Generation X (19 page)

The Palmer children, all seven of us, have the stalwart, sensible,

and unhuggable names that our parents' generation favored—Andrew,

Deirdre, Kathleen, Susan, Dave, and Evan. Tyler is
un peu
exotic, but then he
is
the love child. I once told Tyler I wanted to change my name to something new and hippie-ish, like Harmony or Dust. He looked at me: "You're
mad.
Andrew looks great on a resume—what more could you ask for? Weirdos named Beehive or Fiber Bar
never
make middle management."

Deirdre will be in Port Arthur, Texas this Christmas, being de-

BLACK HOLES: An X

pressed with her bad marriage made too early in life.

generation subgroup best known

Dave, my oldest brother—the one who should have been the sci-for their possession of almost entirely black wardrobes.

entist but who grew a filmy pony tail instead and who now sells records in an alternative record shop in Seattle (he and his girlfriend, Rain,
BLACK DENS:
Where
Black

only wear black)—he's in London, England this Christmas, doing Ec-

Holes
live; often unheated

stasy and going to nightclubs. When he comes back, he'll affect an

warehouses with Day-Glo spray

painting, mutilated mannequins,

English accent for the next six months.

Elvis references, dozens of

Kathleen, the second eldest, is ideologically opposed to Christmas; overflowing ashtrays, broken

she disapproves of most bourgeois sentimentality. She runs a lucrative mirror sculptures, and Velvet

Underground music playing in

feminist dairy farm up in the allergen-free belt of eastern British Co-background.

lumbia and says that when "the invasion" finally conies, we'll all be out shopping for greeting cards and we'll deserve everything that happens
STRANGELOVE

to us.

REPRODUCTION:
Having

children to make up for the fact

Susan, my favorite sister, the jokiest sister and the family actress, that one no longer believes in the

panicked after graduating from college years back, went into law, married future.

this horrible know-everything yuppie lawyer name
Brian
(a union that can only lead to grief). Overnight she became so unnaturally serious. It
SQUIRES:
The most

common
X
generation subgroup

can happen. I've seen it happen lots of times.

and the only subgroup given to

The two of them live in Chicago. On Christmas morning Brian will

breeding.
Squires
exist almost

exclusively in couples and are

be taking Polaroids of their baby
Chelsea
(his name choice) in the crib recognizable by their frantic

which has, I believe, a Krugerrand inset in the headboard. They'll

attempts to recreate a

probably work all day, right through dinner.

semblance of Eisenhower-era

plenitude in their daily lives in the

One day I hope to retrieve Susan from her cheerless fate. Dave and

face of exorbitant housing prices

I wanted to hire a deprogrammer at one point, actually going so far as and two-job life-styles.
Squires

to call the theology department of the university to try and find out where tend to be continually exhausted

from their voraciously acquisitive

to locate one.

pursuit of furniture and

Aside from Tyler, whom you already know about, there remains

knickknacks.

only Evan, in Eugene, Oregon. Neighbors call him, "the normal Palmer child." But then there are things the neighbors don't know: how he drinks to excess, blows his salary on coke, how he's losing his looks almost daily, and how he will confide to Dave, Tyler, and me how he cheats on his wife, Lisa, whom he addresses in an Elmer Fudd cartoon voice in public. Evan won't eat vegetables, either, and we're all con-vinced that one day his heart is simply going to explode. I mean, go completely
k a b l o o e y
i n s i d e h i s c h e s t . H e d o e s n ' t c a r e .

Oh, Mr. Leonard, how
did
we all end up so messy? We're looking hard for
that fromage
you were holding—we really are—but we're just
n o t
seeing it any more. Send us a clue,
p l e a s e .

Two days before Christmas, Palm Springs Airport is crammed with

cranberry-skinned tourists and geeky scalped marines all heading home for their annual doses of slammed doors, righteously abandoned meals, and the traditional family psychodramas. Claire is crabbily chain -smoking while waiting for her flight to New York; I'm waiting for my flight to Portland. Dag is affecting an ersatz bonhomie; he doesn't want us to know how lonely he'll be for the week we're away. Even the

MacArthurs are heading up to Calgary for the holidays.

Claire's crabbiness is a defense mechanism: "I
know
you guys think I'm an obsequious doormat for following Tobias to New York. Stop

looking at me like that."

"Actually, Claire, I'm just reading the paper," I say.

" W e l l y o u
w a n t
to stare at me. I can tell."

Why bother telling her she's only being paranoid? Since Tobias left that day, Claire has had only the most cursory of telephone conversations with him. She chirped away, making all sort of plans. Tobias merely l i s t e n e d i n a t t h e o t h e r e n d l i k e a r e s t a u r a n t p a t r o n b e i n g l e n g t h i l y informed of the day's specials —mahimahi, flounder, swordfish—all of which he knew right from the start h e d i d n ' t w a n t .

So here we sit in the outdoor lounge area waiting for our buses with wings. My plane leaves first, and before I leave to cross the tarmac, D a g t e l l s m e t o t r y n o t t o b u r n d o w n t h e h o u s e .

* * * * *

As mentioned before, my parents, "Frank 'n' Louise," have turned the house into a museum of fifteen years ago—the last year they ever bought new furniture and the year the Family Photo was taken. Since that time, most of their energies have been channeled into staving off evidence of time's passing.

