A Family Affair

God must have created our family on one of his headache days, or after having to deal with a particularly venal sin. Either way, the brain genes he put together for my parents, me and my siblings, are a mess.  And just in case you’re thinking, C’mon, it can’t be as bad as all that, I’ll give you the inventory.

First in line, Christopher, named after my grandfather. Not because I’m special, but because I was the first to arrive. Though actually Mom and I do have a special relationship, because I have her to thank for my Prosopagnosia. The face blindness that means we can’t recognize each other in a crowd, or anyone else we know. When she picks me up from the airport, she has to hold up a card with both of our names on. If not, we’ll stand next to each other for hours, cursing because one of us is late.

Next, my beautiful twin sister, Kelly. A Tourette’s special, with a major in swearing. The kind of person you avoid being near anywhere public, unless you want her to say the really bad stuff you’d rather somebody else took the blame for.  She has been useful in this respect, on a number of memorable occasions.

And last, the baby of the family, Carlton, whose first word took him a whole minute to say. The poor little guy stutters like he’s trying to break a world record, except that no one has time to find out which one. I love him, particularly because I don’t need to know his face to know who’s speaking. He’s cute too, a mass of blonde curls and a pleasure to see, over and over again, if you’re someone like me, or Mom.

And let’s not forget my Dad, even though I try. Apart from being twice the size he should be, you could think he’s defect-free, until you ask him to play Let’s Pretend. He’s got something called aphantasia, which means his mind’s eye is blind, as in he can’t imagine anything he can’t see for real, which also means that he can’t imagine being someone like me.   

It probably sounds like hell on earth, but actually as a family we work well. Kelly knows not to be upset when I walk straight past her, and I know not to be upset when she tells me to F… off. None of us argues about wearing Mum’s name tags at home, we never ask Dad to imagine anything and we all know the dangers of leaving the room before Carlton has finished his word. So it works, but only between us.

Outside in the other world everything is a challenge. People say I’m rude, and that I think too much of myself to stop and say, “Hi,” in the street, but how would they feel if I told them I didn’t even know who they were? I chose my one and only girlfriend, because she had a mass of frizzy red hair like no one else on earth, but then one day she had it cut and I didn’t recognize her when she decided to spring a birthday surprise. 

“Da daaa! Surprise!”

“Er, sorry do I know you?”

My Dad thought it was hilarious, but I wanted to die. The only good part being that not recognizing her meant I didn’t know I was being blanked. People like me learn to find a silver lining in even the darkest cloud. My sister is good at that too. When she interviewed for her psychology school, she told them that her most recent tick was a new form of social interaction. “What? You haven’t encountered under-breath humming? The latest development in emotional interception?” Well, of course she was happy to demonstrate, but unfortunately also felt to compelled to conclude with her favorite, the “damn-assed biscuit,” which needed some explanation.

And then there is Carlton, whose silver linings still seem to be a long way off. In kindergarten he pretended to be a late speaker, a cover blown when a boy sat on his favorite toy. “Smash my car and I’ll smash your fricking face,” he shouted as a direct audio copy of his sister, which is when we found out that his stutter disappears the minute he is angry.  I wasn’t there to see the teacher’s face, but I imagined it, which I enjoyed telling my Dad. Carlton is in 7^th grade now and getting smarter every day, but we only know just how smart, if we look at his books.

As you’ve probably guessed, Mom is the one we run to when things get tough. The one who understands, lets us be who we are and sits down for hours working out management strategies for our individual specialties, which is what she calls them.  If she had been in marketing she could have sold green eggs. So, there you have it, the full picture of our family, as it stutters, swears and blinds its way through life. An odd bunch, but coping, until the day Dad tells us about his plans for a family reunion.

“Grandad Jennings will be an octogenarian this year, god bless him. His grandchildren are scattered all over and he hasn’t seen the rest of the family since Grandma’s funeral. So imagine his face when we invite him over for his birthday dinner and he sees everyone together, all in one place.” Then Dad points to our backyard. “Here.”

If I hadn’t had more pressing problems of my own, I would have reminded him that he is the only one who can’t imagine Grandad Jennings’ face, but meantime Mom is staring at me, white and looking like she is about to faint. Meeting people we know really well is already an ordeal, our recognition success rate based on clues such as familiar body shape, without which Dad would be a literal nobody, so how are we supposed to deal with a whole bunch of people we’ve never even met? In most accounts of this type, you could expect the writer to say that the announcement was followed by a stunned silence, or tears of joy, but as you’ve probably realized by now, our family does not meet expectations.

