Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

In the chaos of her arms, it was easy to lose the point. “Am I the doll, the rejected, or the fool?” I asked.

“But of course you’re no character,” she said. “You are Dasein ! Spirit! Being!”

“Hello hello,” Aunt Miranda said on the phone.

“Hi, it’s me, Ali,” I answered. “Do you remember?” We hadn’t spoken in so long, I didn’t know if she knew my voice anymore. My mother hated it when I spoke to her — Miranda wasn’t a family member anymore, my mother told me, which is why I knew how easily love could be taken away.

“Do I remember !” she said. “I’m calling for you, my love. How are you? What is the newest of news?”

“I’m skating to Sleeping Beauty ,” I said. “Tchaikovsky, the prologue.” It hadn’t been premeditated, but now that the lie had ideated, I realized it was indeed a wonderful one. And a lie, I rationalized, was only fantasizing loudly.

“Oh the prologue, the promise of the prologue!” she said. I could practically hear Aunt Miranda’s arms through the telephone. “You do know the story of course? King Florestan throws a grand christening ceremony in honor of his daughter, Princess Aurora. Aurora : after the dawn. The fairy godmothers, that is, the Candide Fairy, the Coulante Fairy, the Miettes Fairy, the Canari Fairy, and the Violente Fairy, grant the gifts of honesty, grace, prosperity, song and generosity. But the jealous fairy Carabosse crashes the affair and curses Princess Aurora to prick her finger on her sixteenth birthday and die. But all is not lost! The Lilac Fairy saves her with a counter-spell: she will prick her finger but only slumber one hundred years until the kiss of her true love awakens her! She lives because she loves !”

“But she lives before she loves too,” I said.

“And that is what nearly kills her,” Aunt Miranda replied. “It is because she is so full of life that she pricks her finger, dancing carelessly with the spindle given to her by the disguised fairy Carabosse. Then only because Prince Florimund is bored at a hunting party does he find and save and wed her.”

“Why does every ballet have to end with a wedding?”

“Darling, it’s a beautiful story for a beautiful girl. I’ll be watching for you on the television. I’ll say, ‘I always knew that girl had it.’”

“Oh well, you know it really depends on regionals,” I said. I didn’t want her to know I’d lied any more than I wanted the lie to be a lie at all. “But I’d really better be going.”

“Oh so soon? Alas, goodbye, sweet pet, goodbye,” she said. “Until television.”

“Until then,” I said, and I knew that with work and drugs, soon it wouldn’t mean never. I just needed to keep going as though I’d never broken my back. I pushed past mile thirteen.

That same week, my mother hosted a dinner party in celebration of her marriage lasting. Invited were her entire side of the family, and Mark. The day of the party, however, my father became a biohazard and tried to cancel. My mother wouldn’t hear of it. She’d been marinating eight pounds of chicken legs overnight.

“Remember what Yogi Berra said about baseball?” I told my father. “It’s ninety percent mental. The other half is physical. Same thing with healing.”

Congestion had rounded his Ms to resemble Bs and vice versa. It made his answer sound like “That ban bade no sense, me leave me.” He measured a belt of expectorant in a small cup.

“Just mask the symptoms,” my mother said.

“They’re the only things that hurt,” I said, and she laughed.

“The point isn’t getting well, is what you’re saying,” my father said. “The point is to get through the day.”

“If sick is your excuse today, what is it every other time?” my mother asked.

So my father tried to be helpful by staying out of the way, sitting in the living room with a drink until the guests arrived.

Later, over a spread of food, my Uncle Ron said my parents had proved his prediction wrong when he guessed that last year would have been their final anniversary. He warned me to keep the cutlery away from my mother and father when they argued, and we raised our glasses as though what he’d said had been one of those jokes that are funny because they are radically untrue.

Next to me my cousin Lucy slurped chicken skin through her lips like spaghetti. Two blue eyes peeked over a sharp little nose, above that moist little curtain of chicken fat slithering between pretty pink lips. Five years after high school, and there were married men whose wildest, brightest times were still the nights when Lucy accepted a ride home or drank beers with them by the swimming hole. They’d thought she was the one that got away until she returned from college to the home where her mother had drank herself senseless.

“Most of my life, all I wanted was to be a wife and mother. When I met Alvin, he made us a couple. Then Ali made us a family. So tonight, I want to thank the two who made me who I always wanted to be,” my mother said. “To Alvin and Ali.” She raised her glass.

“To Alvin and Ali,” they all said.

“To Dad and me,” I said.

“To Ali and me,” my father said, finishing his gimlet in time to make another before the gin ran out.

I pushed the wet purply lumps of dark meat around my plate as my mother slipped Gladys Knight and the Pips onto the stereo. “I’ve Got to Use My Imagination” moved her hips side to side.

“She always liked black music,” Aunt Dina’s husband Snowden said, shaking his head and looking at me. Uncle Ron made monkey sounds and scratched his armpits and laughed at his own gestures. To them, I was practically black, an embarrassment for which I’d still not been forgiven.

“Sports have replaced religion in America,” Mark was telling Lucy. “Sunday night football is better attended than church. These guys are making millions, while we’ve got people below poverty. It’s the opulence of the Catholic Church. It’s fanaticism. And just as religion once was the opiate of the masses, so sports are now.”

“I, for one, would do anything David Beckham told me,” Lucy said. “As long as there was a safe word.”

“You would without,” I said.

“Don’t I know it,” she agreed.

“And the worst is,” Mark continued, “we’ve got kids in this country wearing caps with racial slurs all over them. They aren’t even old enough to know they’re walking advertisements. We’ve got a team called the Redskins! And don’t think for a second that the public school kids have any idea that their country is predicated on native loss.”

“Winning is always predicated on someone losing,” I said.

“A country isn’t a competition! And doesn’t that offend you poignantly? Redskins?”

Neither I nor Lucy said a thing, both of us looking at each other, knowing that the background we didn’t share was not a topic we ever talked about.

“Mind if I borrow Ali to the little girls room?” Lucy asked Mark. “I know as an educator, you must trust in the buddy system.”

“Help yourself,” he said.

“Thanks, comrade,” I said.

Lucy harnessed her arm through mine and pulled me to the bathroom. She locked the door and pulled her pants to her ankles.

“The older I get, the harder to hold it,” she said.

“Imagine a locked safe,” I said. “Mind over matter. Mind over bladder.”

“Oh yeah, that feels good,” she said. I heard the hot squirt between her knees. “You know, your tutor is cuter than most Marxists. It’s a shame he’s got to be so preachy..” She stood, pulled her pants up, and flushed.