Okay, obviously a few small tokens of cultural progression have

been allowed entry into the house—small tokens such as bulk and

generic grocery shopping, boxy ugly evidence of which clutters up the kitchen, evidence in which they see no embarrassment. (I know it's a lapse in taste, pudding, but it saves so much
money.")

There are also a few new items of technology in the house, mostly

brought in on Tyler's insistence: a microwave oven, a VCR, and a

telephone answering machine. In regard to this, I notice that my parents, technophobes both, will speak into the phone answering machine with all the hesitancy of a Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish making a gramophone re-cording for a time capsule.

"Mom, why didn't you and Dad just go to Maui this year and give up on Christmas. Tyler and I are depressed already."

"Maybe next year, dear, when your father and I are a bit more

POVERTY LURKS:

flush. You know what prices are like. . . . "

Financial paranoia instilled in

"You say that every year. I wish you guys would stop coupon

offspring by depression-era

parents.

clipping. Pretending you're poor."

"Indulge us, Pumpkin. We
enjoy
playing hovel." We're pulling out
PULL-THE-PLUG, SLICE

of the airport in Portland and reentering the familiar drizzling

THE PIE:
A fantasy in which

an offspring mentally tallies up

greenscape of Portland. Already, after ten minutes,
any
spiritual or the net worth of his parents.

psychic progress I may have made in the absence of my family, has

vanished or been invalidated.

UNDERDOGGING: The

"So, is that the way you're cutting your hair now, dear?" I am tendency to almost invariably

side with the underdog in a

reminded that no matter how hard you try, you can never be more than given situation. The consumer

twelve years old with your parents. Parents earnestly try not to inflame, expression of this trait is the

but their comments contain no scale and a strange focus. Discussing purchasing of less successful,

"sad," or failing products: "/

your private life with parents is like misguidedly looking at a zit in a
know these Vienna franks are

car's rearview mirror and being convinced, in the absence of contrast or
heart failure on a stick, but they

context, that you have developed combined heat rash and skin cancer.

were so sad looking up against

all the other yuppie food items

"So," I say, "It really
is
just me and Tyler at home this year?"

that I just had to buy them."

"Seems that way. But I think Dee might come up from Port Arthur.

She'll be in her old bedroom soon enough. I can see the signs."

"Signs?"

Mom increases the wiper-blade speed and turns on the lights.

Something's on her mind.

"Oh, you've all left and come back and left and come back so many times now, I don't really even see the point in telling my friends that my kids have left home. Not that the subject ever
comes up
these days.

My friends are all going through similar things with their kids. When I bump into someone at the Safeway nowadays, it's implicit we don't ask about the children the way we used to. We'd get too depressed. Oh, by the way, you remember Allana du Bois?

"The dish?"

"Shaved her head and joined a cult."

"No!"

"And not before she sold off all of her mother's jewelry to pay for her share of the guru's Lotus Elite. She left Post-it Notes all over the house saying, Til pray for you, Mom.' Mom finally booted her out. She's growing turnips now in Tennessee."

"Everyone's such a mess. Nobody turned out normal. Have you

seen anyone else?"

"Everyone. But I can't remember their names. Donny . . . Ar-nold . . . I remember their faces from when they used to come over to the house for Popsicles. But they all look so beaten, so
old
now—so prematurely
middle-aged.
Tyler's friends, though, I
must
say, are all so perky. They're different.

"Tyler's friends live in bubbles."

"That's neither true nor fair, Andy."

She's right. I'm just jealous of how unafraid Tyler's friends are of the future. Scared and envious. "Okay. Sorry. What were the signs that Dee might be coming home? You were saying—"

The traffic is light on Sandy Boulevard as we head toward the steel bridges downtown, bridges the color of clouds, and bridges so large and complex that they remind me of Claire's New York City. I wonder if

their mass will contaminate the laws of gravity.

"Well, the moment one of you kids phones up and gets nostaligic for the past or starts talking about how poorly a job is going, I know it's time to put out the fresh linen. Or if things are going
too well.
Three months ago Dee called and said Luke was buying her her own frozen

yogurt franchise. She'd never been more excited. Right away I told your father, 'Frank, I give her till spring before she's back up in her bedroom boo-hooing over her high-school annuals.' Looks like I'll win that bet.

"Or the time Davie had the one halfway decent job he ever had, working as an art director at that magazine and telling me all the time how he loved it. Well, I knew it was only a matter of minutes before he'd become bored, and sure enough,
ding-dong,
there goes the doorbell, and there's Davie with that girl of his,
Rain,
looking like refugees from a child labor camp. The loving couple lived at the house for
six months,
Andy. You weren't here; you were in Japan or something. You have no
idea
what
that
was like. I
still
find toenail clippings everywhere. Your poor father found one in the freezer—black nail polish—awful crea-ture."

"Do you and Rain tolerate each other now?"

"Barely. Can't say I'm unhappy to know she's in England this

Christmas."

It's raining heavily now, and making one of my favorite sounds,

that of rain on a car's metal roof. Mom sighs. "I really did have such high hopes for all of you kids. I mean, how can you look in your little baby's face and not feel that way? But I just had to give up caring what 2 + 2 = 5 -ISM: Caving in

any of you do with your lives. I hope you don't mind, but it's made my to a target marketing strategy

life
that much
easier."

aimed at oneself after holding

out for a long period of time.