Random House of Canada

Prologue

On one late afternoon in September 1978, our family driver took me to the detention centre in Baghlan, where my father was imprisoned. My purple velvety trousers were brushing the dust from the unpaved road as we walked to the compound. I was holding the driver’s hand, forcing him to go faster. I wanted to see my father. For a child, whose world consisted of family — parents, a younger brother and a baby sister — not seeing my father for three days was a great deal of missing. I was three months short of being five years old.

At the prison, all I could see of my father was his face — striped with the lines from the shadow of the metal bars. He looked desolate. I wanted to hug and kiss him. But he was boxed in a small room. A thick wall, iron bars and several policemen stood between us. I was sitting on the ground, pushing my feet against the soil and crying, my trousers disappearing into a cloud of dry dust and hardly looking purple or velvety any more.

I shall never forget the angry voice of my father. “I didn’t raise you to cry on such a day,” he shouted at me. His words shook the compound. I stopped crying. Holding the driver’s hand, I stood embarrassed, head down, listening to my father. At times his voice grew thicker, as if he himself was going to cry, but he paused and continued. “You mustn’t cry,” he said. “You have to be strong and help your mother.” He told me to tell her that he was fine and that they had no reason to keep him imprisoned. He’d be home soon.

“Your ten minutes is up,” a voice announced coldly. There was a silent goodbye as my father shook his head. I had no tears, and my father faded from view.

I walked back to our car with the driver. There was a revolution inside me. I wanted to be strong, to break all those walls and bars and set my father free. I kept fighting the desperate need to burst into tears. My eyes were burning, much like my father’s. But his were inflamed with anger, mine with helplessness. I wanted to arrive home without tears, even though I knew my mother wouldn’t mind. She had shed many of her own tears in the last few days. I heard her cry at night, quietly in her bed.

That night I hated my mother’s sobbing. I wanted to scream at her “Stop it!” But I felt sorry for her. I knew she was crying from the pain of missing my father, and it was not the only thing. I also heard her talking to a friend in the living room as she described how men were verbally abusing her. She spent her days going to various government offices to see if she could obtain my father’s release. The governor of the city had told her she was “too young and beautiful to waste her life with a criminal” who was against the “rightful government.” A police officer had told her “there were plenty of men who would be happy to please” her. The principal of the school where she was teaching said he was going to report my mother to the “higher authorities” if she missed another day of work to follow up on my father’s case. But if she reciprocated his “keen affection,” she would be nominated that year’s best teacher.

* * *

My mother was not nominated any year’s best teacher, and my father was released after nearly five months in prison. “He had a brave lawyer and lots of luck,” as one of his best friends put it. It took me a while to grasp the gravity of my father’s crime in refusing to support the communist government. The full extent of its meaning did not become clear until later in my life. In some ways, to this day, the child in me still asks “Why?” Why was my father, who in his daughter’s view was a kind man and a good medical doctor, locked up away from us? Children see everything through the injustices they’ve suffered. In the perfect world that every child expects, this episode left a crack in the wall of my innocence.

Chapter 1

Escape

Let’s mourn—
Orders come from abroad, like death itself;
The guns are free,
So are the bullets,
And this year is the year of dying young,
The year of departures,
The year of refugees.
Qahar Ausi, 1989

At dusk, the downtown Kabul district of Dehe Afghanan is cloaked with grey clouds and grey smoke. The early spring rain has left dirt and water across the paved roads. For over a decade now the highways have not been maintained, and the potholes have become deeper, the city’s drainage system more derelict each year. It’s not cold, but we all hug our arms around our bodies as if shivering from fear. We all walk fast, very fast — hoping to get away from everything and everyone. It’s been ten years since the beginning of the war. Who started it? Who will end it? These days, we are so tired that we wish to forget. But is it possible to forget about war when minute by minute, hour by hour and day by day we feel that something bloody and terrible is about to happen?

The curfew starts at 10:00 every night. But there is another unspoken curfew that is imposed not by the communist government but by fear, a curfew that sets in much earlier. Which is why, at this hour, a cocktail of bicycles, motorbikes, pickup trucks, white-and-blue buses, red-and-orange minibuses and yellow taxis, all overcrowded, are merging into a river of traffic. People flood along the main road between the vehicles to reach the two bus stations. Vendors scream their hearts out in a desperate attempt to sell their apples and beans, spinach and meat. Fabrics are measured and cut at speed, four customers at a time. Even the clouds are racing over my head.

From the Hardcover edition.

Let’s Roll

We foresee great peril if governments and societies do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and to prevent further climate change.
–stephen hawking, physicist and member of the atomic bulletin’s board of sponsors, 2007

I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew ­before . . .
–william james, 1902

Given my druthers, I would prefer not to be afraid of the following: phone bills, ovarian cancer, black bears, climate change, walking on golf courses at night, being blundered into by winged insects; unseemly heights, running out of gas, having the mole on my back that I can feel, but not see, secretly morph into a malignant melanoma. Plus, flying. This is a big problem. Also, on occasion, the prospect that the supervolcano underlying Yosemite National Park will erupt and kill us all. Certainly, in addition, unexpected liver failure. And cows. Also, but only occasionally, when I’m really over the edge with anxiety, the fear that the car I’m driving will simply explode.

It is not that these fears aren’t inherently valid, because maybe they are. One must be vigilant. One must struggle continuously with the validity of one’s fears. Yet they vex me because of what I do not fear: crime, bats, ­house fires, social censure, terrorism, breast cancer, trans fats, and any harm coming to my two small children.

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself,” wrote Walt Whitman, that great American poet who was phobic of spiders. Apparently, I share this odd proclivity for contradiction with forty million adult Americans in any given year. That is an astonishing number. Nearly 20 percent of the adult inhabitants of the Land of the Brave are as anxious as I am, in one way or another, to a clinically significant degree. Phobic, some of them; others, prone to panic attacks; generalized anxiety, which is my label; somatic hysteria, ­post-­traumatic stress disorder, obsessive compulsive ­disorder–an array of thorny cloaks to wear.

I like to imagine ­them–these forty million kindred ner­vous ­souls–experiencing the same juddering sense of alarm that I felt in January 2006 when I noticed that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Ser­vices had issued a bulletin about pandemic influenza. The warning went out via a newly dedicated Web site, pandemicflu.gov, advising the citizenry in all states to stockpile six to eight weeks’ worth of food and water . . . like, nowish.

“But why?” I wondered, with detectable palpitations of the heart. “What’s about to happen?” A Google search suggested terrible things. Vast amounts of suffering and death. Rasping, ­blue-­in-­the-­face plague along the lines of the Great Influenza of 1918. A brand new pandemic that would kill pretty much everyone in the prime of their lives more or less shortly (it ­wasn’t precisely clear when). In the winter of 2006, the virus was still busy trying to figure out how to mutate in order to infect humans more swiftly than birds, but then . . . well. That’s it. You understand? Calamity.

Therefore, proclaimed pandemicflu.gov, which I had stumbled across from a random link on the Drudge Report, you really, really need to stock cans of tuna and Evian water in the basement, because at the appointed time, the clerk at the 7-­Eleven will drop dead and no one will sell you your food.

How do I, and forty million Americans, put this? When you suffer from anxiety, which has been very aptly described as fear in search of a cause, you do not need official encouragement. Go away with your stockpile advisory, because ­here is what it is going to make me do:

“Patricia?” ventured my husband about a month later, having signed for a postal delivery at our door. “Are you all right?”

“Why?” I called down distractedly from my ­third-­floor home office.

