Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

“Except the point is to get the hell out of life before it happens again,” she said. “Samsara. Am I right my little farro seed?”

“Loose, don’t you even know farro is a grain?” my father said.

“Grain, seed, what’s the difference? Anyway, I think it’s time for me to go to sleep. That little wiener really tired me out — and he’s not even up and running yet.” She returned drowsily to song. “He’ll wear an itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka dot bikini.”

“I will be praying for you and the baby,” my mother said as she stood above the hospital bed and made eye contact with the new father.

“And they kindly accept donations,” I said, drawing a giant heart in the air with my arm. “Unless they’re canned goods.” Lucy grabbed my wrist and kissed it in the fashion of corn on the cob. “I love you too,” I told her.

Postponed. She said the word, and I felt the gravity in my bones. It wasn’t never, which was a long time. But it wasn’t soon, as we’d planned, either. What delayed the trip wasn’t weather or a terrorist attack or any of the other airplane delays you hear about. It wasn’t a woman beginning labor right before the plane took off. She said she was doing it for me.

“It’s the opportunity of a lifetime,” Dorothy explained. She’d been awarded a grant that would send her to another continent to learn how food worked scientifically. She’d study under a chemist who had pioneered the field. “As in the This!” she qualified.

“Better than the That,” I said, but really, I had no idea what she was talking about.

“Hervé This!” she exclaimed. “As in The Father of Molecular Gastronomy! And I will be learning from him. I’d been feeling so long that something was missing, waking up and just lying there, thinking, and ?”

“I’m happy for you,” I said. “And I feel like roadkill too.”

“I knew you would. I need to do this to be the best me I can be before we meet. This This thing: it’s for you.”

“Maybe I could visit you in Europe.”

“You’re disappointed,” she said, ignoring the part about Europe. “You know I don’t have a choice.” She began talking about a new direction: college. She wanted to learn everything there was to know about chemistry and physics. In high school, she’d never been much for beakers and hot plates, but now she wanted a doctorate. “But first maybe I’ll take a detour to Spain! If I’ve studied with This, perhaps I could get an interview with Ferran Adria at elBulli. He, of course, prefers the term ‘deconstructivist.’ I guess you can make up your own words when you’re Ferran Adria!”

I stood in front of the mirror and listened. It became clear that I’d been leaning on the similarity of our cells for substance enough to hold onto, forgetting the limitations of the naked human eye and that all along this was someone I couldn’t even picture. I liked that Dorothy wanted to be something besides a woman, but the decision ossified quickly, and though I was afraid to say it at first, I imagined red windmills. I turned them blue, stopped holding my breath, and then, “Did you ever think about keeping me?”

“What?”

“When I was born,” I said. “Did you ever think about keeping me?”

“I was going places,” she said quietly. Places to go, people to leave; I watched a tremble in the mirror, but I didn’t feel it until I tried to speak again. Pools grew in the pink part of my eyes and the corners of my mouth would not still. If I could exercise sportsmanship, which is to say the graceful acceptance of loss, I could still be a family with her. If I could forgive quitting me, I wouldn’t have to quit her. You cannot leave someone without ever having been together, so how could I be left, unless in the sense of not being right?

“I think I understand,” I said. I didn’t want to lose the mother I’d never had.

“You think,” she said. “You think!”

“Yes,” I said. “I approximate understanding, i.e. I think.”

“This isn’t a thought. This is reality. If I had kept you, then I never could have been proud of myself. I would never have had any life at all.”

“What about my life?”

“What about yours, Ali? You’re fine. You’re grown. You’re healthy. You’re happy.”

“How do you know? We didn’t speak for seventeen years.” I wasn’t happy.

“And if I had kept you, I wouldn’t have my Michelin star!”

“Not the star again.”

“I am not a bad person. I am improving a necessity of life! And that, the scope of it, the cuisine, that’s more important than you. You are only one life. I’ve fed thousands.”

“No, you are not a bad person,” I said. “You are a person with only one in a rubric of three. You don’t even have two stars, and two is only ‘worth a detour.’ Well, what can I say except that I trust Michelin? You are neither ‘worth a detour’ nor ‘worth a special journey.’ I’ve lived seventeen years without you and wouldn’t care if those years doubled. Goodbye.”

For a few minutes after, I hoped the phone would ring. An apology would not unsay anything, but it would make space to say more, say it better. I watched the clock. No refrain came. I was the only one looking back in the mirror.

Suddenly, I felt a sense of momentum building and carrying me away from them, all of them. I was unhinged from their histories, the mothers and fathers whose commitments came and went like menstrual periods. Only I was the same. Only my love stayed.

Mark was right: always the skating.

Up until that night, the night after Lucy’s labor, I had been just another face in the circle. I wore a nametag, sat in a folding chair, did as everyone else. But the problem with my new level of alertness was that I could now focus on what they were saying, and what I heard in the Prayer for Serenity was irresponsibility. I was reckless with all the excess. My heart was pattering like a reanimated rabbit’s foot charm. I was shimmering from the forehead with sweat in December.

It started around “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.” I didn’t mind “Living one day at a time; Enjoying one moment at a time;” but when the leader continued on to “That I may be reasonably happy in this life,” that’s when I asked if that was the best they could do. A roomful of heads turned toward me.

“Do we have a problem here?” the leader asked. He looked a little like Mr. Hammerling.

“We don’t. The rules do, and I’ll count them off for you: one, two, three, six, seven, eleven, and twelve.” Now that I thought about it, there were at least seven ways the whole program was the opposite of self-help. As far as I could tell, everything except steps four, five, eight, nine, and ten — the ones about admitting mistakes — had been delegated to God. “If you really believe you’re powerless over addiction, then why bother coming to meetings?” The room was so quiet you could hear the second hand on the clock outside in the hall, and from the circle of eyes narrowed in my direction, it was obvious I’d managed to become the most hated person at AA without even being an alcoholic.

The group leader cleared his throat. “Perhaps now would be the time to remind you of the first of the Twelve Traditions,” he said finally. “‘Our common welfare should come first; personal recovery depends upon AA unity.’”

“This isn’t patriotism. It’s rehab,” I said.

“If you’re so smart, what are you doing here?” a woman called from across the room.

“Him!” I said and pointed to Mo. “ I’m not the one with the problem.” Mo put his forehead in his hand.