The Futilitarians Read online

  And for a short time, Rachel seemed to be doing well. Had a nice boyfriend she was so proud of. She liked to remind us he was getting his PhD, in sociology, her proxy in a family that valued education. He was a kind and thoughtful father to her son, and she was an involved and affectionate young mother. They lived in a sweet Arts and Crafts cottage in Mid-City with a porch and a dog. She’d gotten her GED and enrolled in community college. A picture of her I love from around that time was printed in the newspaper; she’s flipping through a box of prints at a festival upriver at Destrehan Plantation, and her son, on her back, is looking over her shoulder, sharing a moment of appraisal, the sun backlighting them so that even in the flatness of the black-and-white newsprint, their pretty silhouettes, their wisps of short hair, are incandescent. Then, around the anniversary of Rebecca’s death, some missteps, large and small, began to pile up. An affair, a breakup with the only real father her son had known, a quickie marriage in Vegas, a fender bender. I imagine the temptation was overwhelming, both to rid herself of the pain and to be reunited with Rebecca, so much so that perhaps she wasn’t able to see that her desire to be made whole again would create an ever-expanding world of grief.

  After hearing the news about Rachel, the family gravitated to my parents’ house. The image from that afternoon, which recurs with great force and clarity, is the liminal moment of my parents telling her son his mother has died. They had wanted to tell him alone, so a few of us went outside and stood aimlessly on the walk leading up to the wide brick steps of their porch; none of us could bear to look at one another or say anything. I watched through a series of receding thresholds: between two white columns of the porch, through the floor-to-ceiling window frame, through the front parlor’s pocket doors, to where my nephew sat on a couch between my parents. He listened to them and then made a movement forward and I felt all of me fall forward inside, and had to turn away.

  Everyone was changed in that moment. Not only my nephew, who within seconds transformed from being a boy with a loving mother to being a boy with no mother, and worse, he would learn later, a mother who chose to leave him forever. But also my parents, because it was the moment they had to say those words to their grandson. I don’t know why the pain felt compounded and not buffered by the house’s architecture, but it did. I’d always had such wonderful memories of growing up there, days and evenings clustered around the hypnotic porch swing, the tar-coated balcony off the bedroom where we sunned ourselves until our minds went white and sparkly, the front alcove’s perfect accommodation of the Christmas tree (but not the dozens of presents that materialized beneath it and spread toward the stairs), the front parlor for visiting, the second for lounging in front of the television, the dining room fireplace’s intricately carved flora an absorbing distraction from the intensity of Sunday dinners that aimed to nourish ten mouths and ten minds. Even though I knew that it was all tenuously financed, and that the bottle of gin under the kitchen sink behind the 409 and Dad’s explosive temper, both imperfect stress-management tools, were connected to that tenuousness, to me the house meant pride in my family. It meant the fun we had together, it meant Dad’s hard-won status, it meant Mom somehow holding it all together with craft projects and family field trips and an abiding trust in us children to take care of one another.

  Maybe in that moment, the house magnified the recognition that the twins’ memories must have been so divergent from my own, the awareness that none of the positive things I associated with that house could have saved them. While we older siblings had known a series of modest houses that grew progressively larger and nicer, this was the only one the twins ever really knew. It was the house that helped make them, or was at least the vessel for their dynamic and disjointed selves.

  Not that they hadn’t had their own cherished memories. There was one Easter morning, when as a surprise for their little nieces and nephews who’d be coming over for brunch, they planted dozens of pinwheels on the front lawn. A spontaneous garden of exuberant, erratic whirling in a neighborhood landscaped with box hedges and azaleas. To this day family members sometimes leave pinwheels at their tomb as a more appropriate tribute than flowers.

