Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

“Well would you?” he asked. “Or are you busy?”

“I thought you were going Green.”

“That was before.”

I was quiet.

“Well?”

“I’m thinking.”

“You know what Wilfred Bion said? ‘Thinking has to be called into existence to cope with thoughts.’ What is there to cope with? Can you go?”

“I could go,” I said.

“Thatta girl,” he said, and kissed my cheek. Suddenly, it was difficult to look him in the eye. There was a vibration in my chest like the hysterical buzzing of mosquitos. But I quickly edited my motivations so that they befit a champion; I was going for the speed not the giddy thrum between us.

Something was burning in the kitchen, which set off the smoke alarm. I went to look for a screwdriver to deactivate the detector. My mother had finally returned and was trying to baste the turkey, but she was too late. You cannot uncook a bird, but you can drown a dead one in gravy. From the hallway I heard her slam the oven door.

“You know, Donnie O’Donnell is in town,” she said.

“Donnie Two-Time?” Aunt Dina began coughing.

“If you can’t say something nice…” began my mother.

“…Don’t say anything about Donnie Two-Time,” Aunt Dina finished.

“He’s changed, Dina.” I hovered a few feet from the door.

“You can change a quarter to five nickels, but it’s still twenty-five cents, if you know what I mean.”

“He’s divorced now.”

“He was divorced then too.”

“Not from this one.”

“From the one before.” My mother turned the faucet on to let Aunt Dina know the conversation was over. I walked into the kitchen.

“Where were you? I was worried,” I said.

“ Somebody’s hungry.” She was humming Motown.

“I’m never hungry,” I said.

“I just met a very nice young man in the store.”

“Should Dad be worried?” I asked.

“Worried?”

“It was a joke. You know, when God closes a door and there are hard knock-knocks, the atheist asks, ‘Who’s there?’”

“Jesus, Ali.” She slipped an oven mitt off. “Anyway, I meant a nice young man for you. One of your classmates. Joel Tipton. He seems like a nice boy.”

“He calls me Ted Kaczynski.”

“The Unabomber?” my father asked. He’d trailed in after me.

“Alvin!” my mother said. “I told him you would love it if he came over to trim the tree before Christmas.”

“The guy calls me Ted Kaczynski,” I said again.

“Reverse psychology is how young boys flirt,” she said.

“The Unabomber,” I said one last time. But I was thankful she was home.

My parents came back today, I say. I’ve been doing this long enough that I know it’s easier to talk than to pretend there’s nothing to talk about. I might as well make it easy on the doctor for once.

And how was that?

I lied to them.

Oh? The doctor lolls a hard candy in the pocket between her teeth and cheek, an unintended tongue tic I recognize as signification that she’s interested. Even recently, I would have considered this a test, but I can see now that everything the doctor does isn’t choreographed around me. She just likes eating sweets.

I told them that I realized I was wrong, that I didn’t want to watch the national championships anymore. I don’t know why I did that.

Sometimes we revert to lying as a survival instinct. Are you familiar with the wolf spider? It is highly sensitive to vibrations. It can feel the vibrations of other organisms as they land in its proximity. With this knowledge, the wolf spider will camouflage itself, then make the kill to prevent its own death.

But I wasn’t in danger.

Sometimes we lie not because we need to kill or be killed. Sometimes we lie because emotionally, the matter is of life or death consequence. We don’t see a way out, and lying is the only tool with which we are equipped to be kind.

Kind?

Yes. I believe that you lied to be kind to your parents, to ameliorate their suffering.

She doesn’t say it unkindly, doesn’t emphasize that it is me who makes them suffer. Of course at night I often think about whether they’re sleeping or if they just stay up thinking about how it would have been easier not to have a child at all.

It was selfish, I say. It made me feel better too.

Because you want your parents to be happy, she says.

In the hallway, I hear a man screaming. He’s calling one of the nurses a slappy-ass-bust-a-nut slut. He says he’ll devour her alive, starting with her little painted fingers. I look at the doctor. These are the people she wants to help. These are the people that make it possible for her to think I’m kind.

I suppose.

I sense some hesitancy. Why?

Because I haven’t always cared about their happiness. I’ve cared sometimes but not always. I didn’t think about it when it wasn’t convenient for me.

Nobody is kind all the time, Miss Doyle.

Well in this way, I guess I can say I’m not a nobody. If I can do this with human frailty, just think what I could do with lemons, doc.

Lemonade that would stop global warming.

Lemonade for world peace.

Lemonade for inner peace.

I don’t know if I’d go that far.

She laughs.

But why not? Why not try seeing just how far you could go with imagining life after this.

After the hospital?

Exactly.

Are you telling me that you’ve made a decision?

She pauses, then, crunches candy: not necessarily.

You’re a bit of a tease, you know that?

Miss Doyle, you’ve got a wonderful imagination, and I’d like to see you use that to your benefit.

That would be a change.

Or, if you’d rather, you could tell me what you imagine about your past, that is, what you imagine about your biological parents.

She’s good at this, changing topics quickly. It must be something these doctors do to surprise you into answering their questions.

You sound like Mark. I see where you’re going.

And where is that?

You want this all to be about being adopted. You can’t accept that my problems are my own. They must be the result of some other issue. That’s what psychology is all about: finding the problem that isn’t the main problem.

That’s one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that you may have sacrificed feelings of curiosity about your biological parents to keep an even keel. Or to be kind.

She pushes the candy dish toward me, and I take one, twist and untwist a butterscotch wrapper, fiddling this sticky trifle. It’s so simple, the left and right twirl, the open and close. When are motivations ever that clear in their direction?

Maybe I sacrificed those feelings for myself.

What do you mean?

I mean that I was afraid of every destiny except one, and I didn’t know whether my genes would allow for it.

The day after Thanksgiving, the noises in the kitchen were red and green and white lights all over. They were stars and Jesus, gold, myrrh, and frankincense. Jingle bells jangled at my mother’s every step downstairs. It was quiet until the hysteria of two feet running back up to the attic for more Christmas decorations. Then the clanking and sorting of things put away eleven months of the year overhead again. Yesterday had been gluttony and today was business: my mother had begun decorating for Christmas.

Jesuses sat on the coffee table as a centerpiece, and I felt the panic rise up in me alongside the collection of miraculously born ceramic sons. Mark had gotten me thinking about who I could turn out to be, and it was disrupting who I wanted to be. I’d been up for hours the night before thinking the lies could be futile. The pushups could be futile. The drugs could be futile. I hadn’t always been so uncertain. A done deal was how I’d thought of the future before; it had already passed quite perfectly in my mind. But I could have the genes of a matronly woman, not an Olympian. Besides, John Doe’s uppers were fakes, and even if I could figure out another source, what then? I’d go hyperactive and close-mouthed against food. I’d sprint to Lucy’s house to borrow more money. And then one day, I would wake up and realize that I’d never had a chance against adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine. It would be like how Watson and Crick were accredited with the discovery of the double helix, though Franklin was the one to X-Ray it. I’d run myself down only to find that I’d never reach fighting form, while some little technocrat sprite with slim hips landed triple after triple to the tear-jerking swell of an Olympic crowd.