“Good,” he said, satisfied with her assessment.
She took the ukulele from him and placed it carefully on his dresser. Then she turned off the lamp and she leaned against his bed. In only a few minutes, she heard the easy, steady breathing of her son, already asleep. She knew she needed to leave the room; she still had work to do, but she lay against the bed until she began to drift into sleep, knowing that, when he awoke, she would be right there.
chapter fifteen
the infinite family project (year seven)
Ten members of the Infinite Family Project claimed two rows of chairs at Parnassus Books in Nashville, each of them holding a copy of Julie’s new novel, An Artificial Family. Link was standing in the back with a camcorder and several children were hanging out in the children’s section of the bookstore, playing with a train set and reading picture books about dragons, a newfound obsession of the family. Izzy sat next to Dr. Grind and watched as Julie sipped from a water bottle and talked to some of the audience members in the front row. The bookstore was nearly filled with people, some of them, Izzy noticed, openly staring at the Infinite Family, smiling at them as if to show that they were progressive enough to approve of their situation.
Izzy returned her gaze to the novel in her hands, a hardcover book with a light blue cover featuring a wooden dollhouse filled to overflowing with Fisher-Price Little People figurines from the ’70s. On the back of the novel, there was a picture of Julie, standing in front of one of the AstroTurf-covered buildings of the complex, looking more serious than Izzy had ever seen her in real life. The photographer had wanted to include all the members of the Infinite Family in the background, but several of the adults had balked at this idea, the weirdness of it, as if Julie had adopted them or ruled over them. The ad copy on the back cover began: A novel about a unique kind of family, from one of the members of The Infinite Family Project, which had given Julie fits at first, the way the publisher demanded that her status in the project be part of the promotional materials. “I was a writer before the project, you know,” she said, exasperated, at dinner one night.
The novel itself was about a woman in her forties who has inherited a fortune after her parents pass away in a plane crash. Without any family now of her own, no husband or wife, no children, no brothers or sisters, she decides to hire a group of actors to play her family. Soon, she hires more and more actors, until she has an extended family of thirty people, some of whom she only sees once a year. She eventually falls in love with one of the actors who plays her brother and they end up marrying and having children of their own.
To Izzy, who had read, like most of the Infinite Family, galleys before the book had been released, it was a weird kind of postmodern fairy tale. It was also, thank god, fairly removed from the actual Infinite Family, which had been a worry of many of the members of the project when they heard the title of the novel. “The publisher wanted that title,” Julie informed them immediately after showing them the cover, her face pink with embarrassment. “It’s pretty darn close to the Infinite Family, isn’t it?” Harris asked, his face smiling in a Silly Putty way, but no one else commented on the similarity. At least not at the table, not in front of Julie.
And yet, there were enough people in the family who felt ill at ease with Julie’s book, not only from outright jealousy but also from a feeling that Julie was using the Infinite Family as a promotional tool for her own career, no matter how often she said otherwise, the way she was, whether they wanted it or not, pulling them into the spotlight.
“When you get down to it,” Nikisha said to Susan and Izzy one night, “she and Link were the two people who needed the project the least. They weren’t poor, Eliza wasn’t an accident, they already had their own careers.” Nikisha ticked off each detail as if she were a lawyer in the midst of a closing argument. Nikisha was, to Izzy’s mind, one of the smartest people in the family, had an uncanny ability to recall perfectly anything that she had read, was unbelievably capable and seemingly impossible to unsteady, so Izzy could not help but fall into agreement with her, even if, hours later, alone, she realized that she actually didn’t think that way.
“It’s like the project is their own experiment,” Nikisha continued, “one that just Link and Julie are conducting, and we’re just lab rats.”
“I don’t know,” Susan said. “They had just as many reasons as we did to join, and Julie’s always been one of the biggest cheerleaders for the project. Should she give up writing because it might make us uncomfortable?”