Imagine Us Happy

by Jennifer Yu

  He stops just short of me. Takes me in.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  Kevin reaches out with one hand and runs it through my hair, then down the side of my neck, then over the curve of my shoulder and along my collarbone. A trail of goose bumps rises behind his fingertips.

  “You’re actually here,” he whispers.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I really missed you.”

  He steps in. Leans into me.

  “Stel,” he breathes.

  And then things are okay again.

  38.

  Dear Stella,

  I don’t know how to write this letter.

  Letters, you see, are supposed to be crafted. They’re supposed to have narrative arcs and messages and themes. Letters are supposed to have beginnings that reveal middles that flow into ends that—if it’s a really good letter, the kind that’s truly satisfying to read—somehow brings you back to the beginning again.

  I don’t have any of that. I have an apology. I have a surplus of feelings. Mostly, I just have fear.

  The truth is, Stel, that I have never been a particularly brave person, and that you make me weaker than anyone or anything I’ve ever encountered. When I’m with you, I feel like a six-year-old running around in a park, chasing bubbles, and he’s finally caught one. He is holding it in the palm of his hand. It is sparkling under the sun, and in that moment, he is absolutely certain that he is the luckiest little boy alive in the entire universe. The idea that this bubble is a third, maybe half, of a second away from popping doesn’t even occur to him—because he’s six, and six-year-olds don’t think like that.

  The problem, I suppose, is that I’m not six, and I do think like that, and I am painfully aware that that bubble is fragile. It’s unstable. In a few moments, the wind will pick up, and the bubble will pop, and there will nothing left on this child’s hand to suggest that he once held a miracle atop his palm other than, perhaps, the slightest trace of liquid.

  When I stormed out of your room the other day, it wasn’t really about you staying over my house on Friday night. Which is not to say that I didn’t actually want you to stay over, because I did. Of course I did. If I could control time, we would exist in the hours between midnight and daybreak on the nights you stay over, when the entire universe feels so incredibly small, and nothing Beckett or de Beauvoir has ever written could change that.

  But that wasn’t what I was thinking about as I left. I was thinking about the future. About how in a few months, I’m going to be leaving Wethersfield; how one year after that, you’re going to be leaving Wethersfield; how the relationship that we’ve created between the two of us, like all relationships, is a function of so many different variables that—through some confluence of coincidences—all lined up at the same time to give us what we have now. But these variables are always changing, and I cannot, no matter how hard I try, imagine a future in which the bubble does not pop.

  I know that it must seem that I am being awfully callous. Please believe me when I say that I have tried to think otherwise, and my inability to do so—to treat the best relationship I’ve ever been in like every other normal human would instead of like a ticking bomb waiting to detonate—kills me, it really does.

  I guess what I want to say is that I am not asking you to forgive me, or even to understand. I just think that you deserve to know. When I left the other day, it wasn’t because of you, or Katie, or whether or not you could stay over that Friday. It was because every time we argue, there is a part of my brain that insists that every word thrown in anger and desperation is futile, anyway, so why even bother; and every time you make me laugh, or I kiss you the way I know you like to be kissed, that same part of my brain says that this is all just going to make the inevitable collapse more painful, so why even bother with that, either? And every time either of those things happens, I am struck with the knowledge that I will come back, over and over again, despite it all. Despite myself. Because I cannot stay away.

  As I said, Stel. You make me weak.

  There’s one more thing that I want to write about. And I can already picture you rolling your eyes as you read this, but that one thing is a quote from Albert Camus.

  Bear with me for a second. Let me explain.

  In 1942, Camus published an essay called The Myth of Sisyphus. At the crux of the essay is Sisyphus, a figure from Greek mythology whom you may remember from freshman year World Literature (although no one could fault you for not remembering, because that class was a fucking bore).

  Sisyphus was a mortal king who represented the best and the worst of humanity: he was clever and quick-witted, but he was also deceitful and arrogant. He made chess pieces out of the living and fools out of the gods, and was punished accordingly. Sisyphus was condemned to spend all eternity rolling a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down again.

  So what does Camus say about Sisyphus? Surely, you think, the entire essay is just one long depressing treatise about how all of our lives are just as futile as Sisyphus’s eternal labor, how our boulders may take many forms these days, but they are just as heavy and our mountains just as lonely. And you’d be right. Camus is using Sisyphus’s eternal condemnation as a metaphor for man’s perpetual, fruitless search for meaning. But his conclusion isn’t what you might expect. He writes:

  “I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He, too, concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

  I read this passage for the first time a couple of years ago, and I must admit that it was all a bit wasted on me. I pictured Camus at his writing desk, certain in the knowledge that there was no meaning to be found in this world or the next, striving desperately for some note of optimism. Perhaps the idea that Sisyphus could smile in the face of his eternal damnation was the best Camus could come up with at the time. How ironic, I thought. Albert Camus, struggling to relieve the weight of his own boulders.

  I thought about this essay for the first time in years last week, a couple of days after we argued. It was two in the morning. I was lying in bed, unable to fall asleep, thinking about how I’d been such an idiot, how perhaps none of it mattered in the end, anyway. And then the thought came to me, unbidden, out of nowhere: one must imagine Sisyphus happy.

