All Families Are Psychotic (10 page)

'They probably cut up the frui t on the butcher block righ t after they cut up some cow.'

'In a place like this,' Nickie said, 'your frui t plate would have been manufactured last February in a frui t plate laboratory in Tennessee.'

'Oh look,' said Janet in her chipper 1956 voice, 'scrambled eggs. How lovely.' This motherly tone persuaded the others to properly check out the menu. Janet removed a pill caddie from her purse and plunk ed it onto the table.

Nickie was agog. 'Christ, your pillbo x is the size of a sewing ki t. Will I to have to buy one of those?' Just then the waiter, name-tagged Kevin, returned. 'That's
nothing,'
he said. 'A few of the folks who come in here, their pillbo xes are as big as Kimble-Wurli tzer organs.'

Janet nodded at Nickie. 'She and I both have aids.' 'Well, so do I,' said the waiter.

Nickie said, 'Well isn' t
this a
party.'

'I feel a group hug coming ,' said the waiter, 'but my boss is chewing my ass to speed things up here. There's a Trailways busload of French tourists that arrived fifteen minu tes ago -France-French — it 's your worst table-waiting nigh tmare come true, so I have to take your orders real quick. Don' t worry abou t

tipping .'

The women placed their orders, while much Parisian quacking was heard from the restaurant's other side. 'So, like, what is it with your family?' Shw asked. 'You're like the
disease
family. Are any of you
not
sick?' Nickie looked at Shw and changed the topic. 'I hear you're not too thrill ed with having a kid, eh?'

'Oh look — Trophy Wife can actually talk.'

'Such lovely manners,' Nickie said. 'I've stuck my foot into it as always. If it makes you feel any better, I've

done it, like, a half dozen times.' 'It?'

'Abor t.'

'I'm going to the toilet.' Shw skulked off.

'I though t that maybe if she saw a ship wreck like me who'd been in the same boat, that maybe she'd think tw ice abou t her actions.'

'Do you want kids?'

'I guess. But I'd be a disgraceful mother.' 'You wouldn ' t.'

'Well, thank
you,
Cindy Brady. Anyway, we couldn ' t aff ord kids.' 'I forgo t — he's that broke, huh?'

'Oh! We're so screwed ragged it 's sick.' 'But you went marlin fishing—'

'Cour tesy of one of his so-called friends. And you kno w what we've been eating down here since we

arrived? Nachos and salsa. And hot dogs. That's what. We stopped at some jumbo outlet store on the way in from the airpor t.' Nickie looked at her nails and found them buffed enough . 'I
hate
being poor. I really do. And it really bugs me that I can' t just dump Ted.'

'That's one of the most romantic things I've heard in mon ths.'

Nickie said, 'And the one thing that bugs me abou t this whole aids business is that Ted migh t leave
me.
Imagine: I care abou t a person who'd dump me like that.' She sipped her coffee. ' Maybe I'm selling him shor t. I don ' t care if I die. And these hiv drug cocktail thingi es make you gro w fat deposits in the weirdest places — I could end up with six tits.'

Janet asked, 'Do you talk like this around Ted?' 'Basically.'

Janet looked out the windo w at the brilli ant parking lot. 'I sometimes wonder if I'd been more . . .

forward
like you and like her — whether things migh t have been sligh tly different between me and Ted?' 'You? Maybe. But probably not. Ted says that you tw o never fough t. He said you " simmered " . That's his word —
simmered.'

'I did. It 's an unatt ractive trait. I no longer simmer.'

Nickie said, 'I should go try to retrieve Gwendolyn. The things we do for family — however tw isted the

connection.' She stood up, turned around and said, 'Hey, check out those tw o hunky pilo ts coming up the walkway.'

'You don ' t have an off butt on, do you, Nickie?' 'Nope.'

Nickie walked over toward the ladies' room near the till, just as the pilo ts walked through the door, dashing and bronzed. She swapped a smile with the less tanned pilo t, who then grabbed her around the

waist and slapped a piece of duct tape over her mou th. He screamed, 'Everybody. Listen. Listen -
now!
We have ourselves our first hostage. Anybody fucks up even once, and Malibu Barbie here gets her head

blo wn off. No cell phones, no pagers, no 911s, no nothing.'

