Perfect Little World(25)

During one of his many visits to Brenda’s home in Knoxville to discuss the project, she asked him, “Have you decided on the name yet?” Branding was important to her, she reminded him, had been one of her husband’s greatest interests in business.

“I think so,” he replied. “The Expanded Family.”

“Oh, yes?” she said, still smiling, but the light had gone out behind it. “You like that?”

“I think it encompasses what we’re doing here, not just an extended family, but an expanded one, moving out in all directions.”

“Well, it is straightforward,” she said. “But can I offer some constructive criticism?”

When he nodded, now afraid, she continued, “It’s got to be memorable. It has to ring true but also suggest something more than what they had already suspected.”

“Who is they?” he asked her, and she replied, “Everyone in the world.”

“Well,” Dr. Grind said, now completely flummoxed, “do you have any thoughts on it?”

She smiled again, the light returned. “I do. I thought back to something we had discussed when we first met, the idea of boundlessness, of how this will continue from family to family, forever.”

“Well, technically, it’s going to end after eight—”

“No, Preston. No, it won’t. Even if that’s true, we won’t say it. This will outlast both of us, will be our true gift to the world.”

“I see,” he said, not totally seeing.

“The Infinite Family Project,” she said, her hands out in front of her like she was offering it to him.

“I see,” he said.

“I like that,” she said, as if he had been the one to suggest it, her voice ringing with certainty. “That will certainly look good on a T-shirt.”

Dr. Grind smiled and nodded. She had the money. She got to name it. It was only fair.


Mrs. Acklen had initially worried about the study being connected to the Acklen Super Stores brand. “My sons, honestly, would have a conniption fit if they knew I was fully funding a study to redefine traditional family values. They were, god bless them, raised with every need and want fulfilled. To them, things work just fine as they are. They don’t know what it’s like to be totally lost, to have no idea how to get from one day to the next.” In the end, however, it seemed advantageous to the project, and Preston’s ability to bring in talented people, if her name, and her money, were attached to The Infinite Family Project. Two days after she agreed, her publicity department had contacted the New York Times and an article had been written. “The sons are not happy,” Mrs. Acklen had reported to Preston by e-mail. “Oh well.”


Mrs. Acklen’s lawyers created the Early Childhood Foundation, which would house The IFP, and transferred an initial deposit of eighty million dollars into the account. More would come, Mrs. Acklen assured Preston, as needed. Almost immediately after he was able to utilize the money, he hired these three fellows, all incredibly talented and perceptive and willing to enter into this unconventional study because he could offer them three times what they would make elsewhere. And, of course, there was the chance to do something entirely unique, to make something brand-new and see if it worked.


“I don’t think, honestly, that the project has done enough to take into account the challenges that face single mothers,” Kalina said. Kalina’s research at Harvard had focused on the implications of attachment parenting for feminism. She had argued, and her study had supported, that attachment parenting actively inhibited the agency of mothers from a societal, philosophical, and emotional standpoint. She argued for cooperative child rearing as a more progressive model; she was the first fellow whom Dr. Grind sought out. “We’ve talked about low-income families, but at least those couples have each other. Single mothers are forced to navigate these issues entirely on their own; that’s coupled with the unrealistic expectations of modern parenting. I think we owe it to ourselves to include a single parent in the family.”

“Well, I think that’s a reasonable request, though it means one less parent involved in the day-to-day activities of the larger family.”

“That seems to be a fair trade-off,” said Jill, from Duke University, who specialized in gifted children, the markers of child prodigies, and Jeffrey agreed as well.

“So, why is Isabel the single parent that we choose?” Dr. Grind asked.

“She’s quite young, nineteen, but she scored a 138 on the Stanford-Binet IQ test, the highest score of all the parents that I screened. She has esoteric talents for someone so young, as well. Of all the parents with whom I corresponded, she was the most comprehensive in her answers.”

“What about the father?” Jeffrey asked.

“He committed suicide after Isabel became pregnant,” Kalina answered.

“Jesus,” said Jeffrey, shaking his head.

“Her mother also passed away when Isabel was thirteen.”

“Well, she’s certainly deserving of something good in her life after all that,” Preston replied. “But do you think someone so young, without a partner, would fit into the project?”

“Isn’t that the whole point of the project?” Kalina asked. “To provide a cooperative parenting model that would benefit people exactly like Isabel?”