“Well,” he said, coming upstairs, his ­even-­tempered voice growing louder with each step, “last week a box with twelve containers of ­freeze-­dried vegetables arrived at the ­house from a company called Survival Acres, and I meant to ask you about it, you know, but I forgot, and now you seem to have purchased a really big tin of powdered butter.”

He darkened the threshold of my office, displaying the newly delivered package. “It says you need to add ­twenty-­seven cups of water.” My dear husband eyed me thoughtfully, poised somewhere between bursting out laughing and giving me a hug.

It is always thus. I catch him off guard. Ask anyone who suffers from what John Keats called “wakeful anguish,” and they will assure you that their affliction isn’t visible to the naked eye. The chronically anxious aren’t physically timid, or cringing. We don’t quake in our boots or whimper aloud as we board airplanes. In folklore and anecdote, the anxious have been conflated with the immature and emotionally uninhibited as “ner­vous Nellies,” but the perception is a prejudice. Our fears are private, arbitrary, idiosyncratic, and very often masked. Anxiety rages undetected in the mind, both secretive and wild.

Friends and acquaintances, children, even lovers can be fooled. Who knew that Charles Darwin was struggling to suppress a rising sense of panic in his later years? Who glimpsed the dread felt by Alfred Lord Tennyson, or by W. B. Yeats? Is a ­face-­clutching terror evident in the bold joy of Aretha Franklin as she sings, or in the elegant play of David Beckham? Yet both contend all the time with a fraught sense of balancing on the cliff’s edge. I know of one CEO who gets paralyzed with terror whenever he enters a tunnel, but I doubt his business associates have noticed this when they’ve driven together in a limo from LaGuardia beneath the East River and into Manhattan. Another accomplished professional of my acquaintance spends her downtime silently making contingency plans for the tornado she’s certain will hit her ­house in Montreal. One friend is a gregarious charmer, a man who soars at his job in Chicago, all the while governed by his phobia that something will snap off his toes.

You ­can’t claim to spot an anxious person a mile away. The signals aren’t that strong. Anxious people don’t even recognize one another. Apprehension runs through us like an underground current; it electrifies when no one is watching.

By March 2006, the government of New Zealand had embarked upon a ­house-­by-­house mailing to all of its nationals, asking them to think seriously about an imminent outbreak of death and pestilence. I knew this because, rather than contend with the financial issues that ­were actually causing my anxiety, I had become a daily visitor to a Web site called Flu Wiki. ­Here could be found a great milling together of fiercely articulate and ­freaked-­out people from around the world, posting to discussion topics like “What Will We Do with the Bodies?” It was like an informal or unacknowledged meeting space for Neurotics Anonymous. The conversations ranged widely, from scientific discourses on virus mutation to historic analysis of pandemics, to tips for home fuel ­storage–on the presumption that ­self-­quarantine would be the only effective protection from contracting the virus.

“I’ve washed my hands so much this week they’re bleeding,” a Texan mother of seven posted to the Flu Wiki one eve­ning. She was ­self-­reliant and in control. She had already bought birthday and Christmas presents for her youngsters so that they would enjoy all their rituals while in quarantine. She had thought of every possibility. For anxiety is engaged in endless subsets of “what if?” and “if then.” The essence of the condition is an intolerance of uncertainty. A need, as the psychologist Maria Miceli has said, “for absolute predictive control.” The mother from Texas was a frequent poster to the site, and seemed to function as a maternal figure for the others. She confessed to being exhausted. I might have suggested that she had a touch of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, what with washing her hands until they bled, but any post that implied that the community was ­disordered–and such posts appeared now and ­then–was swiftly batted away by a chorus of boos.

I read “Cooking with Canned Goods Only” with interest, feeling a certain nostalgia for pioneer days as depicted in Little ­House on the Prairie, when fears ­were succinct and clear and Pa had a gun. But I didn’t warm to the more jangly ­post-­apocalyptic topic “How to Prevent Home Invasions,” which was based on the notion that people who had failed to prepare for the pandemic would begin searching desperately and aggressively for food. All 262 suggestions on this classic American thread ­were inventive in an earnest, homemade kind of way, as if Martha Stewart had developed a psychosis and put out a special issue of her magazine: crafts and cupcakes for The Followed. “Roll up towels ­etc. and tie them all up in plastic bags to look like the shape of a dead body and put skunk oil on it,” one poster suggested. “Maybe lay the ‘dead body’ on pavement, or somewhere, so that the ‘blood’ that seems to be seeping from it is noticed.”

Lest anyone on Flu Wiki begin to wonder if we ­were paying “selective attention to threat,” as researchers say those of us with anxiety are prone to do, one could always find a supportive quotation from bird flu experts. According to the epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, for example, if the pandemic hit that winter, “I don’t know what we could do about it except say, ‘We’re screwed.’”

Of course. But ­we’re screwed anyway. As I write this in the winter of 2007, scientists in London have just moved the hand on their Doomsday Clock one minute closer to midnight in order to symbolize the approach of civilization’s end. I’m not sure what they want me to do in response to this dramatic ceremonial gesture, other than sigh deeply and lie down. Cover myself with crumbled autumnal leaves, ­perhaps, as I once witnessed an injured squirrel do in my backyard on a ­bone-­damp November morning, remarkably effacing itself.

At least, in prepping for a flu pandemic, I can store tins of butter and plot my family’s flight from an urban center. What exactly am I supposed to do about “civilization’s end”? The scientists who operate the Doomsday Clock are practicing a ­self-­defeating rhetoric that actually appeals more to the depressed than to the anxious. Anxiety distinguishes itself from depression by expressing a grim and slender hope that one will manage to prevail. The depressed drop their briefcases, sink to their knees, and say “fuck it.” The anxious pick and choose between the many vague, ­world-­ending scenarios offered to them these days and seek out the ones they can plan around. To respond to the Doomsday Clock requires tracking down shadowy figures in international arms dealing in remote corners of central Asia and somehow preventing them from selling nuclear weapons or ­else the world will end; the threat of bird flu calls for a ­whole bunch of shopping at Target.

There are several ways to cope with dread, but I specialize in what psychologist Maria Miceli calls “hypothetical analytical planning.” This is where you lie in bed at night and run through as many prospective scenarios as you can imagine and then rehearse them in French, or from the vantage point of a cat. “One’s power over events is closely dependent on one’s power to foresee,” Miceli notes, “because if I cannot foresee, I cannot act.” In order to be able to take the preventive actions required, I have to proceed in the laborious and demanding task of formulating the various hypotheses about the possible courses that events could take. And since those courses are pretty much infinite, the anxiety is never solved and simply deepens, like grooves being laid down in vinyl.

What if I ­can’t fit
The powdered butter and dehydrated dinners
Into my Mazda? Along with the dogs and children?
Will we stay ­here? In the basement?
If the dogs need to go out, how will they come back in
Without bringing the virus into the home on their feet?
They might
Step in avian feces.
Shall I purchase booties?

In these times we speak a great deal about fear: the politics of fear, the culture of fear, the “gift” of fear, the fear of fear. But fear and anxiety are vitally different experiences, and it is actually anxiety that characterizes our age. Fear is invoked by immediate threat, and galvanizes a response. A bear chases you: you run away. A car hurtles out of control: you leap off the road. Terrorists hijack your flight and aim it at Washington: you say, “Let’s roll.”

“Fear sharpens the senses,” observed the German psychiatrist Kurt Goldstein, “anxiety paralyzes them.”

We perceive these two responses as if they marked a difference in character, but it’s really a difference in plight. It isn’t that there are some people prone to paralytic anxiety and others prone to clarifying courage. On the contrary. Recent MRI research has demonstrated that the same people who suffer from anxiety disorders have a totally normal ­response–in how the part of the brain known as the amygdala lights up when ­cued–to real danger. In other words, on United 93, the neurotics would have been right up there with everyone ­else in responding briskly and bravely to the clear and present threat.

