Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

“Rich Miss Havisham initiates Pip into capitalist greed: villain. He never knew to want anything more than what he had until her. Magwich redistributes his wealth to Pip: tragic hero. He is reborn from his degeneracy to become savior. And then dies.”

“How Judeo-Christian of you, Opiates,” I said. “But Miss Havisham isn’t a villain. She’s suffering. She loved the wrong person.”

“Just because she’s held onto a rotting cake for decades doesn’t make her not a villain. I’ve got pickles in my fridge that look ready to sour, and look at what I jerk I am.”

“I a little more than like you.” I didn’t know why I said it. I certainly hadn’t planned to say it, even if I’d thought it before.

“Is that like more than a little like?”

“It’s like I like you enough not to think you’re a jerk despite your shoddy Marxist reading of Great Expectations .” From the outermost reach of my eye, I could see that Mark and I were mirror images, two sides of a grinning Rorschach, smiling eyes staring into the hands folded in our laps. He cleared his throat.

“But we don’t know what happens to Pip and Estella in the end really.”

“We know that they meet again,” he said. “And we hope.” He gathered my side farthest from him for a moment so that my cheek leaned on his neck, this moist hammock of man between ear and shoulder, and then I felt myself return to my place as he let me go.

“Psychology,” I said, grasping at the game for more.

“This one is harder but not impossible. Stay with me. Are you with me?”

“I’m with you.” My heart was going mad hatter. I might have taken too many pills — and I was enamored of the feel of flightless levitation, the unfettered cardiac warbling of ‘phets!

“In this case the patient is producing thoughts, so he controls the means of production. And the shrink, the shrink’s got to labor over the pittance of information provided by the patient. He too becomes a commodity that the patient pays for, and the shrink only appropriates power by violently overthrowing the means of production: conscious thought.”

“I can accept that.”

“Keep them coming. I want more.”

“You’re pretty greedy for a communist.”

“No one is perfect,” he said.

“The third defenestration of Prague.” I couldn’t sit still, and when I looked straight down, I could see the elastic band of my panties, that’s how loose my pants were at the waist. They could slip right off if I stood; gravity could undress me.

“Oh come on, that’s too easy.”

“You want a challenge? Okay, let me think. How about figure skating?”

“Figure skating, figure skating,” he tapped his chin. “Well to start, it’s exploitative.”

“Exploitative?” Now my heart was at double time.

“Just take yourself. Like you the worker were expected to perform surplus labor, even though you didn’t control the means of production. Not that I’m not sure you weren’t talented.”

“You’re sure I was.”

“Not that I’m not sure you are. Actually, I know.”

“You know? You don’t know. You don’t know anything about figure skating. Those aren’t motions you just see walking to Arby’s.”

“I would never eat at Arby’s.”

“And the worst part is, you think you’re so versed in communism, and I bet you don’t even know one Eastern Bloc skater.”

“Katarina Witt.”

“You only know her because she posed in Playboy ! Sergei Grinkov, how about him? Know him?”

“No.”

“Two-time Olympic champion! Died at twenty-eight of a heart attack of indeterminate origin!”

“Sounds like steroids.”

“Irina Rodnina?”

“Is this a test?”

“Her music stopped at the 1973 World Championships, and you know what? She kept going. She thrilled the crowd to clapping musical rhythm because she kept going. An Irina Rodnina isn’t born every day.”

“All I’m saying is it’s beneath you,” he said.

“Then why did I fail?”

“I’m sorry. I’m sure you were talented. It’s just so—” His forehead furrowed into gullies. “It’s just so bourgeois. You said it yourself, it’s a rich kids’ sport.”

“And having a tutor?” I asked. “And having the luxury to drop out of Dartmouth?”

“I didn’t drop out. I can go back anytime.”

“Yes, you can go back to your life anytime. You can take your life back anytime, and instead you harass customers outside your, yes, capitalist café to vote for a guy who thinks he can undo the American economy when the only thing he’s known for is standing in front of a rolling bulldozer.”

“I didn’t come here for this.”

“No you came to get paid,”

“You don’t really believe—”

“Seventy-five American dollars, In God We Trust, Five Washingtons, two Lincolns, three Andrew Jacksons.”

And then he was gone. On my bed, a depression in the shape of his bottom disrupted the smoothness of sheets where for days I’d lain alone.

Lucy wanted to bring Big Jack by so that we would know the father of her child, even if she didn’t. Perhaps the only thing that could’ve gotten my mother out of bed was the promise of a baby. She cooked fettuccine that tangled like a giant brain in a bowl at the center of the table. When she served it, the strands stuck together and strayed off plates as they remained half embedded in the bowl, half trailing sauce onto the tablecloth. My father gave Lucy a Harvard onesie he’d bought because it was never too early for a legacy. She held it to her stomach and twirled. “Do I look fat in this?” she said, turning to the side.

“If you weren’t pregnant, I’d tell you to cut the carbohydrates,” I said. “Any new designs of your own?”

“Only for the baby,” she said. “Pink is for Pussies. That one has cats on it. And Hugh Heffner Raids the Zoo. That one has bunnies, of course.”

“In Indian folk tales, bunnies symbolize the reaction to fear,” Jack said.

“VoVo is Shawnee,” Lucy said. My mother gave her a look while my father scraped the last of his fettuccine from his plate and began picking up dishes to wash loudly in the sink. He’d been pretending nothing — or rather, no one — was out of place for seventeen years, so he knew how to be noisier than what wasn’t pleasant to hear.

“Care to cop a feel?” Lucy asked my mother. “She’s kicking.”

“A she!” my mother said as she put her hand on Lucy’s stomach.

“Or a he,” said Big Jack.

“A hermaphrodite,” Lucy chimed in.

“The question is what do you want?” I asked.

“Enlightened men will tell you the origin of suffering is desire,” said Big Jack. “Eliminate desire and you will eliminate suffering. Those who don’t know will say that samsara is the cycle of birth and death, but it is also ‘continuous pursuit.’”

“Now that he’s going to be a father, Jack doesn’t want to come back a tadpole,” Lucy said. “He’s breaking some habits with a Buddhist kick. A Buddhist kick in the pants. There’s no meat in the house besides his ding dong.”

My mother wasn’t listening. She was still preoccupied by the life kicking through the pill-embroidered cotton of A Very Judy Garland Holiday.

“But if you want to eliminate suffering, isn’t that a desire too?” I asked.

“If you want to eliminate suffering, eliminate soy patties,” Lucy said. “The name alone makes me want an antiemetic.” A mimed gag. I squeezed her hand. My lovely, vulgar balloon of a cousin.

“Some questions are unanswerable,” Jack said. “Even the Buddha himself refused to answer the question ‘Is the self identical with the body?’ He said it was part of a net of dogma from which he’d already been liberated.”