like a jack-in-the-box. Shw squealed away, and within a few moments she was gone.

  Wade was hosing himself off as Bryan hobbled towards him and Ted.

  ‘Your taste in women is flawless, Bryan,’ said Ted.

  In response Wade spritzed his father with the hose, and Ted said, ‘Christ, are you two ever testy.’

  At that point Bryan’s face screwed up.

  ‘Don’t tell me—’ said Wade.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Ted.

  Bryan had left the letter inside the trunk.

  ‘I’m just a fuckup.’

  15

  Janet and Nickie giggled like cartoon mice as they entered a biker bar in pursuit of their post-holdup cocktails. After the morning’s disaster, a biker bar was a no-brainer. A half hour later, they’d downed three drinks with a new round on the way, at which point they’d calmed slightly. They watched the billiards table, where men who most likely owned junkyard dogs cracked a rack of balls. Nickie said, ‘I wonder if Shw could dominate these louts.’ She made a disgusted noise, ‘Forget about Shw.’ She turned to Janet and said, ‘Janet, tell me more about Helena. To be honest I really don’t know what happened.’

  ‘Helena, God—’ Janet sighed. ‘Where to start? She was my best friend. We went to university together in the 1950s. In Toronto. I was the uptight one and she was the bohemian. We were a good match. When I had kids she fell away a bit – she was into 1960s feminism and then New Age and crafts and shawls and sand candles and all that spacey stuff. But when Helena was around I felt like there were so many other things to do in life besides be a housewife. She convinced me that my own narrow little road wasn’t some sort of dead-end trap.’

  Two screwdrivers arrived. Janet raised her glass: ‘To unlikely friends.’ The women each took a sip and Janet went on: ‘I moved to Vancouver with Ted and the kids, and she moved West around the same time, too – Vancouver was so hippsy-dippsy then – and the kids loved it when Helena came to the house because she was so different from what they were used to. She really turned me on to cooking. Oh – that was one of her big gifts – she could cook like a fiend.’

  ‘What happened?’ Nickie asked.

  ‘It was so weird,’ Janet said. ‘So goddamn weird.’

  ‘Go on.’

  Janet told her, even though she was still trying to make sense of it. On a very dull Wednesday afternoon some years earlier she’d looked out the den window and had seen Helena’s car pulling up. Helena’s here – what fun! There had been a recent estrangement – Helena had taken an oddly vinegary disliking to Janet’s politics, which, by Janet’s own confession, were milquetoast. When she saw the car, Janet figured a truce was in the offing, and her spirits rose. She opened the front to find Helena hopping out of her Chevette wearing blue jeans, Frye boots and … nothing else. ‘Boobies just flapping in the breeze. It was a chilly day, too.’

  ‘Oh, geez.’

  ‘You better believe it. Clem and Judy Payne next door just about had a seizure. I mean, you just can’t imagine how odd it is to see a woman – let alone a very full-breasted sixty-year-old woman – walking around in half a birthday suit.’

  ‘I’m trying but—’

  ‘Exactly. The most preposterous thing I ever saw. Maybe in five hundred years all the gals will be going bareback, but in West Vancouver in 1996? Shocking. Shocking. Just shocking.’

  Janet had opened the front door as if there were nothing untoward about the situation.

  ‘Hi, Jan.’

  ‘Helena – what in God’s name? Come in – come into the house.’

  ‘Not just yet, Jan. The day’s so nice. I want to take in the sun.’

  ‘Helena, it is not sunny, it’s overcast and freezing outside and you are naked. Come in the house.’

  ‘You’re so uptight, Jan.’

  ‘I am not uptight.’

  ‘Listen to yourself.’

  Nickie was glued to the story, which Janet had never told anyone.

