The Theory of Opposites

by Scotch, Allison Winn

  Nicky made it safely to Palo Alto two days ago, and now I’ve been left to face the utter aloneness of my situation. I wake up to silence; I make my coffee in silence; I check Facebook in silence.

  Accept.

  Ignore.

  Deny.

  I still haven’t written Theodore back, though I’ve googled “testicular cancer” enough to apply for a grant at the AMA.

  I offered Oliver our spare bedroom but he grinned — evidently not too, too concerned about the FBI investigation into the funding of the Kalumdrali Retreat — and said the Tribeca Grand was comping him. All friends of Jennifer get comped, he said. So I took a stab in the dark and said, “Lopez?” and he said, “Aniston,” and Raina said, “Of course.”

  Nicky emailed yesterday that Palo Alto was “kind of cool,” but that there were a lot of people who thought they were really granola who drove Priuses but who also wore Rolexes and fancy yoga clothes all day, and “he found that kind of fucked up.” I naturally responded and corrected his language, but he just replied and said, “Aunt Willa, this zipline in Uncle Shawn’s office is fucking awesome!” And attached a picture of himself hanging ten while soaring over Wired2Go’s open floor plan.

  I didn’t write back and rebuke him because I’m not the kid’s mother, after all.

  “Hello, are you listening to me?” Vanessa asks, as we stop at the crosswalk on Central Park West. It’s a grim late June day in the city. All low clouds and gray lines, the humidity swaddling the hurried New Yorkers as they scatter every which way. But I didn’t have anywhere to hurry to, no one to hurry with.

  A red-faced toddler marches up next to me and punches my calf.

  “Ow!”

  I look down and see him, unrepentant. He narrows his eyes, like I’ve done something in his short, miniature life to offend him.

  “Sorry,” his mom half-heartedly apologizes. “You know how it is.”

  The light turns, and just before we step forward, the boy slugs me again.

  “Jasper!” the mom reluctantly reprimands him as Vanessa and I leave them behind.

  I glance back, just before we enter the park and see little Jasper screaming on the corner, his mother pulling him in for a hug. Motherhood is complicated, I decide. You can tell a kid not to use “fuck” all you want, but that doesn’t mean it will change anything, that he’ll actually listen.

  “Seriously, Will, hello! Have you heard anything I’ve said? This is important.” Vanessa is now a half-step ahead of me, her ponytail swooshing through the air to match her stride.

  “What? No. I’m sorry.”

  She stops suddenly, and I lean over and massage my calf.

  “Willa, I’m serious: are you committed?”

  I want to say: Committed? To what? Meadow Air? Can they find a spot for me? A nice bed to lie down on and sleep for a hundred years?

  “To the book?” I ask instead.

  “Yes, to the book. To embracing the ‘theory of opposites.’ To running counter to your dad’s ideas. To daring yourself to run counter to them in the first place.”

  “I am,” I answer, though I don’t think either of us really believes it.

  “So what is the one thing you hate more than anything in the whole world?” She resumes her pace.

  “Pâté. I find pâté to be truly revolting. Also, recently, sea bass. Bad associations with sexual imagery of my parents.”

  Vanessa halts again, rests her hands on her waist and dips her chin to her chest.

  “This is going to be much harder than I thought.”

  “What? You asked! I really, really hate pâté! And sea bass!”

  “I had something else in mind.” She squints toward the sun, the light reflecting off her cheeks like she’s some sort of goddess. “Pack your bags. Be ready in the morning.”

  “Disney World? Because I’ve been surprised with that before. It’s less great than you’d think.”

  “No.” She shakes her head but smiles. “Come on, this book has nothing to do with fairy tales.”