The signature vexation of anxiety is that it is objectless. It washes over one in formless waves, pulls one under until the pressure and constriction are tangible and panic rears: I’m in deep, I’m going to drown. What is so incredibly harrowing, as the psychoanalyst Karen Horney once noted, is “the feeling of diffuseness and uncertainty, and the experience of helplessness toward the threat.”

From the Hardcover edition.

Sonya
I am SonyaVronsky, professor of mathematics atTel Aviv University, and this is the story of a day in late August. On this remarkable day I kissed a student, pursued a lover, found my father, and left my brother.

The morning began with a series of sneezes. The sneezes interrupted a dream I was having about a glass-walled elevator that had left its shaft and was shooting about wildly through immense futuristic building complexes. Like something out of Asimov, I thought. I was just starting to enjoy both the sensation and the spectacle when the sneezes woke me.

I like to sleep with the shutters open; I like to feel the sun on my body as soon as I wake. A warm, luminous world awaits me – or so I imagine. Ordinarily, I would have switched off the air-conditioning, opened the window and looked out at our garden; I would have turned my face toward the sky and breathed in the sweet, tyrannous August air. But today my sneezing distracted me. My late-summer allergies were kicking in.

I sat up in my queen-sized bed and reached for the box of rainbow-colored tissues on the night table. I set the box between my knees, which were protruding like two islands from under the sheets. A boxy ship, precariously balanced.

My mother, who slept next to me when I was little, always accompanied her good-night kiss with a quote–affectionate if she was sober (“Come, live with me, and be my love,” for example), gloomier if she was inebriated (“Out, out, brief candle!”).Then she’d turn off the light and I’d snuggle up against her lace nightgown, breathe in her cinnamon perfume. My mother was a night bird; when she woke she was not in a quoting mood. But I am the opposite, more inclined toward poetry in the morning than at bedtime, and I suppose my choices are also somewhat less formal than hers. “You are old, Father William . . . ,” I began, but didn’t finish; a sneeze interrupted me.

Kostya, my darling brother, appeared in the doorway, dark and shadowy because the light was behind him. With his trimmed gray beard and his tall, still body he looked like a character in a French film from the 1960s, a film about alienation and ennui, with the male lead dark and brooding. In fact, he was there to offer me an antihistamine. My brother has very low tolerance for disruption, and the sneezes were annoying him.

But I’m being unfair: he was also trying to help. My poor brother lives with the guilt of my two catastrophes, neither of which he had anything to do with. Human error lay behind the first disaster: twenty years ago, when I was twelve, I was taken to the hospital with a kidney infection, and some nurse or doctor or hospital pharmacist gave me the wrong dose of the wrong drug. I moved into another dimension, spooky at first, frightening at first, then surreal, and finally exotic or ridiculous, depending on the day. I lost my hearing.

And human evil, which no one can entirely avoid, accounts for the artillery unleashed at me in an empty university classroom by stoned twin teenagers with shaven heads and dragon tattoos.

But guilt has a way of insinuating itself into the path of any series of events leading to a given outcome. Kostya believes, for example, that had he fixed our broken toilet, I would not have come down with a kidney infection in the first place. The toilet howled and groaned like a ghoul in chains and I was afraid to use it; my solution was to drink less in order to limit my visits to the bathroom. I didn’t tell anyone about my aversion; had Kostya known, he would have attended to the problem. And then, had I not been deaf I might have heard the twins before seeing them (this is really stretching it) and escaped in time. These are tenuous links but well entrenched in our family mythology.

“Do you want an allergy pill?” my brother asked, speaking as he signed. “It’s non-soporific.” We’d developed so many signing shortcuts and private gestures over the years that by now we almost had our own language.

“Oh ...kay!” I managed to say between sneezes. He vanished and returned with a small yellow pill, his heartbreaking offering of the morning, nestled in the palm of his large, intelligent hand. In his other hand he held a small bottle of Eden spring water.

I obediently swallowed the pill. “You’re lucky I’m so nice to you,” I said.

My brother smiled. It would be no exaggeration to say that he suffers from my misfortunes more than I ever did. He should take comfort in the fact that I have a good life, that I have fun–and maybe he does, to some degree. Maybe not. It’s hard to know for sure.

“Tell me when you’re ready for breakfast,” he said.

I blew him a kiss and he left the room. My briefcase was next to the night table, and I emptied its contents in front of me. Exams, articles, receipts, notes and miscellaneous slips of paper floated out angelically and settled on the bed. I organized them all efficiently and quickly.Then I waddled to the bathroom like a goose headed for its mud pond, and had a shower. There is nothing quite as wonderful and endlessly surprising as a soft, heavy stream of hot water falling on one’s shoulders and down one’s body. I was filled with gratitude, as I always am during the first few moments of a shower, that something so lovely exists on this planet, and I was only sorry that it was not available to everyone. A few kilometers away, there was not even enough drinking water.

But, inexcusably, my sense of guilt soon faded, and as I ran the soapy sea sponge along my legs I succumbed completely to the pleasures of my morning shower.

From the Hardcover edition.

Carrot, Parsnip and Celeriac Stir-fry

SERVES 8

Substitute other vegetables to suit your taste-turnips, rutabaga and sweet potatoes or squash are all good choices.

2 cups celeriac, peeled and cut in 1/2-inch pieces
2 cups parsnips, peeled and cut in  ½- inch pieces
2 cups carrots, peeled and cut in 1/2-inch pieces
3 tbsp butter
Salt and freshly ground pepper
2 tbsp chopped chives

COMBINE celeriac, parsnips and carrots in a pot. Cover with cold salted water and bring to a boil. Boil for 5 to 10 minutes, or until vegetables are tender. Drain.

HEAT butter in a large, deep skillet over medium-high heat. Add vegetables and stir-fry for 5 minutes, or until browned and heated through. Season with salt and pepper and sprinkle with chives.

Halibut with Spiced Moroccan Sauce

SERVES 4

The combination of spices and colours makes this a real taste treat and feast for the eyes. I make it with fresh tomatoes in summer and good-quality canned tomatoes in other seasons.

1/4 cup chopped fresh coriander
1/4 cup chopped parsley
2 tsp chopped garlic
3 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp paprika
Pinch cayenne
Salt and freshly ground pepper
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/2 cup white wine
2/3 cup chopped fresh or canned tomatoes
4 halibut fillets (about 6 oz/175 g each)
1/2 cup cracked green olives

PREHEAT oven to 425°F.

CHOP coriander, parsley and garlic in a food processor. Add oil, cumin, paprika, cayenne, salt and pepper and puree. Add lemon juice and combine. Reserve 2 tbsp spice mixture.

COMBINE wine, tomatoes and remaining spice mixture in a baking dish. Place halibut in baking dish in a single layer, skin-side down. Spread reserved spice mixture over fish.

BAKE for 15 minutes. Add olives and continue to bake for 5 minutes, or until white juices appear on fish. Serve fish with sauce.

Spicy Green Beans

SERVES 4

The deep-frying changes the texture of the beans and makes them as addictive as French fries, and a perfect foil for the fish. This dish can be prepared ahead and then quickly stir-fried to reheat before serving. You can also spread the deep-fried beans on a baking sheet and reheat them at 400°F for 5 minutes.

