The Tumbleweed: An Explanation of a Family Genealogy
By Suzanne Saunders (with help from friends and dormmates Matt, Karl and Brian)
My name is Suzanne. This all started when I was 17 years old and I lived at home with my 16-year-old sister Crystal and my parents Jon and Sara. Next door to us lived Momma Sara's brother Brian, his wife Aunt Shira, their daughter Ami who's Crystal's age, and our Grandpa Conrad. (Grandma Renee died in an accident a few years back.) We're a very close-knit family.
We were all excited because our fifth cousin Matt from the Western branch of the family was coming to visit. The day before he arrived I was talking about it to our next door neighbors on the other side, two brothers about Mom and Dad's age. Dylan never married; Chris (better known as "D.B." ;it's an old nickname and I never did find out what it stood for) is divorced and has a daughter Crystal's age, Sarah, who lives across town and comes to visit sometimes. They told me that Sarah would be here at the same time Matt would be, and Chris said we should try to get them together, because he worries about his daughter not having a boyfriend. Dylan didn't look very happy at the idea. I told him not to worry, it was just an idea. (As it turned out, they hardly noticed one another, both being occupied with other matters during the time they were here.)
The next day Matt arrived. He's my age, and Dad asked the three of us girls to show him around town. Since it was Friday night, we skipped the tourist spots and went to the night spots, ending up at a party some friends of mine were having. Everyone had a bit too much to drink (or in some cases more than just a bit). We had told our parents about the party (though not that the resident parents were out of town) and said that we'd probably stay over there for the night. So we just crashed wherever nobody else had.
The next morning I was awakened by my sister, who was saying that she had to talk to me. Blearily, I followed her outside to the patio, but her story woke me up rather quickly.
She had complained last night, after a few drinks. of being too hot, and Matt had suggested going outside by the pool to cool off. One of the two--Crystal wasn't even sure which--had suggested taking a dip, and the lack of suits had not stopped them. After splashing around for a while, they had somehow ended up together lying on the diving board ("kinda...intertwined" as Crystal delicately phrased it.)
Crystal was rather upset, understandably enough I thought, since she hadn't intended for this (or anything) to happen between her and Matt. She wanted me to go talk to him because she didn't think she could face him. I promised her I would whenever I had a chance and reassured her that I didn't think she was a bad person. Then we went to find the rest of our group and go home and change.
I didn't get a chance to confront Matt until Sunday evening, by which time I worked up quite a rage against this despoiler of my little sister. So I couldn't have sounded too happy when I knocked on his door that evening and told him I needed to talk to him. He let me in and the first thing I said once the door was shut behind me was, "Crystal told me about what happened at the party. I can't believe you would do such a thing!"
His response was "Crystal did not say no, nor did she express any reluctance." Obviously Matt was reading through his grammar book earlier. "It was her choice. I admit I wasn't thinking all that clearly or I might have known she wouldn't feel the same way later, but I didn't take advantage of her!" And we argued on, angrily but quietly, not wanting to wake up the rest of the house who were all asleep by this time.
Suddenly Matt grabbed me while I was talking and kissed me passionately. I was surprised, but my instincts took over and not only did I kiss back, but when he stepped away to await my reaction, well, I pulled him back toward me. (I probably should have slapped him; it would have simplified future events considerably.)
We continued to caress one another, leaning against the wall, and then Matt lifted me up off the floor. I quickly wrapped both legs around him for balance and he carried me to the nearest horizontal surface, a table that used to be Dad's drafting board. And on that table we made love, after pushing a lot of junk onto the floor.
Afterwards, we didn't say much, but he did reassure me that he knew how Crystal felt and that they could forget that anything happened. I didn't ask if we were in the same situation.
The next few days were pretty boring. We went to school (most of the time) and everything, while Matt killed time during the day and we all went on family outings afterwards. Nothing out of the ordinary seemed to be going on.
Crystal, Ami and I were talking about Matt one day. I hadn't managed to tell Crystal what had happened with me and him. But Ami was talking and said she had a big secret to tell us. We leaned closer in anticipation.
"Well, you know on Wednesday I was skipping, and Dad's at work and Mom's usually at the hairdresser after lunch, so I came home and I was going to go into her room to borrow some clothes and I heard some noise, so I peeked around the corner and do you know what I saw?"
"What?" Crystal and I said simultaneously.
"Mom and Matt! On the bed, in, you know, the middle of things!"