  Half-delirious from frustration and sleep deprivation, I got my phone from across the room. I Googled the quote. I reread the essay.

  And you know what, Stel? It made sense this time. Camus’s words, which I had discarded with an eye roll back in freshman year, were sharply, almost painfully resonant. This idea that we must all reconcile ourselves to the absurdity of existence, but that we can and must all be happy in spite of that knowledge, took hold of me. That the victory comes not in denying the reality that lays ahead, but in accepting it with defiant goodwill. That we must.

  imagine.

  Sisyphus.

  happy.

  I want to share that thought with you, Stel, and I want to tell you that I do. I do imagine Sisyphus happy. That despite knowing what will come, my eyes are still cast toward the heights and my heart is full of love for you.

  Yours,

  Kevin.

  42.

  If you had told me that one month into the second semester of junior year, I’d be standing in front of Jeremy Cox’s house at 8:00 p.m. on a Saturday night with a baby in my arms and a backpack full of diapers, I’d have laughed. “Doorstep of a varsity athlete? Evidence of sexual activity? Good joke, but I think you’re looking for Katie.”

  But I guess these are the kinds of things that happen w
hen you subject yourself to four years of Principal Holmquist’s renowned Bridgemont Curriculum—or, at least, what happens when your parents willingly subject you to four years of the Bridgemont Curriculum without really ever asking you for your opinion on the matter. I have a year and a half of high school left. By the time I graduate, I won’t have learned anything about filing taxes, finding a doctor or balancing a checkbook (do people still use checkbooks?). But worry not, because I will have completed a two-month unit in health class in which I raise a fake baby with a partner whose name I drew out of a hat. Because that’s how it works in the real world.

  Jeremy answers the door wearing a generic Under Armour T-shirt and sweatpants, which is an outfit that would scream I’VE GIVEN UP ON LIFE AND AM MAILING IT IN on any normal human being. But this is Jeremy Cox we’re talking about, and he’s six-one, with biceps that actually look like they might be carved out of marble, and as he turns around I realize that his generic Under Armour T-shirt has his last name emblazoned across the back of it. So I guess what I’m saying is that it works on Jeremy, a fact which goes from a source of great surprise to a source of great resentment in my head in about thirty seconds. No one should look good in sweatpants.

  “Hey, Stella,” Jeremy says. He takes the baby rocker out of my hands the second I’ve stepped into the foyer—who says chivalry is dead?—and looks at the baby inside of it with a vaguely bemused expression on his face. “And hey to you, too, I guess.”

  I can hear his parents’ voices drifting up the stairs from another room in the house as we make our way up to the second floor. Which is weird. It’s weird that I’m at Jeremy’s house and it’s weirder that I’m accidentally listening to his parents talk about whose turn it is to go to the grocery store tomorrow and it’s weirdest of all that the two of us—Jeremy Cox, Bridgemont hero whose talents include catching a rubber ball and shotgunning beers at house parties, and me, Bridgemont liability whose talents include ditching therapy and dissolving into hysterics for arbitrary reasons—are now supposed to raise a fake child together.

  “Hi,” I say, instead of any of that.

  “Thanks for coming over to work on the project,” he says. He leads me into his room and puts the baby down on his bed. Then he falls onto the bed with an easy, controlled grace and sprawls out on his stomach.

  “No problem,” I say. Then, when he doesn’t respond: “Nice room. Um, lots of trophies.”

  There are trophies everywhere. On his dresser. On his desk. On shelves nailed to the wall. Jeremy has more trophies than I have accomplishments to my name, which is equal parts completely unsurprising and vaguely disheartening.

  “Oh,” Jeremy says. He smiles, and he almost looks embarrassed. “It’s really not that impressive. Half of these are from middle school, you know, when everyone gets a trophy just for showing up to practice. But my mom gets mad at me when I try to take them down, so...”

  He shrugs, then adds: “Sorry it’s such a mess in here.”

  “A mess?” I say blankly.

  Jeremy points to his floor.

  “That’s not a mess,” I say. “That’s literally just four socks. If we were in my room and I said, ‘Sorry it’s such a mess in here,’ and then pointed at the floor, you wouldn’t even be able to see the floor. It’s practically sterile in here.”

  Jeremy laughs. “Do me a favor,” he says. “Say that a bit louder when you’re leaving later tonight. Like, loudly enough that my parents can hear you.”

  Now Jeremy’s got this grin on his face, right, that makes him look like he’s just been caught doing something against the rules but he knows he’s going to be able to get out of it, and that’s when it hits me that Jeremy Cox is really, really good-looking. Like, it takes me a couple of seconds to process what he’s said, because for a moment I’m just staring at his face and wondering how it could be possible for someone to be that hot, and—even more bafflingly—how it could be possible that I’ve never noticed this until now. I guess I was always so busy desperately avoiding any and all conversations about topics ending in the suffix “-ball,” and resenting the existence of people like Jeremy for making it freaking impossible to avoid said conversations, that I just never really looked.