Sauce 2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp rice wine or dry sherry
2 tsp granulated sugar
1 tsp sesame oil
2 tsp hot Asian chili sauce, or to taste
1/4 cup finely chopped shallots
2 tsp finely chopped gingerroot
2 tsp finely chopped garlic
2 cups vegetable oil
2 lb (1 kg) green beans, trimmed
2 tsp balsamic vinegar
Salt

MIX together soy sauce, rice wine, sugar, sesame oil and chili sauce in a small bowl. Set aside.

COMBINE shallots, ginger and garlic in a separate small bowl and set aside.

HEAT a wok or deep skillet over high heat. Add vegetable oil. Heat to about 350°F, or until a cube of bread browns in 15 seconds.

ADD beans in batches and fry for about 5 to 6 minutes, or until crisp and wrinkled. Place a strainer over a bowl and carefully transfer beans to strainer with a slotted spoon as they are ready. Let sit to drip until cool.

REMOVE all but 2 tbsp oil from wok. Add shallot mixture and stir-fry for 30 seconds. Add beans and sauce and stir-fry for 1 minute, or until beans are coated with sauce and heated through. Drizzle with vinegar and season with salt.

Chapter One
Janet opened her eyes — Florida's prehistoric glare dazzled outside the motel window. A dog barked; a car honked; a man was singing a snatch of a Spanish song. She absentmindedly touched the scar from the bullet wound beneath her left rib cage, a scar that had healed over, bumpy and formless and hard, like a piece of gum stuck beneath a tabletop. She hadn't expected her flesh to have healed so blandly — What was I expecting, a scar shaped like an American flag?
Janet's forehead flushed: My children — where are they? She did a rapid-fire tally of the whereabouts of her three children, a ritual she'd enacted daily since the birth of Wade back in 1958. Once she'd mentally placed her offspring in their geographic slots, she remembered to breathe: They're all going to be here in Orlando today.
She looked at the motel's bedside clock: 7:03 A.M. Pill o'clock. She took two capsules from her prescription pill caddie and swallowed them with tap water gone flat overnight, which now tasted like nickels and pennies. It registered on her that motel rooms now came equipped with coffee makers. What a sensible idea, so bloody sensible — why didn't they do this years ago? Why is all the good stuff happening now?
A few days back, on the phone, her daughter, Sarah, had said, 'Mom, at least buy Evian, OK? The tap water in that heap is probably laced with crack. I can't believe you chose to stay there.'
'But dear, I don't mind it here.'
'Go stay at the Peabody with the rest of the family. I've told you a hundred times I'll pay.'
'That's not the point, dear. A hotel really ought not cost more than this.'
'Mom, NASA cuts deals with the hotels, and ...' Sarah made a puff of air, acknowledging defeat. 'Forget it. But I think you're too well off to be pulling your Third World routine.'
Sarah — so cavalier with money! — as were the two others. None had known poverty, and they'd never known war, but the advantage hadn't made them golden, and Janet had never gotten over this fact. A life of abundance had turned her two boys into an element other than gold — lead? — silicon? — bismuth? But then Sarah — Sarah was an element finer than gold — carbon crystallized as diamond — a bolt of lightning frozen in midflash, sliced into strips, and stored in a vault.
Janet's phone rang and she answered it: Wade, calling from an Orange County lock-up facility. Janet imagined Wade in a drab concrete hallway, unshaven and disheveled, yet still radiating 'the glint' — the spark in the eye he'd inherited from his father. Bryan didn't have it and Sarah didn't need it, but Wade had glinted his way through life, and maybe it hadn't been the best attribute to inherit after all.
Wade: Janet remembered being back home, and driving along Marine Drive in the morning, watching a certain type of man waiting for a bus to take him downtown. He'd be slightly seedy and one or two notches short of respectability; it was always patently clear he'd lost his driver's license after a DWI, but this only made him more interesting, and whenever Janet smiled at one of these men from her car, they fired a smile right back. And that was Wade and, in some unflossed cranny of her memory, her ex-husband, Ted.
'Dear, aren't you too old to be calling me from — jail? Even saying the word "jail" feels silly.'
'Mom, I don't do bad stuff any more. This was a fluke.'
'Okay then, what happened — did you accidentally drive a busload of Girl Guides into the Everglades?'
'It was a bar brawl, Mom.'
Janet repeated this: 'A bar brawl.'
'I know, I know — you think I don't know how idiotic that sounds? I'm phoning because I need a ride away from this dump. My rental car's back at the bar.'
'Where's Beth? Why doesn't she drive you?'
'She gets in early this afternoon.'
'OK. Well, let's go back a step, dear. How exactly does one get into a bar brawl?'
'You wouldn't believe me if I told you.'
'You'd be amazed what I'm believing these days. Try me.'
There was a pause on the other end. 'I got in a fight because this guy — this jerk — was making fun of God.'
'God.' He can't be serious.
'Yeah, well, he was.'
'In what way?'
'He was being so nasty about it, saying, "God's an asshole," and "God doesn't care about squat," and he kept on going on and on, and I had to put a stop to it. I think he got fired that day.'
'You were defending God's honor?'
'Yeah. I was.'
Tread carefully here, Janet. 'Wade, I know Beth is very religious. Are you becoming religious, too?'
'Me? Maybe. Nah. Yes. No. It depends on how you define religious. It keeps Beth calm, and maybe ...' Wade paused. 'Maybe it can calm me, too.'
'So you spent the night in jail, then?'
'Safely in the arms of a four-hundred-pound convenience store thief named Bubba.'
'Wade, I can't pick you up. I think it's going to be one of those no-energy days. And besides, the car I rented smells like a carpet in a frat house — and the roads down here, they're white, and the glare makes me sleepy.'
'Mom, come on ...'
'Don't be such a baby. You're forty-two. Act it. You couldn't even get to the hotel in time yesterday.'
'I was making a quick detour to visit a friend in Tampa. I stopped for a drink. Hey — don't treat me like I'm Bryan. It wasn't like I started the fight or ...'
'Stop! Stop right there. Call a cab.'
'I'm short on cash.'
'Simple cab fare? Then how are you paying for the hotel?'
Wade was silent.
'Wade?'
'Sarah's covering it for us until we can pay it back.' An awkward silence followed.
'Mom, you could pick me up if you really wanted to. I know you could.'
'Yes, I suppose I could. But I think you should phone your father down in ... what's that place called?'
'Kissimmee — and I already did call him.'
'And?'
'He's gone marlin fishing with Nickie.'
'Marlin fishing? People still do that?'
'I don't know. I guess. I thought they were extinct. They probably have a guy in a wet suit who attaches a big plastic marlin onto their line.'
'Marlins are so ugly. They remind me of basement rec rooms that people built in 1958 and never used again.'
'I know. It's hard to imagine they ever existed in the first place.'