"Oh my God!" Crystal gasped. I didn't say anything. "He's 17 and she's 38! And just after what happened with me..."
"What happened with you?" Ami asked. Crystal told her story. And then I got up the courage to admit what had happened to me. Crystal was very shocked, but then she was like, "Gee, Ami, I'm surprised nothing's happened with you and him."
Ami blushed, looked away, cleared her throat, and finally spoke. "Well, actually," she admitted, "something has. But I made the move." Crystal looked shocked and I admit to feeling a little jealous. Ami continued with the story.
"I asked him to come down to the football field with me, and we drove over there in the truck. So, I borrowed one of Mom's teddies and wore just that under my jacket and jeans, and when we were parked, I just unzipped the jacket and said, 'Do you like what you see?' He certainly seemed to." She paused, and then leaned forward to add quietly, "And you remember that little mattress we used to use for sleepovers?"
"Yes, why?" I asked avidly.
"I put it in the back of the truck. That's what we used, because I think it would have been kinda uncomfortable with nothing under us. But we took all our clothes off, in the middle of the football field! That was so weird." Crystal got up and left about this time, but Ami and I sat and talked some more about Matt and our respective experiences.
Matt had to go back out West after a week and a half, and he got one of the most emotional farewells our family could give, at least from the female members. I made him promise to write and got his address. That's how he found out when I missed a period, before I told anyone else. The next letter carried news of Crystal's and Ami's similar situations, and all of us could testify that it had to be his. We told our parents that we were pregnant (but not by whom), and they were very supportive; of course we had to stay in school and it wouldn't be much financial trouble because all of us could easily get scholarships to the state college in town and live at home. So the subdued reaction to this didn't really prepare us for the next major bombshell left as a consequence of Matt's visit.
There would have been a big scene between Aunt Shira and Uncle Brian in any case. But when she said not only that she was pregnant, but that the child wasn't his, it was more than could be argued over one night and then forgotten. originally, she hadn't intended to tell him that the baby was someone else's, but when Brian said that he didn't want any more kids, Shira blew up and told him that he wasn't even responsible for this one. (She wasn't rash enough to say who actually was; being cuckolded by a seventeen-year-old might have tempted even calm Uncle Brian to violence.) So Shira walked out that night, spending the night in a hotel rather than our house, the traditional refuge from family fights. The next day she left town and we didn't hear from her until she sent Ami an apologetic note explaining that the marriage had been troubled anyway. Ami wrote back saying that she understood and forgave, and they corresponded regularly (I also wrote to Aunt Shira for many years, and eventually relations quieted down enough with her and the rest of the family that she could visit with the baby, a girl named Jordan.) Ami continued to live with her dad so she could finish school in the same place, and she managed not to take sides.
Brian did not adjust so easily, even with the help of the rest of the family, now increased by three little girls: my Lisa, Crystal's Jill, and Ami's Michelle. Though he seemed ok in public most of the time, Ami told us that he was acting strangely sometimes. And many nights, when father and daughter were both sorrowing and both tipsy, they found comfort in closeness to one another. But the closeness got a little too extreme for most people's standards, especially right after little Michelle learned to sleep through the night. Probably not wanting to admit that this was becoming a regular, planned thing, they apparently never used birth control. So when Ami (now 18) told us that she was pregnant again, she was a little reluctant to admit who the father was. But we dragged it out of her, and I for one wasn't very shocked, considering the things that had already gone on in this family. At least her baby seemed ok in the sonogram, and eventually was born healthy.
So effectively we had four mothers and five fathers (the bachelor two next door were around enough that they qualified) for four children. Lisa, Michelle, Jill, Gerry (and Jordan when she was around) grew up regarding each other as siblings, because we didn't even want to try explaining the true family relationships to small children. They were all fairly normal children and they drew all the adults together in various combinations within a very close-knit group. And all the extra parents were a great help in balancing school (or eventually our careers) and motherhood, especially during finals week.
One evening when Gerry was about two, all the women were in our living room, with D.B. He was sitting with Ami's legs over his lap and she was trying to tickle him with her feet. I was reading and Mom and Crystal were watching TV. That's when Ami made the announcement that she and D.B. were moving to Tahoe. Dylan would keep the house and possibly rent out a bedroom. Michelle and Gerry were to stay here (Mom and Crystal would have insisted if Ami hadn't already said that was her plan.) She thought she just needed to get away from home and her dad, and D.B. also wanted to go off to someplace new.
