Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

“If I go will it end this conversation?” he asked.

“You’ll have the entire drive not to hear me yapping.”

“Done,” he said, and then I heard footsteps.

Shut eyes and a couch-prone body affected that I hadn’t been listening from the living room. My father agitated a shoulder with one hand to wake me and held my coat in the other. “The sooner you wake up, the sooner you can go back to sleep,” he said. I took my time with his hand on my shoulder and pretended to turn over in sleepiness so he would touch my other shoulder once more. I remembered the way his hand had been the year before, lifting the weight of my sports bag from my shoulder, how it reached toward me, wanting to be a part of my life, even if that part was carrying a burden.

Feigning, I stretched my arms above like someone entering a new day. And maybe it would be a new day after all, I thought suddenly. I could stop pretending, and maybe the love I loved would be big and strong and animating enough to take my father into its territories. For me, losing meant regaining, at least when it came to body weight and dreams, and if he too valued a life better than only not losing, he might understand. The Long Distance Dedication radio show wouldn’t air on this ride, but we’d gone miles learning the lessons of losers of loved ones.

From Sandy in Montana who discovered the trick to going with the flow from a hemophiliac friend.

From Nancy in Bel Air, whose dog saved her engagement ring from falling down a drain: that gravity is a force to be reckoned with.

From Gerald in Wyoming, a heartbroken widower since before I was born: that ‘til death do us part is only physically true.

The decision was made. I would tell my father about my plan.

He grunted, “Work is work,” and I told him he sounded like Dr. Ogden. Twenty minutes to the turkey farm, twenty-four hours in a day, seventeen years of life, and all I could think to say was that my father was like my old psychologist? The past has passed, Dr. Ogden would say. Or, the present is the greatest gift.

I figured I had to gain some momentum in the conversation before mentioning my plan. It had been so long since we shared the lexis of skating that the words of ease and school days and pleasant weather had wasted away. We didn’t talk about where he wasn’t bringing me or what I wasn’t doing. I would have to remind him that I was still his daughter, which hadn’t seemed quite apparent to him since the accident.

“At least you’ll get casual Friday?” I said.

He nodded. “Casual Black Friday.”

“Where does the phrase Black Friday come from anyway?”

“Debt,” he said. “It’s the day retailers begin to hope that they’ll get out of the red and into the black. They spend most of the year in the red. Then they try to rectify the debt of eleven months in one day.”

“Like Catholics at confession?”

“Like people whose best isn’t best,” he said. It wasn’t an accusation, but I began to wish I’d stayed home.

“What are you learning at school?” he said finally.

“French.”

“French? Wow.”

“It’s the language of diplomacy,” I elaborated. “The first thing they teach you is circumlocution. That way, when you don’t know how to say something, you can talk around it.”

“I never thought I’d have a Jewish son,” my father said, winking.

“But a Shawnee daughter?” And though it was only a bad joke, I knew there were so many expectations I did not address. He was a man who had studied patrilineal traits and recessive genes in college, whose interests were the biological legacies imparted by proteins. He had only agreed to the adoption because my mother wouldn’t relent from that threatening question: what’s the point in being a wife if I’m not going to be a mother?

C’est la vie que vous n’avez pas. C’est quelquechose que n’est pas pres. C’est une conversatione difficile que nous ne faisons pas.

My plan, I now realized, sounded much worse than it was. Maniacal, even. I wanted to snap a windshield wiper off the front of the car and beat something with it. And then just as quick, I felt how mania is, for the sane, exhausting. But I was probably only tired from all of the recent exercise and the excitement that had kept me up all night afterward.

I told my father he had better pull over at the next gas station so that I could go to the restroom. I needed to take another pill.

The sky had turned to that fogged gray that is as true of dusk as early morning. I returned from the gas station restroom renewed from Adderall. It was beautiful; I could lift the entire mass of a human body with just a few milligrams. I’d noticed in the bathroom that the prescription bottle was labeled John Deer, not John Doe, but decided that a lie was irrelevant to the sense of gravity dissipating in the wake of my new acquisition.

“Look what the cat dragged in!” my father said when I reached the car. He motioned beside him, smiling. It was Mark.

“The cat has hit his Mark,” I smiled.

“Hi Ali,” Mark said.

“Mark and I were talking shop,” my father said. “I was just telling him about that great friction graph I made to show you how skating is possible. In the sense of physics, I mean. It was quite an effective visual, wasn’t it?”

“The cat who ate the canary, apparently,” I said. I couldn’t believe he was speaking about the graphs, our graphs, as though they were just some school assignment. They weren’t a conversation piece. They were a way to figure out miracles. That destruction bore movement, that the friction of the blade to the ice heated its solidity into a film of liquid, this is what we graphed. We drew the points at which friction, temperature, and the ruinous will of the skater made the passage through a solid surface possible. Miracles.

“Do you know Mark never even took physics? At Dartmouth.”

“Are you taking physics at school?” Mark asked.

“An object in motion will stay in motion; an object at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force.” I recited. I was impatient. “Is that what you wanted to know?”

“I wanted to know about what you’re doing.” He looked as though I’d smacked him, his eyes insufferably puppyish as they drooped at the outer corners.

My father looked at his watch. “So I guess we should be going before Lou starts worrying. I’m sorry to hear about Leonards.”

“I am too,” Mark said.

“Heart attack?” It was my best guess. I hadn’t been following the news.

“Teenage girl,” my father said.

“And a video,” Mark said.

“You’re kidding,” my father said.

“I wish. I dropped out of school for that guy. But there’s this other guy from the Green Party, and I like what he has to say. Also, I’d been thinking recently that maybe politics aren’t for me. I read a lot about stem cell research when I was campaigning for Leonards and thinking that maybe what I ought to do is become a scientific ethicist. It combines my interest in philosophy with current affairs, the environment, and medicine.”

“Fascinating,” my father said.

“A virtuoso,” I said. “Goodbye.”

“Why don’t you come by Thursday for dinner?” my father asked. I shook my head. Mark had maneuvered his way into the family, between us, as it were.

“That would be great,” Mark said.

“Wouldn’t it?” My father turned to me and then turned back to Mark. I wondered aloud if when we got to the farm, we would see evidence that the cliché was correct, or at least that it applied to turkeys: People say a chicken can run the length of two football fields after decapitation, its body still uninformed that it has been dispatched of life. Turkeys, bigger and wilder, would probably cover more distance. Or perhaps they wouldn’t run. They’d flail like someone lost at sea. “Point taken,” my father said. “We’d better be going.”