Free In Spite of Everything by Susan Gregory Thomas

runs to the Safeway, and were consequently exposed to our fair share of leering, masturbating perverts in adjacent vehicles. Disgusting, but probably not unusual. At twelve, just after my parents had separated, I spent the night at a friend’s house in which no parents were present and the older brother was compulsively watching porn on a giant TV in the family room, and that night he came on to me aggressively, with such animated images as backdrop. Again, not uncommon. A similar situation emerged on a semi-regular basis at the parentless home of another friend, minus the porn. Same deal.
    Same deal for a lot of us. Consider this random sampling, chosen with no special deliberation but from the top of my head. A friend I’ll call Jeremy, who grew up on the West Coast, was regularly compelled, at six years of age, to comfort his single mother as she lay crying on the bathroom floor playing “Send in the Clowns” over and over again; weekend visits with his heavy-drinking father often amounted to trips to the homes of unstable girlfriends and their roving wolf-pack children, who introduced him prematurely to drugs and sex. According to another friend, “Carrie,” her elementary school years in Wisconsin were spent watching TV after school with her brothers while her father smoked pot and “worked” at his desk. Her parents were always throwing bacchanalian parties, occasionally of the “key party” variety depicted in
The Ice Storm
, Rick Moody’s odyssey of the byways of suburban marital degeneracy in the 1970s. My friend “Julie,” who grew up in Texas, grew up in a house littered with her father’s print pornography collection, his carelessly degrading comments, and her mother’s nervous silence. One of my oldest friends, “Jessica,” and her siblings had to themselves an entire floor of their childhood home outside Philadelphia, where they spent much of their time smoking pot, drinking siphoned-off liquor from their parents’ stash, and isolating in adolescent angst,with rare check-ins from their parents, who entertained frequently in the lower living quarters. (At twelve, I smoked my first cigarette and got drunk for the first time on that floor.) Jessica’s sister, now a mother of three, had this comment about the one-story ranch in which she’s raising her own family now: “My kids are not going to be on their own floor, crying alone.”
    On their own floor, crying alone. An orphan world, wandering without destination in the numbing, frigid desert of deep space
. Unknown Regions. The locus of X’s narcissistic wound is sure to be found in these vicinities.
    As a parent now, it frankly blows me away to ruminate on the way so many of us lived as kids. Holy shit. How were we supposed to approach dating and relationships—much less marriage—after having hatched from such solitary confinement? Can the orphan planet ever latch on to a new star? It certainly can’t do it by merely flirting with the outer orbit of whatever solar system it happens to be hurtling past along its solitary, pointless trajectory. In physics, it turns out that for the orphan, theoretically, to have a shot at the sure embrace of a sun, it would have to be hurled, and pulled, into it by massive gravitational power. All in or not at all.
    In the thousands of conversations I have had with hundreds upon hundreds of Xers who came from divorced households of the 1970s and ’80s, very few of them honestly say they actually ever dated. Had random, lost sex? Yes. Chucked themselves headlong at relationships, whether or not they were involved with the right person? Definitely. All in or not at all.
    T he peak age in girls’ psychosexual efflorescence is thirteen, and for me, turning thirteen converged with my dad’s official leaving and, within a few months of that, with my mother’s regularly depositing me after school at the home of family friends. The parents were often not present, but their almost-twenty-year-old son invariably