Her pregnancy forces Rebecca Monroe--married to a scientist who is a firm believer in genetic disposition not fate--to reassess her own own offbeat, sometimes dysfunctional family history, including a loving mother obsessed with holiday trifle, an aging hippie aunt, an overly imaginative sister, and a grandmother hiding a lifelong secret. A first novel. 25,000 first printing.
Part One
beginning
n 1 : time at which anything begins; source; origin
1.1 fate n 1 : power predetermining events unalterably from eternity
2 : what is destined to happen
3 : doomed to destruction
The caravan entered our lives like Fate. Although from the outside, it looked like a Winnebago.
It appeared one morning in our driveway, an alien spaceship from a planet more exciting than our own. Inside, there was a miniature stove with an eye-level grill, and a fridge that was pretending to be a cupboard. Tiffany and I, experienced sniffers of nail-polish remover, stood on the threshold and inhaled the slightly toxic smell of new upholstery and expectation. I was eight years old and susceptible to the idea that technology could change your life. They said so in the TV ads.
I have a photograph from that day. We’re standing in the driveway, smiling, certain, shoulders locked together in a single row. It reminds me of one of those Soviet posters from the thirties: the Family Monroe, brave pioneers of a new type of holiday, proudly facing the future together. The sun is making me squint, and my mother must have blinked, because her eyes are shut, but otherwise I’d say we looked happy.
The caravan itself is blurred in the picture. A hazy beige outline that befits its semi-mystical presence in our midst. As a family, we’d never been that keen on the outdoors, generally preferring indoor activities such as playing cards or bickering. But we stood in thrall to the brave new world it represented. We’d all read the accompanying brochure and knew that the caravan allied the power of progress with the concept of free will: we would Travel in the Modern Way and Go As We Pleased. Although we never did. We went where our mother told us, which turned out to be Norfolk.
There she is now, breaking free from the frame of the photo and walking back inside. There is a joint of pork that requires her attention, a hall carpet that must be vacuumed, a freezer compartment that needs defrosting. She tip-taps her way back up the driveway, her hairsprayed curls bouncing up and down, a small, contented smile playing at the corners of her lips. I’ve never been much good at divining what goes on beyond the net curtains of her eyes, but my guess is that she is thinking about the new fitted kitchen that will one day be hers. I can sense beige Formica units and a built-in oven hovering just beyond the field of my perception.
Am I exaggerating the role of the caravan in our family history? Or embellishing it? I’m not sure. Alistair’s the one who believes in fate, although he calls it “genetic predisposition.” But then he has his reasons for this. I’m more skeptical, I’ll admit. But then, as you’ll see, I have my reasons for this too.
Alistair’s my husband. But perhaps you’ve heard of him already. Alistair Betterton? The author of Destiny’s Child: Nature Versus Nurture in the Age of the Genome? If you look on page seven of the first edition, you’ll find me. “To my darling wife,” it says. I didn’t make the second edition, but apparently this was due to lack of space.
If I wasn’t married to Alistair, I suspect that I’d tell this story differently. But I know what I know. He showed me a gene map once. It was like a temperature chart or a rainfall map, with Europe portrayed as colored contours. It showed how populations have merged and blended, how you can track the passage of people across continents by the DNA left behind in the cells of their descendants. That’s you, Alistair said, and me. We are a sum of the past. Don’t you mean we are the sum of our past? I said. No, he said, we’re the sum of other people’s pasts. We’re made up of other people’s genes. We’re the bits they leave behind.
And it’s true, I have my grandmother’s skin (sallow) and my mother’s hair (mouse). But I can’t blame them for what happened. I can’t blame anybody. Or at least I can’t blame anyone other than myself. I, Rebecca Monroe, take full responsibility for most of what happened. And the rest? I put it down to chance. Poor timing. Bad luck. It’s not a fashionable theory, but then this was the seventies. It’s probably best to try and leave fashion out of it. 1.2 family n 1 : a fundamental social group in society typically consisting of one or two parents and their children
“Missionary position,” said Lucy. “Name given by amused Polynesians, who preferred squatting to the European matrimonial. Libel on one of the most rewarding sex positions.”
We were lying on her parents’ bed, leafing through the pages of our latest discovery.
“Who’s Polly Neezhuns?”
Lucy looked up, her dark hair swinging around her face, and shrugged.
“Croupade. Any position in which he takes her squarely from behind; i.e., all rear-entry positions except those where she has one leg between his or is half turned on her side. See Cuissade.”
There was a pause as we both tried to configure this in our minds.
“What does it say under Cuissade?”
