Passing Around

It started when Carrie Underwood mailed the Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy to her oldest daughter Megan.

It’s not the kind of thing I like, she scribbled. You might like it.

Carrie had heard the whole story of how Megan returned to Philly without her pills and she wanted to do something for her. Rose didn’t want to tell her, but Carrie wormed everything out of her. Rose hadn't bothered to mail the pills to Megan. She knew Megan wouldn’t take the pills and wasn’t leaving the house.

She might as well never have stayed a month here. And the visit to the psychiatrist was a total waste.

I could fly to Philadelphia and have her committed to a hospital. Isn’t one of her friends a psychiatric nurse?

Oh, him. He’s worthless. He’s a dope buddy, Rose said contemptuously. Don’t talk to him. And don’t bother to commit her. She’d be polite and say whatever it took to get out. And she’d never take her pills or speak to you again.

Well, I want her to speak to me.

Of course you do. She’s kind of a nice gal. Just annoying.

It turned out Megan loved the Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy. She hadn’t expected to like it. She was in a reading phase. She got up and read, read, read all day. Every night she worked a little on her book. Truth to tell, it was almost done. She had never thought she’d finish it. And she was thinking of publishing it on the internet even though she didn’t use a computer. Her son liked You Tube, but he used to have a blog. She’d been a little hazy about the blog, but she didn’t see why she couldn’t have one. He could teach her to type her book on a word-processing program and then he could post it for her. She was kind of excited about it, to tell you the truth. She thought it was revolutionary: publishing on the net. She didn’t know how to reach readers, but it was better than trying to sell it to a commercial publisher. She didn’t know any agents, certainly couldn’t make a trip to New York and schmooze with any, and knew it would never get published.

In the early ‘60s when John F. Kennedy was president, who were they? That’s what Americans want to know. They are wistful about the ‘60s. They think it was a simpler time because people ate TV dinners and hamburger-Campbell’s soup casseroles. They imagine that listening to the Lennon Sisters, eating Space Food Sticks, and taking family camping trips in national parks imade life less complicated than it is today. The Bay of Pigs crisis was solved, much to everybody’s relief. The family was still intact: men worked, women stayed home, families lived on TV dinners, and everybody played Sorry.

Sure. That’s the way they like to tell it. That’s not the way it was. The Cuban missile crisis in 1962 terrified everybody. My mother was furious about it. The world was on the brink of nuclear war when Kennedy ordered a naval blockade to stop shipments of arms from the Soviet Union to Cuba. Cuba, fearing another U.S. invasion after the Bay of Pigs, had received weapons from the Soviet Union and had nuclear missiles. Finally the Soviet Union agreed to remove the weapons.

What a mess. It could have all been prevented if the CIA hadn’t organized the Bay of Pigs invasion.

And she was furious about the Vietnam War. The U.S. had been already covertly, quietly embroiled in Vietnam since1959.

My mother lived on alimony and tried to write a novel while we played in the same room. She tuned us out and typed for hours. My father had left my mother for another woman, a sleazy blonde who visited a neighbor, and he moved to California with her. We never saw him afterwards. Not once. We were proud New Yorkers who rarely left our state. My mother eventually got a job teaching English: first in community colleges, then at a Catholic school. I taught my sisters to read before they started school. Their dolls were also in attendance in my “classroom”: Chatty Cathy, a talking doll, Suzy Smart, a doll with her own desk and chalkboard, and several dolls whose names were unknown....

Megan wanted to pass down her book to her son as her mother had passed down her novel to her children. The girls had loved their mother’s novel. Well, they had been characters in it. They’d loved that. The story had reminded Megan vaguely of Margaret Drabble, vaguely of Carol Shields. Not as well-written, of course, but very original. Never published, though her mother had certainly had more friends than any of her daughters.

Megan had used her mother’s book in writing her own books. It helped her remember what had happened.

Her mother had smoked cigarettes. That made her laugh. The characters in her book all smoked cigarettes and drank cocktails, like characters in Updike.

We were all traumatized by our father’s departure, she thought. Me? A lifetime on marijuana. What a bad mother I was. Jason doesn’t seem to have noticed. I went to work, came home, lit up. He couldn’t have friends over. I was always wrecked. The less you give, the more dependent they are. It’s not what you want, but it’s what happens. Jason always hopes to get something from me. But he gets more from my mother actually. She has the instinct.

Rose is the most successful, the only one with ambition. Never had children, didn’t want them. Oh. She gave away a baby. That probably fucked things up. She is quiet. Married to Ben, she doesn’t have to talk. She entertains quietly.

As for Abby, she never saw her, never thought about her. Abby was in Chicago, doing some incomprehensible business thing.

Feeling some affection for her sister Rose, she put Robert Anton Wilson’s trilogy in the mail and cornered her mail carrier and got him to send it to Rose. She gave him $5 and told him to keep the change. He said he couldn’t keep the change and estimated that it would cost less than $2. He brought the change the next day.

Her note said: Mom must be on drugs at last. You’ve got to read this!!!

Three exclamation points?

Yes, three. She must really like it.

I’m glad I could send her something she liked.

Now everyone in the family was passing around Robert Anton Wilson’s trilogy. Rose kind of liked it, kind of was bored by it. She mailed it to Abby, who passed it on to her daughter, the one who had visited Rose and Ben.

If only we could be a book group, we could be a family, Megan said on the phone one night.

Yes, said Rose. If only it were that simple.