  ‘Of course ten seconds later a police cruiser pulls up the driveway behind Helena’s car. It’s a recurring theme in my life – police cruisers pulling up the driveway – it’s how periods in my life begin and end.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Janet ran the movie in her head: the police officers – a man and a woman – approached the front door in a bland, official manner. Janet was miming a What-can-I-do? gesture as she watched the police approach Helena. They asked if everybody could step inside, but Helena didn’t see why that might be necessary.

  The officers spoke to Helena: ‘If we could just step inside, ma’am—’

  Helena didn’t reply.

  ‘Ma’am? Please.’

  ‘No. I like it out here. I’m going to sit on this stoop and enjoy the day.’

  The Kim family’s teenage boys were out on their deck watching things develop. Binoculars were quickly produced. The Paynes weren’t going to budge from their perch, either.

  Helena said, ‘If sitting in the sun and enjoying nature is a crime, I stand accused. Arrest me. Otherwise, leave me alone. Janet – please ask these people to leave your property.’

  Janet and Nickie sipped their drinks. Janet continued, ‘The cops tried being rational, but of course it wasn’t a rational situation, and things went nowhere. The Kim kids, meanwhile, had called their pals on their cell phones, so out of nowhere there were maybe a dozen teenage boys across the street staring at my front stoop. One of them was taping the episode on a camcorder. It felt so – underwater and dreamy. The woman officer told Helena she was going to have to arrest her, and Helena said, “Fine.” I mean, the officers bent backwards giving her every chance to save face, but no.’

  ‘Yikes.’

  ‘I know. So the woman officer tried to handcuff Helena, and Helena went nuts and tried biting her, so the other one came to help her, and her boobs were flying around and suddenly she was screaming “Rape!” I could only stand there aghast. Then Helena noticed that I wasn’t trying to stop the police, and she began screaming just the vilest names at me. Have teenage boys and you get used to being called names – but then she started talking about…’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘She started talking about how she’d been having an affair with my father – for decades, it turns out. I didn’t believe her, but it’s amazing how many names, dates and places a madwoman can scream out while evading arrest – a huge list of wheres and whens – as well as where my mother had been while the trysts were occurring – worst of all, she screamed out things my father had said about me.’

  ‘Oh, Christ.’

  ‘There aren’t words to describe the feeling. There just aren’t. Then the teenage boys joined in
on the bull herding – like Pamplona. It was October – there was still dew on the lawn. Such a mess.’

  It’s all your fault, Janet Drummond. You’re a traitor to your sex. You’re a traitor to your family and to me, your only true friend in the world. You’re a scab. You’re dried up. That’s what your father said about you – you’re a dried-up goody two-shoes party-pooper scab.

  ‘It took a few minutes to get Helena into the cruiser, and I was so relieved the windows were rolled up so I couldn’t hear her filth any more. The cops drove away, the neighbors evaporated, and there I was at my front doorstep. My life could never be the same again, and I was just standing at my door. I got cramps it was so awful.’

  Janet finished her drink. ‘Very shortly I’m going to be over-the-top drunk. We should go back to the hotel.’ She got out her card to pay. ‘You know, after Helena went nuts, the divorce was a complete anticlimax. I never minded the divorce as much as it seemed on the outside. We probably shouldn’t have married to begin with. Live and learn.’ She paid the bill. ‘Shall we go?’

  They went back to the hotel and both fell asleep on the king-size bed. Around sunset, they were awakened from their slightly drunken sleeps by fireworks neatly framed by their window: blisteringly pink and white chrysanthemums blooming and dying.

  Nickie said, ‘I bet this is how rich people get to wake up – with fireworks displays. I bet they probably have rich-people-only fireworks that we’ll never get to see – ones that work during daylight.’

  Janet briefly couldn’t remember where she was, or why, but then the morning’s events came back to her. My children, where are they? She made her usual waking tally: The boys hadn’t yet returned from Disney World. Sarah was in Cape Canaveral.

  The two women remained slightly shell-shocked from the morning’s holdup. They also watched as the ever-present fire ants, plump and stupid, batted themselves against the twenty-sixth-floor windows. What do they want?

