.

Three young adults, working in northern California’s Silicon Valley, are able to maintain a superficial impression among their peers that they are successful, reasonably content, and well adjusted.  Underneath the surface, however, the emotional baggage that they are carrying is so heavy that their lives are on the verge of spinning out of control.  The Syzygy is an amalgam of three interwoven narratives.  Rebecca is in session with her psychotherapist, with whom she is trying to get to the bottom of her relationship problems.  An anonymous blogger, unrestrained by social norms or self insight, spews out misogynistic male chauvinist propaganda.  And Ross recounts the story of the secret obsession that has led him, almost against his will, along a path that is sure to place him in grave danger.  Over the course of the novel, the roots of the characters’ personalities are exposed, revealing how the forces that have shaped their lives continue to govern their actions.  As a result, the events leading to the dramatic, and potentially tragic, conclusion become imbued with a sense of inevitability, predestined by the inescapable past that is haunting each of the three protagonists.

THE CONFESSIONS OF ROSS

I Hate My Sister

There are so many reasons I hate my little sister that I don’t even know where to begin.  I guess it makes sense to begin at the beginning.  The mere fact of her existence ruined my life and my mother’s life.  The first breath of air that she drew, the first piercing cry that issued forth from her lungs, reverberating through the delivery room, was an assault upon our freedom and happiness, a warning of the years of misery that the malevolent creature would be bringing down upon our heads.  The moment of her birth coincided with the hatching of a grand conspiracy conceived by my father, an evil plot designed to shackle, imprison, and incapacitate his wife, and rob her of all that she held most dear.

My days of glory came early in life, during my first year of elementary school.  That’s when it all came together for Ross Newlin.  Leaving behind nursery school to enter kindergarten was a gigantic step for me.  I would be out of the house for six hours a day, just like all the big school kids in the neighborhood.  Though I was nervous about the transition, it turned out that school was just a structured playground, where I spent all day making friends and interacting with my peers.  And any trepidation that I might have had about diving into that pool was alleviated because I had a special advantage over all the other kids.  You see my mother was a schoolteacher.  She had stopped working for five years after I was born.  But when I turned five and started kindergarten, she returned to work.  Fortuitously, she was able to find a teaching slot at the same elementary school that I was attending.  So I had my own personal safety net right down the hallway if I were to encounter any kind of emergency, be it a bruise, an insoluble math problem, or an unkind remark.

In the morning my mother would wake me up, serve breakfast, eat with me, oversee my ablutions, help me to get dressed, and pack up my lunch.  Then we would rush to the car, with my mother warning me that if we didn’t hurry up we were going to be late.  (I have since learned that this was a deception that she practiced in order to overcome my perennial resistance to being strapped into my car seat.)  I got door-to-door service to and from my classroom.  On an average day, I might only catch one glimpse of her in the hallway, just enough time to exchange our secret wave of the week, which, after weighty consideration, had been selected and rehearsed on Sunday evening.  But I always knew exactly where to find her if I needed her.  And sometimes she would pop into the cafeteria at lunch time or walk past the playground during recess to check on how my day was going.  I was aware that some of my peers, even in kindergarten, were completely mortified if a parent kissed them goodbye when they were dropped off.  Especially the boys.  And others who had a parent who worked in the school, or was volunteering in the classroom, or showed up on their birthday were embarrassed by their presence.  But I was proud of my mother.  She was so beautiful and so popular that I had no qualms about being affiliated with her, and I was happy to bathe in the ring of sunlight that surrounded her.

And my mother was happy too.  She loved that job like no one before or since.  She was like one of those major league baseball players being interviewed on TV who can’t believe how lucky he is that he gets to spend his life being paid to do what he loves to do.  It was hard work, and the pay was a tiny fraction of a professional baseball player’s salary.  But she was on a mission, forever challenging herself to find the key that would unlock the puzzle.  She had until June to figure it out, to develop a sufficient understanding of each child so that she knew what it would take to light the kid up, to allow them to blossom, to make them shine.  And she would study and obsess over each one of them until she had come up with the right formula.  Whatever it took.  And it took a lot of time, and it was exhausting.  Sometimes, when she put me to bed and lay down next to me, to protect me from the terrors of the night, she would fall asleep as well.  She might even sleep straight through the night, so that I would wake up in my mother’s arms.

