Charlie Anders

PEACEMAKER Conflict is my element. I don't mean that the way a white water rafter claims affinity with the river that thirsts to drown her. It's more like I inhale rage, or I eat contention. Without these things, I waste away. Not that I'm an angry person, mind. I've never raised my voice. As a child, I heard inner scorn whenever I launched a tantrum. You're becoming a joke, I heard inside. You fool, your grievances are ludicrous. The part of me that spoke at those moments looked down and saw my body, a hot funnel cake of passion. It was all I could do not to veer from bawling to laughter, as if it had been a stunt. "Bailey can't stay mad," my dad said, as if I had a strange allergy to one of the food groups. But other people's anger sustains me. I devour it and excrete tranquility. And I always find what I need. In grad school, I befriended the only two angry social work students and sutured their quarrels day by day. My first apartment, I shared with a Hell's Angel, a former beauty queen and a Queer Nation activist who was hooked on speed. I'm now convinced I got into a group marriage just so I could be the mediator in my love life as well. In my late thirties, I became a high-paid consultant, brought in to deal with corporate turf wars, succession battles and random cheese-moving. Finally I recognized an unsustainable living arrangement. All living arrangements are unsustainable, but some more than others, and that's where stories come from. I wanted to use my phenomenal problem-solving skills to fix my odd tendency, but no instrument can ever measure itself. Hard enough to make a story out of the past, harder still to frame it with an ending other than death. But that's why we're here.   #   My mom called me "little Kissinger." I thought it meant she liked my kisses. The first time I settled a parental dispute, I was five. My dad wanted to warm sake in the coffee percolator, or my mom wanted to eat at a lobster place ("You get to keep the bibs!") which my dad said was too expensive. It all blurs. Whatever the fight, I pleaded for gentleness and helped my parents to see that their fight was really about other, less solvable, problems. We hit on a compromise, sake in a saucepan or Italian food or a new toaster oven or whatever. Every day or so, plates skittered across the kitchen like skeet. My dad went through a phase of cutting his hand open every few days, until he risked nerve damage and then he stopped. It's weird: I can't remember my voice when I settled disputes. I remember reasoning and pleading for peace, but not the actual words I ever used. It all feels blurry. Mostly I remember my parents' faces as I explained there was a way for everyone to have what they wanted, a new hand-saw (for sawing hands) as well as a new meat cleaver (for throwing) as long as we made a budget. My parents' faces always had a weird mixture, at such times, of condescension and why-didn't-I-think-of-it-myselfishness. My parents planned to give me a younger sibling, but they had quintuplets, all boys. I swear I saw two of the quints trying to smother a third when they were a few months old. They shoved a stuffed Big Bird into his squirt of a nose, and almost held it there long enough before I yanked it off. They couldn't talk yet, so there was no reasoning with them. When they discovered words, disputes blossomed as schisms follow religion. Davey smashed Nicky's face into a tree over which Van Halen lead singer was better. Matt lost the crucial Lego piece to complete a battle cruiser and found himself under eight fists. For my brothers, especially, I served the same function as my taunting inner voice did for me. I was a prosthetic superego. They didn't respect me, but they listened to anything I said. I could talk them down from almost any battle stance. My mom hardly acknowledged me when I wasn't fixing things up. I became the lone goat in her wolf tribe after the quints were born. She swaggered to the mall, flanked by boys. They all wore matching bandanas and glared at the taster forks the food court people held out. My dad would say he and I were splitting off together, then he'd buy me socks with flowers on them as a bribe to let him go off on his own. My dad nurtured every breath of femininity in me, perhaps sensing I'd never be a fighter. He lashed out at parking-lot bystanders after he'd sat through the Care Bears or the Black Stallion with me, almost as if releasing two hours' pent-up hostility. But he never stopped taking me to those movies.   #   When I was twelve my parents started paying me to settle fights. A quarter for squalls, fifty cents for real violence averted or ended. Once or twice I got a dollar when the quints got into full-on kitchen smackdown. Nobody ever wrote down these tariffs or told them to me, I just started to notice a pattern. The first few times it was furtive, my dad clasping my hand and leaving a shiny Washington behind. I figured out quick I could drive up my earnings if I encouraged the quints to act up, then settled it. But I knew my parents trusted me not to do that. They paid me to settle their own fights as well as the quints'. "Cheaper than dumb ol' Dr. Margolies," my mom said once as she tossed me two bits. I kept a ledger for a while: how much I made, the cause, and how I spent it. Here's a typical few days: Monday. 75 cents. Kevin forced eat bugs. Mom broke TV. Saved for Barbie furniture. Tuesday. 