matter how delightfully odd.
It does help if you’re an affluent exotic, a mass of psychic knots, a tangle of phobias and compulsions backed by a trust fund. Then even the suicidal and the homicidal are welcome. Hippies and goons, poets and anorexics, twitchers, Touretters, and the vaguely traumatized are all hugged close to Dr. Clara Loiseaux’s pillowy bosom, feeling the warm embrace of the maternal healer, inhaling her distinctive scent of rose petals and licorice.
The first step is the journey in the ’Tute’s van, with Happy Harley transporting problem children back from family leave to our true home on the shore of Lake Lucinda, a destination for snowy egrets, geese, mallards, hawks, and loons of various stripes. Except that with winter upon us, I had six months of white tundra to look forward to, the silence of the night broken only by the wind stirring the snowdrifts and the lake’s black ice cracking sharp like gunshots into the depths of sleep. Loiseaux is a calm place in winter. New guests are seldom admitted during this dark season; the prospects of six hours of bright sunlight and a night that stretches from 5:00d P.M. to 8:00 A.M. can bring on the kind of melancholia that dries the spirit and rusts the heart.
I rolled down the window, and the whir of tires on the pavement brought back the sound of my trike when I was six, yes, a three-wheeler because I was not blessed with even a minimal sense of balance. After trying training wheels on a regular bike, all geared up with knee and elbow pads and a helmet to protect me in my frequent tumbles, I was given an overgrown child’s contraption with balloon tires and heavy-duty hand brakes. No matter. Rocinante, as Mother named my conveyance, flew like the wind, responding to my frantic pedaling on the uphills, then back, feet out, legs splayed like wings, caroming on the downgrades. Swaddled in heavy corduroy pants and a sweatshirt, I could feel the wind blowing on my face and hear the hum of rubber on asphalt singing in my head. In the years since, I’ve never been able to recapture that sweet momentum, the sensation of rushing so fast that a slight bump on the road would lift me and Rocinante off the ground into a frictionless surface of pure air.
Chapter Two
On that Thanksgiving Day of ’01 our house smelled like sweat. Not the musky fragrance of recently exuded aerobic perspiration but the stale, bottom-of-the-clothes-basket kind. It was not the clean sweat that glistened on my father’s brow when he was thinking hard or the pearly mustache beading above my mother’s upper lip when she puttered in her garden. Certainly not the sweet dancer’s moisture that darkened Cousin Iris’s leotard along her tight midriff and under her breasts when she did bar work. That day’s smell was more like the sweat from my brother Ted’s glands, a musty redolence incorporating Giorgio aftershave and hot tar from his road-repair job.
Following my nose, I traced the odor to the kitchen where a fifteen-pound turkey had been in the oven since dawn. I was not going to eat any of it. This presented a problem because food is a contentious thing for my family. The way the day was shaping up, I expected I’d be sent packing once again. This time I was supposed to be home for good, but at thirteen I continued to feel like a visitor.
In the last few years I had undergone periodic banishment via the ’Tute van. This had harsh consequences, considering that I was born to be here among these fine people, ordained by the fates, I’m sure. I don’t know that there was anything unusual about my birth; I haven’t seen tapes or interviewed witnesses. In any case, my presence at home had been an off-and-on thing. The exact circumstances of my comings and goings were muddled.
Nobody has ever asked my opinion regarding the Webb household. It contains two official parents, one biological brother, and one honorary cousin. But my inclinations toward vegetarianism, Marx, the goddess Kali, alternative fashion, and psychotropic meds were much in conflict with the unambiguous preferences of the family.
On this visit home I carried a thick brown envelope with school transcripts, prescriptions, psychological evaluations, test scores (IQ 173, four As and two Bs, surprisingly excellent for a slacker personality). A second, sealed envelope inside the outer envelope contained a clinical evaluation of my progress that year. If I’d had the nerve to look inside, it would have provided much humorous material; even after years of Confessional Therapy (registered trademark: Institute Loiseaux), my psyche is a closed book to all, including me. An address was pinned to my jacket as if I were some kind of lobotomee who might get confused in the big city: The Webbs, 328 Kimball Street, St. Paul, 651-798-3269.
My suitcase with its scuffed corners and taped handle was crammed to bursting. I had packed a box of raisins for the sugar, sesame sticks for the salt, Diet Pepsi for energy, my prescribed meds for outward equanimity and inner joy. I had some books, including Das Kapital bound in black. Also all kinds of clothes because I couldn’t decide whether to put on a dress or jeans. Sure, I know what I am; I’ve got eyes, there are mirrors. Genital considerations aside, from the age of eleven I could go either way, swinging to extremes: either soaking in bubbles under the morning light that flows like honey through the bathroom skylight or rolling in the muddy backyard, a boy-pig in pork heaven.
I started out as a slow reader, but when I finally got around to Marx, I knew he would always be part of my intellectual arsenal. The Big K has, through the years, given theoretical heft to my ideas, from “Communal Order in Wasps” (show and tell, Miss Hanteel’s fourth grade biology) to “The Irony of Martyrdom” (honors paper, Mr. Steadman’s seventh grade world history). People know better than to argue with me when they realize my theories are solidly grounded. Marx is back in fashion in the better universities, too, now that he doesn’t associate with East European bureaucrats with cabbage breath and we have villains with beards and turbans to worry about. Next to those guys, communists are downright quaint.
When life gets prickly, I like to lose myself in reading while the natural order of things takes its course toward more favorable circumstances. That Thanksgiving day I escaped the kitchen smells by burying myself in Blindness, a novel about a very scary plague. I’ve been known to read a whole book without anyone seeing me blink. I used to pull out each page as I read it until the contents were scattered throughout the house, loose leaves slipped behind furniture, under rugs and cushions, in the toilet. I was releasing the story back into the ether. That’s what I imagined. It takes courage to let a book go and make room in your head for the next one.
Some people hang on to books and find a permanent place for them, rows upon rows classified by author, title, subject, color, size. My books end up wherever I happen to be when I finish them: a car’s backseat, their spines splayed from my trying to hold them steady over the bumps and twists of the road, or water-swollen in a corner of the bathtub, or disappearing into the sand on some beach. They don’t stay put for long; other eyes glom on to them. I am only a stop in their journey. Books, like me, are visitors.
Ted, aka Brother Tedious, considered himself a man of action; he did not like books. Or the people who read them. He had not broken the code that separates humans from turnips. He said reading was like being dead to the world, life’s experience reduced to black squiggles on white paper. He claimed that even TV is more active than that. His idea of action was Game Boy mayhem—lust, dismemberments and beheadings, explosions and car wrecks. It was a pity he couldn’t do anything more significant with his fingers after Homo sapiens had mutated through hundreds of thousands of years to the evolutionary peak of opposable thumbs. He also did serious weight lifting, slow, grunting presses that started smoothly and ended with a crash to the floor of his room. He used his strength to get into school fights with numbing regularity.
Tedious is a big, magnificent guy. He’s got ape-sized feet with hairy toes and hands like baseball mitts. For this holiday feast he was mashing up various tubers. He took the boiled sweet potatoes and pressed them down with a special utensil that is basically a bunch of small holes with a handle. He took a yam in his hand and showed it to me. At a certain angle, it looked like it had a nose, lips, and chin.
“This is
