Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

The doctor mulls this, writes something down, crosses it out. She’s figuring something out. There is thinking all over the face. She clears her throat: You found your mind untrainable? Is that what you mean?

It’s like how in high school I was assigned a research paper to answer the question of how to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. If the answer were in books, wouldn’t the war be over? I asked the teacher.

Am I to understand that you do not believe Dr. Ogden could have been a more effective therapist?

All I’m saying, doc, is how do you end a war with yourself when it means you necessarily will lose?

A few days later at school, Mr. Hammerling said while this wasn’t a test you could fail, there were people whose results made them best suited to be jewelry salesperson. Myriad were the questions, but from so much self-reflection the answers were all four-letter words. ESTJ: extroverted, sensing, thinking, judgment; INFP: introverted, intuitive, feeling, perception. We were taking the test to find fulfilling life paths. I was pleased to think about what was ahead rather than behind until my future in the estimation of the abridged Myers-Briggs turned out to be psychologist, musician, or clergyman.

“The INFP is a special individual who needs a career which is more than a job,” my results read. “The INFP needs to feel that everything they do in their lives is in accordance with their strongly-felt value systems, and is moving them in a positive, growth-oriented direction. They are motivated to do something meaningful and purposeful with their lives.”

I didn’t play music and I wasn’t a man, so I couldn’t be a clergyman. That left psychologist. I decided to take the test again. That morning I’d taken three amphetamines, and I couldn’t make myself busy enough. With specific results in mind, I circled better answers. This way my future was firefighter, athlete, or forensic pathologist. They were probably the four letters that would keep me filed code red, but I didn’t care about the social codes, as long as they didn’t interfere.

I looked at Molly Sanders at the desk next to mine. “I might as well be reading my horoscope.”

“I love horoscopes,” she said.

“What did you get?”

“ISTP: firefighter, athlete, forensic pathologist. Horrible.”

“Naturally,” I said.

When my father came home that night, he went straight to the computer. He’d been finding more and more massive open online courses, and this occupied much of his time. He watched the classes he’d never gotten to take and recited back the key points like a brown noser. I found a journal by the computer with notes: “Instance of the Letter”: Lacan recontextualizes desire in terms of the Structuralist model, considers the psychological substitution of one desire for the desire to return to unity with the mother. Fascinating!

Now he was in a thrall over Dr. Edward E. Hacker at Harvard and the certainty of uncertainty. I walked over to his bent back and kissed the top of his head.

“What if your job was biologist?” he verved when I told him about Myers-Briggs.

“My projected career was firefighter,” I said.

“Firefighter, smite or fire!” He took a sip from his highball. “The body is a phase. The mind is permanent. There’s no security in manual labor.”

“At least a farmer can hold his work in his hand,” I said.

“Not during times of blight,” my father answered. “What about something tangentially —as in obliquely — related? What about psychiatry?”

“No.”

“Psychology?”

“I’d rather keep my head out of the gutter.”

My father also had his own tests for me. If you didn’t know the answer, there were the leftovers. Couldn’t be B, couldn’t be D, at least odds were up if the only choices were A, C, E. I knew the tricks of ignorance, how to make not knowing what was right still lead to the answer that wasn’t wrong, and I knew that being wrong didn’t deduct so much as not add. Just choose something , my father said.

Sometimes, there were T-shirts for motivation. And of course, I had my own motivations, which were driving forward with the force of amphetamines. On optimistic days I believed I could score at the concert with Mark. On pessimistic days, I thought of all the drugs I was missing by skipping out on my debt. Sex was a last resort, but now every time I thought of sex, I thought of my mother and Donnie O’Donnell, and that was enough to keep my pants on.

“Red and gold! Harvard becomes you,” my father said one day, holding up a shirt.

“That’s what you said about teal and purple and hornets too.”

“Welter!” he said, pulling an index card from his pocket.

“Not again.”

“To writhe, to toss about, to be in turmoil.”

“Thanks for the T-shirt, Dad.” I turned to leave the kitchen.

“Chimera!”

“Dad.”

“A thing that is wished for or hoped for but is in fact only an illusion or impossible to achieve. And for bonus points: in Greek mythology a fire-breathing female monster with a lion’s head, a serpent’s tail, and a goat’s body, though the word is now used loosely to mean any mythological creature comprised of the parts of different animals.”

“There are no bonus points on the SATs, Dad.”

“You’ve been listening!” he beamed.

“You’ve been loud and difficult to ignore.”

“Ali, I think your scholarly life is incipient, you know, beginning to come into being or becoming apparent.”

“Way to use it in a sentence, Dad.”

“Really? It wasn’t too pedantic , as in, ostentatiously displaying learning?”

“No, just officious, as in meddlesome, pushy, offering services where they are undesired. Where did it come from anyway? This college thing?”

“Allow me to remonstrate ,” my father began. “These are salutary endeavors, which I am sedulously pursuing in order to tamp you with knowledge that perhaps will result in admission being tendered . Please take no umbrage .”

“I’m getting splenetic,” I said.

“Bad-tempered and irritable?”

“Exactly.”

Still it was difficult to begrudge my father a definition here or there when vocabulary drills had been his only source of joy in the last several months and he had a liar for a wife. Sometimes I looked at him comparing admissions statistics and student retention rates, and I was hopeful seeing him bestowed again with obsession. I wanted him to have a love all his own. Then he’d ask if I’d like to practice filling in answer bubbles, and the answer was no. I cut my tolerance for tedium off at marathon running.

I tried to imagine scissors to wake up, but when it didn’t work I popped a pill. Then when that didn’t work, I took another. I noted that though I was running low on the go-go-go glow enclosed in promising capsules and my body was all dead weight and turgid legs, I would be able to speak from experience to Ryan now about uppers. Next would be the quad. Realistically, I’d first have to catch up to where I’d been, re-master moves I’d not executed in months. It was best, I thought, to bicycle through the amphetamines and remember that conjecture wasn’t realism at all; nothing could be real that hadn’t yet happened. I just needed another month or so, more miles, less pounds.

Twenty miles to nowhere and my mother knocked on the door. For a deluded, hopeful second, I thought she’d come to say she’d been wrong: we were enough, after all. Instead, Christmas was imminent, and there were things to be bought.