They left a few weeks later, and we heard from them often. Six months later Ami called to announce that she was again pregnant. She and Chris were happy and might even sometime get around to making it legal. We didn't find it necessary to worry about them.
Shortly after D.B. moved out of his old house, his daughter Sarah moved in to live with her uncle Dylan. The attachment was no surprise to me; I had noticed signs of it beginning nearly four years earlier. Even Chris didn't seem to mind his daughter sleeping with her uncle. But Sarah was nice to have around.
All of us grew older; Crystal became a math teacher, Ami a social worker, me a full-time junior editor at a local publishing house and part-time writer, eventually becoming fairly successful. (After my second sale to Fantasy & Science Fiction, I bought the house across the street from the three occupied by our extended family so I could have room for a study to write in.) Matt became a lawyer and wrote that he was thinking of running for office, so was there any way his opponents could dig up the children's parentage and use it against him? We didn't think so, and apparently no one in search of mud to sling ever did quite that much research. Matt's campaign went well and he rose to a full-time career in politics, and we told all the children to be proud of their "cousin" Matt. And our four children grew, doing well in school and usually not getting in major trouble.
The general consensus was that Ami and D.B.'s son Karl was a very strange child. We saw enough of him to make that judgment at our frequent family reunions and visits. IQ tests showed him to have genius-level intelligence, but he was very eccentric. He led the other children in unusual imaginative games despite being the youngest, but his favorite was always dress-up, making up very creative characters to go with the costumes. We have pictures of him at age 6 in 11-year-old Lisa's favorite black miniskirt (though it wasn't very "mini" on him). This was only a little over a year before Lisa got backstage at the Bon Jovi concert a week before her 13th birthday, and became hooked enough on the lifestyle that she packed a suitcase, left a farewell note, and hitched a ride on the roadies' bus to wherever the next concert was. I was frantic for the first week or so until she first got around to calling to say where she was. After that we heard from her often enough to keep me reassured of her safety, but she never stayed in one place long enough for me to write back. I wasn't happy about her leaving home until she got old enough that I really felt she could take care of herself, and I always missed her, but at least she was living a worthwhile life. (I'm just as music-addicted as my daughter, just without the courage to leave home for it.) But Karl was annoyed when she left; he said the wardrobes of his other cousins were boring.
So it didn't surprise me very much (although nothing can surprise me anymore) when Karl announced that he would be taking on the identity of Karla. He was still about 15 when he made this announcement, and Ami and D.B. weren't quite that liberal a set of parents; he couldn't do that sort of thing while he was under their roof. So the knowledge preceded the fact for the family, but he moved out as soon as he could, got an apartment and proceeded to attend college during the week as Karl and go to bars on the weekends as Karla. We got used to him in both guises, although we really didn't see much of him. After all, he was going through college and graduate school years early and was very busy studying psychiatry. And when he was about 19 and Gerry and Jill were making plans for their wedding, he told them that he would be glad to attend, but that he would need a babysitter; he was now the proud parent of a baby boy named Chris after Karl's father. We were surprised at the news, but mostly because he hadn't told us anything about this, even though the baby was several months old now. But Chris was an adorable baby. And Karl seemed to have been cured of his interest in women's clothing; when Crystal asked him, "Where's Karla?" he told us, "She's on sabbatical, writing a book."
Gerry's and Jill's wedding was a grand affair. Although some might have considered the marriage rather peculiar, the two being first cousins who had been raised as siblings, we didn't care. Everyone enjoyed the spectacle--there hadn't been a wedding in our family in ages! The whole family came in from the far corners of the country, and of course all the friends of the family were there too. The bride's grandfather Jon gave her away (her father Matt was there with his new wife but had asked that someone else do the honor). Crystal was there, crying over the wedding of her baby, but she considered it a very good omen when she caught the bouquet, because she did have a new boyfriend, Jay, who would have been at her side if he hadn't had to be out of town.
We had many other family reunion-type activities outside of the ceremony and reception. And the day after one of them, a family tennis tournament, Crystal once again came to me and said she needed to talk to me about something. Once a big sister, always a big sister.
