Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

It was one of those afternoons when the mall was filled with forgetful spouses and cheapskates. In department stores, men held up sweaters on hangers and nodded at the apparel to indicate good enough. “Cute!” my mother said of a dress. “Nice!” of a scarf. We crawled through the mall to the rhythm of her praise. “Lovely!” she said and held up the flimsy liquid film of a silk blouse. “This really brings out the brown of your eyes!”

“Like horseshit,” I responded.

We walked by a man with a cottony white chin wig. A child made a running start up onto his lap with a list. “Have you been a very good boy this year?” the man asked him.

“I thought you checked the list twice,” the child’s mother said, but it was spoken with the sarcasm love affords.

Near the winter wonderland photo set was a lingerie chain. In the window, white headless figures without nipples modeled full-bottomed panties and lace balconet bras. A sign showed a model straddling a wrapped gift, underneath the words: SHHHHH! DON’T TELL SANTA.

“Practical and fun!” my mother said, pointing to the window. “Would you like that?”

“A boob job!? But how ever will you top that next year? A pony?”

“Ali, I know you’re upset. I wish I could explain it to you,” she said. “What do you want from me?”

“Nothing. I don’t want anything from you.”

“How about a stereo?”

“I want to feel different,” I said. I looked at her, wondered if maybe it was like with food allergies, where if you introduced an allergen little by little, you’d develop tolerance. But beyond tolerance? Perhaps the best thing was to be accident prone. Because wasn’t loving always accidental?

“Ali, level with me please.”

“I don’t want to sink any lower,” I said.

“Then don’t tell your father,” she said. “Think about how sad it would be to come home from college at Thanksgiving to an apartment — two apartments.”

So this was what the entire excursion was about: quarantining information. She didn’t want to celebrate Christmas. She wanted to have an eight-room house with an acre of yard space and country chic dishes and daffodils. She didn’t want to live in an apartment, as did my other mother. Like so many other times, I wanted to go backwards. The origin story I’d always been told began with God, but I wanted one with literal blood and body. Now I had a mother whose bond wasn’t figurative. She had been a ghost most of my life, but in the present she resurrected as sheer potential. Specificity was, Dorothy claimed, her obsession. And yet, she didn’t even know when I was born. But I knew it was possible to fixate so intently on a single something — a moment, a Salchow — that what was fundamental would fade even in the foreground.

“Eight hundred dollars,” I said. I didn’t know how much a flight to New York would be, but that had to be sufficient. I would see Dorothy, and could buy enough product off John Doe to last me until I found a new source in the city. I could even go to the Skating Club of New York, where the Olympian Sarah Hughes had trained.

“Excuse me?”

“Give me eight hundred dollars and don’t tell Dad I’m not going to visit Columbia.”

“What are you going to do with eight hundred dollars?”

“And don’t ask questions. That’s the other part of the deal.” I pointed to an ATM machine.

“Are you blackmailing me?”

“I’m taking your blackmail and raising it a secret. I’m going back to the beginning and reversing history. Do you feel special now?”

“You’re talking crazy,” she said. But hadn’t she always thought I was crazy? Crazy wiry hair. Crazy skating. Crazy curiosity about life outside Amherst, New Hampshire, Indian graveyard of stuck in the sticks inhabitants.

“Anger is a critical step in the mourning process,” I said. “The next is bargaining. Why don’t we skip right over depression and get to acceptance. Are you giving me the money or not?”

“Ali, sweetie—”

“I won’t be flattered into giving it up,” I said. “I’m not like you. Do you want your white picket? Or do you want to sleep on Aunt Dina’s couch? This is the life you chose. You want to feel special? There’s a price to pay.”

She was crying now, and for a moment, I was afraid I’d give up, hug her. But she walked to the ATM and swiped her card. I would soon be on a plane to New York.

“Let’s etymologize a little,” Mark said. He pumped his arms aerobically and I threw a weighted kettle ball at him. He threw it back. It was a week until the benefit concert, and he had come over to teach me how to take the SAT. I wasn’t sleeping much, and had taken to lifting weights and studying skating videos all night long. I was one degree from a breakdown, but I felt corporeal again, vibrating. I thought about Dorothy all the time, which is to say I thought about the future all the time. She could be my worst nightmare, but I’d already decided. It was a relief to see Mark, the comfort of his strong block letters, the rhythmic back and forth chug of talk.

“This is sort of fun,” I said.

“Yeah, well, that was the great study break for hilarity and anaerobic conditioning. Now it’s time for Greek and Latin roots.” I sighed. “It’s just like history,” he said. “If you know the origins, you can solve the mystery of the present meaning.”

I looked at the list. Am-, amat-, amor: love. Amic, — imic-: friend. Ampi-: ample. A-, an-: not, without. Ana-, an-: against. Andro-: man .

“Like take apostasy,” he said. “Apo means away from or at the farthest point from. So apostasy is when someone renounces their religion.”

“I’d like to apo-study.”

“You know what Aristotle said? ‘For that for the sake of which a thing is, is its principle, and the becoming is for the sake of the end; and the actuality is the end, and it is for the sake of this that the potentiality is acquired. For animals do not see in order that they may have sight, but they have sight that they may see.’”

“Are we still defining stuff?”

“What I’m saying is, stupid isn’t as stupid does. Stupid does so stupid is.”

“Or one insults to make someone else insulted.” I knew an insult when I heard one. I’d spent years hearing girls tell each other they were looking womanly in the locker room before competition. Or that their thighs looked developed. I’d seen asthma attacks happen over the word “curvy.” But I didn’t feel what I knew to be happening, this insult. I was too elated.

“I only insult you because poiein is better than paschein . I only insult you because you’re my friend. And what is a friend? ‘A soul dwelling in two bodies.’”

“I think I prefer to monopolize my soul.” He didn’t understand, so I went the route of Shakespeare. Figure skating is soliloquy, I told him. It’s the self speaking into the ether, the poetry of the individual.

“Always the figure skating,” he said.

“If only,” I said, and he held up a flashcard: solipsistic. We laughed. “Anyway, there’s something I want to tell you that might surprise you.” He moved closer and looked at me intently, those blue orbs roving then going still on the brown of my own. I could smell fresh coffee on his breath, sweet and bitter. “I’m going to New York to meet my biological mother.”

Mark grabbed my hands. We didn’t speak about tests the rest of the afternoon. We spoke about confronting the past. We spoke about New York, this city I’d never seen. The gaudy Technicolor glitter of Indian restaurants on Sixth Street, the winding Guggenheim spiral, the twinkle of lit windows winking across the Williamsburg Bridge — he knew my mother’s world better than I did — and for a moment, the poverty of my experience dawned on me. But then he was flurrying questions about my tribe, the lands, the culture. As always, I didn’t care as much about the group as the individual, the mother I’d not met. But I told him I would ask, and he told me if I wanted, he’d even pick me up from the airport.