Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

I didn’t know what to say, so I relied on Lucy. “My cousin is having a baby,” I said. There was a frivolousness to this woman, but wasn’t that what I liked? That she wanted to transcend bare functionality? To dislike her would be to dislike myself, and yet here I was, talking about someone Dorothy had never met because it was easier than exposing myself.

“Oh,” she said.

“She names all the baby outfits in full sentences.”

“You know, they’ve had you for seventeen years. Can’t I just have your full attention for one phone call?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. And I was. There was something in her voice, this thin brittleness, that I knew from my own. It was the sound of knowing you weren’t enough.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Look, it’s just really difficult for me knowing they’re the experts. I’m running to catch up, and it just isn’t fair. You’re my child.”

“Experts is a stretch,” I said. But I understood the sentiment of seeing what you wanted so close to the horizon it seemed you’d never be able to make it.

“I’ve given my life up to esoteric cuisine, and I love it, of course. There is an absolute beauty to an art that isn’t useless, an art that makes the survival requirements of every day amazing. It’s not painting or sculpting or dancing. It’s art that perpetuates the survival of humanity. But when I think that I’ve dedicated all these years to perpetuating humanity, and my own daughter doesn’t even recognize me as her family, I wonder, what’s this life I’m saving for?”

“I do recognize you,” I said. “It makes me proud that my mother is such a perpetuator.” Except I tripped on my tongue and it came out “perpetrator.”

“At least I have my Michelin star.”

“Yes, you have your star. And I’m coming to see you soon.”

“It’s true; you will very soon. So we should plan this out perfectly. I need to prepare. My daughter is coming! How do you eat your burger? I will make you one that will ruin everything else for you for life.” I told her I ate my burger rare, and if I’d said the adverb, it wouldn’t have been a lie. I’d bought a plane ticket already, but when I arrived, I’d need to explain to Dorothy that I was down to five hundred calories a day and still had more to lose. Food was her passion; I was at the mercy of physics. “But we should leave our options open. I don’t like to be limited,” she said.

“We could do anything,” I said.

“Anything could happen,” she said. Many things would happen.

Some days, I think it’s not that different here than anywhere else, except people are more likely to take care of you. Others, I could claw the doors down for the outside world, that place that once seemed so bereft of dazzle and bloated with mediocrity. Today is the second kind, a bad day.

It seems there were reservations about meeting Dorothy. Did you perhaps believe you’d discover something about her that you didn’t want to discover?

If you think you will discover something about someone you don’t want to discover, it means you already have.

So it was easier not to be disappointed than to discover who Dorothy was.

It might have been if I hadn’t have, I say. I’m not looking at the doctor, trying to catch whatever’s between the blind slats, the alternating inches of freedom: rough puffs of lush evergreen bush. A tiny tip of pink — petal? Yellow canvas sneaker, then ankle, thigh, hip gliding through the black glitter-grit of pavement.

If you hadn’t?

Ask yourself that question enough times, and you’ll realize all you’re doing is counting the eggs that already hatched to try to figure out how many chickens there were.

I’m not sure I understand, says the doctor.

Neither do I.

Then it seems that we have our work cut out for us.

This is America, Doc. Isn’t the patriotic ideal that the work isn’t cut for us, but that we cut the work? Maybe this was exactly my mistake: believing in shortcuts. I thought I could circumvent time.

The doctor clears her throat. If the ideal is to be healthy and happy, then you will need to continue cooperating in this work.

What Dr. Ogden never told me is that an If and Only If statement is different than an If-Then statement. You’re honest. There is doubt to your motivations.

I don’t doubt that your condition will improve.

Which doesn’t mean that you believe. Take that song “You’re Nobody ’Til Somebody Loves You.” In formal logic, you’re not a somebody just because somebody loves you.

Yet the bi-conditional logical connective does not, in fact, preclude that you’re a somebody. It simply admits chance.

In the one inch increments of outside, there are no more feet, ankles, anything. The yellow sneakers that led to the white shirt and then a golden mop have slipped away to life out there.

What we’re doing is Wall Street you’ve got to admit, I say, and look at the doctor finally.

I don’t make promises. I only present opportunities.

Do you have children, Doctor?

No.

Yet you are, of course, familiar with the idea of a mother’s unconditional love for her child?

I am.

Then you understand that some things don’t get better. But I’ve got to get out of here. Provided I am sane— by who this sanity is provided, I wonder — I can go. Go out there, where there are yellow sneakers, petals, reprieve from shrinks.

And sometimes, the doctor says, you can be your own hero.

I think you mean villain.

Miss Doyle, I don’t. I promise that I don’t.

Are you telling me that you do not believe someone who blackmails the woman who raised her is, in fact, a villain? Obviously, she does. That’s why I’m still here. She hasn’t made a decision. She doesn’t think I deserve my freedom. It’s been two weeks.

Our progress is not driven by a moral imperative, she says with a poker blank face.

I suppose that’s a trick of the trade the doc profs taught you: answer in generalities when the specifics of a question will trip you up. Smart.

Tricks aren’t my prerogative. But you seem quite interested in my education, especially considering your own resistance to college. What was it about the trip to Harvard that you found most distasteful?

How Dr. Connolly lapped himself, lapped as in licked and lapped as in overtook by an entire racetrack circuit. He was so pleased with himself for taking the circuitous route to nowhere. But now even heavy velvet curtains and dark wood, the books on books and doubts of doubt, wink coyly. Ideas about ideas. Theories about theories. Writing about writing. It all circles back on itself, but maybe it’s better than turning on yourself. And that’s what I’m doing here, turning informant against my dreams.

Perhaps he believed he was providing food for thought.

Food for thought: such cannibalism. What do you feed thoughts with? Thought. So you feed it thoughts to continue thinking to end up where you began.

This sounds not unlike addiction. Were you not feeding one addiction with another?

Don’t give me the finger, Doc. The pointed one, I mean.

This is not an accusation. It’s an observation.

And even if this is what I did? Even if addiction was served to addiction — so?

I suppose you might consider that this is what brought you here.

Beneath my chin, I wrap my fingers in a thinker’s repose, a therapizing Rodin on exhibition right here at Matthew Thornton Med.

Do you know why it is I eat candy all the time? I’m sure you’ve noticed, the doctor says.

I’ve noticed.

Because I’m quitting cigarettes, and the candy helps.

This wasn’t what I expected, and suddenly I find myself trying to imagine the doctor struggling with anything. This is a woman so together, it seems like her hair doesn’t even grow. Her bob is perpetually chin length, turned to the neck just so.