Her story was that after the last match, a hard-fought battle between Matt and Karl with the younger man finally winning, she had asked Karl to help her with her game. They had been alone on the courts, with no one in sight, and the tennis lesson had gone in a rather interesting direction. Crystal was worried about the consequences of having not only been unfaithful to Jay, but with her own nephew, who was half her age. I reassured her that Jay need never find out, and that (at least compared to some of the stuff we knew about) there was nothing particularly horrible about sleeping with a grown man who just happened to be your nephew. It's not as if he were young and inexperienced anyway; he was already a father. So reassured, Crystal went on with seeing her grown daughter off on her honeymoon.
Karl also disappeared shortly after the wedding was over, having made arrangements to leave Chris at my house. I didn't mind; after more than two decades of raising children, it would have seemed unnatural not to have any around our four-house family complex. But it was a nice change to only have one around. Unfortunately, that didn't last long.
When Crystal found out she was pregnant, she confided to me that she was sure it was Karl's. Or as we found out, "they were" Karl's, since the sonogram showed that she was having twins. Jay was also aware that there was a discrepancy between how far along she was and the timing of his presence in town. A very stormy period in their relationship followed, but it seemed to strengthen it in the long run. Jay even grew to like the babies when they were born: A girl, Joey, who looked just like her mother, and a boy, Skippy. Skippy looked exactly like his great-uncle Brian had in all the pictures (and almost the exact opposite of his brother). Grandpa Conrad snickered whenever he saw the child, and I began to wonder if maybe he wasn't getting a bit senile. Although Conrad was in incredibly good health for a man of his age (he was close to eighty and could pass for nearly thirty years younger) you never know about the mind at that age. So one day I asked Grandpa exactly what was so funny about Skippy.
"Well," he explained, "I'm just in a good mood because the experiment worked." He told me that as a young man he had been interested in genetics and cryonics, and had wanted to experiment. So when his wife Renee had been pregnant with their first child they had had an amniocentesis done, which gathers information about the fetus through examining fetal cells present in the amniotic fluid. Conrad had somehow gotten hold of the samples of fluid and frozen them. Recently, as a bored retiree, he had unfrozen them, cultivated the cells until another viable embryo was produced, and somehow implanted it in Crystal's uterus with the baby she had just announced she was carrying. (So that's why the doctor had said that this one looked almost like it was a few weeks behind the other in development!) So Skippy looked like his granduncle because they were genetic identical twins.
I looked at Grandpa, and wondered if the genes for insanity ran in the family. It would explain a lot if they did. But I now had the moral dilemma of trying to decide whether to reveal this to the rest of the family. It might be better to warn the family about this crazy man living with Brian, but it also might affect intra-family relations in an adverse manner, not to mention Skippy's upbringing. In the end, I didn't tell anyone, but I extracted a promise from Grandpa to run these things by me before he tried them so I could keep him out of trouble. Hopefully.
We all reshuffled houses when Jill and Gerry got back from their honeymoon, to give the newlyweds a place of their own. Michelle moved in with me and little Chris, Momma and Dad moved in with Uncle Brian and Conrad, and Crystal and the babies now shared a house with Dylan and Sarah and their recently-born daughter Sandra. Gerry and Jill had a baby boy, named Bob, and a few months later Jay moved in with Crystal.
Recently I had been having even more success with my writing, and I had to go to California to talk over a publishing contract for my newest science-fiction series. Having just received a letter from Karl postmarked Los Angeles, I wrote back and suggested that we get together while I was out there. As the other writer in the family (he'd then written four or five screenplays under a pseudonym, the last two quite well received) I've always enjoyed talking shop with Karl, and nobody in the family had seen him in close to two years, another excuse.
Karl had a lot to talk about. He'd been doing intensive training in martial arts, writing a scholarly treatise on the psychology of cross-dressing (so that's what that crack about Karla writing a book was about ... ) and assisting in the direction of his latest screenplay, which was why he was taking time off from his secluded enclave where his training went on, to be here in L.A. He was also very pleased with himself because of his new lover, some model named Kathy Ireland who was the co-star in the movie. Apparently they took one look at each other and knew it had to be, even though neither of them was particularly able to stay in one location for long, due to her job and his temperament. But for a while they apparently were happy on the rare occasions they were together.
After he told me all this, I bored him silly with my stories about the time I spent the night with Robert Plant. He also confided that the reason he was training in these martial arts is that he planned to form this underground organization (called the Real International Police, to form the oh-so-creative acronym of RIP). He had a lot of grandiose plans for taking out South American drug dealers and everyone else he didn't like. I sort of tuned him out, and when he asked for my opinion I told him that if he wanted to go get himself killed that was his business. He was sort of disappointed that I wasn't enthusiastic, and quit talking about it. We sampled the nightlife that evening, and parted the next day. He promised to keep me updated on the progress in readying RIP for operation.