'So he's out marlin fishing with Nickie then?'
'Yeah. With Nickie.'
'That cheesy slut.'
'Mom?'
'Wade, I'm not a saint. I've been holding stuff inside me for decades — girls my age were trained to do that, and it's why we all have colitis. Besides, a dash of spicy language is refreshing every so often. Just yesterday I was hunting for information on vitamin D derivatives on the Internet, and suddenly, doink! I land in the Anal Love website. I'm looking at a cheerleader in a leather harness on the —'
'Mom, how can you visit sites like that?'
'Wade, may I remind you that you are standing in a human Dumpster somewhere in Orlando, yet hearing a sixty-five-year-old woman discuss the Internet over a pay phone shocks you? You wouldn't believe the sites I've visited. And the chat rooms, too. I'm not always Janet Drummond, you know.'
'Mom, why are you telling me this?'
'Oh, forget it. And your stepmother, Nickie, is still a cheesy slut. Phone Howie — maybe he can come fetch you.'
'Howie's so boring he makes me almost pass out. I can't believe Sarah married such a blank.'
'I'm the one who gave birth to her, and I'm the one who has to drive with him to Cape Canaveral today.'
'Ooh — bummer. Another NASA do?'
'Yes. And you're welcome to come along.'
'Wait a second, Mom — why aren't you at the Peabody with everybody else? What are you staying in a motel for? By the way, it took thirty rings for the clerk — who, I might add, sounded like a kidney thief — to answer the phone.'
'Wade, you're changing the subject. Phone Howie. Oh wait — I think I hear somebody at the door.' Janet held the phone at arm's length from her head, and said, 'Knock knock knock knock.'
'Very funny, Mom.'
'I have to answer the door, Wade.'
'That's really funny. I —'
Click
The motel room made her feel slightly too transient, but it was a bargain, and that turned the minuses into pluses. Nonetheless, Janet missed her morning waking-up rituals in her own bedroom. She touched her body gently and methodically, as though she were at the bank counting a stack of twenties. She gently rubbed a set of ulcers on her lips' insides, still there, same as the day before, not just a dream. Her hands probed further downward — no lumps in her breasts, not today — but then what had Sarah told her? We've all had cancer thousands of times, Mom, but in all those thousands of times your body removed it. It's lazy bookkeeping to only count the cancers that stick. You and I could have cancer right now, but tomorrow it might be gone.
The motel room smelled like a lifetime of cigarettes. She looked at Sarah's photo in the Miami Herald beside the phone, a standard NASA PR crew photo: an upper body shot against a navy ice-cream swirl background and complexion-flattering lighting that made one suspect a noble, scientific disdain for cosmetics. Sarah clutched a helmet underneath her right arm. Her left arm, handless, rested by her side: Space knows no limitations.
Janet sighed. She twiddled her toes. Ten minutes later her phone rang again: Sarah calling from the Cape.
'Hi, Mom. I just spoke to Howie. He'll go pick up Wade.'
'Good morning, Sarah. How's your day?'
'This morning we had a zero-G evacuation test, but what I really wanted to do was sit in a nice quiet bathroom and test out a new brand of pore-cleansing strips. The humidity in these suits is giving me killer blackheads. They never talked about that in those old Life magazine photo essays. Have you eaten yet?'
'No.'
'Come eat at the Cape with me. We can have dehydrated astronaut's ice cream out of a shiny Mylar bag.'
Janet sat up on her bed and pulled her legs over the side. She felt her skin — her meat — hanging from her bones as though it were so much water-logged clothing. She needed to pee. She began to meter her words as she eyed the bathroom door. 'I don't think so, dear. The only time they ever allow me to have with you are three seconds for a photo op.'
Sarah asked, 'Is Beth arriving today?'
Beth was Wade's wife. 'Later this afternoon. I think I'm going to dinner with the two of them.'
'How far along is she?'
'I think this is her fourth month. It may even be a Christmas baby.'
'Huh. I see.'
'Something wrong, Sarah?'
'It's just that —'
'What?'
'Mom, how could Wade marry ... her. She's so priggish and born-again. I always thought Wade would marry Miss Roller Derby. Beth is so frigging sanctimonious.'
'She keeps him alive.'
'I guess she does. When does Bryan arrive?'
'He and his girlfriend are already here. He called from the Peabody.'
'Girlfriend? Bryan? What's her name?'
'If I tell you, you won't believe me.'
'It can't be that bad. Is it one of those made-up names like DawnElle or Kerrissa or CindaJo?'
'Worse.'
'What could be worse?'
'Shw.'
'I beg your pardon?'
'Shw. That's her name: Shw.'
'Spell that for me.'
'S. H. W.'
'And?'
'There's no vowel, if that's what you're waiting for.'
'What — her name is Shw? Am I pronouncing that properly?'
'I'm afraid so.'
'That is the most ... impractical name I've ever heard. Is she from Sri Lanka or Finland or something?'
Janet's eye lingered on the bathroom door and the toilet beyond. 'As far as I know she's from Alberta. Bryan worships her, and she's also knocked up like a prom queen.'
'Bryan's pregnant? How come I don't know any of this?'
'I just met her last week myself, dear. She seems to rather like me, though she treats everybody else like dirt. So I don't mind her at all, really.'
'Bryan is such a freak. I'm not going to be able to keep a straight face, you know — when she tells me her name, that is.'
Janet said, 'Shw!'
Sarah giggled.
'Shw! Shw! Shw!'
Sarah laughed. 'Is she pretty?'
'Sort of. She's also about eighteen and an angry little hornet. In the fifties we would have called her a pixie. Nowadays we'd call her hyperthyroid. She's bug-eyed.'
'Where'd they meet?'
'Seattle. She helped Bryan set fire — I believe — to a stack of pastel-colored waffle-knit T-shirts in a Gap — back during the World Trade Organization riots. They were separated, then a few months ago they met again destroying a test facility growing genetically modified runner beans.'
Janet could sense Sarah changing gears; she was finished discussing the family. Next would come business-like matters: 'Well, good for Bryan. You're OK for today's NASA gig?'
'Still.'
'Howie will pick you up at 9:30, after he picks up my darling brother. By the way, Dad's broke.'
'That doesn't surprise me. I'd heard he'd lost his job.'
'I tried to loan him some money, but he, of course, said no. Not that there's much to loan. Howie lost the bulk of our savings in some website that sells products for pets. I could strangle him.'
'Oh dear.' It's so easy to fall into the mother mode.
'Tell me about it. Hey, when was the last time you even saw Dad?'
'Half a year ago. By accident at Super-Valu.'
'Tense?'
'I can handle him.'
'Good. See you there.'
'Yes, dear.'
Click
On the walkway outside her room, Janet heard children mewling as they set off to Walt Disney World with their families. She walked to the bathroom across a floor made lunar from eons of cigarette burns and various stains better left uninvestigated. She thought of serial murderers using acids to dissolve the teeth and jawbones of their victims.