  Within a few years after the twins’ deaths, Dad would sell the house that had symbolized so much compromised achievement to him, the same one that he’d mortgaged over and over to pay for our upbringing. Would try to escape the debt and those final difficult memories there. My parents also wanted to be closer to Kristin, my older sister, and her kids as they tried to raise Rachel’s son. After she died, though my other siblings with young children had offered, almost insisted, my parents wanted to raise the son she’d given birth to at nineteen and whose father had never been in the picture. Though mired in the difficult combination of being grieving parents and indulgent grandparents, they would do their best with him.

  After Rachel’s death, once again: the handling of the painfully transformed personal effects, the small excruciating funeral at Saint Clare’s Monastery, the sextons at Lafayette No. 1 who had opened, then plastered over the tomb entrance only a year and a half before, busting open their handiwork to accommodate another sister and sealing it off again. Parents I couldn’t look at. Siblings I found too painful to be with but who were the only people I wanted to be with. Extreme acts of generosity and support from friends and family; others who had no idea how to respond to a second suicide. And then the continuous, stubborn reevaluations of events that brought the girls, all of us, to that point. The counseling and hospitals, terrible boyfriends, nice boyfriends, phone calls, rumors, missed opportunities.

  The compounding and the reverberations of the double deaths, how they informed each other, how they differed from each other, would preoccupy me for years. For example, their “viewings” at the funeral home were not symmetrical. Rebecca’s was in a spacious dark-paneled parlor with fresh flowers and elegant settees. There was plenty of room for us to move around within our grief, gravitate toward one another, or just be alone next to her body, displayed on a ceremonial plinth. With a white sheet pulled up high over her neck, her blond hair brushed back, her makeup more demure than I’d seen it in years, she looked like one of those Pre-Raphaelite paintings of a lost luminous beauty, even more muselike in death. If Rebecca had had any romantic imaginings of how we would mourn her, this must’ve approximated them.

  A year and a half later, that same funeral home was under construction. Rachel was put down a hall in a small room that only a few of us could fit into at a time, her body still on the gurney. Her makeup seemed haphazard and you could actually see the marks on her neck, which one of us covered before bringing her son in. The name of the hospital was printed across the top of the sheet. There were neither elegant acknowledgments nor any formal pretension for our grief. Down the hall, electrical saws and drills from the construction whined and seared the air. In the narrow hallway, the same funeral director, who’d been so deferential with Rebecca, sat in a chair, slightly bored, and said in an offhand way, “Seems like y’all were just here,” and not much else. The next week, I wrote a letter detailing these disparities and indignities to the owner of the company, who responded with an apology and a generous donation to Rachel’s son’s school. I remember feeling surprised by his reply, a concrete response in an envelope, with a letterhead and a signature, my unreal grief and grievances having spawned a mundane business transaction.

  I came across that letter while going through some of my father’s personal papers after he died. Files and files of correspondences regarding the twins—with schools, mental hospitals, the police department, the D.A.’s office. The coroner’s office. He applied the force of his legal apparatus to seek help and answers until the very end. There was even evidence of the old T and C in some of the grainy lawyer-faxing: Eric, I understand why you were so upset on the phone yesterday but… Apparently I had cc’d him on that letter to the funeral home. Though my name was on it, the document seemed foreign, forged. Yes, there was something familiar in the angry, strident, wo
unded tone, but it still seemed as though it was written by someone else.

  Perhaps by this person:

  A woman who one morning woke up deep in the blackest grief, in a lethargic strategizing about how she was going to get herself out of bed, and saw that the stack of books on her bedside table, Wallace Stevens and Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, suddenly seemed like dry husks that had once held something vital for her but that she could no longer access. People often talked about seeking out books to cope with grief, but she found herself unable to connect with literature. She felt ashamed for spending so much of her life on its “pleasures” and then, when she should’ve found it the most helpful, should’ve needed it most, literature seemed useless to her. Sentences fell apart in front of her eyes. Little words and letters all lined up, attendant but inert. Language seemed a fraud, all this human striving for expression that couldn’t approach the actual pain, could only dress it up, give it shape, and so what.