We both pronounced it Cue-is-aid. They didn’t teach French at Middleton Primary School.
“Cue-is-aid,” said Lucy, enunciating the words carefully. She was using her newsreader- announcing-the-unemployment-figures voice. “The half-rear entry position, where she turns her back to him and he enters with one of her legs between his and the other more or less drawn up: in some versions she lies half turned on her side for him, still facing away.”
We stared at the picture accompanying this particular passage in the book. The illustration was smudgy and drawn by hand, but there was definitely a man with no clothes on. He seemed to be holding some sort of broom pole. It was rude, that much was sure. Possibly very rude. Poor Lucy. I felt a pang of pity for my cousin, for it was in her parents’ bedroom, specifically her father’s, Uncle Kenneth’s, sock drawer, that we had found the book. She didn’t seem to mind though. She was already flicking to the next section on “Coitus à la Florentine.”
“Loooooooooooooooooooooooocy!” Aunty Suzanne had a good pair of lungs on her, and although we were two flights up and separated by several doors, we jumped up, covered our find with Argyle wool socks and sprinted downstairs, arriving breathless in the kitchen.
“Yes!” We appeared under Aunty Suzanne’s elbow.
“Ooh, you startled me. Do you want some milk and cookies?”
“Yes please!”
Aunty Suzanne arranged a liberal quantity of chocolate-chip cookies on a plate and poured us a glass of milk. I couldn’t help thinking that America was probably a lot like this. At our house they were called “biscuits” and kept in a tin that was strictly off-limits.
“So?” said Aunty Suzanne, who was always trying to take an interest in her daughter’s development. “What have you girls been up to?”
We looked at each other.
“Nothing.”
“Oh! Nothing at all?”
Aunty Suzanne looked at us expectantly through a pair of large round glasses. She had the same long dark hair as Lucy, although she covered hers with an orange silk scarf, tasseled at the edges. Of all the different kinds of mothers who waited at the school gates, Aunty Suzanne was by far the most exotic.
“Just playing,” said Lucy. “Ripping stuff!”
Aunty Suzanne narrowed her eyes.
“I hope you haven’t been reading those books again, have you?”
We looked at each other guiltily. How did she know?
“You know I don’t approve of all those old-fashioned boarding school tales. They’re terribly reactionary.”
“No,” said Lucy, although of course she was lying. Aunty Suzanne had a blacklist of authors that included Rudyard Kipling, Enid Blyton and Ivy Compton-Burnett. Lucy, naturally, had made it a point of honor to read them all, acquiring a devotion of the kind that I suspected only samizdat literature could inspire. I had been weaned on The Jungle Book and The Secret Seven and had never once been tempted to say “ripping.”
When we’d finished our milk, we played our new favorite game: studying the dictionary.
“Missionary n 1 : one who is sent on a mission, especially one sent to do religious or charitable work in a territory or foreign country 2 : one who attempts to persuade or convert others to a particular program, doctrine or set of principles; a propagandist.”
We looked at each other blankly. What did that have to do with anything? We returned, again, to the well-thumbed entry for “sex.”
“Sex n 1 : the property or quality by which organisms are classified as female or male on the basis of their reproductive organs and functions 2 : females or males considered as a group 3 : the condition or character of being female or male 4 : the sexual urge or instinct as it manifests itself in behavior 5 : sexual intercourse.”
Lucy cross-referenced to “intercourse n” although we’d done this before and knew it wasn’t going to get us anywhere. “1 : dealings or communications between persons or groups 2 : sexual intercourse.”
What a ridiculous concept a dictionary was! It was a wonder we knew the meaning of anything. We spent hours cross-referencing between entries but, somehow, the truth always eluded us. It was six o’clock and time to go home.
“Bye-bye, Lucy! Bye-bye, Aunty Suzanne!”
“Just a minute, Rebecca.” My aunt caught me by the door and licked shut an envelope. “Give your mother this, would you? And say we’d be delighted if she and your dad could make it.”
“Yes, Aunty Suzanne. Bye, Aunty Suzanne.”
“You can just call me Suzanne you know.”
“Yes A— Suzanne.”
I turned and ran off down the driveway.
“Bye, Aunty Suzanne. Bye, Lucy.”
When I arrived home, Tiffany was hanging around the kitchen looking moody. Her sulk, now in its second full day, was showing no sign of diminishing. We’d been getting ready to go to school the day before when our mother called us excitedly. I had my toothbrush in my mouth and Tiffany was combing her hair, but we followed her into the lounge, where the television set was switched on. This was in the days before breakfast TV, so we knew immediately that something was up.
