The Family Outing: A Memoir

Dedication

For Felix, Alexandra, Jude, Sebastian, August, and Alice Camille

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Part One: Origin

One: The Stakeout

Two: Crush

Three: Oh Lamb of God

Four: Therapists

Part Two: The Closet

Five: Infinity

Six: French Training

Seven: We Will Serve the Lord

Eight: Our Bodies, Ourselves

Nine: I Am the Problem

Ten: Help Us

Eleven: It’s Not You

Twelve: All of the Ways We Pretend

Thirteen: Both Hands

Part Three: Hurt

Fourteen: Outing Dad

Fifteen: Can I Have the Keys?

Sixteen: You’ve Reached a Number That Is No Longer in Service

Seventeen: Three-Headed Monster

Eighteen: I Don’t Even Remember the Fight

Nineteen: Family Conference Call

Part Four: Heal

Twenty: Transformation

Twenty-One: What Persists

Twenty-Two: Tattoos

Twenty-Three: Transitions

Twenty-Four: Surfing

Twenty-Five: Oscillations

Twenty-Six: Marriage, Round One

Twenty-Seven: H-I-Fucking-V

Twenty-Eight: The Duckling in Her Bra

Twenty-Nine: Everything Falls Apart

Thirty: Falling

Thirty-One: Magic Penny

Thirty-Two: You Will Make Mistakes

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

Everyone has secrets. I exist because of two secrets—one acute and unusual, belonging to my mother, and one common and culturally condemned, belonging to my father. These hidden truths worked their way into the fabric of my being, coming up through me. My parents’ shame became my shame. Without ever being told, I learned what I could share about myself and what I had to hide. I didn’t have a name for this, only a fear that I was in danger.

I dreamed about this before I had language for it. It’s my earliest memory that I know to be all my own. I must be almost three, because I don’t remember being in my crib. I already sleep in a big-girl bed, with a mesh safety net attached to it. This bed is nestled against one pink-patterned wall of a room where my dad, a law student, studies. Our family lives in a duplex in Acton, Massachusetts, with train tracks that cut a line through the backyard. In a house nearby are Raina and Bill Rice, the landlords. They are retirees who have shells and sea artifacts all over their home from Bill’s scuba-diving hobby. Raina is a mousy woman with tightly curled white hair. Bill is good-natured, grandfatherly. He gives me orange soda when I visit. But in the dream, I awake to noise outside my window. This is the confusing part, when I am awaking but still asleep in a dream—the reason that, later, I will be so certain that these events actually happened. Dream-me pulls back the curtain and peeks out the window, and there are Raina and Bill coming toward me, flanked by a fireman and a police officer. The sky behind them is orange and red, dusky, opening up as if it will swallow all of us. Raina has a black pistol. Bill is pointing a green water gun at me. They know what I have done, who I am. If they reach me, they will shoot me. I’m sure of it. I’m screaming. I’m screaming in my sleep so loud that I have screamed myself awake.

Then my mother is there. She’s lifting me up out of my bed, and she sits down in the mahogany rocker that my grandparents in Ypsilanti bought my parents for their first Christmas together. Adrenaline runs through my body as I try to explain the danger. But I don’t have enough language yet. I can only express that there is someone outside the window. My mother reaches forward and pulls the curtains open, says there is nothing. I don’t believe her.

For a while, this happens most nights. We sit there in the chair. My mother is trying to help me, but she can’t understand the danger. I can’t communicate it to her. When I think about it then, and even when I think about it now, my arms freeze up so that I cannot lift them. Eventually my mother carries me back to my parents’ room, to the large waterbed they share. It’s one of those mid-1970s mainstays, one big bag of water that sloshes anytime anyone moves. I’m sandwiched between my parents. I know that I must lie very still if I’m going to be permitted to stay, that I must try to sleep. And there, right there in between their bodies, my mom’s elbow draped over me, I relax. I’m safe. But I can never sleep. I can’t stay still, and the waterbed roils like the ocean every time I move. No one is sleeping. Now my parents are annoyed with me. Dad lifts me up to return me to my bed. No, I cry. No. I’ll be killed, the landlords are coming for me. Dad carries me through the kitchen and back into our shared bedroom-study. He tucks me into bed and then plops into the rocker, waiting and waiting for me to sleep.