  She wasn’t just doubting language, but also the redemptive power of the narrative. Didion’s proclamation “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” suddenly seemed like neurotic grandstanding. She reversed it, wondering what stories her sisters told themselves in order to die. This was a dank and webby rabbit hole to explore. Orchestrating your own ending would seem the ultimate control over your narrative, right? Did Rebecca tell herself that her soul was worthless, something that years of the commodification of her young body might have reinforced? The men, the transactions, the shame? That her suicide would be the ultimate punishment for M., for his infidelities and abuses? The ultimate punishment for all of those who didn’t love her enough and who constantly judged her? That this was the best, most expedient ending for her suffering? Did Rachel have to tell herself that she was a terrible wife and mother and that everyone, including her son, would be better off without her? That she needed to join Rebecca, a tidy return to the womb, their beginnings? There at least was evidence of these stories of Rachel’s in the notes she left, three of them, taped to her bedroom door—one for her new husband, one for her parents, and one for her son. Each with these explanations, each embellished with smiley faces. The woman later found out from a colleague whose husband, an Uptown financier who’d also drawn a smiley face on his suicide note before he shot himself, that this was not uncommon. The smiley faces were symptomatic of the profound disconnect that allows suicides to tie the noose, pull the trigger, down the pills.

  How did the experiences they shaped into meaning, the stories they told themselves, match up with other stories of them? Of course, not very closely. Others believed they were loved unconditionally, the youngest, yes, troubled but full of hope and promise. But their older siblings were gone a lot, too, in college out of state, or in town but disappeared into their own young adulthood. Checking in with them when they could. What had they really known of them? Their stories?

  For that woman at this time, a cold chaotic abyss always seemed to be on the other side of any worldly interaction.

  Through both deaths, the woman was teaching high school, and one thing that helped pull her out of her nihilism was that she had to go in every day and convince teenagers that literature, stories, mattered. It was the task she was paid biweekly to do. And daily, through Madame Bovary and Invisible Man and British Modernism, through the tests, the papers, and the tentative revving of young brains in class discussions, she gradually reconvinced herself of literature’s worth. She let time work its salve. Narratives survived all kinds of epic loss and tragedy, even if individuals did not. Even if the structures felt artificial and contrived, they still originated within an individual’s consciousness. There was something hopeful in that. It was the collective human project her classes were dissecting and enjoying and suffering through. With her roll book and whiteboard, she was a kind of truss in the scaffolding, connecting the past to the future. By reading, everyone was involved in the project’s endless construction. That involvement made life more tolerable. The woman conceded that maybe Didion was sort of right after all.

  In “The Hangover” Amis discusses the paucity of literary treatments of hangovers, both literally and metaphorically. He makes a pithy, offhand case for Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Starting “with the hero waking up one morning and finding he has turned into a man-sized cockroach,” Amis claims, it is “the best literary treatment of all,” and continues: “The central image could hardly be better chosen, and there is a telling touch in the nasty way everybody goes on at the chap. (I can find no information about Kafka’s drinking history.)” Though some would dispute Amis’s description of Gregor Samsa being man-sized and a cockroach, we know he woke up transformed into a large bug. As a human, Gregor was a traveling salesman, a hard worker who supported his middle-class family—his parents and sister. When he wakes up changed into something that is no longer useful for them, he conscientiously tries to minimize his family’s fear and revulsion. As described by Kafka with heartbreaking particularity, Gregor negotiates his new state in his locked room, his world suddenly circumscribed by small objects and small desires. And even those are so terribly out of reach.

  To complement the Amis, Nate had sent us the The Metamorphosis as well, a story that had been confounding me since high school. On this most recent reading, the confoundedness lessened as the tale progressed and the pathos for Gregor deepened. As Gregor becomes more animal, more detached from the machinations of civilization though still trapped by it, his longings and injuries and joys become more isolated and intensified. His movements are laborious and pained. Human mystery remains intact. The lovely woman in the picture with the fur muff he’d once torn from a magazine as a man and now inches toward as an insect; the apple lodged in the chitin of his back, launched by his own father; the beauty of his sister’s violin playing that draws him out of his room.

