Good Family Read Free Page B

is my grandmother, droopy-bosomed even before she was middle-aged, three children—four, if you count the one who died—two boys and one girl who would each go on to have two children of their own. Postwar babies whoarrived after my uncle and father returned from Europe, toddling on the knees of aunts whose saving graces were their sisters-in-law and the army of maids in my grandmother’s staff. We are the cousins, and there is ample documentation of our ever-expanding family. Nineteen forty-nine—the first one, Adele, followed by the identical twins Edward and Derek, who had to endure the scrutiny of four grandparents and two sets of aunts and uncles.
    The rest of us were born in the fifties—almost the sixties, in my case. Ike was president, Elvis was singing “Love Me Tender,” and the low rumblings of sex, drugs, and rock and roll were beyond the curve of the earth. That world, consisting of two kinds of people—relatives and friends—was my Eden, pristine and blank, unfettered by truth before knowledge first touched my lips.
    Nineteen-sixty is the first family photo where we’re all together. Edward stands off to the side almost in premonition of his absence. The other cousins are crew-cutted or pixied, three of us fair with Scots-Irish blood, three of us dark—the mysterious gypsy genes—our expressions ranging from confident to surly, our beaming, Coke-fed faces betraying nothing of what came later. There is no hint of multiple incarnations in Adele then. Or of Derek’s artistic bent. And the smaller of us—Sedgie, Dana, and me—we are scooped into our mothers’ laps or leaning against our fathers’ legs, our grandmother, now widowed, anchoring the center. It is here at the Aerie that we all come together, our yearly pilgrimage that defines and gives us meaning. No one looking at this picture would see anyone alcoholic or oversexed or neurotic or delusional. Dana, on my father’s lap, looks slightly worried, her eyebrows furrowed even then. And me? I am the youngest, hardly yet formed, a lump on my mother’s knee, as raw and unprotected as a just-hatched chick.
    W hen Dana comes into the dining room, I am looking at the place I marked twelve years ago behind the door. Eighteen inches above the floor, the initials S.A.F. Sadie Addison Farley. She was fifteen weeks old. We held her up to the wall as if we were taking a mug shot.Sadie’s wrinkled face was red with baby acne, and she looked like a cranky old man in need of a bowel movement.
    Penciled into the same soft bead-board, initialed and dated, is the mark of Aunt Pat at age five, already tall for her age. Below and above it are those of my father, barely two feet in ’23, shooting all the way up to six feet two inches in ’55. The whole wall looks like a Rosetta stone of growing children. Some of the initials are difficult to read. Some have changed with marriage and divorce. Next to an aunt in 1920 is a great-nephew in 1984. Same height, two generations later.
    “Did you check on Mom?”
    “Hmm,” I say.
    “So what do you think?”
    How, exactly, to phrase my response? Do I say that it’s an abomination that our mother is lying bedridden in a diaper, drooling out of the left side of her mouth? That she can no longer walk or talk coherently or smile or give any indication of what she’s thinking, or if she thinks at all?
    I touch the mark on the wall and stand up.
    “The guard brought your suitcase, and Dr. Mead is coming over,” Dana says. “This afternoon.” She pushes her glasses up on her nose, looks from me to the wall, but doesn’t ask. I was hoping to go swimming this afternoon, but the rain I predicted last night is waiting to drop, and the lake is a forlorn gray.
    “Did hospice call?” I say.
    “Still waiting.” Dana looks exasperated as she says this. “The phone’s been tied up,” she adds in a tone as if she’s been stewing over something for the longest time, and that this particular transgression, which should