The Dark Comedy of Generational Trauma

Novel excerpt

A few years ago, I started writing a children’s novel narrated by a twelve-year-old girl named Elfie Ott, whose dad invented a labor-saving technology called The Zenardo Method.

Elfie was born into a gluey matrix of familial dysfunction. We now know that the Big Five personality traits are heritable, so that the same tendencies and weaknesses get reshuffled in each generation like a deck of cards. Lurking like jokers in the pack are behavior-driving factors like epigenetics and the Freudian repetition compulsion. Starting in childhood, you play the hand you’re dealt.

This is the backstory to Chapter 2: The Curse of the Zenardos.

*

Back when they were married, my parents decided that my brother and I would take my mother’s surname. Zenardo was a problem they didn’t want to inflict on us. 

When Stefan (my dad) was a schoolboy, classmates mocked him with a cruel-but-accurate version of his name. 

“Hey, Ze-nerdo! Reading again, huh?  Don’t your legs work? Recess is for running around, dummy.” 

“Ze-nerdo doesn’t like to play!  His only friends are books like A Brief History of Time. Oh wow, you guys, look at the author on the cover. He’s in a wheelchair!” 

“Nice book, Ze-nerdo! That’s probably your dream life, right? Being in a wheelchair, writing about the ‘history of time.’ Sounds stupid!” 

“Time doesn’t have a history, Ze-nerdo! It’s just whatever time it is. Like, time to punch you!” 

“Hey guys, please stop. Quit it, quit it, quit it—”

“Let’s not do that again,” grown-up Stefan said to Sabrina (my mom), who rested one hand on her big belly with Cornelius in it. 

“Yes, that sounds pretty bad. Shall we go with Ott, then?” she asked. 

“Let’s just tease out the possibilities,” Stefan said cautiously.  “What’s the worst they could do?” 

“Spot, Dot, Rot, Smells-a-Lot,” said Sabrina. 

“Cot, Clot, Pot—that could be something. Chamber pot, a pot kept under the bed before the invention of plumbing, filled with urine and excrement?”

“No modern child knows what a chamber pot is,” Sabrina assured him. “Ott the Pothead?” 

“Our kids aren’t going to be potheads,” Stefan said briskly. “There is no history of potheads in the family. So that would be, at most, an ineffective taunt.” 

“Ott the Snot, or Little Snott?” 

“There is a history of snots,” Stefan admitted. “Arguably, I was one myself.” 

“No doubt you were. That’s pretty mild, though. So Ott it is, then?” 

“The only thing is that Ott sounds a lot like odd. People might call our children odd.” 

“Well, they probably will be odd,” Sabrina said.

“They probably will,” Stefan agreed.

“But there are worse things.” 

“It’s settled, then. Our first child will be Cornelius Stefan Ott.” 

“C. Ott,” Sabrina mused. “Like sea otter. That’s charming!” 

“Are we done here?” Stefan said, glancing at his digital watch. 

“Yes.” 

As you can see, even before our births, Sabrina assumed we would turn out odd.  But why? To understand, you need to know of the Zenardo family background, or as it has been called, The Curse of the Zenardos.

For generations, the Zenardos were an almost freakishly accomplished family.  In the 1700s, Ambrus Zenardo discovered a new chemical element known as Zenardum until it was added to the periodic table by his lifelong rival, Hans Cobalt.  In the 1800s, a nine-year-old Gergo Zenardo toured the palaces of Europe as a musical prodigy, playing a child-sized lute and an early version of the mouth harp. That same century, Dorka Zenardo and her identical twin sister Hanga were the first women to be formally licensed as ocular surgeons. In America, Mor Zenardo taught mathematics at Harvard University, famously calling the Class of 1897 “a semi-literate herd of buck-toothed farmboys” to their faces. Gizella Zenardo was a minor Jazz Age poet who wrote bravely about heartache, depression, and drink.  In the 1950s, Mathilde Zenardo engineered jet planes for the Boeing Corporation. And in the 1980s, brothers Vencel and Vid Zenardo patented a stain remover, Z-No!, that sold briskly in late-night infomercials before being discontinued as dangerously toxic. 

That was the good side of the Zenardos. 

On the flip side, the family’s personal lives were littered with failures.  For every Zenardo shortlisted for the Vetlesen Prize in geophysics, another Zenardo—or quite possibly, the same one—made the newspaper for smashing his car into a tree while fleeing a tense domestic scene in which his wife ripped off his girlfriend’s wig and threw it over a fence.  Divorce, infidelity, bankruptcy, and the occasional suicide or capital crime plagued the family down the generations. At holiday gatherings, they talked of long-running feuds and murky secrets, like which of the Zenardo children was covertly adopted or carried a gene that, within years, would render him or her clinically insane. 

By the age of eighteen, Stefan was tired of his family, though he had inherited the Zenardo brilliance. He moved far away from his relatives and married a girl named Sabrina, the beautiful daughter of a normal-seeming family called the Otts. 

Stefan and Sabrina were happy for a time. Stefan’s career took off, and Sabrina enjoyed her job in advertising.  Cornelius came along, then me.

But before too long, the Curse of the Zenardos reared its ugly head. The young couple one day woke up and realized they couldn’t live in the same house.  One look at Stefan hunched over his laptop set Sabrina’s teeth on edge. And when Sabrina made simple requests, like could Stefan take out the garbage, Stefan winced at the entitled wheedle of her voice and felt he would die if he submitted to her terms.

The family cracked, then split, each parent spinning off into their own orbit. Cornelius and me were passed back and forth along with diaper bags, stuffed animals, footie pajamas, sippy cups, and What Is Life? by Erwin Schrödinger, which Cornelius discovered in first grade and pronounced his favorite book.

Maybe because we were named Ott, we could one day escape the curse? We didn’t know. But that was how our lives began, mine and Cornelius’. Kind of a rough start, if you ask me. 

(Photo by Robert Linder on Unsplash)