  Nate, whose mind magnetically connects phenomena, literary or otherwise, with systems, started a brief discussion about the buglike, scheming nature of Gregor’s traveling-salesman job, Marxism, and the futility of most work. This led to a lively, exasperated detour with Brad, Chris, and Ellen, who sometimes land on the same scenic paint crews, about the transience of below-the-line movie work, long days in warehouses or on location, capricious art directors, gallons of paint and tedious brush technique, in service of cultural ephemera fated for Dumpsters and cable channels. Chris referred to the paint crew as “the Original Futilitarians.”

  But it was Tristan, standing and smoking in the doorway, who connected The Metamorphosis to shame and family: “We don’t want to talk about the bugs in our family. We want to keep them locked away in the broom closet. Don’t you think the Samsas are relieved when Gregor disappears?” And Ellen, eternally aggrieved youngest of seven children herself, agreed: “Gregor was a slave to the family, the family created that sad little monster. They made him possible and then they had to let him die.” This discussion is something I’ve thought quite a lot about over the years: Are we all creatures forged in the crucible of the family?

  Years ago, a friend visiting from college, an observant outsider, remarked after one of our big, lively family dinners that he didn’t think we took the little twins very seriously when they talked. That we cut them off, or laughed at things they said when they weren’t necessarily joking. In the bustle of older kids and larger personalities, they were overlooked and underestimated, he thought. Of course, I dismissed it—the rest of us were convinced that the twins were spoiled and that, as our parents got older and more worn down by parenting, they got away with stuff we never could have. I didn’t think again about his comments until after Rebecca hanged herself and one of my other sisters remarked that she was surprised Rebecca even knew how to tie an effective knot. Underestimated indeed.

  Rebecca once said she loved animals so much because they didn’t judge her. She had been a junior zookeeper at the Audubon Zoo as a teenager, had lots of pets in her brief adulthood, including a sugar glider that slept in a tiny hammock and a Vietnamese potbellied pig
that once got into her coke stash and cornered her for over an hour in her kitchen, crazed and wired. After she died, I ended up with one of her hairbrushes, grabbed from M.’s house, matted with her own long blond hair as well as that of her Siberian husky, Sasha, a dog totally ill suited to our climate. I’d picture them together on her black leather couch, Rebecca absently brushing Sasha’s hair, then her own, not making any distinction between them.

  I have a maroon velvet pouch where I keep locks of both twins’ hair, cut by the mortician before cremation. Rebecca’s hair had been bleached light blond, Rachel’s dyed a deep russet, as if they were trying to distinguish themselves both from each other and from the family genetics. I feel kind of cheated that my one physical relic of them is artificially altered, but I guess it also represents a choice on their part, something they could actually control. Like in a lot of large families, our features were clustered into groups, and I share theirs—dark blond hair, brown eyes, slightly smaller frame than the others. At the funeral home, Rachel’s new husband/new widower saw me in the corridor outside the viewing room and gasped that I looked so much like her, grabbed and hugged me too hard and for too long. Both times after the twins’ obituaries and pictures appeared in the paper, people remarked on how alike we looked. Somewhere it’s been absorbed into my person that I’ve seen death, kissed its face, and it looks a lot like me.

  We helped make them; their deaths changed us. I harbor a terrible, guilty suspicion that the deaths of my sisters, their disappearance from the family structure, their removing themselves from it, made the rest of us who we are turning out to be, and maybe allowed us to do things we might not otherwise have ventured. “Strengthened” seems wrong, but it possibly drove us to prove things to ourselves, and to our parents. Since suicide is often viewed as the ultimate failure of everything, the surviving six became charged with the impossible task of trying to compensate, offering our accomplishments, trials won, children birthed, campaigns run, works published, art shown, communities helped, to them as evidence that, yes, they were good, loving parents and most of us were doing pretty well.