THIS DREAM STAYS WITH ME in the years that follow. I have it when I am six and seven, and I wake up in a cold sweat. By now, I’ve learned not to call for my parents when dreams scare me. They cannot make it better. And anyhow, now we live in a four-bedroom split-level on a cul-de-sac in Greenville, South Carolina, and Raina and Bill are still back in Massachusetts. I know as soon as the adrenaline shoots my body into waking that there is no one outside my window. I pad down the hall to the bathroom and pour a glass of water that I drink slowly. This is the first time I remember thinking I’m a bad person.

I have the dream at nine, as we move to another new house. We are back in Massachusetts, staying with my aunt while we get settled. Katje, Evan, and I sleep on the floor of my aunt’s study like a pile of puppies. Katje is five and Evan is three, and as I watch them sleep, I’m angry at them for their relative youth and innocence. It doesn’t occur to me that they may already have fear and shame, too.

For a little while, the dream comes frequently again. I’m nervous about starting another new school. Then I make some friends and get to know my teacher. The dream recedes.

At sixteen, when I’ve figured out that (maybe possibly but not for sure) I am gay, the dream comes back. I’m old enough to notice how the emotions it conjures are filtered through a younger me, toddler-sized, amorphous and physically grounded in my body. Raina and Bill are there, more muted, with their guns. Now they feel more distant. As scared as I am, I’m also curious. In the dream, I know that I’m in the dream. I can pause it in still frames, but I can’t figure out how to move closer to the figures who are pursuing me. I wake up panicked and sweaty.

The last time I have the dream is when I’m twenty-four. I live in the Bay Area, and I’ve just started therapy with a therapist I don’t perceive to be helpful because I don’t feel better after I speak to her. I tell this woman everything I know about myself. She’s like the garbage barge that runs along the bottom of the river dredging up sediment so that the water becomes cloudy, leaving it for something else to clean. Only what I don’t realize then is that the work is the dredging. Cloudy waters come clean on their own.

I tell her about the dream, about how it makes me feel. And then I never have it again.

WHAT HAPPENED TO ME? I used to think this question was important, that in its answer was the reason I didn’t have the things I thought I wanted in my adulthood—namely, love, partnership, a relationship whose bottom wouldn’t fall out. The security of knowing that the bottom of my own life wouldn’t fall out. So starting in my late twenties, I’d sit in a therapist’s office every Thursday morning and explore my memory: Did Bill abuse me? Did someone hurt me? Did the twin secrets of my family doom me?

I thought I was the expert on my messy, overwhelming family then. I thought I understood my parents, that their missteps were both unusual and unfortunate. I thought I understood my brother and my sister, that their indignities were somehow undeserved compared with my own. I’ve always been an effective storyteller, I think. If you had asked me about my family back then, I would have held you in an uncomfortable mix of horror and pity with stories about my adolescence, about Mom’s depression and Dad’s absence, and then left you laughing with the punch line: We all came out of the closet, and now we’re okay!

You would feel satisfied with this ending. You would feel better.

I would not.

That was when I believed that pain was earned instead of felt, and I hadn’t earned the right to claim it yet. When the feelings came, rising like a tsunami threatening to take me under, I pushed them back. I worked out or went out partying. I drank enough to forget for a few minutes, or I threw myself into an article I was researching. I was thirty by then, a grown woman with a media career and a big hole where I felt a family should be. I wrote cover stories for magazines and had a regular spot on the ABC News’s morning program as a technology expert. And sometimes, because of circumstances that felt largely out of my control and that I couldn’t predict, the feelings would overpower me. I had a name for this. I called it the emotional flu. I’d sit in the bathroom of my apartment, under the sink, holding my head between my elbows, rocking. Silent screams emerged in heavy gasps. Time collapsed and turned in on itself. I missed deadlines, flaked on email. Once I arrived unprepared for a live spot on CNN. I was booked to comment on the 2012 Olympics, which would be held in London. What do you think of the surprise city choice? the anchor asked me, because evidently everyone thought the location would be Paris. And reflecting back now, I can imagine any number of things I might have been able to say. But at the time, I looked dead-eyed at the anchor and said nothing.