  —

  Excerpt:

  New York Times bestseller, Is It Really Your Choice? Why Your Entire Life May Be Out of Your Control

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  SECTION ONE: EMBRACE THE MASTER UNIVERSE WAY

  Summary: Throughout the book, you will hear me refer to what I call the Master Universe Way. Others will choose to call this “God’s plan,” or perhaps “divine intervention,” or simply, “that what will be will be.” Please know that while my preferred term is MUW, and should you choose to sign up for our online course — Master the Master Universe Way! — that you will be asked to use our preferred phrasing, any name or title or moniker that you choose to give this phenomenon of “God’s plan” while reading this book is a-okay with me.

  SECTION TWO: ACCEPT INERTIA

  Summary: Do not swim upstream! Life already knows where you are headed. Do not fight the feeling of being pulled in the direction to which you are meant. No good can come of this. Only heartbreak and failure come from jumping off a cliff. (And smattered innards too!)

  SECTION THREE: CLOSE YOUR EYES AND FOLLOW THE MAP

  Summary: Once you have accepted that you can embrace inertia, that you can be pulled wherever life pulls you, merely close your eyes, and your perspective will change — your senses will be heightened, you’ll no longer be afraid of the figurative dark! Once you stop fighting change, change will find you. You will feel calmer! More peaceful! As if you are being carried by both the stream and the wind, and you will land wherever these forces of nature deem fit. Let the map of life carry you…there is no need to get caught up in life’s confusing (and useless) detours!

  SECTION FOUR: BE WHAT YOU ALREADY ARE

  Summary: We are who we are. The saying is true. I don’t mean to imply that humans aren’t capable of evolution, because we learn to outgrow diapers, and eventually we don’t throw our food at the wall if we are displeased with it (though I have a few colleagues who do that too, dear readers!), but getting older should not be confused with getting wiser, and my research has shown me that who we are when we are born is more or less who we are when we die. All of which is an eloquent way of saying, I’m sorry to tell you that your stubborn mother-in-law will never change.

  SECTION FIVE: SET YOURSELF FREE

  Summary: No summary can be provided because no shortcuts are allowed on the road to self-freedom. Read the rest of the book (and of course, buy the workbook and corresponding CD set) to liberate your own true self!

  —

  “This is where we start,” Vanessa says, pointing to the table of contents of my father’s book that night. “This is where we run counter to his advice, where I dare you to try something different.”

  “Do I get to dare you to do anything? Because this seems a little unfair.” I chew on the inside of my cheek and think: this is more than a little unfair!

  “How do you run counter to ideas like ‘setting yourself free’?” Oliver asks. “Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s brilliant, but…impossible.”

  Oliver has begrudgingly agreed to apartment-sit while Vanessa and I are away — she has booked two tickets to Seattle in the morning. Though he’s also agreed to stay only if I allow him to rearrange the rooms to make them more in line with his feng shui. He adjusts an armchair in the living room, shifting it toward the window.

  I flip through the delivery menus rather than argue with him. He’s right: it’s not the dumbest idea in the world — set yourself free! Who can argue with that? It’s easy to see why so many millions embraced the book. Why Shawn cited it the day he left me. Don’t do anything — no hard work required! — and you’ll be happier. Yeah, sign me up too.

  Oliver squeaks the armchair another twenty degrees left, the noise like nails on a chalkboard. He steps back and angl
es his head, then clicks his tongue in approval.

  “What do you guys know about Mark Zuckerberg’s wife?”

  “Genius,” Oliver says.

  “Helpful,” I say back.

  “I know someone who knew her at Stanford. Why?”

  “Just curious.” I shuffle the menus. I can’t come out and say: “Shawn was tagged in a photo with her yesterday on Facebook,” because I’m not supposed to be stalking Shawn’s Facebook. But he was tagged with her, and so rather than stalking him, I googled her.

  What would Mark Zuckerberg’s wife order for dinner?

  “Anyway, can we get back to what I was saying?” Vanessa interrupts. She grabs the Indian menu out of my left hand. “There, decision made.”

  Oliver tuts. “No way. I’m not having Indian, not after having authentic Indian.”

  Vanessa says, “Oliver, do you ever know how big of a jackass you sound like?”

