Perfect Little World(110)
Preston, who had married Izzy as soon as the project ended, had been worryingly adrift, spending day after day sitting around the house, waiting anxiously for Cap and Izzy to return. He spent hours at night creating elaborate bento boxes for Cap’s lunch, became really interested in composting, and spent a lot of time on eBay buying rare punk rock records from Europe. He continued to wear his uniform from the Infinite Family, his tie now tucked into the middle of his dress shirt to avoid stains, his sneakers replaced with slippers. Izzy found his leather pouch in the back of their closet. He had of course told her about his scars, his process, before they married, and he had vowed to quit. She forced him into the car, placed the pouch in his lap, and they drove twenty miles to a Hardee’s fast food restaurant, and she made him shove the pouch into a trash can just outside the entrance. “Nothing is changing for you,” she said, and he agreed, the rest of the ride back home in total silence.
And then, one evening, he received an e-mail from a man who had been raised using the Constant Friction Method. The man said that he had never quite recovered from the experience, had been in therapy since adolescence, rarely if ever saw his parents, and, when he did, it ended in screaming and arguments. He could barely hold down a job. The man, Charlie, who also happened to live in Nashville, wanted to know if Preston could give him some advice, since Preston had gone through the same experience and seemed to have managed to live a life without incident. “All I’m asking for is a few tips about how you deal with that weird buzzing in your head, that moment where it seems like clairvoyance, that you know something bad is about to happen and you can’t stop it from happening,” Charlie had written, which Preston had read to Izzy that same night.
“Buzzing?” Izzy asked.
“It’s not untrue,” Preston admitted. “It’s a kind of malfunctioning spidey sense that you can’t rely on. I haven’t thought about it in some time.”
“There’s a buzzing in your head?” she asked Preston.
“A kind of buzzing,” he admitted, his voice just above a whisper, his attention entirely focused on the e-mail, reading and rereading it.
Over the next few months, Preston met three times a week with Charlie, while also searching message boards and blogs dedicated to adults who had been raised using his parents’ method. He started reaching out to them, discussing his own methods for dealing with the fallout from that particular childhood experience. He began traveling around the Southeast, meeting with people, inviting them to become part of a new study that he was only beginning to outline. It wasn’t going to focus on the effects of the Constant Friction Method, which had been done numerous times by researchers better than him; the results of these studies were tainted by biases and improper methodology. What Preston was interested in was creating a method to deal with the aftereffects of the Constant Friction Method, a way for adults to find their way clear of that upbringing, a support system that would override what their parents had done to them.
Now two years into the study, Preston had amassed data from more than 350 adults, had developed a network that covered most of the Southeast. He was also, as a way of funding his work with this new project, writing a memoir of his childhood, an examination of his parents and how he fit into their lives. He had retrieved a good deal of his parents’ journals and notes from his childhood, and was discovering just how conflicted they were about the method the longer it progressed. “We can’t stop now,” his mother had written in one of her journals, “we can only hope we’ve done the right thing. And if not, we pray that Preston is strong enough that none of this sticks.” The book, A Constant Fiction: A Portrait of a Normal Family, had sold in the high six figures, and Preston was working on a second draft, the pages of which he read to Izzy each night, Izzy learning details about her husband, and the in-laws she had never known, the sensation like discovering a sealed-up room in a house you had lived in for years.
As the food was served, Izzy finally took a seat beside her husband, who called the kids over to the table. “To family,” he said, raising his glass, and everyone happily shouted, “Family!” in response. They ate and talked and it felt like, though it would never be the same as it had been at the complex, a close approximation that allowed them, if they tried hard enough, to pretend that things had never changed.
After lunch, the makeshift bluegrass band played songs and the parents and children danced on the porch, twisting and twirling. Izzy danced awkwardly with Mr. Tannehill, who had become the closest thing to a grandfather for Cap, and who, most nights, enjoyed dinner with Izzy and her family.
Cap, only nine years old, sang in a high lonesome voice, and the other players struggled to keep up with the virtuosic way he played the banjo. Mr. Tannehill then handed Izzy off to Preston, who swung Izzy around the porch, neatly avoiding the other families. And, not for the first time and not for the last time, Izzy marveled at the sheer luck of her life, the family she had prayed for and somehow received.
It wasn’t always easy, life away from the complex. Cap, along with the other kids from the Infinite Family, was way ahead of the other students in their grade, but Izzy didn’t want him to skip ahead and be surrounded by older kids because he was, still, so naive in social situations. A life lived around only nine other children, his brothers and sisters, had left him wide open to the world, so trusting that it nearly ripped out Izzy’s heart each time he learned, once again, that not everyone wanted to be his friend, that not every child was his sibling.