Inside the O'Briens

by Lisa Genova

  But the real reason Katie hasn’t risked having Felix stay at her place has to do with her parents, who live on the first floor of their triple-decker. Felix Martin is not a nice Irish Catholic boy from Charlestown. Felix Martin is from the Bronx and was raised in the Baptist Church. A real-live Protestant. And, oh yeah, Felix Martin is black.

  It’s the religion, Katie would like to believe, and not the beautiful color of his skin that her mom, in particular, would object to. It’s never been overtly stated, but Katie knows her mom expects her to marry a Murphy or a Fitzpatrick, someone similarly pale and freckled and baptized as an infant in the Catholic Church and, ideally, whose family is from Town and maybe even descended from the same village in Ireland. Wouldn’t that be lucky? Katie’s never understood what would be so gloriously fortunate about this fate. So she and her husband could hang their identical family crests on the wall? So they could trace their family trees back through the branches and find themselves hugging the same trunk? So she can marry her cousin? A nice Irish boy from the neighborhood, from a good Catholic family. This is the future her mom imagines for her. Her mom has certainly not imagined Felix.

  Her dad would probably be fine with both Felix’s race and religion. It’s his affiliation with New York that wouldn’t sit well. Felix is a passionate fan of the Yankees. He might as well worship Satan.

  So Katie has successfully steered her overnights away from Cook Street. Until last night. She and Felix went to a new vegan restaurant in Central Square. She had the most delicious vegan pad thai and too many basil lime martinis. It was late when they returned to Charlestown. Felix found a parking space on Cook Street, so it only felt natural that’d they go to her place. They didn’t even discuss it. He simply followed her to the front stoop and up the stairs.

  Meghan is already awake and gone. Katie heard the water running in the pipes and Meghan’s footsteps squeaking the hallway floorboards hours ago. She opened her eyes only long enough to register that her bedroom was still dark. Meghan has a matinee performance today at noon and before that a rehearsal, then hair, makeup, costume, and the painstaking process of preparing another pair of new pointe shoes.

  Meghan is the other reason Katie hasn’t been in a rush for Felix to stay over, and Katie’s more than a little relieved that Meghan isn’t home right now. For one, there’s the potential for either judgment or teasing, and as her older sister, Meghan has historically acted 100 percent entitled to either option. But the more subconscious and unflattering reason has to do with a jealous insecurity in Katie so deeply and long embedded, it might very well be congenital.

  Meghan always gets everything. She got the naturally skinny body, the prettier hair, better skin, better grades, the talent for dance, and the boys. Meghan always got the boys.

  Every crush Katie had in high school went unrequited because every boy she liked was crazy for Meghan. Everyone in Town is still crazy for her. Katie can’t go to the post office or the hairdresser or Dunkin’ Donuts without someone there telling her how wonderful it must be to have such a remarkable, accomplished sister.

  The Boston Ballet! Isn’t that something? Yes, it is. Now can we all please talk about something else?

  Her parents and brothers never seem to tire of gushing about Meghan to anyone who will listen, and they never miss her performances. Her mom has given Meghan a pink rose after every dance recital and performance since she was three. It’s their mother-daughter tradition. Meghan keeps the petals in glass bowls displayed all over their apartment. Homemade potpourri. Meanwhile, no one ever gives Katie flowers, she doesn’t have a mother-daughter tradition, and not one member of her family has taken a yoga class.

  Well, now Katie has the boy. Not Meghan. But if her life so far has taught her anything, Felix will take one look at Meghan and toss Katie aside for the better O’Brien sister. Lying in bed next to Felix, Katie can admit to herself that this fabricated drama sounds more than a touch paranoid and even preposterous, yet she’s still relieved that Meghan isn’t home.

  “So this is your place,” says Felix, lying on his back, looking at everything around them.

  Katie yawns, trying to see her things as if they were new to her, how Felix might be interpreting her purple bedspread and floral sheets, her childhood dresser and collection of Hello Kitty figurines, her fuzzy throw rug from Pier 1 Imports, the cracks in the plaster walls that spread like river tributaries from floor to ceiling, her cheap, once-white window shades yellowed like old teeth, and the tacky green curtains her mother made and recently ironed.