“Look, girls!” Our mother was waving excitedly at the television. “It’s an Historic Occasion!”
A woman in a peacock blue jacket was talking to the camera. Her blouse was tied into a big bow at the neck, and she spoke very slowly, a bit like the way Mrs. Price at school talked to Steven German, who came from what our mother called a “broken home” and had once wet his pants in PE.
“It’s Britain’s first ever lady prime minister!”
We both gazed solemnly at the television.
Tiffany stamped her foot. Her Clarks sandals sank silently into the pile, her protest thwarted by the orange and brown swirls of our lounge carpet.
“But I wanted to be Britain’s first lady prime minister!”
I looked at her, impressed. I hadn’t even realized that Britain had lacked a lady prime minister.
“A lady prime minister!” said our mother. “Who ever would have thought it?” She sniffed. “Of course, it’s the children I feel sorry for.”
Tiffany marched out of the room and slammed the door. She was tall for her age and had a habit of throwing her head back that made her seem taller still. I followed her up the stairs and onto the landing.
“You could be the second lady prime minister,” I pointed out. She glared at me.
“Shut up, Rebecca! Who’d want to be second?”
She stomped into the bathroom. I shrugged my shoulders and went back to my room. But then, I was a youngest child. I was used to coming second.
My mother was toiling over her frying pan when I handed her Aunty Suzanne’s envelope and we opened it together.
Dr. and Mrs. Kenneth Edwards
At Home
Saturday June 16, 1979, 1pm
The Old Parsonage
Middleton
RSVP
It was printed on thick cardboard, and the words were engraved in golden ink with curlicues and baroque squiggles, the A in “At Home” its finest swirl. At the top, in brilliant blue ink, it said, “Mr. & Mrs. James Monroe & family.”
“Well! It’s all right for some!”
But she hummed and smiled and tried to pin it to the cork notice board (ousting a timetable for upcoming PTA meetings). She struggled for a moment trying to pierce the card with a pin, but it was simply too thick and had to stand on the breakfast bar instead, propped up against the sugar bowl. There was a sudden hiatus in the preparation of our dinner (frozen beef burgers and chips, it was a bit of an off night for my mother, and she wouldn’t be happy if she knew this particular menu was being recorded for posterity).
“Whatever am I going to wear?” she exclaimed.
I looked around but there was only me in the room. It was hard to imagine that my mother was really soliciting my advice. Nevertheless I gave the matter careful consideration before replying.
“Why don’t you wear your red dress with the silver buckle?” My mother had what Granny Monroe called a “tidy” figure, and in her red dress with her hair up, she looked like one of the efficient secretary types they had on ITV sitcoms. She narrowed her eyes at me.
“I don’t think so, Rebecca.”
“Mum?”
“Hmm.”
“Mum? Do we have to send out cards when we stay at home?” I stood waiting but she’d turned her attention back to her frying pan. The reply never came. But then when did they ever?
“Coitus à la Florentine,” said Lucy. We were sprawled across the genuine New England patchwork quilt of her parents’ bed and I was seeing how long I could hold my legs in the air. Lucy stumbled over the words, but there was no mistaking that at least half of them were rude.
“Intercourse with the woman holding the man’s penile skin forcibly back with finger and thumb at the root of the penis and keeping it stretched all the time,” said Lucy. “Excellent way of speeding up ejaculation, and greatly boosts intensity of male sensation if you get the tension right.”
She paused for breath and I swallowed hard. I understood only one word in ten, but it was enough to remind me of my only previous encounter of a sexual nature: when I’d watched Love Story on the television and Ryan O’Neal’s woollen hat had rubbed against Ali MacGraw’s in a provocative manner.
Lucy, because her father was a doctor, but mostly because she liked to be right, claimed to have superior knowledge in all matters pertaining to everything. “Kenneth told me,” she’d say if I tried to dispute one of her more unlikely claims, such as the assertion that if you swallowed chewing gum it stuck to your heart or that the sun could give you cancer. Lucy didn’t call her parents Mum and Dad. She called them “Kenneth” and “Suzanne,” which I found bizarre and unnatural. Lucy did know a lot, though; this was undisputable. She’d garnered certain information from her cousin Elsa, on the other side of the family. Elsa had told Lucy that if you hit her in the chest, her breasts felt like two sharp stones; that there was no such thing as Santa Claus; and that Suzanne and Kenneth enjoyed the benefit of an open marriage.
“Open?”
“Elsa says Suzanne says she doesn’t want to succumb to the const...
