Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

“How convenient for him,” I said.

“There is no I in Buddhism.”

“Merriam-Webster might disagree.”

“I’m talking about dependent origination,” Jack said.

I had no idea what he was talking about, and I didn’t want to. Lucy may have forgiven him, but I hadn’t. If he wanted to be part of her life, he should have to earn it. Besides, I wasn’t about to be taught by an idiot, so I nodded knowingly until my father placed a cake with a gaping hole on the table between us. “I hate to break up an intellectual debate,” he said, “but pineapple upside down, anyone?”

“You call this intellectual?”

“A she!” my mother exclaimed.

“Alright, Handsy,” Lucy told her. “Spring break is over. I’m eating for two while I can.” My father handed her a plate.

“Have you decided what kind of parent you’ll be?” my mother asked.

Lucy looked confused.

“You know, permissive or propagative? Nurturing or authoritarian?”

“I’ll be the kind of parent with a kid.” Lucy was already halfway through her hunk of cake. “You give birth to this thing like science fucking fiction — pardon my French — and it’s a zero. Then one day suddenly the kid has all these tastes. He only drinks ginger ale or she’s obsessed with cosmonauts, and you wonder where the hell did these feelings come from? So I’m not planning anything. I’m just going to wing it.”

“I wish you wanted to plan more. Planning is half the fun.”

“Stuffing face is how I plan,” Lucy said.

“Lucy is investing in a future of diabetic obesity,” I said.

“Thank you! Finally someone who understands my parenting style!” Lucy tossed her arms upward in mock victory.

“It would behoove you to take this a little more seriously. This is a privilege,” my mother said.

“This is a privilege!” my father added, exaggerating his enjoyment of the cake.

“So VoVo, are you getting excited for the concert?”

“What concert?” my father asked.

“With Mark the Marxist,” Lucy said.

“Not with Mark the Marxist,” I said.

“Mark was telling me that with your background, you could go to Dartmouth free of tuition,” my father said.

“I’m not going to either.”

“Why not?” Lucy asked.

“Do I get to have any business of my own?”

“Guys,” my mother said, and I was almost grateful.

My father shook Jack’s hand at the door as he and Lucy were leaving. “Ever read the Pali Canon?” he asked.

“Of course.” Jack turned to my mother and kissed her cheek. “Theravada will change your life.”

“I hope Ali meets someone as nice as you someday,” my mother said.

“And walks right on by,” I said.

That night I watched myself become married and professional. I hadn’t slept in a while, and it was one of those dreams where you watch yourself from so far away, the orb of your world appears flat. You are not seeing out of your body but at it. You are yourself but blonde. Yourself but older. You watch for a while before you know who this person is. That someone will do what you would never do, and you think: don’t hide in the closet; the murderer will find you.

I dreamed the future my parents wanted for me. Big, round, thinking, I gorged on cookies, couldn’t stop. I didn’t stop fattening until I woke up afraid that the dreams of my sleep were realer than the dreams of my waking. No, it couldn’t be. My future couldn’t be the one my parents would choose for me, the coupling and procreating. I thought of that first day on ice, telling Mrs. Swenson: I’m not afraid.

Three Dexadrine into the day, I was back. I’m not afraid, I repeated. I’m not afraid. I would keep my promise to meet Dorothy.

Sped to the point of four waking nights, I filled out dozens of college applications in five days. I was a new person. Amphetamines had reversed the arrow on the scale so that it resembled a backwards ticking clock. I was so convinced of myself I thought I could deceive my mother. I told her I wanted to spend time with my dear old cousin Mo.

“Why?” she asked.

“I thought you wanted me to make friends with the family, jump off bridges, that sort of thing,” I said. “Wasn’t it your idea for me to support Mo’s rehabilitation?”

“Since when have you ever wanted to do something that I wanted you to?”

“Since coincidence,” I said.

I wanted more drugs from John Doe. When I took the pills, I swallowed and soon felt like something was about to happen. I took two pills, and got out of bed. If I wasn’t studying for college entrance exams, I would run around in circles through the snow or mount numbers on the display of the stationary bicycle.

“You called him an obese idiot on Thanksgiving,” my mother said.

“Friends don’t let friends,” I faltered.

“Have self-esteem?”

“Delusions of tabescence,” I said.

“Tabescence?”

“The act of wasting away,” Salt was the trick Ryan had taught me once to not finish dinner. When you’d eaten enough to have energy to skate and little enough not to gain weight, you spilled salt on your food so it wasn’t edible. You had to pour enough that you couldn’t swallow. Otherwise, you’d just end up dehydrated.

“I’m not your father. You won’t get anywhere with me dropping obscure words.”

But I had the affair on her and nothing to lose. And ever since I’d received my college entrance examination scores, my father was back to bragging to gas station attendants. No one solves an analogy like Ali, he’d tell them, that sort of thing. We were getting along better than ever. He had even given me an extra two hundred dollars for my made-up trip to New York. In the car if I didn’t have much to say, I just repeated test preparations aloud. Precarious: not securely held or in position; dangerously likely to fall or collapse; or dependent on chance; uncertain. Doe is to deer as bitch is to dog.

“You want to take the test again?” he asked. He couldn’t believe it.

“I’m going back to nab those two wrong questions,” I told him. I was going for realism.

Even the school had been tricked. Where before my lids went limp with the weight of droning pedagogy, now every word I heard distinct and clear. Mr. Hammerling lowered my code from red to yellow after Mrs. Malester reported she had finally gotten through to me in our discussion of Madame Bovary. Feminist or villain? she’d asked. Spoiled bourgeois wife or victim of a world that withholds achievement? I ginned up verisimilitude in attacks of Emma Bovary’s mediocre middle class crimes, so they would see someone angling for the Ivy League.

All I needed to gain my life back was to lose another eight pounds and to check more boxes. I felt good, my knee pumping and my heart like a popcorn machine from uppers. Biology couldn’t cheat me of the Rube Goldberg life I was making, sending balls down ramps to hit mallets that opened trap doors and on and on.

I take the gold medallion of a butterscotch when the doctor offers me the bowl. Candy, to my chagrin, has become a small holiday from the bluish scent of hospital cleaning fluids and the flat foot shuffling of my confinement. Yes, this is what my life has been reduced to: enjoying the leisurely melt of mass-produced penny candy.

It must have been difficult for you to hear someone who you cared about deeply criticize something you loved, the doctor says.

If you’re referring to Mark, I never said that I cared.

Didn’t you? She unwraps a strawberry candy from its strawberry simulacrum wrapper.

He was a competent tutor, absolutely. Excellent grasp of Greek. The candy brings a spitty lisp to the phrase, and I grind it with my back teeth, recalling the deep drone of his voice: Am-, amat-, amor: love. Amic, — imic-: friend. A-, an-: not, without.