  “I like all the quotes,” he says.

  “Thanks.”

  She’s handwritten twenty-one inspirational quotes on her walls with a black Sharpie. Most come from the mouths of master yogis such as Baron Baptiste, Shiva Rea, and Ana Forrest. There are also quotes from the poems of Rumi and the teachings of Buddha, Ram Dass, and Eckhart Tolle.

  When she was growing up, her mom used to try to feed her spiritual wisdom from the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but those words left her feeling hungry. Too many of the Catholic psalms passed right by Katie’s ears, unabsorbed, discarded as outdated, esoteric, irrelevant. She couldn’t relate. Through the spiritual teachings of yoga, Buddhism, and even poetry, Katie has found the words that nourish her soul.

  Plus, yoga teachers love quotes—affirmations, intentions, words of enlightenment. Yoga is about creating balance in mind, body, and spirit so that life can be lived in peace, health, and harmony with others. The quotes are quick cheat-sheet reminders to focus on what matters. Whenever Katie’s thought DJ gets stuck on a negative playlist, she borrows from a quote on her wall, consciously replacing her own default doom and gloom with prepackaged, time-proven positive words of wisdom.

  She reads:

  “You are either Now Here or Nowhere”

  —Baron Baptiste

  “I especially like your bed,” Felix says with a devilish smile, and kisses her.

  Her bed once belonged to a woman named Mildred, the sister of their neighbor Mrs. Murphy. Mildred actually died in this bed. Katie had been completely skeeved out by the prospect of inheriting Mildred’s bed, but she’d been sleeping on a futon mattress on the floor, and Mrs. Murphy was offering it to her for free. What? You gonna turn down a perfectly good free bed? Katie’s mother had said. Katie had wanted to argue that a woman had just died in it, so it wasn’t exactly perfectly good, but Katie was broke and in no position to argue. She smudged it with incense every day for weeks and still prays to Mildred each night, thanking her for the comfortable place to sleep, hoping she’s happy in heaven and that she won’t be visiting for any naps or slumber parties. She’s surely rolling over in her grave right now if she can see the naked black Protestant in her bed. Katie kisses Felix and chooses not to tell him about Mildred.

  “I feel bad that we skipped class this morning,” says Katie, carting out her guilt.

  She learned guilt right along with her manners. Please. I want something. Guilt. Thank you. I have something. Guilt. I’m kissing a beautiful naked man in Mildred’s bed while my oblivious parents watch TV two floors below me. Guilt. The ability to attach guilt firmly by the hand to any positive emotion is a skill cultivated by the Irish, a fine art admired even more than Meghan’s pirouettes. Katie’s been fully awake for about five minutes, and guilt is already sitting wide-eyed at the table, grinning with that shiny crown on its head.

  “We had some spiritually enlightening exercise last night,” Felix says, smiling, flashing the dimple in his left cheek that she’s crazy for, hinting at another go.

  “I’m starving. You hungry?” she asks.

  “Ravenous.”

  “You want breakfast or lunch?”

  “Either. Whatever you’ve got.”

  Oh. She was thinking of getting out of her apartment, maybe going to Sorelle’s. Last night in the safety of the late, dark hour and with a few martinis a
t the helm of her normally tightly navigated ship, the possibility of bumping into her parents seemed like a faraway continent. But now it’s well into the next day, and her mom could easily pop by to say hello or to have a cup of tea or simply to remind her that it’s Sunday and supper is at four o’clock, as it always is. Her dad could be out on the front stoop, walking Yaz. Shit.

  Katie looks over at her alarm clock. Her mother probably won’t come up. She suppresses the urge to hustle Felix out before they’re caught and instead dresses in underwear and a Red Sox T-shirt. Felix throws on his boxers and follows her down the narrow hallway into the kitchen.

  Her apartment has the same footprint as her parents’ unit, the house she grew up in, and it’s similarly lame. Worn, dirty-looking-even-after-mopping linoleum floor, a Mr. Coffee on the avocado-colored Formica counter, a secondhand kitchen table, and two mismatched chairs. No stainless steel, no soapstone, no espresso machine here. Not like Felix’s place. His bedroom, kitchen, and living room feel so mature, so independent, so real.