The other pilo t raised a ri fle, cocked it, and blasted a pie case, sideswiping Kevin's arm. A blizzard of

blood and breakfasts smashed onto the cash coun ter and floor. Customers screamed; the pilo t shot out a plate glass windo w; tw o people in the parking lot ducked and ran for a hedge. The less suntanned pilo t screamed, 'Shut the fuck up all of you. We're here on business and we
mean
business. My friend Todd here is going to be coming around to take your jewelry. You Frenchies all love jewelry, and no Disney shit

— I repeat,
no Disney shit — ne pas de merde à la Disney.
Any crappy li tt le Lion King brooches or Litt le Mermaid bracelets, and Todd here takes one of your toes as a punishment.'

The French tw ittered among themselves; the pilo t shot one of them, a middl e-aged man, square in the chest. The room went silent. Janet saw the metal gun barrel touching Nickie's righ t ear; she remembered, as a child, her father pretending to pull quarters out of her own ear. Her head felt like a bee sting.

Our lives are geared mainly to deflect the darts thrown at us by the laws of probabili ty. The moment we're able, we insulate ourselves from random acts of hate and destruction. It 's always been there — in

the neighborhood s we build , the walls between our houses, the wariness with which we treat the unkno wn. One person in six million will be struck by ligh tning. Fifteen people in a hundred will

experience clinical depression. One woman in sixteen will experience breast cancer. One child in 30,000 will experience a serious limb deformi ty. One American in five will be victim of a violent crime. A day in which nothing bad happens is a miracle, a day in which all the things that could have gone wrong didn ' t.

The dull day is a triumph of the human spiri t, and boredom is a luxury unprecedented in the history of our species.

Janet left her boo th and walked toward Kevin.

The gunman at the till said, ' Move back, lady.' Nickie was trying to shou t through the duct tape.

'I'm sixty-five, you twerp. Shoo t me, but I'm going to help Kevin here. I'm sure your buddi es would really respect you for shoo ting an unarmed sixty-five-year-old lady.' Janet sat down beside Kevin and held his hand.

Pilo t Number Two, 'Todd ', had turned away and hopped from table to table, making the Europeans

dump their jewelry into a cott on sack. When one woman refused, he said, 'Not going to play along then, eh?'
Bang.
He blasted off the toe of the man beside her. Janet heard screams and the gentle clinking of coins and jewels tumbling over one another, into the loo t bag.

'It 's time,' shou ted Nickie's captor.
' Move.'

Todd returned to the fron t door just as Shw, oblivious to the restaurant's drama, was exiting the ladies' room near the fron t door. The pilo t reached for her purse, but she pulled it back just enough so that its contents sprayed over the floor, hundr eds of fifty-dollar bill s.

'Jesus,' said Number Two, stopping briefly to pick up a wad of them. 'There's no time. Go.
Now.'

In a breath, they were out the door and gone.

Nickie ripped the duct tape from her mou th. She sucked in air as if she'd been deep underwater, figh ting for the duration of a dream to rise to the surface.

Janet looked down and the linol eum before her was soaked in blood , a rich, cough-syrupy purpl e. Nickie was talking to her, but she couldn ' t hear —
no sound.

Nobody in the restaurant was moving. The smell of burning breakfasts wafted in from the ki tchen, where Janet would later learn the staff had locked themselves in the fridge. A dozen police off icers stormed

through , bello wing,
Nobody move!
Paramedics hopped over partitions and boo ths, heading for the

traumatized French. Photographers were already documenting the scene, and Kevin's blood looked black in the afterburn of flashbulb s.

Janet looked over to see Shw picking up wads of bill s with . . .
doughnu t tongs?
A cop bello wed, 'Don' t touch that money!'

'It 's my money, you prick. Those assholes tried taking it.'

'Jesus, Shw,' said Nickie, 'Where'd you get a load of fift ies like that?'

The manager confirmed that the money was Shw's, but the cops still told her not to touch the evidence. 'What? Like I'm gonna want to scrape off the scabs when it dries?'

'Leave it where it is, ma'am, or I'll have to charge you with tampering with a crime scene.'

Shw flung her purse onto the floor. Medics in space suits descended on Kevin, as tw o off icers solicited a descrip tion of the tw o gunmen from Nickie: 'The first one was cute in a Kevin Costner way, but he had mean eyes, like he tortured bugs and small animals when he was a kid. He had really bad skin — too many drugs or an all-candy diet. He had a blue tatt oo of a Celtic cross on his righ t upper hand, and, oh — he was really hung.'

'We can' t use that in a repor t, ma'am.'