Five seconds of nothing on live TV is terrifying. It’s a break in reality. It’s a crisis. It’s what drove me to therapy.

How do you feel? the therapist would ask me. How am I supposed to know how I feel until I know what prompted how I felt?

I’m trying to remember what happened, I’d answer. There’s what I think happened. There are the made-up bits I’ve told people along the way, exaggerated for the sake of the story or withheld for fear of the same. There’s my dad’s version of the story. There’s what my mom believes. There’s our childhood according to my brother and my sister, neither of whom understood the other in our youth. I’d fall silent until my brain hurt and I zoned out, and then I’d ask the therapist, What happened to me?

I spent a decade trying to answer this question. Now I know that the answer is as irrelevant as it is unknowable. Our memories are imperfect. In every retelling, we expand them. We change details, and then we tell the important stories so many times that those details become truer than the original details. What matters is the emotional seat of an experience, and this can change with time. The terror I felt in my childhood nightmare about Bill and Raina is true. So is the freedom that came from speaking it.

WE ALL CAME OUT OF THE CLOSET, and now we’re okay. These things are correlated, but they are not causal. Coming out was an inevitability. For close to two decades, my family lived in the shadow of our closets. We lived with the pain that comes from hiding one’s most authentic self and the pain that comes from being raised by people who are hiding their most authentic selves. It was a shame that began on the inside and spilled out of us. Disguising this shame took effort. It took thinking and planning and always being on the verge of being found out. It took lying, and lying about the lies. It took our life force. Collectively, we reached a point where the hiding had robbed us of our oxygen. Something had to change, or we would die.

Then, in the space of five years, like a chain reaction that couldn’t be stopped once it had been set in motion, we each revealed our secrets, first to ourselves and then to everyone: I came out as lesbian. Dad announced he was gay. Katje told us she was bisexual. Evan found the courage to say he was transgender. And Mom found the voice to call herself a survivor of a series of crimes so reprehensible that I could only allow myself to learn about them in small doses over many years.

But revealing our secrets is not the same as living our truths. We came out of the closet. Also, now we’re okay. I’d go so far as to say we are thriving. As a family, we’re close. My dad takes yoga over Zoom and cooks luscious meals of food he grows. My mom just finished another continuing education class for her counseling practice. My sister and her wife have just had their second child, a pandemic baby. My brother’s second child arrived a month later. It was early in the pandemic and COVID was raging, so he chose to deliver at home, his wife counting the seconds between his contractions. My newest nephew arrived less than an hour after the first contraction.

And me. Somehow I’ve come through it. I have the things I never believed I’d be able to have: My own family. A wife. Children. A gentle confidence that I’m not about to fall out of the bottom of my life. But all of that is a proxy for the way that I am able to feel. I love, and a lot of the time, I feel loved.

MY SON IS NEARLY THE same age as I was when I first had the shame dream. I can hear him upstairs, talking with his other mother. His language is coming in phrases. He repeats things. I go the whole wide world, go the whole wide world just to find her, the radio plays softly. My wife sings along to the end of the song as she moves around the living room: Just to find her. And then there’s Jude: Jutht to find er.

He’s just starting to pick up words. But even now, his memories are taking shape. They live within his body. And already, he has a strong sense of what is unjust. He falls constantly in the way that new walkers do, and he brings his scrapes to us to witness. Boom, he tells us, and shows us with a hand motion where he has fallen, what table edge has bonked him. So many bonks. He still has perfect faith that telling us will release the pain.

He isn’t wrong.

This pattern of correspondence is something we all eventually forget. Not how to name what has hurt us, but how to listen to those we love who have been hurt. How to listen to ourselves, to take our own pain seriously. Right now, I listen for Jude’s cries and attend to his bonks. Explain what happened, I tell him. He goes through the details maybe eight times. The table edge. The floorboard. The stumble. He uses grand hand motions, and I nod and reassure him: I hear you. And look, you are okay.