  He’s a bit older, twenty-five. JJ’s age. He has an MBA from Sloan and works in business development for a start-up company that turns trash into fuel. He makes a lot more money than she does.

  She stands in front of two open cabinets, not finding much, wishing she’d grocery shopped yesterday.

  “Granola and bananas okay?”

  “Sure,” says Felix, having a seat at the table, tipping his head to examine the pictures magnetized to the fridge door.

  “Herbal tea or coffee. The coffee won’t be any good.”

  “Tea is good. Those guys your brothers?”

  “Yeah, that’s JJ on the left, Patrick on the right.”

  She wishes she had the money to fix this place up. Yoga instruction, she’s realized, is an “in-debt career.” She teaches five classes a week and makes six dollars a head, capping at seventy-two dollars a class. Even if she manages a handful of Toonie privates or a bachelorette party here and there, she barely makes enough to pay rent and eat. She still waitresses on the side, but it doesn’t change her life. Plus there are the expenses—yoga clothes, music for class playlists, books, attending workshops and retreats. That may not sound like much, but it’s enough to put her in the red when she makes only four hundred dollars a week. She could never afford health insurance. Thank God she’s healthy.

  “Which one’s the firefighter?”

  “JJ.”

  The only way out of this financially strapped existence is to open her own studio. But she’s friends with Andrea, the owner of Town Yoga, and Charlestown already has two studios. There aren’t enough bodies in this small neighborhood to support a third. Plus Andrea would be pissed. But Katie sees this as a sign rather than an obstacle, because it gives her the perfect reason to marry her dream of running her own studio with her other, bigger dream.

  Moving out of Charlestown.

  It’s not that she doesn’t appreciate having grown up here or love many aspects of living here now. She’s proud of being Irish. She’s proud of being stubborn and tough and street smart. Her cousins from the suburbs always seemed so spoiled and sheltered with their scheduled, supervised play dates and Martha Stewart summer camps. Charlestown is real life in the real world. There’s no Pollyanna bullshit here, and Katie’s grateful for that.

  It’s just so insular. Everyone knows everyone here, and no one ever does anything or goes anywhere outside of a few square blocks. Seriously.

  Every weekend before Felix, she was either at the Warren Tavern, Sullivan’s, or Ironsides, and really it’s always Ironsides. Outside of her immediate friends, she’s JJ’s little sister or Officer Joe O’Brien’s daughter or the dancer’s sister or even Frank O’Brien’s granddaughter, God rest his soul. It’s the same people week after week, complaining about the same things—parking spaces, the Yankees, the weather, the revolving-door drama of who is hooking up or breaking up, and they’re always talking about the same cast of characters, guys they’ve all known since they learned how to tie their shoes. If she doesn’t do something drastic, she’s going to end up like everyone else here—married to an Irish Townie, saddled with a handful of freckled, copper-headed kids, still living upstairs from her parents.

  The teachings of yoga have opened her eyes to concepts and possibilities beyond St. Francis Church and this tiny Irish neighborhood—Buddhism, Tibet, the Dalai Lama, Hinduism, India, Bhakti, Sanskrit, Shiva, Ganesh. The philosophies of a vegan diet and Ayurveda introduced a new mindfulness around health and eating, choices other than bangers and mash and blood sausage. She grew up with the Ten Commandments, a list of Thou Shalt Nots that insisted on obedience motivated by a fear of hell and God’s wrath. The Eight Limbs of Yoga offer a gentler code for living soulfully. Unlike the domineering Thou Shalt Nots, the yamas and niyamas are reminders to connect with her true human nature, to live in peace, health, and loving harmony with everyone and everything. She mumbled along to the hymns in church as a girl because she knew the words and her mother insisted. Now she attends kirtans instead of mass and her heart sings.

  And the people within the yoga community, hailing from all over the planet, are so exotic to Katie—Asian, Indian, African. Hell, Californian is exotic to Katie. There are mala beads instead of rosary, Krishna Das concerts instead of Mumford and Sons, tofu instead of hamburger, kombucha instead of Guinness. She’s intuitively drawn to what she isn’t, naive and enthralled.

