“The revolution never stopped,” Ray speaks across her thoughts. “The media is us, the politicians are us; there isn’t a them out there to villainize any more.” Ray rises from the table, steps across the minute kitchen to his two-burner stove, and lifts the still-warm kettle to refill his cup. He offers hot water with his raised eyebrows, but Sharon shakes her head. She sits on the vinyl-bottomed chair across from his and rests her forearms on the cool surface of the small metal-edged table.

“Look,” he says as he sits again. “Jung said myth is to the collective unconsciousness what dream is to the individual unconsciousness. Once you posit a collective unconsciousness, you can go places with it! So if a child, say, can be so traumatized by some event that he carries a neurosis or compulsion throughout his life in response to it, well then why can’t a generation, especially one as self-conscious as the post-war baby boom, why can’t a generation be collectively traumatized into response?” Ray leans forward with intensity.

“The Vietnam conflict, among other things, was traumatic. But that betrayal of us, that killing us to protect so-called leaders in their incorrectness, that was the big trauma. What if our generation’s response was to tear down the customs that led to that protection?”

“I think I understand what you’re saying,” Sharon comments, “but what about all the complaints I’m hearing? how the media will print anything that will sell; or that Washington just ought to shut up about the President’s sex life and let him get on with the good job he’s doing – it sounds to me like our generation doesn’t like the stripping away of leader dignity any more than the last did.”

“The key word, my dear… the key word is unconsciousness.” Ray emphasizes his point with the index finger of the hand that is not holding his cup of hot water. His didactic tone annoys Sharon. She doubts that he uses it with his third-graders. She thinks he intends to use it on the college students of his future, if he ever manages to complete the doctorate necessary to have college students in his future.

“You definitely may have something, Ray. But right now I have to finish cleaning. Maybe you’ll join us for dinner?” Ray sits down with Tim and Sharon most evenings, but something about Sunday requires a specific invitation to him; he won’t drop by on his sabbath without one.

He accepts of course, and Sharon returns to her house. He’s still talking aloud as she crosses the small patio, but she knows from experience that she doesn’t have to pay attention. At the moment Ray is talking more to her than to himself, but he doesn’t require a response, and he’ll shift completely to himself within another minute.

Sharon puts the barrette in the pocket of her sweatpants as she resumes vacuuming, and she doesn’t think about Nancy again until she changes to jeans so she can add her sweats to the pre-dinner laundry.

While she vacuums and dusts, while she scours and sponges, she considers her cousin Ray. This is the second summer of his doctoral work, and he seems weirder than last year. She didn’t really know him back in the late 60s and early 70s when he was an undergrad, but she’s heard the family stories. Ray went crazy then. There was something about studying and maybe the times, but he became convinced that the Tet Offensive was the most significant event in modern history, he became obsessed with a fantasy of wrecking the R.O.T.C. building with a bazooka, and he just basically got things out of perspective. Since he didn’t have access to a bazooka no one worried about him; from what Sharon hears, folks found him amusing or tiresome then. But he flipped out right after he graduated, when his mother killed herself.

Ray’s mother, Aunt Emily, was an alcoholic suicide. So were her sister Esther eight years before her, and their father Willem 20 years earlier still. It was like Ray picked up the family curse as soon as his mother dropped it; within months of her death he was diagnosed as manic depressive with suicidal tendencies, and put on psychotropic drugs. He hated them. Eventually he got himself under control without the drugs but with Catholicism and rigid diet-and-exercise routines.

Sharon isn’t related to Ray on his mother’s side. Her mother and Ray’s father are siblings. There’s plenty of dysfunction in that family, as Sharon knows full well, but she’s grateful not to be related to Aunt Emily.