I got home and a flustered Michelle greeted me with the message to go to the hospital. "Aunt Sara's had an accident." Of course I hurried over to see Momma. Crystal, Dad, Uncle Brian, and everyone else not needed to keep the kids from tearing the house down were already there. Momma was in bed; her condition wasn't desperate but she was scheduled for surgery the next day. She was very glad to see me, and after speaking with all of us for a while she asked if the rest of them would mind if she spoke to Crystal and me alone. Everyone was quite willing and they all filed out of the room.
Once alone, she spoke quietly to us. "Even though the doctors say of course I'll be fine, there's a possibility that I may not come out of it tomorrow. There's something you girls have to know." We reassured her that this was no unusual operation; of course she would be fine. "No, this is important. It's time you knew anyway. My husband is sterile." I was the one to notice that she hadn't said "your father."
Crystal asked, "So how did we get born?" in a disbelieving tone of voice.
"Other men," Momma answered matter-of-factly. Crystal gasped. "When I got the results for the tests we took to see why we were having such trouble conceiving, I didn't tell ion. He knew I wanted children, and it would break his heart to know he couldn't give me any. I just said he had a slightly low sperm count, which would explain our problem. So he didn't suspect anything when I got pregnant."
"But if Daddy isn't our father, who is?" Crystal asked.
"Crystal, do you remember the mayor who got chased out of town after it came out that he had been paid off by the construction company? When the buildings they built started to crumble? You were about six."
Crystal shook her head, but I remembered my teacher talking about it in social studies class. "Victor Riviera."
Momma nodded. "That's him. Crystal, he's your real father." Crystal gasped in shock. "And Suzanne, you've known your real father all your life. Dylan." I sat down heavily in the bedside chair. Dylan my father? I was too dazed to think about it.
Momma let us have some time to try to sort this news out, then she spoke again. "I thought it was time for the two of you to know about this, but I'd rather you didn't talk about it to anyone else. Neither Jon or Dylan knows anything about this, and Victor didn't either. Jon raised you, kept food on the table and a roof over your heads, and helped with your own kids. I think, he deserves to be considered your father no matter whose genes you carry. I just wanted to tell you; it's a big secret to keep for forty years."
We automatically wished Momma good luck for her surgery and wandered out into the hall to tell the rest of the family they could come out of the waiting room. Both of us needed some time to absorb this bombshell.
I went home to look through the photo album. Dad, I mean Jon, stood next to his wife and supposed children smiling proudly, unaware for all those years of what had happened to bring us to him. Dylan was in a lot of the pictures too, playing with his own niece and her friends from next door... including the daughter he didn't know he had. It was strange to think about. Crystal hadn't seemed to be having much problem dealing with the revelation of her paternity, but then her choices were Jon and a true slimeball; it was easy for her to forget she had ever been told about Victor and keep on considering Dad her father. It was not quite so easy for someone who knows and loves both the choices. It took most of the night to quiet myself down and decide that it truly would be best to follow Mom's advice and keep this to myself. (After all, I am a writer; it's natural for me to shout things to the world. Even keeping the secrets of Lisa's paternity, and now Skippy's, had been difficult.) The decision was made easier when Momma came out of her surgery perfectly all right and recovered nicely.
Nothing much happened for a long time after that. We were busy raising kids again, but they all grew up fine. Chris, Bob, Joey, Skippy, and Sandra were no different than the generation we raised before them, or the one I grew up as part of.
It was a big surprise when it was time for Chris to graduate from high school. It didn't seem like that much time had gone by, without even anything strange happening. I looked in the mirror the morning of the ceremony. I was 61 that year, and looked like a well-kept forty. The rest of my generation of the family seemed about the same. It was scary to think that I was the only one who had noticed, but then I was there when Grandpa Conrad, nearly a hundred, got carded when he tried to buy a senior citizen platter in a restaurant. (The waiter didn't believe he was 65.) That was shortly before we put him in the rest home. He had spells of being quite normal, but also periods of outrageous behavior and of almost amnesia. We just couldn't cope with him at home anymore. So we sent him to the Shady Acres Retirement Complex, where he seemed quite happy to be visited every two weeks by whosever turn it was.