She unsuspectingly caught sight of herself in a floor-length mirror by the sink and the sight stopped her cold. Yes, Janet, that's correct: you are shrinking — sinew by sinew, protein molecule by protein molecule you are turning into an ... an elf, yes, you, Janet Drummond, once voted 'Girl We'd Rob a Bank For.'
She was transfixed by the view of herself in a blue nightie, as if she were once again young and this image had been delivered to her from the future as a warning — If I squint I can still see the cool immaculate housewife I once dreamed of becoming. I'm Elizabeth Montgomery starring in Bewitched. I'm Dina Merrill lunching at the Museum of Modern Art with Christina Ford.
Oh forget it. She peed, showered, dried and then modified those traces of time's passage on her face that she could.
There. I'm not so bad after all. A man might still rob a bank for me, and men still do flirt — not too frequently — and older men perhaps — but the look in the eyes never changes.
She dressed, and five minutes later she was a block away sitting in a Denny's reading a paper. The North American weather map on the rear page was a rich, unhealthy crimson, with only a small strip of cool green running up the coast from Seattle to Alaska. Outside the restaurant window the sun on the parking lot made the area seem like a science experiment. She realized she no longer cared about the weather. Next.
Back in her motel room, she lay down on the bed haunted by a thousand sex acts. OK — this place is creepy but at least I'm not throwing away money. Her lips were sore to the point that speech was painful, and it hurt to exhale. Her pill buzzer buzzed; she sat up. She reached into her purse and removed a prescription bottle. She turned on the TV, and there was Sarah being interviewed on CNN. As always, her daughter looked glowingly pretty on TV, like a nun who'd never touched makeup.
— Do you think you and children like you, born with damage caused by thalidomide, have other messages to tell the world?
— Of course. We were the canaries in the coal mine. We were the first children born in which it was proved that chemicals from the outside world — in our case thalidomide — could severely damage the human embryo. These days, most mothers don't smoke or drink during pregnancy. They know that the outer world can enter their babies and cause damage. But in my mother's generation, they didn't know this. They smoked and drank and took any number of medications without thinking twice. Now we know better, and as a species we're smarter as a result — we're aware of teratogens.
— Teratogens?
— Yes. It means 'monster forming'. A horrible word, but then the world can be a horrible place. They're the chemicals that cross the placenta and affect a child's growth in utero.
The host turned to the camera: 'Time for a quick break. I've been speaking with Sarah Drummond-Fournier, a one-handed woman, and one heck of a fighter, who'll be on Friday's shuttle flight. We'll be right back.'
How on earth did I give birth to such a child? I understand nothing about her life. Nothing. And yet she's the spitting image of me, and she's gallivanting up into space. Janet remembered how much she'd wanted to help the young Sarah with her homework, and Sarah's polite-but-resigned invitations to come do so when Janet popped her head into Sarah's doorway. Invariably Janet would look down at the papers that might as well have been in Chinese. Janet would ask a few concerned questions about Sarah's teachers, and then plead kitchen duty, beating a hasty retreat.
She turned off the TV.
She once cared about everything, and if she couldn't muster genuine concern, she could easily fake it: too much rain stunting the petunias; her children's scrapes; stick figure Africans; the plight of marine mammals. She considered herself one of the surviving members of a lost generation, the last generation raised to care about appearances or doing the right thing — to care about caring. She had been born in 1934 in Toronto, a city then much like Chicago or Rochester or Detroit — bland, methodical, thrifty and rules-playing. Her father, William Truro, managed the furniture and household appliance department of the downtown Eaton's department store. William's wife, Kaye, was, well ... William's wife.
The two raised Janet and her older brother, Gerald, on $29.50 a week until 1938, when a salary decrease lowered William's pay to $27 a week, and jam vanished from the Truro breakfast table, the absence of which became Janet's first memory. After the jam, the rest of Janet's life seemed to have been an ongoing reduction — things that had once been essential vanishing without discussion, or even worse, with too much discussion.
Seasons changed. Sweaters became ragged, were patched up and became ragged again, and were grudgingly thrown out. A few flowers were grown in the thin band of dirt in front of the brick row house, species scavenged by Kaye for their value as dried flowers, which scrimped an extra few months' worth of utility from them. Life seemed to be entirely about scrimping. In fall of 1938, Gerald died of polio. In 1939 the war began and Canada was in it from the start, and scrimping kicked into overdrive: bacon fat, tin cans, rubber — all material objects — were scrimp-worthy. Janet's most enjoyable childhood memories were of sorting neighborhood trash in the alleys, in search of crown jewels, metal fragments and love notes from dying princes. During the war, houses in her neighborhood grew dingy — paint became a luxury. When she was six, Janet walked into the kitchen and found her father kissing her mother passionately. They saw Janet standing there, a small, chubby, fuddled Campbell's Soup kid, and they broke apart, blushed, and the incident was never spoken of again. The glimpse was her only evidence of passion until womanhood.
An hour passed and Janet looked at the bedside clock: almost 9:30, and Howie would have already picked up Wade by now. Janet walked down to the hotel's covered breezeway to wait for her son-in-law. A day of boredom loomed.
Then, pow! she was angry all of a sudden. She was angry because she was unable to remember and reexperience her life as a continuous movie-like event. There were only bits of punctuation here and there — the kiss, the jam, the dried flowers — which, when assembled, made Janet who she was — yet there seemed to be no divine logic behind the assemblage. Or any flow. All those bits were merely ... bits. But there had to be logic. How could the small, chubby child of 1940 imagine that one day she'd be in Florida seeing her own daughter launched into outer space? Tiny little Sarah, who was set to circle the Earth hundreds of times. We didn't even think about outer space in 1939. Space didn't exist yet.
She removed a black felt Sharpie pen from her purse, and wrote the word 'laryngitis' on a folded piece of paper. For the remainder of the day she wouldn't have to speak to anybody she didn't want to.
I wonder if Howie is going to be late? No — Howie's not the late type.

