Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

Lucy was sewing in front of the television when I arrived. I set my school books on the table and took a seat. “What’s wrong?” she said. What was wrong was my unpayable debt to John Doe, but of course I didn’t say that.

“My father will not stop pushing college on me,” I said. Because I was beginning to tire of exam preparation twice a week.

“Oh God,” Lucy replied. She was untangling thread that had gotten knotted up by her cat.

“He thinks the mind persists longer than the body.”

“Has he met my mother?” she asked. “The woman’s mind vacated thirty years ago. She still can’t be stopped.” Lucy mimed a confused zombie pretending to down a drink.

“Is that why you quit college?” I’d never asked.

Lucy was sipping a soda and made a squelching noise at the bottom of the can. “I quit school to go be what I’d always wanted to be.”

“What’s that?”

“Loved,” she said.

“ I love you,” I said.

“You’re just a girl, though, VoVo.” She sighed and poked her needle into a pincushion. “But you know, I think I’ve narrowed down the baby’s daddy to one of two: the roadie or his replacement.”

Lucy explained that they met when Lucy rear-ended the roadie’s car near Concord. So she went on the road with him, watching the same stars spin from the circles they danced in different cities. Less for the music than the circulation through cities had the roadie begun following the band Manifest Destiny. The way he liked to live you couldn’t even get cable installed in the time they were in a place. They liked to spin fast when they danced so that even after they’d lost their balance and lay sweating in the grass, it looked like the starry sky was being stirred above. Sometimes someone would be selling tablets with the same effect.

“When the accident happened, I thought you were the most beautiful woman I didn’t know,” he told her when they’d made it to Virginia.

“I am still,” she said.

“Not really,” he said. By sunset they were in Tennessee.

They began to have sex with other people together. She thought it would prolong them.

One night, after they crossed the Mississippi, he told her about another band that would soon depart for a tour in Europe. “I feel so comfortable with you,” he said. “It’s almost as though you aren’t there. That’s why it’s so easy for me to leave you.”

After that, there was Albert, the guy she’d said had the big cucumber. She met him in the seaport town an hour away while looking for a job waiting tables. He was there when she came back from the tour in April, docking there from the Coast Guard.

“You’re a nice girl, and you’ll make a beautiful wife,” he told her, and then he was gone on a Coast Guard boat the day after.

“How will you know whose it is?” I asked.

“Albert is black for one,” she said.

“But why?” I asked. I couldn’t understand why this, of all lives, was the one she had chosen. “Why did you decide to keep it this time?” Dorothy hadn’t.

“Because I realized sex is the only productive thing I’ve ever done.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “That’s just the celibacy talking. We’ll do something now to take your mind off. Do you want me to paint your nails or something?” But I couldn’t make her happy because I wasn’t a man, and she couldn’t make herself happy because she wasn’t a man either.

“Nail polish is a birth defect just waiting to cross-eye my kid,” Lucy said. “That and aspirin and everything that makes me feel better.”

“So what then?” I asked.

“I want to go get stupid,” she said. “But it’s months too late or months too early for that. Do you want to eat something?”

“Are you cooking?”

“Silly VoVo, you know I don’t cook. I microwave.”

“Don’t push buttons on my account.”

“We could go to the pizza place.”

“We could,” I said. But I had so much left to lose for skating.

So she turned on the television, and we leaned back into the oranges and greens of hand me down furniture. She declined through channels, through the glow of faces furrowing with ticking bombs and consummating love and surviving the brutality of the natural world. A man sliced open an iris so that it wept up in a red geyser. “An eye for an eye,” the actor said. And maybe this was the only way. An eye for an eye, tit for tat, tits for that. Maybe what was left was giving this body for the other. The body John Doe wanted for the body I wanted.

I didn’t know much about sex except when you’re having it, it’s vital to keep something between you and the other person. That way everything stays on schedule. When I skated, I thought of sex like downhill skiing, a slippery slope replete with dangerous interruptions. If this was the last way left to settle the debt, I’d need to keep a barrier between me and him. I would be clear: this was an act of love but not directed towards him. This was the pragmatic approach to dreams. For condoms, I’d need to get to the drugstore before it closed. I looked at the clock. Twenty minutes until close. Or else maybe my parents kept a stash.

You know that two people are romantic when you feel like you’re intruding when you walk into a room with them. You can be in your own church or school, or home, yet you feel like a criminal. Of course, there was also the fact of my mother’s skin, more of it than I’d ever seen before, save the beach. On the kitchen table, lip-shaped wine stains smudged on glasses and little white and green tea sandwiches were arranged on a platter. They didn’t see me coming, didn’t hear me turn the key in the locked door. “What are you doing here?” I said to the man.

“You were supposed to go to Lucy’s,” my mother said. She made a move for her cardigan sweater, pushed her bunched skirt so that its hemline was below her knees.

“I did. I’m done.” I said. I turned to the man. “Who are you?”

“Donnie O’Donnell. Perhaps you’ve heard of my book? Alibi Diaries ?” He reached a hairy-knuckled hand out to shake.

“I don’t read books from the ninety-nine cent bin,” I said.

“Ali, please ,” my mother said.

“ Mom , no thank you,” I said. My eyeballs were quivering wetly: “What about Dad?”

“I’d best be scramming,” said Donnie O’Donnell, buttoning up.

“You don’t have to,” my mother said. My mother pulled a chair from beneath the table. “Why? Please. Sit. Stay.”

“Rollover,” I said. “Beg.”

“Ali!”

“Mom,” I said. Turning, I knocked the plate of sandwiches to the floor. Donnie O’Donnell slipped the last of his belt into its buckle, then stepped over the tiny triangles of bread and circles of cucumber, the frills of lettuce and smears of yellowing mayonnaise leading to the door. He stopped and turned just his head back a moment.

“For what it’s worth, while it lasted,” he said.

“Don’t,” my mother said, wilting down to the tiles and covering her face with her hands.

I didn’t move from beside the doorway, even after I’d slammed the door behind Donnie O’Donnell. “Are you crying?”

“I’m not crying.” This said with her face in her hands and her body knotted fetal on the floor. “And what’s it to you anyway?”

“Why him?” I asked.

“Jesus,” she answered. “There’s no reason .”

“You can’t conceive of even one reason?”

“And if I could? Would it make you feel any better to know why?” She paused for a moment. “He makes me feel special,” she said. “And I guess also, well, never mind. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Understand what?”

“I guess this life isn’t what I expected. You and your dad, I love you, but—”