“I don’t care about family and Grandad Jennings stinks of pee.” The first to really express himself is Carlton. His lightning fast erudition being the clearest indication of just how angry he is. 

Next up is Kelly, with an expletive too blue to repeat on this page, and then finally Mum. “Mike, please,” she says. “Let’s talk about this,” but we all know that she’s wasting her time, because if Dad can’t imagine a vase of flowers, how is he going to imagine the way our guts are knotting up inside. 

I’m not sure what everyone else was doing during the ensuing weeks, but I stuck to being in comfortable denial. Preparing for college, a whole minefield still to be encountered, and firmly believing that if I don’t think about something, it won’t happen. Then the replies start coming in. “Well, will you look at that,” Dad shouts to anyone happening to be standing nearby. “Bob’s coming and he’s got a new wife.”

Mom has been getting quieter by the day, so Dad doesn’t even notice that his conversation is a monologue. “She’s pretty too. Looks like a young Jane Fonda, what do you think?”

“How would you know?” I say, in her place, but no one is listening.

After that Dad spends hours on the phone, ordering the tables, chairs, food and people to serve it, which is where Mom finally steps in and I start listening. “We need name badges and place names on the table.” You can tell from her tone that this is one statement no one in their right mind would challenge, and Dad’s mind is fully operational, apart from the aphantasia.

“Good idea,” he says, and then turns to me. “Here’s the list, now get writing,” which is how I know that he’s planning to shoe-horn fifty people into a backyard built for twenty.

If I had to describe the tension as an animal, I would choose a panther. A huge, black beast just waiting to pounce. Dad’s allocation of tasks being as accurate as pinning the tail on the donkey blindfold, or as deliberate as the decision to push each one of us over our personal edge. Carlton is put on the door for the Meet and Greet, guaranteeing that a single hello and how are you, will become an hour-long event. Kelly is assigned to station pick-ups, where the worst road rage language will have nothing on her daily transport expletives. And then me, the person most likely to give his own photo the wrong name, arbitrarily assigned to handing out badges and allocating seating. And Mum? Well, his description of her as social wizard and small talker, defies any further comment from me. 

When the day finally arrives, the atmosphere is more one of submission than rebellion. Dad is back in monologue mode as far as Mom is concerned, while Kelly and Carlton are silent, for understandable reasons, which just leaves me, the relatively safe option for opening the door to the furniture guys.  At least they won’t be expecting me to put names to faces, and my comment that, “Dad’s cousins better not be as fat as he is,” raises a sympathetic response. “Shame dude, he said fifty chairs for fifty people, but he didn’t specify their girth.” Kelly’s random, “Dick wit,” seems fortuitously accurate. 

As luck would have it, at least five of the fifty are babes in arms, so unlikely to take a whole chair, but from there we have to hope that a few others either die or get lost on the way. Failing that, we’ll just have to stack them. Dad’s lack of imagination is obviously a spatial issue too. Then, he even manages to destroy his own bright idea of adding photos to the name and place tags, when he says to me, “All you have to do is match one with the other,” clearly forgetting that after seventeen years, I still can’t recognize my own mother in a crowd. If Kelly had been there she would have articulated my inner cursing, but she was already out on the road and probably melting the asphalt. 

When the guests start to arrive, Dad pushes Carlton out the door, saying, “Your place is at the gate.” The message in Carlton’s glare doesn’t need any imagination, but I’m the only one to see it and what do I know? Perhaps his face looks like that every day? Anyway, the good news is that the combination of Dad’s push and Mum’s insistence that he wear the “cute little suit,” has guaranteed that he is angry as hell, and manages a whole set of welcome phrases, without a single break. 

As the strangers and, perhaps, familiars filter in, I hear comments like, “Geez, she’s some driver,” and “she told that truck driver where to go,” so I know that Kelly has made an impression too. But now, as chief people stacker and guide, it’s my turn to take over. “Hi there,” I say to an elderly lady, with distinctive white hair, which I find reassuring. “I’m Christopher, the eldest, and you are …” I look at the label Carlton has pinned to her low-slung chest. “Baby Rosa?”

Now, for someone like me, this kind of occurrence has the potential to be deeply disturbing, but even I can tell the difference between baby faces and crinkly ones. An observation reinforced by Carlton’s all too recognizable cackle of laughter behind me.  “Revenge is sweet,” he would have said if we had given him an hour, but he doesn’t need to, because I’ve already understood. I guide her to a random place around one of the tables and leave her there to be any age she wants. When I look over at Mom, she winks back and shrugs, which means, just go with the flow.

