Alexandra Borowitz - Family And Other Catastrophes

Jason got up from his seat, wobbling slightly. “Sorry if I took advantage of you. It was just such a perfect opportunity to piss off the ex. You know how it is.”

Nathan nodded. He had never had a girlfriend, but that had not stopped him from plotting his revenge on other women. Already he had made one of his female tormentors cry on Twitter by calling her an imbecile for misspelling lavender . He smiled serenely to himself at the memory of that triumph.

“So you respect me?” Nathan asked.

“Sure. As much as I can respect a guy in a tweed fedora and sneakers.”

“Do I have your gentleman’s word?”

Jason threw his head back and laughed. “Yeah. My gentleman’s word.”

Emily

The air smelled of slightly burnt hot dogs, a childhood smell that filled Emily with nostalgia. She looked around and saw that the two families appeared to be mixing nicely, or at least being polite to each other. Marla and Susan were still talking. Marla was looking ever so slightly over Susan’s head, her chin tilted upward, a very full glass of pinot noir in her hand. Emily heard Susan exclaim “So you’ve actually been to Madison Square Garden? In the Big Apple?”

Meanwhile, her father had cornered Nick by the grill. “I don’t want to bore you with this, but the brutality of the Han Dynasty has been exaggerated by popular media. It was a topic I covered in one of my more famous articles. I’m not sure I would recommend it to you. If you’re not in the field, you might consider it a bit dry.”

“There you are, Emily!” She saw Marla waltzing over to her, her palazzo pants rippling in the wind. “I was looking all over for you. I’m calling a small family meeting outside. Wipe under your eyes, by the way, your mascara is melting.”

“Calling a family meeting at another family’s home?” Emily asked. “Come on, that’s pretty rude.”

Marla feigned pearl-clutching, which actually consisted of clutching her amber necklace, and appeared less satirical than she intended. “Oh no, Emily! Maybe they’ll tell David not to marry you! The horror!”

“That’s not—” Emily paused. She wouldn’t pick this battle.

“If you must know, Emily, I’m doing this here because I fear you and your siblings would lash out at me if we were in private. Discussing this in a public setting makes it more likely that you’ll all behave appropriately.”

Emily wondered how Marla defined appropriate , but she decided not to say anything about it. Having done many “inappropriate” things in her childhood, which Marla still held up as examples of her missed social cues, she wanted to avoid having any of these failures paraded again. One incident in particular was a tantrum she threw at the age of eight when her mother refused to let her get a second candy bag at FAO Schweetz. She’d thought that, twenty years later, such a story would be merely funny or forgettable, but it still embarrassed her deeply, since Marla always made a point to relate all her modern-day anxieties to this one moment and harp on the fact that she was “much too old” to be getting so upset in public. “This is just like that time at FAO Schweetz,” Marla would say, as Emily cried to her on the phone about a fear or hang-up that had nothing to do with candy. “You have problems handling a lack of control.”

Emily followed Marla to a handmade wooden bench at the far end of the patio, where Lauren and Jason were already sitting. Matt sat at the end of the bench, looking like a startled deer. Marla glared at him.

“Matt,” she said sharply, “this is a family meeting.”

Matt nodded and slunk away. Emily took his seat on the bench.

“Mom, you didn’t have to be so mean to Matt,” Lauren said.

“He needs to stop following you everywhere. He’s worse than Ariel.”

“Actually, Ariel is profoundly independent. We still do skin-on-skin bonding, but he doesn’t insist on it.”

“I see.” Marla turned to face the group. “Okay, I’m just going to say it. I want us to work together on what I think you’ll all agree are some troubling issues facing our family.”

“What issues?” Jason asked.

“It’s no surprise that we aren’t exactly close. As I get older, I want to spend time with my children, and while both you and Lauren live within driving distance, or a quick train ride on Metro-North, I rarely see you. And Emily, I know you live all the way in California, but we haven’t seen you since two Christmases ago. I can’t even remember the last time we saw you for Thanksgiving.”

“You and Dad always go to the Vineyard on Thanksgiving.”

“Yes, but only because we anticipate that you won’t want to come home. Meanwhile, Lauren doesn’t even celebrate Thanksgiving.”

“That’s because it should be called National Genocide Day,” Lauren said. “Although to be fair, that’s every day of American history.” She leaned back as if waiting to collect high-fives.

“Look, I’m not here to blame any of you kids. It’s not your fault that we aren’t as close as we should be. I take full responsibility for being too trusting. I was silly to assume you would all want to stay in touch with me as I got old.”

“Mom, don’t do this,” Emily said. “We just have our own lives—it doesn’t mean we don’t want to see you.”

“Anyway,” she continued, “since we’re all together this week, I’ve decided that we should do a special family exercise. I think it will help us repair what has gone wrong.”

“What is it, Mom?” Emily asked. She feared some kind of competitive team-building exercise, like the trip to Six Flags that ClearDrop organized, where everyone had to go on rides together in a group of thirty, and nobody could separate. But no, Marla was too cultured for something like that. Emily still recalled the disdain in her mother’s voice when she found out that her friend Naomi’s daughter got married at Disneyland with some guy dressed as the genie from Aladdin officiating.

“Well,” Marla said, her voice cracking theatrically, “I sometimes feel that I have failed you as a mother, considering how none of you are particularly close. Lauren, when you were born, I was hoping you would become a best friend for Jason, and Emily...”

“I know I was an accident, Mom.”

“Well, I did tell your father that the antibiotics I was taking might interfere with my birth control, but when he gets in the mood...anyway. Basically, what I’m trying to say is that we need to bring this family together before the wedding. If we’ve fought this much only a few hours in, just imagine how this week will be. This might be the last time we all see each other before I die.”

“Are you sick, Mom?” Emily asked. Her throat tensed up.

“I could be,” said Marla. “Many cancers are asymptomatic. But in terms of actual diagnoses, no. Nothing that I know of.”

Lauren groaned. “Mom, you can’t just say something like that to Emily.”

“I apologize, Emily,” Marla said. “But death is a reality, and I will die someday. And I don’t want that to happen before we have all come to terms with our problems.”

“So what’s the plan?” Jason asked, frowning at his empty beer bottle.

Marla took a deep breath. “Family therapy.”

Lauren looked incredulous. “Dad actually agreed to this?”

“Dad won’t be involved. Just me. This is about you kids, not him.”

“Then why would you be there?” Lauren asked.

“Because I’m going to be the therapist,” Marla said triumphantly, as if revealing a stunning M. Night Shyamalan twist.

“You can’t be the therapist for your own children,” said Emily. “That’s unethical.”

“Ethics are important up to a point, but it’s also important not to be too rigid about them,” she said. That, at least, was true. Marla bravely resisted societal pressure to be ethical. “Frankly, Emily, when you call me unethical I think you’re projecting. What you really fear is that your own moral flaws will be uncovered. Don’t be afraid of that. This is for personal growth.”