  ‘How do you think it changed you?’ Nickie asked.

  ‘The robbery?’

  ‘No – when you found out you had … it.’

  ‘It? Oh – don’t you pussyfoot around me, Nickie. Say HIV.’ Janet touched the scar of the bullet hole on her rib cage. ‘What was it like? There was the usual stuff: It can’t be true. There has to be a mistake. You’re confusing me with somebody else. And then I thought, Wait! Science will save me! And science did – sort of. And now I think science is how the disease started in the first place. Some geeks from UNESCO making vaccines out of mashed monkey brains in Africa. We’ll never really know. I mean, AIDS just isn’t a disease a sixtysomething Canadian housewife gets. In my head I don’t even call it aids; I call it Congolese Monkey Brain Particles.’

  The ants made sounds as they batted against the windows – like kitten paws. ‘And after I recovered from the initial shock, I began to think, Ooh – maybe I’m one of those one-in-a-hundred people with a natural HIV antigen in their DNA – if such people even exist.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Oh pish – I don’t know. I tried to be scientific. I learned about vaccine trails and cocktail therapies – on the Internet mostly.’

  ‘My mother used to say “pish”.’

  ‘She’s my vintage, I imagine.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Janet smiled. ‘I even went down to Mexico once – with a friend, Betty, from my book club. She had Hashimoto’s disease and a form of throat cancer. We were trying to find Laetrile – this drug from the 1970s made from peach pits.’

  ‘I remember that – sort of.’

  ‘What a hoax. It killed Steve McQueen. Betty’s gone. The only option I haven’t tried yet is crystals. The moment you start plopping crystals on your sternum, the game’s over.’

  ‘But I don’t think you answered my question. How did you change inside?’

  Janet sighed. ‘Let me think. Nobody’s ever asked me that.’ How have I changed? ‘You know what? The biggest change is that I stopped believing in the future – which is to say, I stopped thinking of the future as being a place, like Paris or Australia – a place you can go to. I started believing that we’re all going, going, going all the time, but there’s no city or place at the end. We’re just going. That’s all.’

  ‘Do you ever blame Wade? Or me?’

  ‘Wade? He stood in front of me to protect me from Ted. How could I blame him? Do I blame you? No. Ted’s the idiot. Lately I’ve started to think that blame is just a lazy person’s way of making sense of chaos.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Suppose a weird or random event happens to you, like a falling cedar tree crushes your pet cat, or you get held as a hostage in the hold-up of some cut rate diner – or Mrs. Drummond gets AIDS from a bullet that passed through her son’s liver – I could blame the tree trimmers for not recommending I top that cedar. I could blame the Florida legal system for – I don’t know – something. Or I could say that the bullet was divine retribution for not trying hard enough to make my marriage work. Or – you see what I mean. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s chaos. Just chaos. Random numbers popping up in a cosmic Lotto draw.’

  ‘You really think so?’

  ‘More and more. How about you? You’re only on Day Four of having gotten the news. What’s going on inside of you?’

  ‘Me? I always figured I’d get it – that I deserved it – if not AIDS then syphilis or some kind of superherpes that turned my body into one big walking canker. It’s a relief, actually. No more waiting. The jury is in.’

  ‘You really think it was Wade?’

  ‘I do. My reputation makes people think I’m some vacuous slut, but Wade was my first stray in years. It was something in his eyes, some kind of gaze he inherited from Ted, and it was the Ted inside of Wade that was so seductive. I could theorize all night.’

  The two women dozed fitfully. Janet pictured a trillion particles of an African monkey brain virus blipping about in her veins like toxic soda water bubbles. I once believed that people never change, that they only become more like themselves. Now I think that people do nothing but change. Janet thought of her father the philanderer, and of her mother who must have known all those years. Time erases both the best and the worst of us. She thought it strange how memory is erased in little bits without regard to memory as a whole.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ Nickie asked.