50 cents. Baseball cards in toilet. Barrettes. Wednesday. $1.25. Dad wants vasectomy. Princess wristband. I felt something was going to pounce on me at any time. Any time someone laughed at school, I flinched as if they must be laughing at me. I felt jumpy all the time and had violent nightmares. Growth spurts made my hands seem far away from my face, just as all my possessions turned into booty from my main family chore. The money traumatized me more than the work did -- I owed so many of my dearest objects to it. I couldn't put something shiny in my hair or give Barbie a place to rest without thinking of bug eating, salt-shaker throwing, biting, kicking and spitting. The money tainted everything, nothing was just itself. One day, I gathered up everything I'd bought with the peace money into a bag made of a bedsheet. Books, adornments, cassettes, toys, they grumbled as I hefted them in both hands. I lugged the sack down the hallway to my parents' bedroom, listing like Santa with scoliosis. "I'm giving it all back," I said. My parents were watching TV, in a good mood. " What on earth for?" my mom asked. Suddenly tears were all over my face. This may have been the last time I cried in front of my parents, I'm not sure. "I don't want it all, I don't deserve it and anyway it's not really mine. It's all really yours. I didn't earn it." I couldn't explain myself at all. My dad couldn't resist looking through my stuff. "All right! A Debbie Gibson tape. Wow, is this really mine now?" He pretended to put the tape in his pocket. "Put it back, Roger," my mom said. She gestured for me to sit on the bed next to her. "Listen, Bailey. You know your dad and I love you a lot, right? And we like to get you things, not on loan but to keep. Right?" I hadn't realized how much green there was in her eyes. She put her arm around me. Her skin felt soft and cool, like her cold cream. I sobbed. My dad was starting to fidget, they were missing their program. My mom said they'd give me an allowance, the same every week. "Does that help?" she asked. I wasn't sure, but I said yes.   #   At nineteen I resigned from my home peacekeeping force. It was the summer after freshman year. How my parents had gotten on without me I didn't know. But as soon as they picked me up, they laid into each other worse than ever. They snarled like dogs and also like yarn. They started in front of my room-mates as we loaded my stuff into their van. "Pack big things first, you always get it backwards," my mom said. "That means you go in first," my dad said. I saw Jerrie McLuhan, who lived just up the hall from me, standing nearby reading a poster for summer environmentalist work. I went and studied it with her. My mom called my dad a tea-bagger. "Did you hear what she called me?" my dad asked me. I read the words, "Save Earth from Home." I wished I could go stay with Jerrie. The quad at school and the suburbs both smelled like lawns, but the campus grass had more chemicals. My dad sideswiped cars whenever he needed to make a point to my mom. In the back seat, my body went stiff as rack-and-pinion steering. My parents skirmished about my dad's driving, the route he chose, the meal my mom had planned, the games the quints played while they waited for us and the reprimand my dad had gotten at his broker job. I felt exhausted listening to them. At college, listening had seemed effortless, like eating. Now it was like eating bricks. I didn't speak once the whole ride home, as if speech would turn me back into my old self. I just stared at the trees passing my window. They sped up as they pulled even with the car, so they seemed to be realizing an urgency too late. When we got home, the quints were shouting. A model tank sulked in the middle of the sitting room, gun turret scattered in pieces. "Christ, Bailey, can you talk to them? I'm finishing dinner," my mom said. "Maybe later, OK mom? I gotta unpack." I hefted a trunk. I made unloading last until dinner. As I ate, I tuned out the talk and mentally inventoried my few high school friends, wondering which I could hang with. My parents yelled about one of my dad's friends that my mom hated. Kevin flicked couscous into Jason's lap, and Jason kicked at Kevin but hit Sean by mistake. I ate, cleared my plate and went up to my room and locked the door. I'd smuggled a cordless phone into my room, so I was able to call my friend Jenny and catch up on gossip. She had just started to tell me about her summer job when I heard sharp noises from downstairs. Then someone ran upstairs and throttled my doorknob. "Bailey, you gotta come down and talk to them, they're all crazy," my dad said. I could hear the stoop of his shoulders, the sag of his fists, through the door. "In a minute, dad, I'm on the phone," I called. Jenny was saying something about fingerpainting for the blind. I was thinking, If I go downstairs now, I'll descend forever, for the rest of my life. The pounding got louder and I shouted "Later, Dad." My mom's voice came on the phone wanting to know what the fuck was up. I explained I was reconnecting with a friend and my mom said people were bleeding. "Gotta call back," I told Jenny. I hung up and tried to pretend I was in a dorm meeting where we were all co-faciliators hugs solved everything. "I'm sorry," I told dad. "I don't think I can do this any more. It's time you all resolved your own conflicts." "Please Bailey, this is your family, we need you," my dad said. "Don't you see we can't hold it together without you?" I remembered the Care Bears and almost left my room. My mom came upstairs and tried to knock my door down. She and my dad argued over whether they should respect my privacy or drag me out by my hair. I'd always had diplomatic immunity, but for the first time my mom screamed at me. It made me feel more part of the family than I ever had before, just as they were threatening to cast me out. And then I realized: I could yell back. My mom screamed that I was garbage, they had never wanted me, and I opened my mouth to scream a response. Tears dribbled into my lower lip. I held in my mind the possibility of calling my mom a bitch in a lung-searing roar. I looked at it on every side, from above and beneath, as if it were a pair of shoes I was thinking of buying. I could lash out, I realized. I have breath, it could be a weapon. I hugged myself and rocked, mouth open. If I did this, I really would be one of them. I started to shake harder, my bed jolted as if I were fucking. I breathed and I breathed, but no sound came. Eventually my parents left me alone.   #   I claimed that victory more than half my age ago. It seemed significant at the time. But self-awareness hibernates. It's in the nature of humans whose last name isn't Gautama to have flashes of understanding followed by clueless interludes. The hero of the Medieval religious epic Piers Plowman takes a forty-five-year hiatus from his search for divine truth. Forty five years! A comforting thought for the next time you fall a few days behind on your inspirational desk calendar. So then the scent of glue swept me back in time twenty years. One of my husbands, Roy, was mending a vase and it smelled exactly the same as the stuff the quints had used to make model airplanes. My other husband Steve was explaining why it wasn't his fault that he'd broken the vase. My wife Moxie let a toaster strudel catch fire to vent her anger over the tax records Roy had turned into a papier mache walrus. The glue fumes were a time bomb in my brain, detonated across decades. For a second, I was nineteen again, holding myself behind my barricades and trying, against my nature, to scream. I'd just planted my flag in crumbling reefs. My parents jostled on the other side of a barrier made of plywood and a lifesize Tiffany poster. I noticed Roy staring at me. I'd paused in mid-sentence, just as I was starting to explain to Roy and Steve the importance of consideration for other people's vases or Form 1040s. Actually, I had no idea what I had just been saying, probably something about communication. My hands were frozen palm up in front of my chest, my gesture that meant the scales balanced out, nobody's perfect, we all need to give a little. "Um," I said. "Are you OK?" Roy asked. "Do you need to sit down?" Steve cleared junk off the couch behind me. One of our kids, Mark, looked up from Pokemon at me. Mark has Roy's lean brown face but Steve's Asian eyes. A thousand DVDs and video tapes filled the space around the big TV set, and every other wall had a bookcase, books partway obstructed by family photos pinned to the shelves. "I'm fine," I said. I let the incomplete gesture drop. My hands flopped on my thighs. "I was just thinking, none of this is my business." I looked around the clutter of toys and knicknacks as if seeing it all for the first time. Then I walked slowly to my study, my private space in the house. I sat at my picture window and thought about making lasagna. I usually make it once a year, in late November or early December when everybody's gotten good and sick of turkey. It was only October, but I was thinking of making it early. I could either make it twice in one year, or try something different two months hence. Did I have enough ricotta? Could I get the whole thing done in an hour? I ignored the whispers outside my door and thought about garlic. How much, and should I crush it or slice it? I had a garlic crusher at the back of one of the kitchen drawers, but I liked the idea of chopping it into nubs. The blade would release juices but also scents and textures, my fingers spangled with fragrant pieces. I fell asleep in my padded desk chair, dreaming of garlic flakes on a mahogany cutting board. The little computer clock said 9:30 when I woke up. I wasn't sure if it was morning or night at first, then I realized the woods were dark outside. I shook my head to throw off the shroud of grogginess, but I still felt half asleep, the way I always did after naps. Maybe some tea would help. I wandered out and headed for the kitchen. "Bailey!" Roy jumped up from the sofa. "Are you OK?" I nodded. "I fell asleep. Why didn't you guys wake me for dinner?" I looked for the kids, but saw only debris, since bedtime had come and gone. Moxie and Steve came in from the kitchen holding beers. "We thought you were upset," Roy said. "We were giving you space." I laughed a little at the idea of the whole house buzzing about my anger while I dreamed of spices. I realized Roy thought I was laughing at him. I put my face to his neck, hands on his nape and the small of his back. He smelled of olives. "Don't worry," I said. "Remember, I'm the one who never gets mad." "You get mad," Moxie said. I could hear the smile on her round face without seeing it. "I can always tell. Usually you make lasagna." "Oh," I said. It's jarring to be that predictable. "I thought you liked my lasagna." "I do," Moxie said. "Though not enough to piss you off on purpose." She came up behind me and put her arms around me and as much of Roy as she could reach. Her head came to my shoulderblades. Steve felt left out, so it turned into a group hug, one of the pluses of having three spouses. Breath bathed me from three directions. I laughed again. Then I asked if maybe it would be okay if I weaned myself off mediation, at least at home. When fights brewed, maybe I could hide out in my study instead of intervening? Sure, the others said, and we'll try and fight less. We'll be perfect grown-ups, they giggled. Just perfect. I dozed in all their arms until hunger drove me all the way awake.       - - - - - -

"Peacemaker" was one of Charlie Anders' experiments in blending personal essay and fiction -- a personal essay by a fictional person. Charlie blogs at io9.com, organizes the Writers With Drinks reading series, and is publisher for the on-hiatus other magazine. Her work has appeared in the McSweeney's Joke Book Of Book Jokes, Sex For America, Best Scicence Fiction And Fantasy Of 2009 and elsewhere.