Anyway, during the summer before Chris went off to college, Momma Sara proved my point by announcing that, (at nearly eighty!) she was pregnant. I cornered her alone as soon as I could and asked who the father of this one was. "Chris," she told me. My foster son, who had always spent as much time at the bowling alley as around the family as soon as he could drive? Still waters can apparently run very deep. I suddenly thought better of the idea he had proposed of going out of town for college. Sleeping with one's great-great-aunt cannot be good for a maturing psyche. (OK, so I'm protective. The last child I raised ran away when she was barely into her teens; I was hoping to make this one a bit more normal.) Again, we kept the paternity of the little girl Momma delivered to ourselves. They say the probability of birth defects increases when a woman over 35 gives birth, and Momma was of course well over 35, but Jill didn't seem to show any abnormality.
Chris went off to college, met a girl in one of his classes and several years later, after they graduated, married her, so I didn't need to worry about him any longer. He and Staci lived a long and happy life, far away from Chris's strange family. I was one of the few family members who had met his wife. (Not having available parents to show off, Chris told people he was an orphan raised by his aunt. Close enough.) No one had seen Karl in a long time. We got letters maybe every two or three years, and once 20/20 did a segment on independent groups who attempted to clean up drug dealers and the like, where they mentioned a group calling itself RIP who claimed responsibility for some of the recent deaths of drug lords. But Karl never spoke directly in his letters about that sort of thing.
Shortly after Jill's birth, we did a small reshuffling of houses again. This was precipitated by Chris leaving, and Jay also. He and Crystal had never actually married, so when Jay decided that he wanted to leave, there was no real obstacle. (At least he stayed around to help raise them, a first from Crystal's lovers.) Bob moved in with Michelle in my house and Sandra also moved in with us.
Brian's "Evil Twin", Skippy (that was always the boys' little joke) ended up a single father. He had been dating another student, Joeli, for a while, when she began avoiding him and acting very strangely. Her parents sent her to a psychiatrist who told then she had multiple personality disorder, and only one of her personae liked Skippy. The others didn't know he existed. Unfortunately, Joeli had just found out she was pregnant (her parents sued the pharmaceutical company which made her birth-control pills) while her moralistic, over- religious persona was controlling the body and this had caused a breakdown. Her parents had her committed to an institution and when the baby was born, Skippy was given the responsibility for her. Joeli's parents had no desire to see this cause of their daughter's problem, and Joeli never really fully recovered enough to take any part in Jenny's upbringing.
Shortly afterwards we gained another child to raise, this one without either of his parents. Crystal was very protective of her daughter Joey, though only wanting to keep her out of the troubles that she herself had gone through, and during her later teen years Joey went through a very rebellious period, although when she was younger she was a very obedient child. But at this time she was sneaking out of the house to go to clubs and such with her friends. And when she needed help she came to Aunt Suzanne.
She told me that she had met a soldier on leave one night, and he had charmed her into bed, with the help of large amounts of liquor. (Apparently Joey's physical similarity to her mother gave them equally low tolerance.) She had never seen him again after the next day when he had to leave, and only knew that his name was Gary. And a month later, she missed a period and panicked. I calmed her down, advised her to tell her mother too, and ended up telling her a lot of things about her mother's past as reassurance that her mother would be being quite a hypocrite if she were particularly angry. Crystal did take the news more calmly than even I had expected. Apparently pregnancy was much better than the diseases we had grown up with.
Dan was born after the usual nine months, by which time Joey had decided she wasn't up to the task of raising him or even coping with the outside world. She had reverted to the obedience of her earlier years and gone past it, and was now considering becoming a nun. Naturally, her protective mother wholeheartedly approved of this idea, and with the encouragement or at least lack of obstacles given to her by the rest of the family she depended on, Joey soon went through with this plan. She seemed happy enough in the quiet atmosphere of the convent and wrote us lots of letters discussing daily routine (the convent ran a soup kitchen for the poor), theology, and her longtime hobby, mathematics.
