Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

Back on the road, I tried to curb my face. Mark had derailed the yarn of intimacy I had been plotting, but I still had the rest of the way to the slaughterhouse to pretend my father and I were conspiring towards dreams.

I did triangular tranquilizing breathing like Dr. Ogden had taught me. I looked out of the car window and inhaled past trees, held it the length of four houses, then exhaled.

“Do you have the hiccups or something?” my father said. “You’re breathing funny.”

“Not the hiccups. Respiratory meditation,” I said.

“And what were you meditating on?”

“On the fact that for life to culminate in a meal seems a cruel fate.”

“Don’t tell me you’re turning into one of those people that believes in pet heaven, Ali. It’s ecology. It’s protein.” If it was malice, humor, or science, I didn’t know. Maybe it was a holy trinity of all three.

“We are protein.”

“You’ve got an imagination, young lady.”

“What I mean is that there’s got to be some other meaning, or else we’re just on the way to being dead meat,” I said. “And I haven’t got imagination. I’ve got inference.” The directional chimed as my father pulled off the exit ramp.

“You’ll need that next year.”

“Next year?”

“You’ll be in college next year,” he said, and his face was the same, but now there was life behind it. “I never thought about it until now, but you’ll be in college next year.” He smiled and squeezed my shoulder and suddenly it seemed decided, this place I never considered. Those four years leading to work is work, computer-ruined wrists. What was it Yogi Berra said? If you don’t know where you’re going, you will wind up somewhere else? “I doubt if you could cut Harvard, but Oregon, where I went undergrad, there’s a place that’s possible.” So that was it. He’d settled his idea of me into people whose best wasn’t best. He’d decided I was a person whose best was only college. And now, with his college proposition, I knew we no longer belonged to the same society of Olympians and striving and ice. His love of skating had never been a love but an interest, and now that interest had migrated, an opportunist scavenger bird flying away from the horizon.

“I don’t know if what’s possible is preferable,” I said.

“Of course possible is,” my father said. “It’s like what my professor Norman Crews once said. ‘Why should we be interested in embryology?’ he asked. No one raised their hand so he said, ‘Everyone stand up that wasn’t once an embryo.’”

This was not where I’d wanted to go, to everyone. It was little fish thinking. “I don’t see the connection.”

“That’s why you need an education,” he said. “You don’t want to end up a drug addict like Mo or whatever it is that Lucy is.”

“You’re talking to me like I’m a teenager.”

“You are a teenager,” he said. “And speaking of, there’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about.” I should have stayed home. I could have been doing squat thrusts that very minute.

“Obviously, you can fight bacteria with mold. This is the lesson of penicillin. But it’s not true of everything.” Perhaps I’d misheard because I hadn’t wanted to listen anymore. “What I’m saying is that you can’t fight alcoholism with alcoholics. The car crash was tragic. No one argues that, Ali. But this isn’t the way to deal with it. We all have to move on and live our lives like normal, as long as that doesn’t involve drunk driving. I never would have believed that your mother would send you to AA with her idiot nephew, but then again, I also would never have maintained contact with any of her family members if I were her. They’re hopeless causes who have unfortunately done what hopeless causes do: booze and drugs. So as long as you understand that drinking and drugs will ruin your life, especially when you learn how to drive, you don’t have to go to the meetings anymore. I know you know all this. We’ve raised you better than that. And you can tell your mother I said so.”

We pulled past season-bared trees, and the car leather warmed slick and sweaty beneath me. I was sitting in a swamp. He didn’t think I was going to be dominated by the coded delinquency of genes, but it was too late. My father would not be party to my hope. I was on my own.

WHY don’t we discuss the visit.

So you heard, I say.

I don’t know why I’m surprised anymore. I’m twenty-four-seven television, here for the watching. Content may not be suitable for children.

I was notified, yes. The staff notes say that your parents came to visit yesterday afternoon at 2:00 pm and left at 2:10 pm.

Unceremoniously, I say, though it’s unnecessary. The evidence is in the time.

So what happened?

Well it was going alright at first: no tears, greetings, hugs.

And then?

And then she pulled this toiletry bag out of her purse.

Ah, the dreaded face creams that hadn’t worked for her, the doctor says with mock gravity. Little smile wrinkles pull by her mouth, but I know I’m not the object of the joke. She’s as much on my side as anyone.

And I asked her, what am I supposed to do with this? And she starts talking about how with the pigment of my skin, I should be using an illuminating moisturizer, this stuff that had just made her l ook greasy.

This bothered you.

Even though she was the one always saying I was an American!

Which you are.

And I realized: she doesn’t care anymore; she no longer wants to pretend.

Pretend what?

That I am hers naturally. My hands are vibrating. Even twisting them into one fist, they shake and sweat.

The doctor speaks slowly. I’m not sure that’s entirely a fair assessment. Did you ask her if this was her sense?

In a way. I asked her if she’d do anything for me. “Of course,” she answered.

That’s what matters. That she loves you as her own, the doctor rushes to say.

But when I asked her if she would tape the national championships for me and bring the video at our next visit, she asked when I was going to learn my lesson. I turned to my father to ask if he’d tape the competition. “You won’t turn this family into a couple again,” my mother said, and she took his hand, and they left.

I’m sorry, the doctor says. I wait for her to say more, but she doesn’t. She’s waiting for me.

I just wanted some relief, I say finally. I just wanted a couple of hours of relief from all this, the being a patient, the hospital, the measured mushy food. Most of my life I would have been horrified to know that the world continued without me, that life wasn’t contingent on the discrete measures of my person, but now I am grateful. I want to see the world without me.

That makes sense.

Not to her.

It doesn’t have to. We all have our limitations.

I think of Mark once saying, I can really be myself with you, as though his self only existed with me. I told him it wasn’t me who allowed him to be him, because I was too stupid to understand what he was saying. Yes, we all have our limitations.

Even you, doctor? I ask.

Even I, she says.

But will you do it for me?

Miss Doyle?

Will you tape the national championships?

I see.

The doctor puts her pen down. She understands me, which is to say she’s disappointed.

Please.

Ali.

I need it.

I’ll think about it. In the meantime, shall we continue?

I have to continue until my birthday unless I kick the bucket before then.

My birthday is now only two weeks away. I will be an adult, based on the boundaries of lawmakers. She can’t keep me here then. Unless she thinks I’m irreparably psychotic.