We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Read Online Free

chain-smoking, hard-drinking,
     fly-fishing atheist from Indianapolis, instead. The Barker family owned a stationery
     store downtown and Will was an estate lawyer, which didn’t matter nearly so much as
     what he wasn’t. What he wasn’t was a psychologist like my father.
    In Bloomington, to someone my grandma’s age, the word
psychologist
evoked Kinsey and his prurient studies, Skinner and his preposterous baby boxes.
     Psychologists didn’t leave their work at the office. They brought it home. They conducted
     experiments around the breakfast table, made freak shows of their own families, and
     all to answer questions nice people wouldn’t even think to ask.
    Will Barker thought your mother hung the moon, Grandma Donna used to tell me, and
     I often wondered if she ever stopped to think that there would be no me if this advantageous
     marriage had taken place. Did Grandma Donna think the no-me part was a bug or a feature?
    I think now that she was one of those women who loved her children so much there was
     really no room for anyone else. Her grandchildren mattered greatly to her, but only
     because they mattered so greatly to her children. I don’t mean that as a criticism.
     I’m glad my mother grew up so loved.
    Tryptophan: a chemical in turkey meat rumored to make you sleepy and careless. One
     of the many minefields in the landscape of the family Thanksgiving.
    Minefield #2: the good china. When I was five, I bit a tooth-sized chunk out of one
     of Grandma Donna’s Waterford goblets for no other reason than to see if I could. Ever
     since, I’d been served my milk in a plastic tumbler with Ronald McDonald (though less
     and less of him each year) imprinted on it. By 1996 I was old enough for wine, but
     the tumbler was the same, it being the sort of joke that never gets old.
    I don’t remember most of what we talked about that year. But I can, with confidence,
     provide a partial list of things not talked about:
    Missing family members. Gone was gone.
    Clinton’s reelection. Two years back, the day had been ruined by my father’s reaction
     to my uncle Bob’s assertion that Clinton had raped a woman or probably several women
     in Arkansas. My uncle Bob sees the whole world in a fun-house mirror, TRUST NO ONE lipsticked luridly across its bowed face. No more politics, Grandma Donna had said
     as a permanent new rule, since we wouldn’t agree to disagree and all of us had access
     to cutlery.
    My own legal troubles, about which no one but my mother and father knew. My relatives
     had been waiting a long time to see me come to no good; it did them no harm to keep
     waiting. In fact, it kept them in fighting trim.
    My cousin Peter’s tragic SAT scores, about which we all knew but were pretending we
     didn’t. 1996 was the year Peter turned eighteen, but the day he was born he was more
     of a grown-up than I’ll ever be. His mother, my aunt Vivi, fit into our family about
     as well as my father—we’re a hard club to join, it seems. Vivi has mysterious flutters,
     weeps, and frets, so by the time Peter was ten, he could come home from school, look
     in the refrigerator, and cook a dinner for four from whatever he found there. He could
     make a white sauce when he was six years old, a fact often impressed upon me by one
     adult or another, with an obvious and iniquitous agenda.
    Peter was also probably the only all-city cellist in the history of the world to be
     voted Best-Looking at his high school. He had brown hair and the shadows of freckles
     dusted like snow over his cheekbones, an old scar curving across the bridge of his
     nose and ending way too close to his eye.
    Everyone loved Peter. My dad loved him because they were fishing buddies and often
     escaped to Lake Lemon to menace the bass there. My mom loved him because he loved
     my dad when no one else in her family could manage it.
    I loved him because of the way he treated his sister. In 1996, Janice was fourteen,
     sullen, peppered with