Meanwhile, Dan stayed with us and along with Jenny, Jill, and Bob and Michelle's boy Scott, comprised the next generation to be brought up at the family complex. Nearly twenty more years slipped by, and the kids got older but the grown-ups didn't seem to. As a science fiction writer and a beneficiary of whatever was going on, I was intensely curious. I did a lot of research on aging, which was fairly easy, this being about the time that the anti-aging medical techniques were starting to become widespread. So there was a lot of material I didn't even have to get my scientifically inclined relatives to translate for me, and with their help I went a little deeper than most laymen could. Did I find anything that seemed to apply to us? Would I be asking this if I had? Maybe if I actually got a doctor to examine the entire family and run every possible test to see what we might have in common that would make us effectively stop aging? (And the age at which this happened seemed to decrease every generation. I was stuck in my early forties, Momma in her late fifties, Grandpa eventually stopped somewhere in his seventies [though it had taken him a hundred years to reach that apparent age.] But it might not keep decreasing; our oldest kids were mostly still looking not too far off their real age as they got to their forties.) Also, the problem of how to reconcile our calendar ages with how we looked arose. It was like the Howards in Robert A. Heinlein's future history series; as Lazarus Long says in one book, "My hair didn't start to gray until I was a hundred and fifty." But luckily for us, the longevity techniques were now pretty widespread, and the family had agreed to say that we had been volunteer subjects for the pioneering research. It was a fairly believable way to explain a birth certificate dated eighty years ago with a face that said about forty-three.
The lives of our current generation didn't get too interesting until they hit their late teens. (Pretty traditional for our family.) For quite a while we were preoccupied with Jill. You see, since Grandpa Conrad had been in the nursing home many years now, physically in perfect health but going through many ups and downs in mental health, and we kept in touch, visiting quite often in turns. In the past year, Jill had gone to see him quite often, even on occasions when the rest of the family was too busy to accompany her. And apparently his granddaughter/great-great-granddaughter (depending on whether you went through her mother or her father) made quite an impression on Conrad, and apparently the rest home was not at all well chaperoned, because Jill came home from a doctor's appointment one day to announce that she was pregnant by our family's patriarch. Much consternation ensued. But baby Sean was born and was no more abnormal than any kid in our family. (Which may not sound like much, but physically it's good.)
Jenny moved away from home as soon as she could and we didn't hear a lot from her. She didn't seem to like our side of her family very much, but she told me that once she visited her mother in the institution and that was too painful an experience to repeat.
Dan had an artistic bent from his early years on, and tried both music (guitar in a rock band, although I confess what passes for rock these modern days sounds nothing like the things I listen to. I haven't been able to listen to rock music released since I was about fifty) and visual art. After college, he and a girl named Carrie founded a commune for various types of artists, which survives to this day despite the hand-to-mouth existence everyone there had on the money the resident band could earn and the proceeds from the artwork they could sell.
I didn't see much of them because I took a very extended vacation shortly after their births. After sixty years of helping raise kids, hardly any of them really my own, and writing science fiction about exotic planets without having ever having even left my own country, life was becoming deadly dull. I wanted to go on a world tour, and the saved proceeds from my writing and the mundane career I had at the publishing company till they made me retire, were plenty to fund it, although the whole family is very well off from saved and invested money and could have lent me the money if I had needed it. So I first went off to explore Europe.
The first news that reached me there was that Crystal was having Scott's baby. I would think she would have been even more tired of raising children than I had been; she had done much more of it. But I guess some people are born mothers. I didn't care what had possessed her to sleep with her great-grandson; consanguinity has really ceased to mean anything to me.
While I spent years chasing around the historic sites and cultural meccas of the Old World, nothing much happened. The only newsworthy thing that I heard was that Skippy had disappeared; no one knew what had happened to him, although Uncle Brian insisted it had something to do with his research on time travel. But I saw no use mourning until we found out if anything bad had actually happened.
After having toured Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia to my own satisfaction, and even managing to make use of my experiences in some writing, I decided to take a break from foreign cultures and visit the family members who didn't live in our central compound. Karl I saw on an Atlantic island he told me was near his organization's base (though I don't see how that could be; there was nothing but empty ocean for many miles around), his parents in Tahoe. Lisa where she had finally settled down in Los Angeles, her father somewhere in Iowa after one of his appearances for his Presidential campaign. Chris and Staci, now expecting their first child. Aunt Shira, writing for a newspaper in New York City. Her daughter Jordan, who I persuaded to take a vacation and come home with me for a short sojourn at the family home.
The long-awaited return of the two of us was occasion for a minor get-together, everyone who was in town. My rooms were exactly the way I had left them, cared for by Sandra and Michelle. It didn't seem like I had been away seventeen years, until I saw the kids. These were the crying brats who hadn't been able to walk when I left? Sean and Nick were college and high school students by now, and I wouldn't have recognized them on the street.