Excerpted from All Families are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland. Copyright © 2001 by Douglas Coupland. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Chapter One
Janet opened her eyes — Florida's prehistoric glare dazzled outside the motel window. A dog barked; a car honked; a man was singing a snatch of a Spanish song. She absentmindedly touched the scar from the bullet wound beneath her left rib cage, a scar that had healed over, bumpy and formless and hard, like a piece of gum stuck beneath a tabletop. She hadn't expected her flesh to have healed so blandly — What was I expecting, a scar shaped like an American flag?
Janet's forehead flushed: My children — where are they? She did a rapid-fire tally of the whereabouts of her three children, a ritual she'd enacted daily since the birth of Wade back in 1958. Once she'd mentally placed her offspring in their geographic slots, she remembered to breathe: They're all going to be here in Orlando today.
She looked at the motel's bedside clock: 7:03 A.M. Pill o'clock. She took two capsules from her prescription pill caddie and swallowed them with tap water gone flat overnight, which now tasted like nickels and pennies. It registered on her that motel rooms now came equipped with coffee makers. What a sensible idea, so bloody sensible — why didn't they do this years ago? Why is all the good stuff happening now?
A few days back, on the phone, her daughter, Sarah, had said, 'Mom, at least buy Evian, OK? The tap water in that heap is probably laced with crack. I can't believe you chose to stay there.'
'But dear, I don't mind it here.'
'Go stay at the Peabody with the rest of the family. I've told you a hundred times I'll pay.'
'That's not the point, dear. A hotel really ought not cost more than this.'
'Mom, NASA cuts deals with the hotels, and ...' Sarah made a puff of air, acknowledging defeat. 'Forget it. But I think you're too well off to be pulling your Third World routine.'
Sarah — so cavalier with money! — as were the two others. None had known poverty, and they'd never known war, but the advantage hadn't made them golden, and Janet had never gotten over this fact. A life of abundance had turned her two boys into an element other than gold — lead? — silicon? — bismuth? But then Sarah — Sarah was an element finer than gold — carbon crystallized as diamond — a bolt of lightning frozen in midflash, sliced into strips, and stored in a vault.
Janet's phone rang and she answered it: Wade, calling from an Orange County lock-up facility. Janet imagined Wade in a drab concrete hallway, unshaven and disheveled, yet still radiating 'the glint' — the spark in the eye he'd inherited from his father. Bryan didn't have it and Sarah didn't need it, but Wade had glinted his way through life, and maybe it hadn't been the best attribute to inherit after all.
Wade: Janet remembered being back home, and driving along Marine Drive in the morning, watching a certain type of man waiting for a bus to take him downtown. He'd be slightly seedy and one or two notches short of respectability; it was always patently clear he'd lost his driver's license after a DWI, but this only made him more interesting, and whenever Janet smiled at one of these men from her car, they fired a smile right back. And that was Wade and, in some unflossed cranny of her memory, her ex-husband, Ted.
'Dear, aren't you too old to be calling me from — jail? Even saying the word "jail" feels silly.'
'Mom, I don't do bad stuff any more. This was a fluke.'
'Okay then, what happened — did you accidentally drive a busload of Girl Guides into the Everglades?'
'It was a bar brawl, Mom.'
Janet repeated this: 'A bar brawl.'
'I know, I know — you think I don't know how idiotic that sounds? I'm phoning because I need a ride away from this dump. My rental car's back at the bar.'
'Where's Beth? Why doesn't she drive you?'
'She gets in early this afternoon.'
'OK. Well, let's go back a step, dear. How exactly does one get into a bar brawl?'
'You wouldn't believe me if I told you.'
'You'd be amazed what I'm believing these days. Try me.'
There was a pause on the other end. 'I got in a fight because this guy — this jerk — was making fun of God.'
'God.' He can't be serious.
'Yeah, well, he was.'
'In what way?'
'He was being so nasty about it, saying, "God's an asshole," and "God doesn't care about squat," and he kept on going on and on, and I had to put a stop to it. I think he got fired that day.'
'You were defending God's honor?'
'Yeah. I was.'
Tread carefully here, Janet. 'Wade, I know Beth is very religious. Are you becoming religious, too?'
'Me? Maybe. Nah. Yes. No. It depends on how you define religious. It keeps Beth calm, and maybe ...' Wade paused. 'Maybe it can calm me, too.'
'So you spent the night in jail, then?'
'Safely in the arms of a four-hundred-pound convenience store thief named Bubba.'
'Wade, I can't pick you up. I think it's going to be one of those no-energy days. And besides, the car I rented smells like a carpet in a frat house — and the roads down here, they're white, and the glare makes me sleepy.'
'Mom, come on ...'
'Don't be such a baby. You're forty-two. Act it. You couldn't even get to the hotel in time yesterday.'
'I was making a quick detour to visit a friend in Tampa. I stopped for a drink. Hey — don't treat me like I'm Bryan. It wasn't like I started the fight or ...'
'Stop! Stop right there. Call a cab.'
'I'm short on cash.'
'Simple cab fare? Then how are you paying for the hotel?'
Wade was silent.
'Wade?'
'Sarah's covering it for us until we can pay it back.' An awkward silence followed.
'Mom, you could pick me up if you really wanted to. I know you could.'
'Yes, I suppose I could. But I think you should phone your father down in ... what's that place called?'
'Kissimmee — and I already did call him.'
'And?'
'He's gone marlin fishing with Nickie.'
'Marlin fishing? People still do that?'
'I don't know. I guess. I thought they were extinct. They probably have a guy in a wet suit who attaches a big plastic marlin onto their line.'
'Marlins are so ugly. They remind me of basement rec rooms that people built in 1958 and never used again.'
'I know. It's hard to imagine they ever existed in the first place.'
'So he's out marlin fishing with Nickie then?'
'Yeah. With Nickie.'
'That cheesy slut.'
'Mom?'
'Wade, I'm not a saint. I've been holding stuff inside me for decades — girls my age were trained to do that, and it's why we all have colitis. Besides, a dash of spicy language is refreshing every so often. Just yesterday I was hunting for information on vitamin D derivatives on the Internet, and suddenly, doink! I land in the Anal Love website. I'm looking at a cheerleader in a leather harness on the —'
'Mom, how can you visit sites like that?'
'Wade, may I remind you that you are standing in a human Dumpster somewhere in Orlando, yet hearing a sixty-five-year-old woman discuss the Internet over a pay phone shocks you? You wouldn't believe the sites I've visited. And the chat rooms, too. I'm not always Janet Drummond, you know.'
'Mom, why are you telling me this?'
'Oh, forget it. And your stepmother, Nickie, is still a cheesy slut. Phone Howie — maybe he can come fetch you.'
'Howie's so boring he makes me almost pass out. I can't believe Sarah married such a blank.'
'I'm the one who gave birth to her, and I'm the one who has to drive with him to Cape Canaveral today.'
'Ooh — bummer. Another NASA do?'
'Yes. And you're welcome to come along.'
'Wait a second, Mom — why aren't you at the Peabody with everybody else? What are you staying in a motel for? By the way, it took thirty rings for the clerk — who, I might add, sounded like a kidney thief — to answer the phone.'
'Wade, you're changing the subject. Phone Howie. Oh wait — I think I hear somebody at the door.' Janet held the phone at arm's length from her head, and said, 'Knock knock knock knock.'
'Very funny, Mom.'
'I have to answer the door, Wade.'
'That's really funny. I —'
Click
The motel room made her feel slightly too transient, but it was a bargain, and that turned the minuses into pluses. Nonetheless, Janet missed her morning waking-up rituals in her own bedroom. She touched her body gently and methodically, as though she were at the bank counting a stack of twenties. She gently rubbed a set of ulcers on her lips' insides, still there, same as the day before, not just a dream. Her hands probed further downward — no lumps in her breasts, not today — but then what had Sarah told her? We've all had cancer thousands of times, Mom, but in all those thousands of times your body removed it. It's lazy bookkeeping to only count the cancers that stick. You and I could have cancer right now, but tomorrow it might be gone.
The motel room smelled like a lifetime of cigarettes. She looked at Sarah's photo in the Miami Herald beside the phone, a standard NASA PR crew photo: an upper body shot against a navy ice-cream swirl background and complexion-flattering lighting that made one suspect a noble, scientific disdain for cosmetics. Sarah clutched a helmet underneath her right arm. Her left arm, handless, rested by her side: Space knows no limitations.
Janet sighed. She twiddled her toes. Ten minutes later her phone rang again: Sarah calling from the Cape.
'Hi, Mom. I just spoke to Howie. He'll go pick up Wade.'
'Good morning, Sarah. How's your day?'
'This morning we had a zero-G evacuation test, but what I really wanted to do was sit in a nice quiet bathroom and test out a new brand of pore-cleansing strips. The humidity in these suits is giving me killer blackheads. They never talked about that in those old Life magazine photo essays. Have you eaten yet?'
'No.'
'Come eat at the Cape with me. We can have dehydrated astronaut's ice cream out of a shiny Mylar bag.'
Janet sat up on her bed and pulled her legs over the side. She felt her skin — her meat — hanging from her bones as though it were so much water-logged clothing. She needed to pee. She began to meter her words as she eyed the bathroom door. 'I don't think so, dear. The only time they ever allow me to have with you are three seconds for a photo op.'
Sarah asked, 'Is Beth arriving today?'
Beth was Wade's wife. 'Later this afternoon. I think I'm going to dinner with the two of them.'
'How far along is she?'