This will change, slowly. Before he forgets how to tell me what hurts, I will forget how to listen well. This is almost a guarantee. So he’ll start to edit his fears, to share with me only what he believes I’ll deem worthy of sympathy. He’ll take the rest to someone else who may listen better, or he’ll tuck it inside to let it fester. This is how a secret is made.

WHAT HAPPENED TO US? This is the question I asked my family. I wanted to find out what would happen if I really listened to their answers. What did our individual closets do to us? And where did our liberation take root? At the start of 2020, I called everyone to see if I could interview them about coming out. There were so many things that none of us had ever spoken about. Up until then, I would sooner talk to strangers about what transpired in my home than talk to the people who had lived through it alongside me. There was too much of a threat that our stories wouldn’t align, that this misalignment would be painful. I feared these conversations would shake my own fragile confidence in the peace I’d found in my adulthood.

The gift of the pandemic was a shift in perspective. In 2020, we had time—hours that accumulated into days that rolled on and on with little structure. Our goals dissolved. Our social lives disappeared. After an early frenetic month of Zoom socializing, we fell out of touch with the people around us. But the five of us—my father, my mother, my sister and brother—leaned in to one another. Quarantining in five separate houses in four different states, we called and texted and Zoomed. With COVID-19 raging, we were aware of our mortality, conscious of the fact that we had to work for our connectedness. So I asked whether I could try, at least, to synthesize our disparate narratives. Could I deliver a story that felt like truth to all of us?

The first person to bless this book was my mom, the person with whom I struggled the most. Dad and Evan signed on shortly after. It scares me, Evan told me. Which is why I think we should do it. Katje let the idea sit for a few weeks, taking the time to fully consider the implications of sharing her thoughts, filtered through my words, with you. But then she agreed, too, because that is what we have become: a group of people who are willing to trust one another. We all understand that there is no one story of a family, but instead competing stories that contain overlapping truths, some of which are contradictory.

Independent of the details, we can all agree on this: We were broken. We broke one another. We hurt one another. Things seemed irreparable. And then we let go. That is when we grew. We became people who knew how to love and feel loved, people who loved themselves. And, improbably, we grew into a family again—a different kind of family, reflecting a new set of values. Every version of ourselves is okay in this family. Every mistake is embraced. Missteps are tolerated. We turn to one another in difficult moments. We delight in one another. What happened to us?

In talking about the hero’s path, Joseph Campbell wrote, We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The life we planned is always mapped outside of us, born of a value system inscribed by our culture, our religious institutions, our television shows, our parents’ fears and perceived failures. The life that awaits us is mapped entirely within. It is expansive, a waterfall of liquid love. Coming out is the act of letting go of our planned lives in pursuit of the lives that wait for all of us. It requires us to listen well to each other, to make room for the people we love most to reveal the secrets that change who they are to us. It requires us to make peace with our own secrets. This is a story about how my family made that peace.

Part One

Origin

One

The Stakeout

Of all the details my mom has told me about the Michigan murders, one evening remains lodged in my imagination. It’s one of those stormy July nights, that midwestern summer storm weather that hangs thick in the air, thunder tumbling across the top of the clouds, until the sky breaks open, spewing wind and water everywhere. That summer, Mom is eighteen. She’s already in bed, finally drifting into a preoccupied sleep, when the phone rings. Her father, Kermit Berry, gets to the receiver by the second ring. I can imagine her straining to pick up his words. The water pelt-pelts so that she cannot hear the conversation happening just outside her bedroom door. She can only tell that Kermit is mostly listening, as though he is taking instructions.

She knows without being told. Karen Beineman has been found.

The call is brief—a few affirmative grunts, and then Kermit drops the receiver into its cradle. In the slit of light beneath her bedroom door, Mom sees his stocking feet, motionless as he takes the news in. She flips on her nightstand light to signal to Kermit that she’s awake. She hopes he’ll come talk to her, reassure her. These nights, when she sits in her bed and worries, have become increasingly frequent. Her questions are always the same.

