Questioning the Fine Line Between Eccentric and Crazy

I'm not here to make any judgments. I'm just here to observe. That's a writer's job. I'm supposed to open my eyes in the morning and assess the world with a knowing and clinical gaze. I'm supposed to be able to decode and deconstruct. I'm supposed to reassemble and make sense of things.

I make note of this because I need to explain something. I need to explain what I had to deconstruct and reassemble on Sunday night at 7:20 PM:

I was sitting at a table with my mother, her boyfriend, my grandfather, his girlfriend, one neighbor, the relatives of my uncle's second wife, my uncle, and my uncle's second wife. That was Table #1. Table #2 was in a separate room and was home to my cousin David, my brother, my uncle's second wife's six foot seven inch son, the neighbor kids, and my mother's boyfriend's eleven year old black belt son who has a fondness for Anime and stuffed animals.

The logistics of all that was boggling enough, but the reason for the gathering topped even the guest list: it was a Halloween party. A very premature Halloween party.

Apparently, my uncle's second wife—a woman he met after he'd moved his family to Tennessee, a woman who has already left him once only to move back to western New York after a good coaxing—loves Halloween more than anything in the world. The love borders on obsession. The obsession borders on histrionics. There's a part of me that is certain that if I looked hard enough in the DSM—the psychology community's compilation of all known disorders—I would be able to find some sort of obscure disorder that explains her obsession. I'm fairly certain it would have something to do with a childhood trauma involving clowns.

The decorating was actually lovely. My uncle's wife is a clever girl, skilled in all manners of interior design. She collects ceramic chickens and manages to make them look interesting. She also likes thimbles, old books, antique food canisters, farm implements, and Victorian hats. And she takes her holiday decorating as seriously as she does her daily decorating. Walking into their house on Sunday night was like walking into a montage of every creepy horror movie ever made. Fake spider webs dripped from every ceiling. Snakes slithered around furniture legs. The lights were turned low. The place was stocked with Three Musketeers and Smarties in every available nook and cranny.

Of course, not every decoration was of the spooky variety. There were happy ghosts and grinning pumpkins and curling black cats. There were even a few live cats that kept snaking their bodies around our legs. My uncle's cats are bizarre. The big one—Roscoe, who has a bobcat's square jaw and giant eyes—regularly beats on the young girl cat. He also brings up clean laundry from the basement. He snatches a panty here, a sock there, and clenches them in his teeth so they will survive the long climb to the main floor, where they are then neatly piled for discovery. While we were there, he brought up wrapping paper for our consideration.

Also situating itself in the non-spooky ranks was the motion-detecting witch figurine that burst into spasms and gruff laughter anytime someone would clap his hands or yell in a particularly loud voice. After they figured this out, my mother's boyfriend's black belt son and one of the non-relative's sons stood underneath the witch, clapping and shrieking like mad.

You're going to marry Jimmy! the black belt would scream at the witch.

You're going to marry Teddy! the non-relative would scream at the witch.

And the witch would bend and twitch and cackle, cackle, cackle.

This was during that dicey pre-dinner hour, where guests were checking their watches and swallowing around hard lumps of hunger. After the thirtieth time of hearing the witch's routine, I looked desperately at my cousin.

"Listen," I said. "You've got to help me. You've got to find me some alcohol."

He shrugged. He didn't think there was any alcohol. He said he could get me some ice and maybe a glass of orange pop.

"I saw a half-empty bottle of wine in the back room," my brother said.

We were deciding whether or not to go foraging when the black belt and the non-relative sent the witch into fits again.

"That's it," my brother said. He stood, stretched, and stepped down into the living room. He walked calmly over to the two little boys. He reached up over their heads and tipped the witch upside down. Her skirt went flying over her head. "Where's the damn off switch?" he asked.

My uncle's wife, busy shuttling serving trays between the two rooms and the two tables, came in and watched as Adam tipped and turned her cackling witch. "What's wrong?" she asked. "Don't you like my laughing witch?"

We sat down to dinner a few minutes later. I was sandwiched in between my mother and my grandfather. My grandfather chose to open the meal with a ten minute discussion on how all this fuss about lead being bad for you was just a bunch of hooey because his toothpaste had come packaged in lead containers when he was a boy, and he smeared that stuff all over his teeth and gums and he had turned out just fine, thank you very much.

After he was finished my mother unfolded a napkin onto her lap. "Oh," she said. "Well then."

I would have given a few toes for a glass of wine, but by that point the food was circulating. It smelled great. In addition to being a skilled decorator, my uncle's wife is an excellent cook. So is my uncle. They'd pulled out all the stops and laid out an entire turkey dinner. There was extra stuffing. There was extra gravy. There was cranberry sauce. Mashed potatoes. Dark and white meat. Green bean casserole. Corn. Ambrosia. Cupcakes with royal icing. Cheesecake. Chocolate pie. Apple pie.

There were also spiders, maggots, snakes, worms, and rats.

My uncle's wife had spent the minutes before dinner mixing fake flies into the corn. She threaded bait shop worms into the stuffing. She had sunk twitchy rubber spiders into the gravy. She had broken holes in the pie and stuck rats inside it.

I spent a considerable amount of plating time worrying the potatoes to get around worms. I had to pick snakes out of my cranberries. I had to re-dunk the gravy ladle to dislodge a spider. I had to look very, very carefully at each bite of my Ambrosia because the maggots were camouflaged perfectly by the marshmallow and coconut and cherries. My mother had to spit out a maggot when she took a much too zealous forkful of the salad.

The only thing unspoiled was the apple cider. I had two large glasses of it, and after I finished them and worked my way across the dessert table while avoiding any and all rodents, I smiled and said thank yous and let my brother take a picture of me with his cell phone so he could send it to Wisconsin Boy and say See what you're missing?

I had nearly missed it myself. I had a stack of composition essays on my table and they were in need of grading. On Saturday I told my mother there was a chance I wouldn't be able to make it, or that I wouldn't be able to stay for very long. Her voice became clipped and she put the infuriating ten second pauses she does so well in between her sentences. This was her way of letting me know that she was angry, that she was pissed, and that there was no way in hell I was leaving her alone with the boyfriend, his black blet son, the non-relatives, the neighbors, the Southern girl who had a fondness for ceramic poultry, her grumbly father, her son who spent most of his time text messaging a cute coworker, her father's girlfriend who spent most of her time taking photos of the decorations, and her brother who, after dinner, went and stretched out, moaning and writhing, across the living room carpet because his back hurt.

But she wasn't alone. I went. I went and tucked every little thing, every little scrap of that night into the dark folds of my brain so I could get at it someday when I needed it the most. My family, after all, is a walking gold mine of strange.