  He breathes in and breathes out before answering.

  “Vanessa, I’m so sorry that you must be so angry inside that you feel the need to take out that anger on others. Also, for your information, I am currently being investigated by the FBI, and I’d rather not eat Indian food, which brings back so many memories of my time in India, for which I am now being unjustly prosecuted.”

  “What?” Vanessa says.

  “The pyramid scheme. I only did it because my mentor asked me to invest! And told me that if I found four other people to invest, I’d make back $100,000! Which I’d planned to donate to Greenpeace, so it’s not like the money wasn’t going to a good cause. The Kalumdrali Retreat was named the third-best retreat in the world by Travel and Leisure! People were healed there. People were saved there.”

  Oliver sits down in the feng shui-ed armchair triumphantly, but then withers just a bit.

  “So, like, can I just order a pizza or something?” I ask.

  “Anyway.” Vanessa pivots toward me. “We’re going to construct our book around your dad’s table of contents. Instead of embracing inertia, we’re going to resist it. Like that. The theory of opposites!”

  She nudges the book across the counter to me. I skim it and bounce my shoulders.

  “Whatever. Sounds good. I don’t know.”

  She laughs, but then presses her thumbs into her temples.

  “I swear to God, Willa, if you don’t know something by the time we’re done here, then maybe your dad will actually be proven right.”

  13

  The first thing you see when flying into Seattle is mountains. Miles of snow-capped mountains, which then give way to meandering, lovely, lingering bodies of water, greenery for miles, and what looks like, even from above, a perfect landscape of a city. They call it the Emerald City, and it’s easy to see why. Flying in, I felt a little bit like I was careening toward Oz.

  “Remind me again.” I clench Vanessa’s forearm as we hit a violent pocket of air. “Why Seattle?”

  “Because you haven’t left New York in almost four years,” Vanessa says.

  “That’s not true,” I reply. That can’t be true. Is that true? Shawn and I honeymooned in Hawaii. And then what? The air calms, and I feel my pulse slow, and I try to recall what other adventures I’ve tripped down since marrying Shawn. Finally, I remember. “We went to D.C. for that conference Shawn had.”

  “D.C. doesn’t count. D.C. is an extension of New York, just with political junkies, not finance junkies.”

  “Fine,” I say. “But still. Why Seattle?”

  I want her to say it — because of Theo — but she shakes her head and offers something murkier: “Because if you’d been more daring, you’d have moved here in another life, in your other life. Maybe in your new life.”

  I’d never move to Seattle, I think. It’s too green. And there’s so much coffee! And recycling! And…plaid! At least, I think Seattle’s all of these things. I really only know what I know from Grey’s Anatomy. And from googling it. I’ve never been here, but it’s not like I haven’t googled it, haven’t googled Theodore and wondered where he goes, what he does, what sort of company he keeps. (In fact, I googled him last night to see if our paths might cross, but the AP informed me he’s in New Orleans working with the Saints on a sexual harassment lawsuit.)

  He asked me to move with him from New York when he founded Y.E.S. — he thought that Seattle, with its up-and-coming tech community and its (arguably) better quality of life (if you like mountain climbing or bike riding or boating or green markets or skiing or general outdoor healthful activities, which I do not), proved too good to pass up. But I was twenty-four and didn’t trust myself. Seattle was too daunting, too far from my parents, too far from everything.

  Theodore and I met the day after I graduated from college. Vanessa and I were unloading our station wagon, dragging our boxes and our books and our Doc Martens and our half-drunk bottles of tequila (because college students would rather pack that than throw it out) up four stories to our walk-up on the Upper East Side, and he stopped to offer to help. It was sort of a self-serving offer since he lived in the apartment below us, and it was only in his best interest to get us in as quickly as possible, but still. He cruised up the sidewalk on his street bike, slung the bike over his shoulder, and grabbed a laundry bag stuffed full of dirty clothes in his free hand. “Come on,” he said. “Let me.”