Kevin was li fted onto a dolly, Janet holding on to his good hand. The paramedics had covered him up with a rustling sheet of plastic foil — a space blanket. The plastic covered him as he was trolli ed out the

doors and into the sunligh t, which turned him and his metal blanket into a gli ttering, crinkling foil wrap. Janet spoke to the Orange Coun ty police off icers, and then it was Nickie's turn again. While the police were interviewing Nickie, another off icer was talking to Shw. Janet was maddened to be able to hear

only shards of Shw's words . . .

'. . . I'm with them' — Shw poin ted at Nickie and Janet — 'but just barely. I used to date the older woman's kid.'

Used to date?

Shw was not the picture of intergenerational warmth. She wanted out of there, and quick. She was finally allo wed to gather her remaining bill s. The manager poin ted her towards the hose behind the restaurant, which was used by staff to rinse out the Dumpsters. Minu tes later Janet and Nickie found her there. She'd laid the rinsed bill s out to dry on a dazzling white-painted ledge, where ants were now crawling over

them, sensing a meal in the traces of blood enzymes.

'We're leaving shor tly,' Janet said, adding , 'You don ' t have to come. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I have a feeling this is the last time we're ever going to be seeing you.'

At this, Shw spri tzed her money more forcefully.

'Well, whatever,' said Nickie, 'in tw o minu tes, we're legally divorced, so you migh t just as well tell us

what's the deal with the cash here. It 's nosiness pure and simple. If I don ' t find out, I'm going to have a hollo w nagging feeling in me until the day I get hit by a bus.'

'It 's
my
body,' said Shw. The hose kinked; she bent down to unkink it. 'You've lost me,' said Janet. 'Can you back up a bit?'

She stopped her rinsing and looked at Nickie. 'Look, Bryan's been telling you I want an abor tion, righ t? He probably would —he's such a death-obsessed basket case.' She resumed spri tzing, and went on. 'This lady in Daytona Beach — her husband's in auto parts. Nice guy, but he shoo ts blanks and they want a kid.

End of story. Thank you, Internet. So this money here is my down payment. Bryan's a moron , but he's

good-looking , and his sister's an astronaut —
that's
what got me into the six-figure range. I said I wanted an abor tion because I figured he'd go along with the death part of it.'

Janet said, 'Wait, wait,
wait —
you're going to
sell
the baby?'

'Well,
duh!
How was I supposed to kno w he'd go loopy?' Her spraying continued. 'There
are
laws.'

'Please don ' t get involved in this, Janet, because I actually like you and I want it to stay that way. And anyway, if you do find me, I'll just say I miscarried in a Tastee-Freeze bathroom .' She looked at Janet's face. 'Oh, don ' t go looking so high-hat on me. The kid is mine and I can do what I want with it.'

'Does Bryan kno w abou t the sale?' 'No. But I imagine he soon will.'

Shw's spraying grew menacingly close to their feet, and Janet could feel dropl ets on her shins. 'I think we'd best be going .'

Janet and Nickie went to their car, and then realized they didn ' t kno w where to head next.

'I think we should go get drunk ,' Nickie said, 'I really do. Can we —
do
that in our condi tion?' 'I think so.'

Silently they pro wled the roads in pursuit of a good, eleven a.m. cocktail.

The monor ail 's interior was steaming clambake hot, as Wade, Ted and Bryan whooshed above a Walt Disney World lake. Garish, emotionless music filled the air like the smell of somebody else's shampoo. Ted was already bored, while Wade was feeling flu-ish.
I used to be so good in the heat — even those

summers in Kansas City.
Only Bryan seemed to be in a festive mood as he jabbered away. 'Hey, Dad,' Bryan said. 'This is kinda cool, huh? You and your sons at Disney World .'

'Yeah, sure. Righ t.'

' Makes you kinda proud , huh, Dad?' Bryan wouldn ' t let up. Ted turned to look at Wade as if to say,
Shut this guy up, will you?

'And isn' t it really neat — us being down here and Sarah going off into space?'

Ted snapped. 'I spent my whole fricking career in engineering so that Sarah and people like her could go up into space and help drag the rest of the species out of the shit. So yes, Bryan, it does seem " kind of neat " that we're all here.' The monor ail was full; people stared at them. Whining childr en stopped

whining . Bryan looked taken aback.

Wade though t,
What a geek. Why on earth would Bryan give a rat's ass about Dad's approval? And does he have to be so bloody pathetic about itì
The loudspeaker's neuter male voice loudl y described a