Элисон Скотч - The Theory of Opposites

I gape at him slack-jawed until I realize that he’s serious, so I crouch my way to the rug and curl myself into a ball and hope that he accepts this as a crunch.

“That’s one,” he says.

“Ugh,” I say.

“Keep going. Only ninety-nine more.”

“I hate you.”

“You hate everything.”

When I hit 56, and it’s obvious that I do not have 44 left in me, Oliver flips a hand and says: “I don’t want to kill you before we even get going, so you can be done.”

I splay my limbs on the kitchen floor and shut my eyes and try to breathe.

From above me, Raina says:

“Ollie’s going in front of the judge on Wednesday of next week. Can you be there?”

“Where else would I be? I mean, assuming I’ve made it off this floor.”

“We’re thinking of plea-bargaining,” Raina says. “I want the whole family there to demonstrate that we believe Ollie’s a good citizen, that he got in over his head.”

I prop up on my elbows and then say to Theo:

“You think he should plea-bargain?”

Theo was never the plea-bargain type.

“I’m just here to advise, as a friend. And I think it’s a tough call. Ollie did it. There’s documentation of it. But he didn’t do it knowingly. He did it at the request of…” He consults the papers on the counter. “Yogi Master Dari.”

“Where’s Yogi Master Dari these days?” I find my way to my knees.

Ollie shrugs. “Kathmandu? Hong Kong? His Twitter feed has been quiet for weeks.”

“Yogi Master Dari has a Twitter feed?”

“Of course! Gaga retweets him all the time.”

I clutch the counter and pull myself up to standing.

“Anyway,” Theo says, “sometimes you have to accept that you broke the rules, even with good intentions. So that’s what I think we present to the judge.” He reaches over and sips my Diet Coke thoughtfully. “Judges have to listen to the law, but they also respect the fact that people are human, that even the most well-intentioned screw up, and part of the time, they don’t even know why.”

“I like that,” I say. “Even the most well-intentioned screw up.”

“Well, it’s true,” Theo says. “We do.” And then there’s that awkward beat when everyone assumes he’s talking about me, and I wonder, Christ, is he actually talking about me ? And then Theo continues, filling the dead air: “I usually like to go for the big win, to go in for the kill, but sometimes you just have to accept that this is what the cards have dealt.”

“Don’t say that,’” Raina says. “You sound like our dad.”

“No, I’m nothing like your dad.”

He looks at me now straight on.

“It’s a good plan,” I offer, remembering how I screwed up everything by not saying Y.E.S. to Seattle. Of not asking what needed to be asked, saying whatever needed to be said. It was inertia and master plans and closed eyes and no guts. A life without a map. Then. Now. Always.

“It’s just my instinct,” he says. “It’s sometimes wrong.”

Raina and I check in on our father at the apartment, our childhood home, the next day.

“I’m fine!” he keeps saying, though he looks pale and shriveled and doesn’t get up from his bed. Instead, he darts his eyes over news feeds and websites and sometimes mutters something to himself that I don’t bother listening to. Aloud he offers: “It was just some blockage! I wish everyone would stop acting like it’s the end of the world.”

Raina orders Chinese food, despite the fact that my dad has been given a diet of bland and healthy foods. He insists on eating the potstickers and moo shu pork, and Raina looks at me when I ask if that’s the best idea and says:

“What? If he doesn’t care, how can I?”

Raina’s too skinny now; I’ve told her as much every night when I try to tempt her with the ice cream sandwiches she keeps on hand for the kids. And her Botox is fading, even though it hasn’t been that long. I caught her staring in the bathroom mirror the other day, squinting and tugging her hairline every which way. She saw me and said, “They said it would last four months! I blame this family and the stress it causes me for my cosmetic dermatology bill.”

“What did you think of when your heart gave out, Dad?” I say, when I’m done chewing my own potstickers, and no one else has anything else to discuss.

“I thought that this might be my time. That I might keel over on 60th Street, and if it was, it was a hell of a way to go. I’m a New Yorker after all.”

He misses my point entirely.

“You know that we were worried, right?” I press. “That you might be ready to die, but that doesn’t mean we’re ready for you to leave us.”

“William!” he says. “I know it is difficult to accept, but everybody dies !”

“Jesus Christ, Dad!” I unintentionally knock my half-empty plate to the ground. “If this is your best advice as a parent, it’s no wonder that I’ve spent my life convinced that I’d be a shitty one.”

“Willa.” Raina reaches for my hand, soothing me like I’m one of her kids.

“It’s true, Raina! And you know it as much as I do.”

“So it’s your hatred for me that is driving you to write this ridiculous book about me,” my father states flatly.

“I don’t hate you. And it’s not ridiculous. And it’s not about you. ”

“Of course it’s about me!” His voice is rising. “How are you so naive as to think this is not about me?”

“Dad!” Raina cries. “You cannot get upset! You can’t work up your heart!”

“If I die, I die!” he shouts. “And at the rate you’re going, I’m pretty sure that you’ll kill me soon enough!” He clutches his chest, and Raina’s on her feet, but it’s just for dramatics, just so he can yell: “You have broken my heart! Literally! You have broken my heart!”

“Your heart is broken because you ate too much crap for the past two decades!” I yell back. “And newsflash: my life is not about you!”

“Your life is about whatever your life is already about,” he says calmly, turning on a dime, just like that, just like I fell into his trap.

And I swear to God, I rewrite my master plan right there and then. Because every instinct in my body tells me to throw my chopsticks firmly at his head. To take aim and put one straight through his pupil. But I breathe in and breathe out, and I open my eyes and I dig deep, and I find some guts. And even if it’s only in my mind, even if I can only escape into the kitchen to be free of him for a few quiet minutes of peace, I start charting a new route somewhere as far away from here as possible.

We can’t leave until the “nurse” arrives.

Raina is busy on her Blackberry, so I slip off to my old room, where I morphed from William to Willa and am now just me. After I moved out, my parents turned it into a study, even though the apartment already held an office, and even though I half-heartedly asked them not to.

The once-purple walls are now covered with deep plaid wallpaper. The corner where my bed once rested now houses a bookshelf. The shelves are adorned with photos of my dad with famous people whose lives he changed: George H.W. Bush, Bruce Springsteen, Liz Taylor. (!!) I sink into the desk chair and try to remember what it felt like to be five or eight or sixteen, kept between these walls, kept so much within myself. I lean back, close my eyes and listen to the legs of the chair squeak back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Then I remember the closet off the bathroom. The door handle sticks for a minute, then gives way.

I find everything here, all the pieces of my old life, all the pieces of who I was and how I came to be. My Doc Martens are coupled together on the floor, like they’re just waiting for a pair of feet to take them around the block. My BU sweatshirts are folded neatly in stacks.