  And I’m not saying that all of a sudden I’m, like, totally overcome by lust for Jeremy Cox, because—hundreds of trophies and good bone structure aside—he’s still a guy who spends a solid twenty-five percent of his waking hours playing a silly game and slapping people’s butts in encouragement. But I guess, three and a half years late, I am finally starting to understand why Katie spent an entire two months in our freshman year doodling Jeremy’s name in her chemistry notebook instead of memorizing the many real-world applications of the ideal gas law.

  Fortunately for me, I don’t have too much time to revel in my newfound appreciation for Jeremy’s dark brown eyes and jawline, because our baby chooses this moment to sputter three times and then start crying in earnest.

  “Oh,” Jeremy says.

  “Oh,” I repeat.

  “It’s crying,” Jeremy says.

  “She, I think,” I say.

  “She’s crying,” Jeremy amends.

  “Maybe we should name her,” I say.

  “Will that make her stop crying?”

  The crying gets louder. I must admit that as creepy as this baby is—with its uncanny valley rubber face and huge, unblinking black eyes—the crying is remarkably, ear-splittingly realistic.

  “How about Ashley? Alex? Amy? Aria? Should I move on to B names?”

  “Uh,” Jeremy says. He is staring at our now-wailing baby with the expression of man who will never have guilt-free sex again.

  “Bridget? Bethany? Betsy? Betty? Beatrice?”

  “Those don’t even sound like real names,” Jeremy says. “The last time I met a Beatrice was when I had to volunteer at that nursing home in Hartford to get my ten mandatory community service hours.”

  “Candace. Camilla. Christina. Caroline. Catherine with a C.”

  “Rest in peace, Beatrice,” Jeremy adds sadly.

  “Demi. Diane. Diana. Debby. Danielle. Dasha.”

  “Suddenly I’m feeling a lot of pressure,” Jeremy says. “This is the name that our hypothetical child will be stuck with for the rest of her life. Do we really want to give her a name like Debby?”

  “Erin. Emily. E...bby? Damn, there really aren’t a lot of E names out there, are there?”

  “I like Emily,” Jeremy says.

  “Great,” I say.

  “Emily,” Jeremy says, in a very reasonable, adult tone of voice, as if trying to coach a particularly stubborn five-year-old into throwing a spiral. “Please stop crying.”

  I stare at him blankly for a second. “You didn’t pay attention during class, did you?”

  “Uh,” Jeremy says.

  I walk over the baby—Emily, I tell myself—and tap the wristband we were all given in health class to her chest. The wristband beeps twice, signifying that Emily now knows that I’m here. Emily keeps crying, presumably because even an infant is smart enough to know that I am ill-equipped for motherhood.

  “You do it,” I say. “Maybe she’ll be happier to know both her parents are here.”

  It takes Jeremy two minutes to fish his wristband out of his backpack. With every second, it seems like the crying grows louder. By the time he’s finally found his wristband and tapped it to Emily’s chest—without even bothering to put it on; that’s how I know that the sound is driving him nuts, too—I’m starting to wonder why anyone would willingly subject him-or herself to a baby.

  “It’s not working,” Jeremy says.

  “Because we suck,” I say. “I wouldn’t stop crying if we were my parents, either.”

  Jeremy looks helplessly at me.

  “Okay,” I say. “The next thing Mrs. Croux said to try was rocking her. So... I guess...let’s do that
.”

  I try to move the rocker back and forth in a soothing rhythm, one that says, I’m here, don’t worry, as opposed to what’s actually going through my head, which is more like, Please, for God’s sake, stop fucking crying. But I guess I’m doing a poor job of keeping my agitation from filtering into my rocking technique, because Jeremy pulls my hand off the rocker and says, “Here, let me try.”

  He rocks Emily once, twice, three times, and then—all at once, almost miraculously—she stops crying.

  There is a brief moment of deafening, ringing silence.

  Then—with the same frozen, wide-eyed expression on her face—Emily giggles.

  “How disturbing,” I say.

  Jeremy sighs, relieved, and flops back down onto the bed with the baby clutched in one hand. “Thank God,” he says.

  I sit down next to him, and he folds his legs at the knees so that I have more room. “Thank God,” I agree, scooting backward until my back is pressed up against the wall. “But what if it hadn’t worked? How long are we supposed to rock this baby for before we give up and just throw it out the window?”

  “Her,” Jeremy corrects.

  “How long are you supposed to rock this baby before we give up and just throw her out the window?” I say.

  “Stella, I don’t think you should throw our child out of the window.”

  And then, as if she’s been listening this entire time, Emily starts crying again.

  43.

  It is ten at night, and Jeremy is standing in my kitchen.

  Jeremy’s not the only one. My parents, who now spend the majority of their days (a) furiously avoiding each other, and (b) furiously denying to me that they are avoiding each other, are standing next to each other with matching expressions of steely resolve—united by a common cause for the first time in months.

  That common cause is lying in a baby rocker on the table in front of us. And she is wailing.

  “Was I like this?” I say to my mom. It’s Jeremy’s turn to rock Emily at the moment, and we’re all staring at him with the grim expressions of those who know that he will fail, and that after he fails, it’ll be our turn. “Because if so, I am so, so, so sorry. I swear I didn’t know better.”