Elizabeth Crane - The History of Great Things

What didn’t make the holiday letter at all: your father’s heart attack.

— Interesting.

— Really? I guessed right?

— No, but he was in the hospital. A heart attack — that’ll work. That sounds weird.

You drive out to Iowa City from Chicago several times a year now — it’s just four hours door to door — so when Jeannie calls from the hospital with the news about Fred, you’re able to get there later that same day without taking on any more credit card debt. The prognosis is good, assuming he changes his entire diet and currently non-existent exercise routine, but he’ll stay in the hospital for a week for observation. Your father is a different kind of patient from me, he’s a patient patient, he’s a patient who doesn’t hate the lukewarm beef broth or the pudding cups on his hospital tray ( Oh, these are delicious! Jeannie, can we get these at home? ), who’s content to catch reruns of old Westerns on network TV and read the back copies of Ramparts magazine that have been piling up at home.

—Ramparts hasn’t existed since the seventies, Mom, but whatever, I guess.

— But is it believable that he still has piles of them that he bookmarked in 1968 to read later?

— Yep. It sure is. Continue.

He would have never thought a thing of it if you hadn’t made it there, but the fact that you did, and that you stayed the whole week, spent every day next to his bed watching those Westerns that actually put you both to sleep at times, sharing the extra pudding he got the nice nurse to bring, meant more to him than he could ever tell you. You really didn’t have to come, Betsy. Dad, I would never not come. Well, it was extra-special nice of you. You’re a good daughter. I could improve. I don’t think a poll of my parents would indicate that to be fact. You’re a wonderful daughter, Betsy! Jeannie says. I fought with Mom when she was in the hospital. What? Oh, you’re exaggerating. Not really.

So I die, and you’re angry and sad and alone, and what comes home now is that you’re single and childless and you have about five minutes to fix that.

— Why does it have to be fixed?

— Are you happy?

— That’s not my point, Mom.

— I guess I have a couple of competing ideas for how it goes for you after this.

— You can say them both.

— That’s not how stories work.

— Stories work any way you want them to work.

— All right, well you can figure it out later. Maybe you’ll like one idea better than the other.

— Maybe I’ll like them both. But I doubt “like” would be the word I’d choose here.

Okay, good. In that case, in scenario one, after I die, you decide there’s no time to waste, so you sign up for a dating service and meet a nice man, Alan, who has some normal steady job with health insurance, which you need, and a nice house in the suburbs of Chicago. You get married and try to have a family right away, but you can’t get pregnant, so you have one of those medical procedures they do now where sometimes you end up having multiples, what’s that called, when they mix shit up in a petri dish—

— In vitro fertilization.

— you have that, and you have twin girls, beautiful twin girls. Before they’re born you knit them sweaters; I remember you had done that a few times over the years for gifts, the sleeves were a bit odd, made some baby quilts too. You fix up an old dresser like I showed you I’d done once. You get caught up in that for a while; you love the girls, of course, but as they get bigger and throw twin tantrums, or you fail to connect with them in that rhapsodic kind of way you hear so much about, greatest thing ever, you don’t know what love really means until you’re a mom, blah blah blah, it’s not even post-partum, it’s post — worst decision you ever made, or you try to join one of those mommy groups only to discover that whatever joy there is in having children is utterly desiccated by talking about having children, that you maybe have a three-minute window before you want to yell that you don’t give two shits about the details of a virtual stranger’s labor, or the tenor of some baby’s first burp, and from there it’s a short hop to realizing that you were not thinking clearly, getting involved with a man named Alan, that you could last long with an Alan, and so you tell Alan he’s better off without you and divorce the best thing that ever happened to you and leave the girls with him and move back to the city, but then you fall into a terrible depression since this makes you a horrible, horrible person. Eventually, though, you get a good therapist who prescribes meds, which is the other best thing that’s ever happened to you, and you meet a new man, Eduardo, a chef, and you live happily ever after.

— Three hundred and ninety words. For the whole rest of my life after you die? I abandon my children in less than four hundred words?

— The kids are fine. I gave you a happy ending.

— A guy.

— Don’t forget, there’s another scenario too.

— I understand, but still. Married, divorced, married again, and that’s it?

— What else do you want?

— Was getting married the end of your story?

— It was the best part of my story.

—. .

— Okay, one of.

— I didn’t have the sense that either of your marriages was so easy.

— Well, I wasn’t easy.

— I won’t argue with me-as-you saying that.

— It was better, though, yes. I needed to be married. But maybe you don’t. Are you married?

— I’m just trying to say — married or not married, maybe more than three hundred and ninety words?

— I did say I had more than one idea.

In scenario two, after I die, you also decide there’s no time to waste, but this time you focus on a career path. You still want to write, but don’t have the drive to make it happen, so you stick with teaching, taking a job at a preschool that eventually earns you some good raises and a promotion to assistant director, which is fine, if not anything more than fine, and after a decade or two of dating with poor results, despondent about not having found the right person, you decide to give it up altogether and become celibate. The end.

— Oh, come on. That’s a third as many words as the first scenario and in this one I’m alone and in a job I don’t really love.

— Do you want to be married or don’t you?

— I want you to imagine a life that I might really want and actually be able make happen. Loosely based on the information you already have.

— Just let me think about it for a while.

— Plus, do I not even grieve for you? I grieved for two sentences in scenario one and not at all in scenario two.

— I thought I covered it. But what is there to say about that?

— Are you kidding? People write entire novels about it.

— About grief? I wouldn’t want to read that. Who’d want to read that?

— People. Me.

— But why?

— Mom, why do we read anything?

— To escape.

— That’s only one reason. Not that I wouldn’t mind doing that right this minute.

— That’s my reason.