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‘Q.’

‘Well it’s been pretty obvious since early on out in Weston the Moms has O.C.D. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. The only reason she’s never been diagnosed or treated for it is that in her the Disorder doesn’t prevent her from functioning. It all seems to come back to functioning. Traversion is character, according to Schtitt. One guy I was close to at E.T.A. for years developed the kind of impairing O.C.D. where you need treatment — Bain wasted huge amounts of time on all these countless rituals of washing, cleaning, checking things, walking, had to have a T-square on the court to make sure all the strings on his stick were intersecting at 90°, could only go through a doorway if he’d felt all around the frame of the doorway by hand, checking the frame for God knows what, and then was totally unable to trust his senses and always had to recheck the doorway he’d just checked. We had to physically carry Bain out of the locker room, before tournaments. Actually we’ve been close all our lives, notwithstanding that Marlon Bain is the single sweatiest human being you’d ever want to get within a click of. I think the O.C.D. might have started as a result of the compulsive sweat, which the sweat itself started after his parents were killed in a grotesque freak accident, Bain’s. Unless the strain of the constant rituals and fussing itself exaculates the perspiring. The Stork used Marlon in Death in Scarsdale, if you want to see way more than you want to know about perspiration. But the E.T.A. staff indulged Bain’s pathology about doorways because Schtitt’s own mentor had been pathologically devoted to this idea that you are what you walk between. It’s so nice to be able to end a sentence with a preposition when it’s easier. Jesus I’m thinking usage again. This is why I avoid the topic of the Moms. The whole topic starts to infect me. It takes me days to clean myself out of it. Traversion being character according to Schtitt. It takes a certain type of woman to look that good in a pantsuit, I think. I’ve always —’

‘Q.’

‘I think the point being that with actual clinical Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder I had to watch much of my ex-doubles partner’s life grind to a halt because it’d take him three hours to shower and then another two to get out through the shower door. He was in this sort of paralysis of compulsive motions that didn’t serve any kind of function. The Moms, on the other hand, can function with the compulsions because she’s also compulsively efficient and practical about her compulsions. Whether this makes her more insane than Marlon Bain or less insane than Marlon Bain, who can like say. As an instance the Moms solved a lot of her threshold-problems by having no real doors or doorways built on the first floor of HmH so the rooms are all split off by angles and partitions and plants. The Moms kept to a Prussian bathroom-schedule so she couldn’t spend hours in there washing her hands until the skin fell off the way Bain’s did, he had to wear cotton gloves the whole summer right before he left E.T.A. The Moms for a while had video cameras installed so she could obsessively check whether Mrs. Clarke’d left the oven on or check her plants’ arrangement or whether all the bathroom towels are lined up with their fringes flush without physically checking; she had a little wall of monitors in her study at HmH; The Stork put up with the cameras but the sense I get is that Tavis isn’t going to be keen on being photorecorded in the bathroom or anyplace else, so maybe she’s had to have other recourse.3 You can check that yourself out there. What I’m trying to say is she’s compulsively efficient even about her obsessions and compulsions. Of course there are doors upstairs, lockable doors, but that’s in service of other compulsions. The Moms’s. You can go ahead and ask her what I mean. She’s so compulsive she’s got the compulsions themselves arranged so efficiently that she can get everything done and still have plenty of time left over for her children. These are a constant drain on her batteries. She’s got to keep Hal’s skull lashed tight to hers without being so overt about it that Hallie has any idea what’s going on, to keep him from trying to pull his skull away. The kid’s still obsessed with her approval. He lives for applause from exactly two hands. He’s still performing for her, syntax- and vocabulary-wise, at seventeen, the same way he did when he was ten. The kid is so shut down talking to him is like throwing a stone in a pond. The kid has no idea he even knows something’s wrong. Plus the Moms has to obsess over Mario and Mario’s various challenges and tribulations and little patheticnesses and worship Mario and think Mario’s some kind of secular martyr to the mess she’d made of her adult life, all the while having to keep up a front of laissez-faire laid-back management where she pretends to let Mario go his own way and do his own thing.’

‘Q-’

‘I’m not going to talk about it.’

‘Q.’

‘No and don’t insult my intelligence, I’m not going to talk about why I don’t want to talk about it. If this is going to be a Moment article, Hallie’s going to read it, and then he’ll read it to Booboo, and I’m not talking about The Stork’s death or the Moms’s stability in a thing where they’ll read about it and have to read some authoritative report on my take on it instead of coming to their own terms about it. With it, rather. Terms with, terms about. No, terms with it.’

‘…’

‘They both might have to wait until they get away from there before they can even realize what’s going on, that the Moms is unredeemably fucking bats. All these terms that became cliches — denial, schizogenic, pathogenic family like systems and so on and so forth. A former acquaintance said The Mad Stork always used to say cliches earned their status as cliches because they were so obviously true.’

‘…’

‘I never once saw the two of them fight, not once in eighteen domestic and Academy years, is all I’ll say.’ ‘Q.’

‘The late Stork was the victim of the most monstrous practical joke ever played, in my opinion, is all I’ll say.’

‘All right, I’ll relate one antidoteb that might be more revealing of the Moms’s emotional weather than any adjective. Jesus, see, I start explicitly referring to parts of speech just thinking about the whole thing. The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info.’

‘Q.’

‘I’m sorry? Right then, one illustrative thing. Which thing to pick. Embarrassment of riches. I’ll pick one at random. I think I was maybe twelve. I was in 12’s, I know, on that summer’s tour. Though I was playing 12’s when I was still ten. It was ten to thirteen that I was regarded as gifted, with a tennis future. I began to decline around what should have been puberty. Call me let’s say twelve. People were talking about NAFTA and something called the quote Information Turnpike and there was still broadcast TV, though we had a satellite dish. The Academy wasn’t even a twinkle in anybody’s eye. The Stork would disappear periodically when money came in. I think he kept going back up to Lyle in Ontario. Call me age ten. We still lived in Weston, known also as Volvoland. The Moms gardened like a fiend out there. This was something else she had to do. Had a thing about. Hadn’t gone to indoor plants yet. Called the garden’s crops her Green Babies. Wouldn’t let us eat the zucchini. Never picked it, it got monstrous and dry and fell off and rotted. Big fun. But her real thing was preparing the garden every spring. She started making lists and pricing supplies and drafting outlines in January. Did I mention her own father had been a potato farmer, at one time a millionaire potato-baron-type farmer, in Quebec?