  I liked him immediately, so when he invited us over for dinner that night, Vanessa begged off and insisted I go. He made gourmet omelets from a cookbook, which I thought was sort of charming, until they landed me in the hospital because he infused them with truffle oil, and I am actually one of the five people on the planet with a truffle allergy.

  But I think about that sometimes: how he rushed me to the ER when my lips blew up; how he calmed me without really knowing me when my breathing grew labored; how he didn’t even find me totally repulsive when my face developed a rash that can only be described as resembling the inside of a pomegranate. I think about it sometimes and consider that if he hadn’t made me an omelet, if he’d chosen spaghetti or warmed-up soup or thrown a steak in the broiler, and if he hadn’t dotted it with truffle oil, how I’d never have ended up in the ER and never fallen in love with him, right then, right there, with my lips the size of bananas, with my face dotted with a modern-day plague.

  He sat with me in the ER and said:

  “Maybe this is fate.”

  And I said: “You believe in fate?”

  And he said: “Actually, I don’t.”

  So I said: “Hmmm.”

  And he said: “But I do believe in truffle-infused omelets.”

  And I laughed (even with my banana lips) and said: “You’re a jerk.”

  And he laughed and said: “Yeah, but you like me anyway.”

  And then, three years later, he moved to Seattle. Got funding for Y.E.S., and asked me to take the leap with him. But Theodore was big and brave and daring in ways I never could be. In three years, I’d never ridden a bike with him (“What if a taxi side-swipes me?”), never learned to cook because I could just as easily order in, never considered that saying “yes” could actually change anything, even though he built his entire life around it. So he asked me, and I did what I always did: I stayed the course, and he, knowing me too well, I suppose, didn’t fight it. He left, and then I met Shawn two years later on Match.com, and then Theo got engaged, and then he lost a testicle and found me on Facebook.

  And now here we are. In Seattle, where maybe fate has meant to bring us all along.

  I stare out the rental car window.

  “Are you ready for this?” Vanessa breaks the silence.

  “For what?”

  “To start scaling mountains.”

  “You’re speaking figuratively, right? Because you know how much I hate the mountains.”

  She presses her foot to the gas.
“Which is exactly why we’re going up.”

  —

  Email from: Richard Chandler

  To: Willa Chandler

  Subject: This book

  Willa — I will get straight to the point. I have heard whispers (actually, Lana, my agent, has) that you are somehow involved in a book project that is intended to disprove my world-renowned theories and conclusions. Even worse, it is evidently tied to a REALITY SHOW!?!? Can this be true? Surely, it cannot be! Need I remind you that I was approached for a reality show by Simon Cowell, and that I turned it down after heated contract negotiations because reality shows are (I determined) the lowest common denominator in our society?

  I assured Lana that she must be mistaken, that no child of mine, however doubtful, would seek out a reality show, much less set out to prove my theories incorrect. (Amended: Raina might perhaps, but not you, not you, William!) Anyway, if I am somehow wrong and you have plans to publicly publicize your issues with my theories, please take a moment and consider the harm this will bring me and our family. Perhaps this email is unnecessary, since I know that in the end, what will be will be, and of course you wouldn’t put such a blight on my reputation (did I mention that CNN has asked me to be a full-time contributor! I am very excited — also Cowell has reapproached Lana with a much more lucrative offer, so we shall see), but I wanted to go on record all the same.

  Your mother has retreated to Palm Beach for a few weeks, and I remain in New York City. I have recently joined Match.com, which I am finding so very fascinating! I think there could be an entire dating book devoted to the inevitability of finding one’s spouse online. Would you be willing to contribute to it? The bounty of electronic dating is so plentiful! I find that my cup runneth over with prospects.

  Your father,

  Richard Chandler

  Richard Chandler

  Author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller, Is It Really Your Choice? Why Your Entire Life May Be Out of Your Control

  Agent: Lana Delaney, Creative Artists Agency

  Email: lifesplan@IsItReallyYourChoice.com

  —