With everyone seated, or randomly stacked, Dad brings in Grandad and tells him to look around. “What do you think Pop?” He says seating him at the head of a yard-length table. “How’s that for a birthday surprise?” 

Grandad’s dentured and gappy smile is all we need. He’s crying too, so at least this part is going well, and I can see from Dad’s body language that he is uber-relieved. Next, he raises a glass and tells us all to do the same, which is when Kelly comes in. I should say here that the Tourette and Tension twins should be separated at birth, but by now they’re kissing and holding hands. Filtering out the right people from the freeloaders looking for a ride has been stressful enough for Kelly, so the last thing she needs is a whole room full of people turning round to stare at her. “So I’m the last in,” she mutters. “But you try to get that ship of a car back in the garage.” So far so good, I’m thinking, confrontational, but not rude. Then she draws breath and samples her latest tic. The one Dad calls the hyena on heat. 

The following silence screams Do something!  And yes, I know drastic action is needed, but I’m the last one to know what it is, so I opt for cowardice and turn to my neighbor instead. “Hi, I’m Christopher,” I say, holding out my hand as Mom taught me, but damn it, something is going wrong here too. “What’s so funny?” The woman is folded over the table and laughing so hard she can hardly breath. 

“That’s the fifth time you’ve introduced yourself,” she gasps, before collapsing into a new round of hyperventilation.

Busted. How many other people have I introduced myself to, over and over again? I’m dying, but then she sits up and I see her name tag. “Hi Uncle Solomon, I didn’t recognize you,” I say, pausing a beat, because timing is everything. “My, how you’ve changed.”

Fortunately, this woman is young enough to be quick off the draw, and turns round to the person seated next to her. A boy of about my age, currently sneaking some wine. “Aunt Adelaide!” She screeches. “I had no idea you were so beautiful,” then she leans over to the next person along, a crusty old guy with a droopy moustache. “And this must be Greta, your daughter.”

Now everyone is looking at their name tags. The whole backyard, stacked and racked, laughing and hee-hawing over something that happens to Mom and I every day. It’s kinda funny, but I’m feeling kinda of sorry for myself too, when I feel a tap on my shoulder, and a strong Irish accent starts talking to me from behind. “Hey there fella, I’ve brought someone I’d like you to meet.” 

In a slightly less crazy situation, I might have recognized the voice, but my world and its senses are currently standing on their heads. When I turn round all I see is my baby brother, dwarfed by the most gorgeous girl I’ve ever laid eyes on, possibly. 

“I’m Ciara, over here visiting my folks.” 

People talk about having split personalities, but this is one mental aberration I’ve managed to dodge, until today. Right now, if you could climb inside my mind, you’d hear two voices shouting at each other like man and wife.

Voice one:         Ciara, that is the most beautiful name and she’s so aaah …

Voice two:          Carlton is speaking Irish!

Voice one:          Look at her hair …            

Voice two:          And he’s not stuttering!

I’m still trying to rein them in when I feel her hand on mine. “It’s what I told your brother,” she says in her glacier-melting brogue. “Sometimes stutterers can talk straight off, if they take on an accent,” then her green eyes meet my mine, I’ve no idea what color. “I’ve got a cousin who’s the same, but he talks like a German,” then she gives me a rendition.

It’s funny and we’re both laughing, but now I’ve a got another voice shouting in the back of my head. She has a cousin who stutters, but she doesn’t think it’s weird. 

“Did you hear Kelly?” I ask her.

“You mean the hyena scream?” She’s laughing again, her lips like a red bow on a Christmas gift. “Yes, that was cool, but it’s a shame she stopped before giving us some good swear words at the end.”

Now I’m speechless, except for the voice in my head, but as she can’t hear it she must think I’m dumb in every kind of way. Head-voice is saying Hey! It’s not just me! We’re weird, but so is everyone else, in their own way. My working mind’s eye, has me tapping a glass for quiet, and then announcing the news, imagining the expression on Dad’s face too, but it’s a scene that will have to wait for my courage to catch up.

I should mention at this point that Dad has lined the yard walls with mirrors, because he read somewhere that they make small spaces look bigger. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, but from my corner of reflections I’m looking at two of the most beautiful girls I can ever remember seeing.

She’s looking too. “Is that who I’m thinking it is?”

“They both are,” I say. “And I guess the two weird geeks beside her must be me.”

“Four beautiful people, who have a whole lot to share.”

I’m in love, head, heels and all the rest, but I’m thinking, Damn, she’s a cousin. This could be a real family affair.