It was paradise, sheer paradise, or the closest I’ve ever gotten.  And guess what!  She taught first grade, which meant that next year I had a one in three shot of having her as my very own teacher!  I could just picture it:  There I was, sitting at my school desk and raising my hand as my mother stood at the blackboard and cast her gaze about the classroom, until finally it fell upon me.  “Yes, Ross?” she would ask.  “Because during the summer the northern hemisphere of the earth is closer to the sun,” I would say.  “And during our winter, the southern hemisphere is closer to the sun.”  Or some other really difficult and complex answer to some other really difficult and complex question.  “Very good, Ross,” she would say.  “Thank you.  Did everyone hear Ross’ answer?”  And she would be so proud of me but she wouldn’t show it so the other kids wouldn’t feel bad.

I suppose the school administration might not have agreed with me that it would be a perfectly satisfactory arrangement if a student’s first grade teacher was his own mother.  But it’s a moot point.  My fantasy was never meant to be.  My sister ruined all of that.  She ruined my life and my mother’s life.

My mother was already showing before the end of the school year, an ominous swelling whose generic meaning was vaguely sketched out for me, but whose full implications were impossible for me to grasp.

It is said that children are extremely resilient, that they can bounce back from almost any kind of insult or injury.  At the same time, paradoxically, they are also extremely fragile.  Young children know nothing of the vicissitudes of life, so that when they are blindsided by sudden misfortune, they may have great difficulty coping with it.

I was booted out of paradise in a brisk ceremony reminiscent of the primordial ejections of Beelzebub, Adam and Eve, and the Greek God Hephaestus.  The first disappointment was that not only was my mother not going to be my teacher, but that, come September, she would not be working in my elementary school at all.  I returned to school as just another citizen in a first grade class, without the prestige and protection I had enjoyed on account of my special connection to those in authority.

But that was nothing compared to the demotion I was scheduled to receive at the end of October.  I still remember that catastrophic Halloween, crying hysterically because the hook and eye patch that were crucial components of my pirate costume had been left behind in the confusion when I was rushed off to do my trick or treating (and to take up lodging as well, as I was later informed) with an acquaintance from the neighborhood whom I did not much care for.  How appropriate that she was born on the day that the evil dead rise up from their graves, on the night that the monsters, ghouls, and witches rule the earth.  I would eventually be officially forbidden to remind my sister of that apt coincidence, even though my enjoyment of Halloween was destined to be forever more disrupted, and my candy yield substantially diminished, by her birthday celebrations.

It seems that babies can be rather demanding.  And so my mother’s availability to me suddenly and precipitously plummeted.  I was lucky to get a cursory kiss goodnight before being left in the dark to fight off, on my own, whatever monster was hiding in the closet or behind the curtains or under the bed.

I must have been an intellectually precocious child, because even though my sister’s actual physical arrival inside my home came as a complete shock, once she got there I was almost immediately able to make a clear assessment of the impact that her presence was likely to have on the family dynamics and my quality of life.  I was also savvy enough to see through the speeches that were delivered to me about the elevation of status that I had been granted and the broad authority that had been conferred upon me in my important new role as an elder brother.  I was able to recognize these platitudes as a lot of propaganda that was intended to appease me and co-opt me into sharing in the frenzied adulation for the bundle of pink cuteness.  A couple of weeks after her installation in her newly painted, decorated, and furnished bedroom, I was caught carrying the crying baby toward the back door.  I told my parents that Gabriella was crying “because she wants to go outside.”  Since it was the middle of November, my mother didn’t think it would be a good idea to comply with her daughter’s wishes.  My memory is a bit fuzzy on this, but I believe that I was headed for the trash bin.  Because of this incident, my child care responsibilities were severely curtailed.  On subsequent occasions, my parents deemed that the manner in which I was playing with the baby was inappropriately rough, and as a consequence of my poorly contained fratricidal impulses I was subjected to a series of punishments of unprecedented harshness.  I was repeatedly censured, exiled to my room, or even banished from the house, and found myself being pushed ever farther away from that soft, warm, formerly welcoming bosom that was now occupied by another.

My mother went back to work only a few months after giving birth to my sister.  However, she returned to work as a part-time substitute teacher, and she was rarely assigned to fill in at my grade school.  It was a compromise and, as so often happens with a compromise solution, it left everyone dissatisfied.  My mother tried to point out to me that I had been privileged to enjoy more than five full years of virtually undivided attention, but that historical perspective did not make my fall from grace any more palatable.  For her part, she was frustrated and exhausted, and felt that she was failing as both a mother and a teacher.

So I suppose that one should feel sorry for baby Gabriella who had to deal with a hostile, malicious sibling and a stressed out, unavailable mother, and was passed back and forth from nannies to day care centers throughout her infancy and early childhood.

Perhaps that helps explain why she became so acquisitive, someone who manipulates people to get what she wants and, if that doesn’t work, is always ready to fight for it.  My sister grew up to be a pig, a real live pig.  She is a person who only takes.  She doesn’t know how to give, and is simply incapable of thinking of anyone but herself.