Jordan hadn't been in her home town since Jill and Gerry's wedding, so Sean was drafted by his mother to show her around. I occupied myself with organizing the boxes of souvenirs I had sent home over the years and taking care of both government and publishing paperwork. Nick volunteered to help when I needed to move out some old furniture, partly because he wanted to talk about some of my recent stories dealing with new developments in computers. He and I were in the attic, talking avidly about science fiction robots past and present while we cleaned out the trunks of stuff that had been stored there when I bought the house, and everything Michelle, Bob, Scott, Chris, Sandra and I had stuck up there since. I discovered a box of my old books (how did books get into the attic? Sacrilege! From my point of view, at least.) I called Nick over to see how many of these he had ever read, or even heard of. He leaned to look over my shoulder into the box, which brought him very close to me. Too close; it was the time of month when my hormones are much too easily wakened and I had already been thinking. I pulled him even nearer to me and kissed him. He was obviously quite surprised but put up no resistance. (Quite flattering, actually; to keep the interest of a seventeen-year old was very good for this girl of nearly a hundred's ego.) So we started to undress one another. And ended up making love there on the attic floor, raising a cloud of dust that got all over us. (Luckily there had been an old quilt handy to spread on the floor.) Quite an experience.
Unfortunately, the reason my hormones are easily awakened at that time of month is because that's when I'm ovulating. Usually, I remembered to guard against my impulsivity: pills when I lived in the U.S. and other methods when I was traveling and it was inconvenient to refill a prescription. But I hadn't gotten to that this time. So, when I went for a routine checkup before leaving the country again, I got the rather interesting news that I was pregnant. I went home to think about this, and Jordan, who was still visiting, came by to talk.
We chatted away for a few minutes and then she asked if I would keep a secret for her. Naturally I agreed. Then she told me that she was pregnant. I'm afraid I angered her at first by bursting into laughter, but it just suddenly struck me as funny that there is almost never a single pregnancy in this family; always two or more at the same time. When I calmed down, I explained that I was in the same condition, and we conferred. Sean was the father of hers, she said. (Now that was a surprise; I had never gotten the impression that they were particularly fond of one another.) Eventually we reached the conclusion that there was nothing to be done except raise the kids ourselves; although we could have dumped them on the core family like so many babies had been, neither of us liked the idea of having a baby and then letting others raise it. Jordan went back to her own home, and raised the twin daughters Tara and Connie, and they never had much contact with us, although I believe both of them ended up joining the same convent as their distant cousin Joey.
I had a boy, named Kris with a "k" to differentiate from the other two. Nick went off to college before Kris was born and eventually moved away to another city (I didn't tell him about his son until later, when the relationship had become obvious just from looking at the two.) He grew up with the whole family lavishing all the care they possibly could on them. I stayed around until Kris was about sixteen, shortly after he and Sandra announced that they were moving in together (they already lived in the same house with me and others, but sharing a bedroom made the relationship official.) Around then I decided he was in good hands and figured I could go ahead and take the second half of my world tour. Off I went, relishing the role of world traveler but returning home briefly when I got an announcement of the birth of my granddaughter Donna and about once a year after that, usually laden with knick-knacks and presents. (It was the first time I'd been an officially acknowledgeable grandma, ok?)
Donna grew up, and the next birth announcement I got was for twin boys, Mark and Matt (the latter promptly nicknamed "Doogie" by everyone in the four houses old enough to remember a television character from a show broadcast when my generation was just done raising its first brood.) When they were about seven, I got bored with traveling and settled back down to writing and family life. There were enough people around all the time that anyone could go take an extended vacation and know that things would be taken care of while they were gone.
Grandpa Conrad died, in the nursing home, at the age of two hundred and one. He'd been senile for many, many years, of course, but he was the first of our strangely long-lived family to go naturally and everyone gathered at the funeral. The preacher Crystal had insisted we hire droned on about God's will and Grandpa's having lived a full life, and then he looked around him. "If you doubt that this man achieved much in his lifetime," he intoned, "look around you. All these descendants stem from this one person! Even in this age of more than a hundred years as an average lifetime, this is an accomplishment. Conrad Borsky must have been proud of his descendants, and still is, as he looks down from Heaven."
I personally believe Grandpa to be past looking at us from any angle, but it's true that he, like all of us, was proud of the family. And as there's no sign of anything slowing us down in the near future, I think it's pretty safe to say that it's going to continue this way for a long time yet.
Check out the Hypertext Family Tree