'I think this is her fourth month. It may even be a Christmas baby.'
'Huh. I see.'
'Something wrong, Sarah?'
'It's just that —'
'What?'
'Mom, how could Wade marry ... her. She's so priggish and born-again. I always thought Wade would marry Miss Roller Derby. Beth is so frigging sanctimonious.'
'She keeps him alive.'
'I guess she does. When does Bryan arrive?'
'He and his girlfriend are already here. He called from the Peabody.'
'Girlfriend? Bryan? What's her name?'
'If I tell you, you won't believe me.'
'It can't be that bad. Is it one of those made-up names like DawnElle or Kerrissa or CindaJo?'
'Worse.'
'What could be worse?'
'Shw.'
'I beg your pardon?'
'Shw. That's her name: Shw.'
'Spell that for me.'
'S. H. W.'
'And?'
'There's no vowel, if that's what you're waiting for.'
'What — her name is Shw? Am I pronouncing that properly?'
'I'm afraid so.'
'That is the most ... impractical name I've ever heard. Is she from Sri Lanka or Finland or something?'
Janet's eye lingered on the bathroom door and the toilet beyond. 'As far as I know she's from Alberta. Bryan worships her, and she's also knocked up like a prom queen.'
'Bryan's pregnant? How come I don't know any of this?'
'I just met her last week myself, dear. She seems to rather like me, though she treats everybody else like dirt. So I don't mind her at all, really.'
'Bryan is such a freak. I'm not going to be able to keep a straight face, you know — when she tells me her name, that is.'
Janet said, 'Shw!'
Sarah giggled.
'Shw! Shw! Shw!'
Sarah laughed. 'Is she pretty?'
'Sort of. She's also about eighteen and an angry little hornet. In the fifties we would have called her a pixie. Nowadays we'd call her hyperthyroid. She's bug-eyed.'
'Where'd they meet?'
'Seattle. She helped Bryan set fire — I believe — to a stack of pastel-colored waffle-knit T-shirts in a Gap — back during the World Trade Organization riots. They were separated, then a few months ago they met again destroying a test facility growing genetically modified runner beans.'
Janet could sense Sarah changing gears; she was finished discussing the family. Next would come business-like matters: 'Well, good for Bryan. You're OK for today's NASA gig?'
'Still.'
'Howie will pick you up at 9:30, after he picks up my darling brother. By the way, Dad's broke.'
'That doesn't surprise me. I'd heard he'd lost his job.'
'I tried to loan him some money, but he, of course, said no. Not that there's much to loan. Howie lost the bulk of our savings in some website that sells products for pets. I could strangle him.'
'Oh dear.' It's so easy to fall into the mother mode.
'Tell me about it. Hey, when was the last time you even saw Dad?'
'Half a year ago. By accident at Super-Valu.'
'Tense?'
'I can handle him.'
'Good. See you there.'
'Yes, dear.'
Click
On the walkway outside her room, Janet heard children mewling as they set off to Walt Disney World with their families. She walked to the bathroom across a floor made lunar from eons of cigarette burns and various stains better left uninvestigated. She thought of serial murderers using acids to dissolve the teeth and jawbones of their victims.
She unsuspectingly caught sight of herself in a floor-length mirror by the sink and the sight stopped her cold. Yes, Janet, that's correct: you are shrinking — sinew by sinew, protein molecule by protein molecule you are turning into an ... an elf, yes, you, Janet Drummond, once voted 'Girl We'd Rob a Bank For.'
She was transfixed by the view of herself in a blue nightie, as if she were once again young and this image had been delivered to her from the future as a warning — If I squint I can still see the cool immaculate housewife I once dreamed of becoming. I'm Elizabeth Montgomery starring in Bewitched. I'm Dina Merrill lunching at the Museum of Modern Art with Christina Ford.
Oh forget it. She peed, showered, dried and then modified those traces of time's passage on her face that she could.
There. I'm not so bad after all. A man might still rob a bank for me, and men still do flirt — not too frequently — and older men perhaps — but the look in the eyes never changes.
She dressed, and five minutes later she was a block away sitting in a Denny's reading a paper. The North American weather map on the rear page was a rich, unhealthy crimson, with only a small strip of cool green running up the coast from Seattle to Alaska. Outside the restaurant window the sun on the parking lot made the area seem like a science experiment. She realized she no longer cared about the weather. Next.
Back in her motel room, she lay down on the bed haunted by a thousand sex acts. OK — this place is creepy but at least I'm not throwing away money. Her lips were sore to the point that speech was painful, and it hurt to exhale. Her pill buzzer buzzed; she sat up. She reached into her purse and removed a prescription bottle. She turned on the TV, and there was Sarah being interviewed on CNN. As always, her daughter looked glowingly pretty on TV, like a nun who'd never touched makeup.
— Do you think you and children like you, born with damage caused by thalidomide, have other messages to tell the world?
— Of course. We were the canaries in the coal mine. We were the first children born in which it was proved that chemicals from the outside world — in our case thalidomide — could severely damage the human embryo. These days, most mothers don't smoke or drink during pregnancy. They know that the outer world can enter their babies and cause damage. But in my mother's generation, they didn't know this. They smoked and drank and took any number of medications without thinking twice. Now we know better, and as a species we're smarter as a result — we're aware of teratogens.
— Teratogens?
— Yes. It means 'monster forming'. A horrible word, but then the world can be a horrible place. They're the chemicals that cross the placenta and affect a child's growth in utero.
The host turned to the camera: 'Time for a quick break. I've been speaking with Sarah Drummond-Fournier, a one-handed woman, and one heck of a fighter, who'll be on Friday's shuttle flight. We'll be right back.'
How on earth did I give birth to such a child? I understand nothing about her life. Nothing. And yet she's the spitting image of me, and she's gallivanting up into space. Janet remembered how much she'd wanted to help the young Sarah with her homework, and Sarah's polite-but-resigned invitations to come do so when Janet popped her head into Sarah's doorway. Invariably Janet would look down at the papers that might as well have been in Chinese. Janet would ask a few concerned questions about Sarah's teachers, and then plead kitchen duty, beating a hasty retreat.
She turned off the TV.
She once cared about everything, and if she couldn't muster genuine concern, she could easily fake it: too much rain stunting the petunias; her children's scrapes; stick figure Africans; the plight of marine mammals. She considered herself one of the surviving members of a lost generation, the last generation raised to care about appearances or doing the right thing — to care about caring. She had been born in 1934 in Toronto, a city then much like Chicago or Rochester or Detroit — bland, methodical, thrifty and rules-playing. Her father, William Truro, managed the furniture and household appliance department of the downtown Eaton's department store. William's wife, Kaye, was, well ... William's wife.
The two raised Janet and her older brother, Gerald, on $29.50 a week until 1938, when a salary decrease lowered William's pay to $27 a week, and jam vanished from the Truro breakfast table, the absence of which became Janet's first memory. After the jam, the rest of Janet's life seemed to have been an ongoing reduction — things that had once been essential vanishing without discussion, or even worse, with too much discussion.
Seasons changed. Sweaters became ragged, were patched up and became ragged again, and were grudgingly thrown out. A few flowers were grown in the thin band of dirt in front of the brick row house, species scavenged by Kaye for their value as dried flowers, which scrimped an extra few months' worth of utility from them. Life seemed to be entirely about scrimping. In fall of 1938, Gerald died of polio. In 1939 the war began and Canada was in it from the start, and scrimping kicked into overdrive: bacon fat, tin cans, rubber — all material objects — were scrimp-worthy. Janet's most enjoyable childhood memories were of sorting neighborhood trash in the alleys, in search of crown jewels, metal fragments and love notes from dying princes. During the war, houses in her neighborhood grew dingy — paint became a luxury. When she was six, Janet walked into the kitchen and found her father kissing her mother passionately. They saw Janet standing there, a small, chubby, fuddled Campbell's Soup kid, and they broke apart, blushed, and the incident was never spoken of again. The glimpse was her only evidence of passion until womanhood.
An hour passed and Janet looked at the bedside clock: almost 9:30, and Howie would have already picked up Wade by now. Janet walked down to the hotel's covered breezeway to wait for her son-in-law. A day of boredom loomed.
Then, pow! she was angry all of a sudden. She was angry because she was unable to remember and reexperience her life as a continuous movie-like event. There were only bits of punctuation here and there — the kiss, the jam, the dried flowers — which, when assembled, made Janet who she was — yet there seemed to be no divine logic behind the assemblage. Or any flow. All those bits were merely ... bits. But there had to be logic. How could the small, chubby child of 1940 imagine that one day she'd be in Florida seeing her own daughter launched into outer space? Tiny little Sarah, who was set to circle the Earth hundreds of times. We didn't even think about outer space in 1939. Space didn't exist yet.
She removed a black felt Sharpie pen from her purse, and wrote the word 'laryngitis' on a folded piece of paper. For the remainder of the day she wouldn't have to speak to anybody she didn't want to.
I wonder if Howie is going to be late? No — Howie's not the late type.

Excerpted from All Families are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland. Copyright © 2001 by Douglas Coupland. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.