  ‘About this time in London,’ Janet replied. ‘In Piccadilly. I didn’t have a watch and I needed to know the time. There was a Rolex store with hundreds of watches in the window. I assumed they’d be collectively precise to the second. But when I looked, each watch displayed a completely different time, and for a few seconds there I felt as if I’d passed into the other side of the mirror where there was no time at all.’

  The door knocked and Nickie shouted out, ‘What!’

  It was turn down service, to which Nickie shouted, ‘No, thank you.’ She turned to Janet and asked, ‘What was the angriest you’ve ever been with Ted?’

  Janet smiled. ‘You won’t believe me.’

  ‘Yes, I will.’

  ‘We were out in the front garden talking about buying manure for the azaleas. Ted asked me if I had any Kleenex and I said no, so he grabbed one of my beautiful pink peonies – so soft, with skin like a baby’s eyelids – and he plucked it from the shrub and honked away and then threw the used flower underneath the sequoia.’

  Nickie horse-laughed at this.

  ‘You laugh! I suppose I could have seen it as funny, but instead I didn’t talk to him for a week. That simmering thing I used to do. I just… couldn’t bring myself to speak to a man who’d done what he’d just done.’

  The two stared at the ceiling some more. Janet said, ‘Let’s go visit Kevin in the hospital.’

  Nickie thought this over. ‘Yes, let’s.’

  Janet had never had much luck with friends. She had always hoped Ted would be her pal, like characters in the lyrics of a song, but Ted was more of the distanced boss in her life an
d got bored easily with any family matters save those involving Sarah. Of her children, Wade was the only one with whom she felt a camaraderie. Sarah was too cool a cucumber, and while she never gave Janet a moment of grief, neither did she give her any moments of bliss. And Bryan – Bryan was always a child. Even as an adult trying to kill himself, he remained in Janet’s eyes a child.

  When Ted left her and she had the house to herself, she thought she was going insane, in the medical sense, with boredom and loneliness. She could put a good face on it – she knew that – but her days became quests to find someone, anyone, to connect with: checkout clerks, auto repairmen, carpet cleaners or fellow course takers at the community center (Celtic calligraphy; ‘Slim and Sixty’; ‘The Eternal Essence of Feng Shui’; CPR; lacemaking). Ultimately it was on the Internet where she could meet with people and not have them instantly spooked away by the look of near-surrender in her eyes, or the taint of Probably Never Being Loved by Anyone New Ever Again. On the Internet people wouldn’t know that she went for days eating only pimiento cream cheese with English water biscuits, or that she obsessively fondled her crow’s feet.

  At least when she’d been shot there had been a brief and shamefully gratifying burst of attention, but that went away quickly enough. But then, with her viral diagnosis came a deluge of people from a surprisingly broad and emotional slice of the culture. The accelerated perception of death quickly eroded many of the traditional barriers between her and others, and she found she had a talent for organizing group discussion dinners. About a year into her diagnosis, Sarah had phoned and asked her mother what she’d been up to lately. Janet found herself, for the first time in recent memory, with plenty to talk about. She described a seropositivity potluck dinner at the house the night previously. Sarah asked who’d been there, and Janet said, ‘Well, there was Mahir. He’s twenty and Persian and his family will no longer acknowledge his existence. He brought falafel. There was Max – he’s seventy-one, and a cardiac transfusion case. He overheard his ex-friends talking about him at the Legion, and now he’s having a crisis along the lines of “Oh-my-God-what-have-I-done-with-my-life?” He has a heart of pure butter, and he brought along two-day-old donuts. Sheila’s my age, and she’s a lesbian whose lover of eighteen years left her after her diagnosis. She shaved her hair off yesterday and was in a foul mood. She brought along those American laxative potato chips, and we all had a good laugh. Wally is our “official compassionate gay guy”. He wanted us to go downtown afterwards to dispense condoms on street corners, but I don’t think I’m evolved to that point yet.’