  She knows she’s only scratched the surface. She’s tasted a small sample of thought, tradition, and living foreign to the way she was raised, the way everyone here lives generation after generation without questioning, and her curious soul is hungry for more.

  She remembers being young, around seven or eight, and standing on the Freedom Trail, each sneaker on a brick, following the red line with her eyes as it snaked along the ground, out of Charlestown. To freedom! She didn’t know then that the trail simply went over the bridge and into the North End, another small ethnic neighborhood in the same city. In her imagination, the redbrick line was constructed by the same mason who designed the Yellow Brick Road in The Wizard of Oz, and so it obviously led to somewhere magical. When she was little, this magical place had houses with farmer’s porches and two-car garages and grassy yards with swing sets. It was a land with trees and ponds and open fields and people who weren’t Irish and who didn’t know her since birth.

  She still dreams of living somewhere over the rainbow in a different zip code with the space to breathe and create the kind of life she wants, a life not predetermined by where and how her parents or even great-grandparents lived. A life she chooses and freely defines, not one inherited from her parents. Someday.

  She’s a big “someday” talker. Someday, I’m going to own my own yoga studio. Someday, I’m going to live in Hawaii or India or Costa Rica. Someday, I’m going to own my own house with a yard and a driveway. Someday, I’m going to leave this neighborhood. Someday something great is going to happen.

  “Am I ever going to meet them?” asks Felix.

  “Who?”

  “Your brothers, your family.”

  “Yeah, sure, someday.”

  “How about today?”

  “Today? Ah, I don’t know if they’re around.”

  “What about this supper you always go to on Sundays? When am I going to get invited to that?”

  “Sweetie, you don’t want to come to Sunday supper, believe me. It’s a duty, it’s not fun. The food is horrible.”

  “It’s not about the food. I want to meet your family.”

  “You will.”

  “What is it? You ashamed of me or something?”

  “No, definitely no. It’s not you.”

  She’s about to pin the blame on her parents, on her mother’s Catholicism and her father’s singular obsession with Boston teams, or on Meghan’s irresistible feminine mystique, but then the real reason presents itself, cle
ar and unavoidable. She’s the reason. She’s standing in an old T-shirt and underwear, barefoot in her tiny kitchen, her feet cold on the dingy linoleum floor, and she doesn’t feel worthy of being with him. She’s practically twitching with discomfort over revealing this much of herself to him, as if the more of her he sees, the less of her he’ll realize there is. Her kitchen exposes her lack of sophistication, her bedroom a lack of maturity, her living room a lack of elegance. The thought of adding her parents and brothers and where she grew up, the real Charlestown, not the Pottery Barn Toonie version, of him seeing her lack of education and culture, the statues of Mary and Jesus and Kermit the Frog in every room and the jelly jars her parents use as glassware, makes her feel far more naked than she was ten minutes ago.

  And if he sees all of her, maybe he won’t love her. Boom. There it is. They haven’t said that word yet, and she’s sure as hell not saying it first. For all her yoga training in vulnerability and living authentically, she’s still a chicken. What if he meets her family and they’re incapable of embracing a Yankee-loving black Baptist, and he takes this into consideration along with the substantial list of everything else about her that isn’t perfect and decides that he can’t love her. She’s not worthy of his love.

  She’s standing at the counter with her back to him, pouring granola into mismatching bowls, thinking about Felix rejecting her, and her body doesn’t know the difference between the real deal and simply rehearsing this shit. It’s monkey-mind madness, and she knows better than to invest energy in this completely invented story, but she can’t help herself. She predicts their breakup in blow-by-blow, excruciating detail, always initiated by him, at least once a week and three times since they woke up today, every imagined split pulling more threads from her heart, knitting into a bigger, tighter knot in her chest.

  Coward. She should own who she is, where she’s from, and how she feels about him. She loves Felix. She should tell him and introduce him to her family. But the risk feels too big, the cliff too high, the chasm between what they have now and what they could have too wide. Like jumping could kill her.