Douglas Kennedy - The Pursuit of Happiness

'Hey...' he said to me, then lapsed into silence. When I asked him over the din of the music if he wanted to head out to a movie, he just said 'Hey' again, though he kept nodding his head sagely, as if he had just revealed to me some great deep karmic secret about life's hidden mysteries.

I didn't hang around - but instead retreated back to campus and ended up nursing a beer by myself in the Union, while tearing into a pack of Viceroy cigarettes. Somewhere during the third cigarette, Margy showed up. She was my best friend - a thin, reedy Manhattan smartass with a big shock of black curly hair. She'd been raised on Central Park West and went to the right school (Nightingale Bamford), and was super-smart. But, by her own admission, she had 'fucked up so badly when it came to opening a book' that she ended up at a state university in Vermont. 'And I'm not even into skiing'.

'You looked pissed off', she said, sitting down, then tapping a Viceroy out of my pack and lighting it up with the book of matches on the table. 'Fun night with Charlie?'

I shrugged.

'The usual freak show over at that commune of his?' she asked.

'Uh-huh'.

'Well, I guess the fact he's cute makes up for...' She stopped herself in mid-phrase, taking a deep pull off her cigarette.

'Go on', I said, 'finish the sentence'.

Another long, thoughtful drag on her cigarette.

'The guy is high every moment of the day. Which kind of doesn't do much good for his use of words with more than one syllable, does it?'

I found myself laughing because in true New York style Margy had cut right through the crap. She was also ruthlessly straight about what she saw as her own limitations... and why, three months into our freshman year, she was still without a boyfriend.

'All the guys here are either ski bums - which, in my Thesaurus, is a synonym for Blah... or they're the sort of dope heads who have turned their brains into Swiss cheese'.

'Hey, it's not for life', I said defensively.

'I'm not talking about your Mr Personality, hon. I'm just making a general observation'.

'You think he'd be devastated if I dumped him?'

'Oh, please. I think he'd take three hits off that stupid bong of his, and get over it before he exhaled the second time'.

It still took me another couple of weeks to break it off. I hate displeasing people and I always want to be liked. This is something that my mother, Dorothy, used to chide me about - because also being a New Yorker (and being my mom), she was similarly no-nonsense when it came to telling me what she thought.

'You know, you don't always have to be Little Miss Popularity', she once said when I was a junior in high school, and complained about not winning a place on the Student Council. 'And not fitting in with the cheerleading crowd seems cool to me. Because it's really okay to be smart'.

'A B-average isn't smart', I said. 'It's mediocre'.

'I had a B-average in high school', Mom said. 'And I thought that was pretty good. And, like you, I only had a couple of friends, and didn't make the cheerleading squad'.

'Mom, they didn't have cheerleaders at your school'.

'All right, so I didn't make the chess team. My point is: the popular girls in high school are usually the least interesting ones... and they always end up marrying orthodontists. And it's not like either your father or I think you're inadequate. On the contrary, you're our star'.

'I know that', I lied. Because I didn't feel like a star. My dad was a star - the great craggy radical hero - and my mom could tell stories about hanging out with De Kooning and Johns and Rauschenberg and Pollock and all those other New York school bigwigs after the war.

She'd exhibited in Paris, and still spoke French, and taught part time in the university art department, and just seemed so damn accomplished and sure of herself. Whereas I really didn't have any talent, let alone the sort of passion that drove my parents through life.

'Will you give yourself a break?' my mother would say. 'You haven't even begun to live, let alone find out what you're good at'.

And then she'd hurry off for a meeting of Vermont Artists Against the War, of which she was, naturally, the spokesperson.

That was the thing about my mom - she was always busy. And she certainly wasn't the type to share casserole recipes and bake Girl Scout cookies and sew costumes for Christmas pageants. In fact, Mom was the worst cook of all time. She really couldn't care less if the spaghetti came out of the pot half-stiff, or if the breakfast oatmeal was a mess of hardened lumps. And when it came to house-work... well, put it this way, from the age of thirteen onwards, I decided it was easier to do it myself. I changed the sheets on all the beds, did everyone's laundry, and ordered the weekly groceries. I didn't mind coordinating everything. It gave me a sense of responsibility. And anyway, I enjoyed being organized.

'You really like to play house, don't you?' Mom once said when I popped over from college to clean the kitchen.

'Hey, be grateful someone around here does'.

Still, my parents never set curfews, never told me what I couldn't wear, never made me tidy my room. But perhaps they didn't have to. I never stayed out all that late, I never did the flower child clothes thing (I preferred short skirts), and I was one hell of a lot tidier than they were.

Even when I started smoking cigarettes at seventeen, they didn't raise hell.

'I read an article in The Atlantic saying they might cause cancer', my mother said when she found me sneaking a butt on the back porch of our house. 'But they're your lungs, kiddo'.

My friends envied me such non-controlling parents. They dug their radical politics and the fact that our New England red clapboard house was filled with my mom's weird abstract paintings. But the price I paid for such freedom was my mom's non-stop sarcasm.

'Prince Not So Bright', she said the day after my parents met Charlie.

'I'm sure it's just a passing thing', my dad said.

'I hope so'.

'Everyone needs at least one goof-ball romance', he said, giving Mom an amused smile.

'De Kooning was no goof-ball'.

'He was perpetually vague'.

'It wasn't a romance. It was just a two-week thing...'

'Hey, you know I am in the room', I said, not amazed how they had somehow managed to blank me out, but just a little astonished to learn that Mom had once been Willem de Kooning's lover.

'We are aware of that, Hannah', my mom said calmly. 'It's just that, for around a minute, the conversation turned away from you'.

Ouch. That was classic Mom. My dad winked at me, as if to say, 'You know she doesn't mean it'. But the thing was, she really did. And being a Good Girl, I didn't storm out in adolescent rage. I just took it on the chin - per usual.

When it came to encouraging my independence Mom urged me to attend college away from Burlington - and gave me a hard time for being a real little homebody when I decided to go to the University of Vermont. She insisted that I live in a dorm on campus. 'It's about time you were ejected from the nest', she said.

One of the things Margy and I shared was a confused background - WASPy dads and difficult Jewish moms who seemed to always find us wanting.

'At least your mom gets off her tukkus and does the art thing', said Margy. 'For my mom, getting a manicure is a major personal achievement'.

'You ever worry you're not really good at anything?' I suddenly said.

'Like only all the time. I mean, my mom keeps reminding me how I was groomed for Vassar and ended up in Vermont. And I know that the thing I do best is bum cigarettes and dress like Janis Joplin... so I'm not exactly Little Miss Bursting With Confidence. But what has you soul searching?'

'Sometimes I think my parents look on me as some separate self-governing state... and a massive disappointment'.