Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

Well yeah, Doc, you’ve got to sublimate your desires somehow.

What I’m trying to say, Ali, is this: addiction doesn’t make you a villain. It just means you’re making life harder for yourself.

So now what?

So now we go on. That’s all that’s left for us to do.

That’s all there’s ever left to do.

I’m happy that you understand that now.

That weekend, an entire party was chased from the town swimming hole, and four townies were arrested for buying alcohol for minors. A tip line was set up. The teachers said it wasn’t ratting, but saving lives. They wanted to recognize the signs of alcohol abuse easy as a swear word — shitty cunt fuck murderer — so the PTA provided a list of criteria. And that’s how I ended up in the guidance counselor’s office for a party that I’d never attended.

“Alivopro,” Mr. Hammerling began. “Your peers have expressed concerns. We’re worried for you.”

“Worried why?”

“Perhaps I could ask you the same question.”

I looked back at him. “Are you?” Mr. Hammerling, the bald runt, pressed his hairy little hands together palm to palm, a frustrated Buddha in a sweater vest. On either side of his head were a framed paint-by-numbers lake tableau and a Heimlich step-by-step.

“I don’t think you’re really listening. We’re working with the police to identify at-risk teenagers and rehabilitate those who show warning signs. Depressed teenagers are twice as likely to abuse alcohol as teenagers who are not depressed.” he said. I wondered which teenagers weren’t depressed. “We’re worried about you.”

“Who is we?”

“The other students. Your teachers.”

“That’s not we to me. There’s no me in that we.”

“So you admit to some troubling antisocial tendencies! Perhaps we can consider some healthier coping mechanisms.” Mr. Hammerling stood up quickly, pacing in foolish little three step increments in the cramped pen between his desk and chair.

“I’m not troubling,” I said.

“If we’re troubled, and we are, you’re troubling, Ali.”

“Why am I here?”

“Do you recall a recent incident in Mrs. Malester’s English class?” What he was referring to was why I hadn’t finished a recently assigned novel. I’d asked Mrs. Malester why we ought to care if the characters lived or died. We all did both of those things competently, but that didn’t mean we belonged on required reading lists. “We’re worried about you. We suspect that you don’t value human life, perhaps even your own.”

“Doesn’t having one count for anything?”

“Quite hardly,” he said, replacing himself in the seat.

“Well then what does?” I respected human life. I simply didn’t respect human life besotted by the marriage plot. The long-skirted ladies of the nineteenth century could nab landowners all they wanted, but I didn’t want to sit through four hundred pages of the pursuit of middle class homemaking. These were the concerns of my mother, Lucy, and all the women I didn’t want to become.

“Are you familiar with the term death wish? Don’t you think the incident shows something in the way of morbid fascination?”

“You mean morbid apathy, I think.” I laughed.

“I’m going to have to file you code red,” he said. “That means the police will be given your name. We know you’re already going to AA, and we know about your family too. Ask either of those cousins to buy drugs or alcohol, and we will find out about it.”

I stopped laughing. They were onto me, and if I was caught, my new life would be over before it had even begun. So I decided that I needed to make haste on those last pounds. I ran home then back to school over and over until nightfall.

Sometime after it was too dark to see where I was going, Lucy called. Just fifteen minutes ago, the roadie had telephoned to tell her that even switching cities got old eventually. He called to tell her he loved her. He’d be in New Hampshire within the hour.

“Jack’ll be flying his flag sky high when he finds out he’s going to be a daddy,” Lucy said.

“Is he?” I said. I looked in the mirror and pulled my shirt up. I could only count twelve ribs out of twenty-four.

“Come on VoVo, can’t you get it up for me a little? When was the last time you heard me so excited?”

It was a good question. “You’re right,” I said.

“I’m better than right,” Lucy replied. “I’m surprised.” But I was afraid he’d surprise her again: goodbye, au revoir, until the next time I feel like it, just like everyone else: ebbing and flowing in love all the time. I agreed to come over immediately. Just a few more miles. I was so close.

Jack arrived with a car full of dream catchers, wearing a T-shirt that looked like the inside of a kaleidoscope. He hung the tangled circles around the cradle, and from my seated vantage, I saw a guy who had told my cousin she’d once been the most beautiful woman he didn’t know with nostalgia. I saw someone who didn’t deserve the love he received.

“So what is there to do around here anyway, Vulva? Hiking? Cross-country skiing?” he asked.

“VoVo, you gorgeous dumbass. VoVo,” Lucy said. My prefabricated bias — Jack the Lecher, Jack leave quick, Jack hump anything with his stick— was quickly finding grim confirmation.

“It’s a nickname — not synecdoche,” I explained.

“What?” He sat on the bottom rung of the step ladder and patted Lucy’s stomach.

“It’s Latin for ‘criminally beautiful and losing her patience,’” Lucy said. “Thank God or your mother or whoever for the talent of your skin tone because it sure wasn’t applied to your hearing.”

That my bold beautiful cousin could swoon over such a person! It was a testament to the audacity of dumb love. They kissed wetly and I averted my eyes.

“We love you Little Jack,” Big Jack whispered to Lucy’s bulge, and I wondered if it had occurred to him that the kid might not be his. Maybe Lucy was right. Maybe he wasn’t a cliché. Maybe he’d feel the child was his whether or not the proteins and peptides aligned.

“But speaking of vulvas, can we focus on what really matters in life?” Lucy asked. “Are you, VoVo, going to let Mark the Marxist stick it in?”

“Who’s Mark the Marxist?”

“Just the guy VoVo doesn’t know she’s in love with,” Lucy said, threading a needle to cross-stitch little appliqués to baby pajamas. I looked at her handiwork. This was what love did to women, I reminded myself. I wouldn’t be derailed.

The band that was to play for the communists’ benefit was called Sickle Cell and the Mutants. Critics who had tried and failed to define their influences said their first album was pioneering, their second disappointing. One member had made his own electric triangle, and in photographs they all looked like they might pass out from the exertion of performance at any given moment. It was the day before the concert, and I’d been pinging with pills all day, counting ribs, counting crunches, rushing, rushing.

“What do Sickle Cell and the Mutants have to do with the Communist Party?” I asked Mark.

“Everything can be read,” he winked, “Marxist.”

“Everything isn’t anything any of us knows much about.” My mouth swung up at the corners. Mark was sitting beside me, only the shared secret of my trip in the vibrating sliver of space between our flanks.

“But everything can be read Marxist.” Mark pushed one eyebrow up and the other down to show he was participating in the play.

“Okay, how about Great Expectations ?” I asked.