Why are girls still disappearing? It has been two years since the first woman turned up. A year after that, almost to the day, a twenty-year-old art student appeared nearby, her body stabbed twenty-five times and raped. Things go quiet for a few months. Then, in the spring, the killer begins to pick up momentum. The murders come more often, every couple weeks. A law student. A teenage runaway. A middle schooler. The victims range in age, but they all have dark brown hair with a bit of a wave. They have pierced ears. They’re around the same height—my mom’s height. Their bodies have all turned up within five miles of Mom’s home.

Who is the killer? Mom perseverates on this question. Surely she can figure it out. All of the victims have disappeared from Ypsilanti. They’re women Mom mostly knows, or knows of. The student art teacher at the high school. The deacon’s secretary at Mom’s church, First Baptist. Many are students at the local college, Eastern Michigan University. These are smart women, women who read the newspapers, who know better than to get in a car with strangers—especially when the university is giving out mace keychains as warnings and the city has established a curfew. He, or they, must be someone everyone knows.

Now it seems a woman disappears every couple weeks, and Ypsilanti—all of Michigan—has become obsessed with finding the killer. Kermit is among the volunteers who support the police in their search. Special reports break into Mom’s favorite television shows when victims turn up. A middling Hollywood psychic has checked himself into a nearby hotel to attempt to relaunch his career by solving these crimes. Newspapers as far away as London have picked up the story of these killings, of this town, giving the murderer a name: the Ypsilanti Slayer.

WHAT MIGHT IT BE LIKE for a young girl to grow up in 1960s Ypsilanti? When Mom tries to describe her childhood to me, there’s an idyllic quality to her stories. It’s an auto city, an hour outside of Detroit. Economically, it has already started a gentle decline, its largest factory having been shuttered a decade earlier as a result of a corporate merger. But many of her friends’ fathers work at the smaller factories. The country is changing by the second half of the decade. There are race riots in Detroit. On the campus of nearby Eastern Michigan University, students are protesting US involvement in Vietnam. But Ypsi is a town with wide sidewalks where children ride their bikes between homes without supervision.

Until the murders, the worst day of my mom’s life was the day John F. Kennedy was shot. She was in Mrs. Dalton’s seventh grade class when the principal’s voice came over the intercom. He just turned on the radio, Mom remembers, and everybody heard it at the same time. The president had been shot. Some of the kids were laughing, she said. And the teacher, she said in a very stern voice, ‘Quiet, this is going to be a moment you will remember the rest of your lives.’ Then school was dismissed, and Mom walked home with her best friend, crying the entire way.

There is something cathartic to this communal grief, the way everyone leaned in together to express their sadness. It’s out in the open. Everyone acknowledged it. Even now that we understand that JFK was a flawed human, a womanizer, and that his presidency was imperfect, we can look back and tap into that sadness. The iconic image of his two small children dressed in their funeral attire, little John-John saluting the president’s casket. Can you feel it in your chest right now? This is permissible sadness. It’s sadness without shame. There’s nothing secret about it.

MOM IS THE BABY OF THE FAMILY, adored by her parents and both of her sisters. They are much older; by the time she is ten, they are out of the house. She loves the singer Andy Williams; JFK, may he rest in peace; and her guitar, which was a present for her fourteenth birthday. She has a face as round as those of the Campbell’s Kids, from the soup ads, and chestnut hair that she rolls into curlers every evening to create the flip style that is popular at the time. Although she’s very pretty, Mom thinks of herself as average—lovely but able to escape notice, not to be vain.

The family’s house is a 1955 ranch with white aluminum siding and three tiny bedrooms. In the basement, Kermit has a study where he lifts weights and grades his papers. Later, in a sign that times are good economically, they finish off part of the basement as a den. There, in a wood-paneled walk-in closet, Kermit collects every issue of LIFE magazine, cataloged by date.

Mom adores her dad. Many of the local fathers still work in the smaller factories, but Kermit is a high school history teacher. He’s five feet six on a good day, with a wide barrel chest, and he coaches the wrestling team. His students rarely win their matches, but this doesn’t concern him. He’s the kind of coach—and father—who cares more about strengthening the skills and self-esteem of his weakest players than honing the ambitions of his strongest. Kermit is also a prankster, and his favorite person to prank is his wife. I can still hear my grandma’s voice, exasperated, calling down the hall, Keeer-miiitttttt! I can hear the eye roll in it.

