Someday_ADE by Lynne Tillman Read Free Book Online Page B

kinship bond, which offers protection at a price—loyalty to blood and brood. What happens in the family stays there: no obedience, no protection. I use various media to explain certain phenomena and enduring characteristics, as well as new adaptations, of the American family. For example, Mafia movies succeeded, after the family was hammered during the 1960s, by promoting oaths that, like marriage, were ’til death do you part, while guilt and criminality occurred only by disregarding the Family, not the law. The movies glorified the thugs’ loyalty to the clan, but HBO’s The Sopranos portrayed mob boss Tony Soprano’s sadism so graphically that, Sunday by Sunday, the viewer’s sympathy was shredded. But other genres will fill the bill, there’ll be no end to war stories for an age of permanent war, and, with the cry for blind patriotism, an American’s fidelity to family can be converted into an uncritical devotion to country.
    My whole life, I’ve been absorbed in the family photo albums, home movies, and videos, classifying and preserving them, yet each time I look at my mother when she was nine, I stare, rapt: what’s that expression, I wonder. Time passes in looking, I don’t know how long, and the same fantasy occurs: I might see her static face move, speak, explain herself to me; in the videos, when my father sits at the head of the table at holidays, I see his contempt and malevolence and despise him even more. The few photographs I myself shot of him he hated, he said I made him look bad, that he didn’t look like that, and tore them up in front of me. It’s more evidence of his aggression to me.
    At home, I study the familiar images, but in the end nothing changes, the movies run along the way they always do, and without close-ups, it’s hard to see their faces, too many people are walking away from the camera, and the photographs don’t open up, either, their surfaces are like closed doors, as mysterious as they were when I first saw them. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, that’s the most honest response to explain my mania. I look and wait. The unguarded moments are the best, they’re most available to interpretation and also to no interpretation, but always they remain unguarded moments that I can make more of, just the way I want to make more of my life. Instead, I’m facing their ambiguity, which may be truer. I also collect snapshots and albums of unknown people. My pleasure is that I don’t know them, their anonymity identifies them to me, and, in a sense, through them, I can recognize my anonymity to others. It’s like making yourself a stranger.
    The American family sustains itself and mutates along with its movies, TV sitcoms, photographs, video. Since the 1960s, in tandem with political agitation, media have remade it, blood ties are no longer necessary, but family cohesion still requires loyalty and secrecy. Any gay/straight sitcom pledges allegiance to the same flag. And though the worst things happen in families, the most disgusting and painful, with long legacies, the family is still idealized; there’s no replacement yet. It remains necessary for survival, and if you’re not in one, your fate is usually worse. Children in London, taken away from their parents in the Blitz, sent to the countryside for safety, were more traumatized than those who stayed home during the bombings. No matter what kind of terrorism happens in a family, relatives hardly ever betray their families’ secrets. The exceptions become sensations—Roseanne, La Toya Jackson. A member’s self-interest can break any contract, implicit or explicit, in the name of honesty, to cure the family or to get just desserts.
    Uncle Jack tried to sell life insurance after Uncle Jerry’s funeral, and then my father stopped speaking to him. It’s nothing to the big world, but the break reverberated in ours, loud, disturbing, and still does. What about weddings? How does the tribe meet, on whose territory? When my