Gaby was not exactly a natural born beauty.  But she did a good job of working with the limited material that God gave her.  By the time she reached seventh grade, she had been fitted with braces and contact lenses.  At the beginning of the summer after her sophomore year of high school, she went to New York and had her nose rebuilt by one of the most renowned plastic surgeons on the east coast.  Then she spent the rest of the summer at our beach house in Delmarva, avoiding everyone she knew and hardly ever going outside.  That way she could return to high school in the fall as if magically transformed.  She even considered switching schools.  My sister’s nose job affected her personality as well as her face, somehow instilling in her a sense of superiority that served to justify her grasping selfishness.

Gaby has a decent body, and never let herself get fat, so I have to give her credit for that.  However, one of her favorite topics of conversation is her body, particularly her body weight and her current diet.  She doesn’t talk about it all the time, just when she eats or changes her clothes or sees herself in a photograph.  And that’s not her only positive attribute.  She is nothing if not kempt.  Until she became a mother, she would not leave the house with a single hair out of place.

Everyone in my family has an obsessive compulsive streak, though there are marked differences among us with respect to how that shared personality trait is expressed.  My father and my sister are the most alike.  They are scary driven, extremely goal oriented.  They know exactly what they want, and will do anything to get it.  Whatever you do, don’t stand in their way.  My mother, perhaps influenced by her religious upbringing, is much more of a martyr or visionary.  She has an image of a perfect world, of how things ought to be.  She has a clear picture of how society ought to function, how the school system should be set up, how her family ought to interact, everything.  But in comparison to my ruthlessly pragmatic father and sister, she is not driven by as strong a call to action, and is less likely to attempt to impose her will upon those around her.  Of the four of us I am by far the most ineffectual since I am the most likely simply to obsess about a problem or issue without taking steps to remedy or change it.  I have neither the flinty edge that empowers my father and sister nor the utopian dream by which my mother is guided.  Half the time the concern that I get all twisted about is an abstract issue, such as a political or social injustice, something that I have no control over.  And yet I will ruminate about it.  I might lose sleep over it.  And I will be unable to get it out of my mind.  And even if it’s an issue close to home that is within my reach to exert an effect upon I am likely to be paralyzed into inaction by uncertainty and self doubt.  And then when I finally decide to do something, I often act rashly and impulsively and for the wrong reasons and am therefore likely to achieve the wrong result.

Anyway, the point is that my sister, like my father, knows exactly what she wants and pursues it with the grim, implacable, bloodthirsty determination of a serial killer during the first 99.5% of your average horror film, before the slasher finally gets his comeuppance.  They’re like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator I.

You can say no to my sister.  I’m not saying that it can’t be done.  But that means that she will then try to go over, under, around, or through you.  And if you don’t eventually come around and join the right team, you’ve probably earned yourself an enemy for life.

She went to college and got herself an MRS degree.  Her academic pursuits clearly took a back seat to her social and matrimonial objectives.  Irrefutable proof of where her priorities lay is provided by the fact that she dropped out after her junior year and got married.  Her fiancé was a year ahead of her, and she couldn’t take the chance of sticking around school after he had left and losing him.  She can always go back, right?  But she never did.  And why would she, if she had already accomplished what she went there for?  She had found herself a guy with no backbone that she could push around, who could support her in the style to which she was hoping to become accustomed.  Her fiancé’s family owned a paper mill and a lucrative printing and packaging company, and it was his intention to go into the family business.  An outrageously conventional fellow, the type that you probably thought didn’t exist any more.  David’s actually a nice guy, but he’s extremely well trained.  He wants to make her happy, and he knows that if she is unhappy then he is going to be unhappy too.  So he can be relied upon to toe the line.  Same as everyone else, really.  Everybody knows that Gaby is very good at making everyone’s life completely miserable until she gets what she wants.

Gaby decided that the lifestyle of a non-working stay-at-home mom is the one that most appealed to her.  And so, in order to seal the deal, she went ahead and got pregnant as soon as she was married, and had her first kid by the time she was twenty-two.  I’m not sure how she knew that she didn’t want to work for a living, since she has never done a day’s worth of paid employment in her life, except on those rare occasions when she did some photocopying at my father’s office.  However, despite her lack of a job, she is one of those people who always complains about how “crazy busy” she is all the time.  She has a crazy busy day, for example, if she has to go to the grocery store, pick the kids up from school, respond to a dinner invitation, and yell at the lawn maintenance guy because there are leaves all over the yard.