Alice is a pianist with a dark curly bob and a nose tip that spreads out from her face like a mushroom cap. As a young woman, she studied with Ada Eddy, a pianist who learned from the great Polish musician Ignacy Jan Paderewski, and Alice would expect you to know who these people were. She teaches the Dunning Conservatory Method of piano to all the children in the neighborhood, as well as many of their mothers. By the time I know Alice, arthritis has encrusted her finger joints, making them cartoonishly large and painful. But Mom grows up to the sounds of Für Elise being plucked out on repeat every afternoon and often late into the evenings.

Starting in the first grade, Mom takes piano lessons from Alice, practicing during the only time the house is silent: before school. Mom has to work at it. Alice makes her work at it. For years, Mom’s pretty good, and that is its own reward. By high school, she realizes Alice teaches children who have more natural talent, kids for whom the piano comes more easily. During a spring recital, Mom is two-thirds of the way through Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 2 when she forgets the ending. She remembers sitting on that bench on the small stage at the First Baptist Church, running through that penultimate chord progression on a loop, circling back to what she did remember so many times that it becomes obvious to everyone she has forgotten. The blood rushes to her face. Alice is watching from the wings. Mom stands and then storms offstage to the other side.

Everything I come to understand about what kind of mom Alice might have been is embodied by what happens next. She has watched her own daughter grow frustrated with the instrument Alice loves most. She has lived enough life to know that being the best at piano doesn’t matter nearly as much as loving it. You can be the best at it and still just spend a lifetime teaching scales in your living room. It has never mattered to her whether her daughter has talent. Alice wants Mom to enjoy the playing. At home, after the recital, Mom strides into the kitchen to announce she’s quitting. She doesn’t want to practice, and she says she doesn’t want to sit beside Alice on the bench any longer. She doesn’t like the piano.

There is no power struggle here. However Alice feels about this, she is playing the long game. Her daughter will never love music if she doesn’t come to it on her own. Alice lets Mom quit.

THE CENTER OF THE BERRY family’s life is the First Baptist Church. Faith isn’t so much a doctrine for them as it is a condition of their existence. Like oxygen in the air, they don’t notice it, but they subsist because of it. Mom’s best friend is the pastor’s daughter, and the adults at the church are family, a couple dozen stand-in aunts and uncles who tend to her upbringing alongside her parents. That’s probably the only reason Mom remembers that first murder, which happened when she had just finished tenth grade. The victim was a nineteen-year-old accounting student at Eastern Michigan University named Mary Fleszar. She’d been working as Earl Studt’s secretary; he was a deacon at the church, and all of the adults were talking about the murder.

Two teens discovered Mary’s body in a decrepit farmhouse near a cornfield. They were putting gas into a tractor when they heard a car door slam and voices in a deserted spot that had a reputation as a lover’s lane. After the car pulled away, the boys went down to investigate. As they approached, they were overwhelmed by a putrid smell. Mary’s corpse was so thoroughly decomposed that police relied on dental records to identify her remains. An autopsy later revealed that she had been stabbed at least thirty times in the chest and abdomen. One forearm and hand were missing. The fingers of her other hand had been removed. Her feet had been severed at the ankles.

To the people at First Baptist, it seemed to be a one-off tragedy. Apart from the murmuring at church, Mom barely remembers the murder. But not everyone dismissed the incident. At the time, a police investigator told the victim’s family, If we don’t catch the perpetrator within thirty days, he will kill again, with increasing frequency within the next year or so.

THE STORMY NIGHT THAT KAREN’S body turned up is two years later. By now, the killer has picked up his pace. An informal curfew is in place for teenagers, and Kermit is one of many Ypsi men who have volunteered for searches, stakeouts, and the more banal nightly neighborhood watches. From her bedroom, Mom hears Kermit shuffle into the bathroom and close the door, hears the sound of his belt buckle, the clink of the metal clip that holds his billy club to his belt. He’s going somewhere.

Mom really wants to get up and make her dad a coffee, but she can’t bring herself to move from her bed. You know how sometimes anxiety washes over you irrationally, like a panic attack, and your arms seize up and your heart starts a