Now she has these two rotten kids and the whole family is simply unbearable to be around.  The boys are spoiled, whining, covetous, nasty, disrespectful, and constantly at each other’s throats.  I know that an uncle should be a hero to his nephews.  Who better to play sports with and do some roughhousing and teach them all manner of manly pursuits?  That’s not how it works with my nephews.  My sister says “Look, boys.  It’s your Uncle Ross!”

The older one, Daniel, will say “Oh no!  Not Uncle Ross.” 

And the younger one, Christopher, says “Oh no!  Not Uncle Ross.  What are you doing here?”

Then they each ask me politely “Uncle Ross, what time do you think you’ll be leaving?”  That’s their running joke, which is repeated at approximately five minute intervals until my sister threatens to deprive them of television.  In fact, however, it echoes her sentiments exactly.

There is a traditional game that I play with the boys in which I am a monster and I’m terrorizing and slowly pursuing them until finally I catch one of them, usually Christopher, and then the other one comes to his rescue and we scuffle with epic ferocity on a bed or couch.  As they grow older, however, I have realized that during the climactic battle between monster and children they have been doing their level best to injure me as seriously as possible, and that they are becoming increasingly effective at doing so.  I have therefore become increasingly reluctant to participate in that particular brand of uncle-nephew horseplay, even though Christopher still persists in commanding me to “be the monster” whenever he’s not inquiring after my projected time of departure.

My family has a wonderful summer house; I think I already mentioned it.  It’s on the Delmarva Peninsula, just a block from the beach, about three hours from our mainland home in Alexandria, Virginia.  Even after I moved to the west coast, no matter how busy I was or how hard I was working, I would always take at least a week off to spend at the beach house.  I have many a fond memory of the place.  During the summer after I turned sixteen, I met a girl named Meredith one weekend toward the end of the season.  She was the same age as I was, and she was down there with her family from Somerville, New Jersey on a ten-day vacation.  We hung out on the beach all day, and at night we played miniature golf together and went for ice cream and made out in the dunes.  We both had a lot of acne but neither of us seemed to mind.  I became very hopeful that Meredith and I were going to lose our virginity together.  I told her that I thought it would be a good idea, and she smiled and shrugged, which I took to be an encouraging sign.  On our last night together we were hard at work in the dunes and I was sure we were going to go all the way.  But a patrol car came by along the beach and, though they didn’t stop, the high beams raking across our bodies spooked us, and the invasion of our privacy was sufficiently disruptive to make our sandy farewell disappointingly anticlimactic.

Anyway, I always liked going down there because I enjoy swimming in the ocean and it’s a great escape because there’s no pressure to do anything.  So you can just relax and go to the beach and read a book and decompress and try to forget about anything that was bothering you back where you have to wear shoes.  But now my sister’s family is out there every weekend from before Memorial Day until after Labor Day.  And she installs herself semi-permanently with the two kids starting on the day that school gets out in June, with David commuting out on the weekends.  And so it’s just not worth it.  I tried crashing the scene once or twice, fiercely determined to bull it out come hell or high water.  I mean it’s my house, too.  Right?  But within five minutes, I would find myself hiding in my bedroom (the smallest one in the house, of course), cornered, pacing, ready to head for the nearest Motel 6.  My sister knows a thousand ways to reinforce the message from her minions that I am an unwanted intruder.  If I play music any time after 9 p.m., even at a decibel level that is virtually inaudible, she will come in and ask me to lower the volume.  “Unfortunately, the walls in this house are like cardboard,” and she’s a very light sleeper.  Did I mention that she complains a lot?  I, on the other hand, have trouble falling asleep, but once I get going I sleep like a rock.  In Delmarva, however, I am unable to sleep past dawn, because by that time the television is blasting and the screaming and bickering and video games and indoor basketball are well under way.  When I’m on vacation, I like to get up late.  But if I succeed in sleeping past nine, my sister informs me that “the kitchen is closed for breakfast.  It’s a house rule, and I would really appreciate if you could abide by it.  Otherwise I’m constantly cleaning up after people all day long.”  Although my sister admits that I am an adult, she contends that I am unable to wipe counters or put plates in a dishwasher in a manner that meets her high standards.  And God help me if I should be so selfish and socially irresponsible as to use more than one towel in any twenty-four hour period.  Guaranteed lecture.  My sister is a dedicated conservationist when it comes to conserving her personal energy resources.  I find myself looking forward to David’s arrival, since I know that he will serve as an alternative outlet for his children’s abuse and his wife’s nagging, even though his craven servitude is difficult to watch.  The result is that I am forced to spend fourteen or sixteen hours per day on the beach, rain or shine, in order to escape the insanity.

The bane of my existence.  That’s what my sister is and always has been.