The Sad Truth About Happiness

by Anne Giardini

  Both of them were too absorbed to acknowledge my arrival. I fetched a third mug from a hook underneath the cupboard and joined them at the table. It was raining hard outside. Inside, despite Lucy’s woe, the kitchen was overwhelmingly its usual, cheerful self. White light spilled down from the six schoolhouse lights that hung in two rows overhead. The clean, milky light resonated around the room like a minor chord, erasing the shadows from the yellow walls. I got up and added milk to my tea from the jug in the fridge, then rejoined the weeper and the comforter at the table. Lucy blew her nose with one hand and reached over with the other and took the cup from me. She began, between sobs and hiccups, to take small sips from it. I picked up the cup that had been sitting in front of her, carried it to the refrigerator, poured in some milk, and then sat down again. Mother put her hand on my wrist.

  “There are some cookies in the tin,” she murmured. I set the cup back down on the table, got a plate, and piled it high with hermits, the only kind of cookie my mother makes—madeleines to her three daughters. Lucy likes to eat in sorrow and in happiness. She began to nibble on a cookie as soon as I put the plate in front of her. I sat down. Mother placed her hand on my wrist again.

  “Go and check on your father,” she asked. I picked up my cup and one of the cookies and carried them into the living room.

  My father was sitting in the ugly brown corduroy chair beside the window reading. The dim light of the late afternoon was supplemented by the glow of a 60-watt bulb set into a bridge lamp beside his chair. The lamp was a recent addition to the house. Janet had spotted it in a second-hand store. I had picked it up, cleaned the rust from the narrow grooves of its long stand, and polished the metal filigree. Ryan had rewired it. Lucy had dusted the old lampshade.

  “Thank you, darling,” my father said, looking up from his magazine. He raised his glasses to the top of his head and rubbed his eyes. His magazine fell onto his lap as he reached to take the cup and cookie from me.

  “I’m not sure when I’ll be able to start dinner. They’ll be in there a while yet, from the sound of it.”

  I sat down on the cracking plastic hassock in front of him and put my arms around my knees.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “She’s heard from Gian Luigi.”

  “And?”

  “Apparently he wants her back.”

  “With Ryan’s baby?”

  “So it seems.”

  “What is she going to do?”

  We sat looking at each other, knowing that, however much we might speculate, what Lucy would do would likely remain a mystery to us all even after she had done it.

  My father drank the tea and ate the cookie. We talked about the work Ryan was doing on the house, but both of us were keeping an ear tuned to the ebb and flow of voices from the kitchen.

  After half an hour, Lucy stopped crying, and I decided to risk going back into the kitchen to scramble some eggs. Mother and Lucy continued to talk, but they lowered their voices to a murmur. Lucy’s tone was plaintive. Mother’s was consoling. I took a bowl of eggs out of the refrigerator and cracked two each for me, Mother, and Father and three for Lucy. I found some onions at the bottom of the cupboard under the sink, sliced them thin, and started them over a low flame in a large knob of butter. I cooked the eggs until they were underset and creamy, then divided them onto four plates with slices of brown bread, toasted and buttered, and small mounds of spinach that I had found in a frozen lump in the freezer and reheated in a small pot with more butter. Father came up from the basement with three bottles of cold beer. I reached around my mother and Lucy and set a plate in front of each of them. I handed a beer to my mother and a glass of milk to Lucy, who looked at it dubiously.

  I carried the other two plates into the living room, where my father and I ate with our plates on our laps. His eyes stole back to his magazine, The New Internationalist, and I picked up a book from the coffee table and pretended to read it. It was about trade patterns in Africa and Asia, the problems of supply and demand, transportation and food preservation. I studied the diagrams and charts, but didn’t absorb any information from them. I was still trying to hear what was going on in the kitchen.

  At last, when I was on the point of abandoning my father and going home, my mother came into the living room carrying a tray. “Ice cream?” she offered. My father gratefully accepted a dish and my mother’s company. I observed how vividly he lighted up when my mother appeared, a man of sixty in love with his wife of almost forty years.

  At the end of my relationship with my first love, Chris, I had asked my mother if Dad ever told her that he loved her. “Every day,” she told me fondly, touching my cheek, her eyes soft, her pleasure in her husband expanding across her face. “Every day.” I remembered suddenly and guiltily the fog of misery I had felt then. It didn’t seem possible that I would ever achieve a lasting love like that, one that would guarantee a portion of tenderness every day of my life.

  After I had finished my ice cream, I took my dish into the kitchen, where I found Lucy standing beside the fridge, eating with a large spoon from the container of ice cream. Her empty bowl sat on the table.

  “Ice cream is a good source of calcium,” she said.

  “So I’ve heard. What did you decide to do?” I sat crossways in the chair my mother had abandoned.

  “I decided that it’s complicated.”

  “You had better tell Ryan soon, if you’ve changed your mind.”

  “I haven’t changed my mind.” Lucy rubbed her stomach, which was the size of a large squash. “I haven’t made it up yet.”

  “Yes, you have. You made up your mind when you left Gian Luigi, told him it was over, quit your job, moved back to Vancouver, and agreed to marry Ryan.”

  “That was then.”

  “What’s changed, Lucy? Why would you do this to Ryan?”

  “Gian Luigi thinks it might be possible for him to leave his wife after all, that he might be able to talk Ivetta into giving him a divorce.”

  “Is that what you want? Because if it is, you have to call it off with Ryan immediately. He’s making plans for both of you. For all three of you. He’s getting that house ready right now.”

  I felt horrified at Lucy’s self-serving reasoning, her careless readiness to set aside Ryan and his plans and work. Poor, steady, adoring, deluded Ryan, dancing and singing around his paint cans, tenderly patching plaster and repairing frayed wiring for a wife and child who might never move in.

  “And doesn’t Ryan even have a say? This is his baby too, after all.”

  “I haven’t made up my mind, Maggie.”

  “Well, you are just going to have to. Think, Lucy! There are a lot of people at stake here. Not only Ryan. There are also Gian Luigi’s children. How many did you say he has?”

  “Three. Claudio, Ugo, and Paula. Paula is five.”

  “Oh, Lucy.”

  “I know. I know. But I love him. And he loves me.”

  “Oh, love!”

  “What do you mean, ‘Oh, love?’ You make it sound like nothing.”

  “I am sorry, but what could be so irresistible, so irreplaceable, so enduring, so valuable about a love for the kind of person that would betray his wife and leave three young children?”

  Lucy drew in her chin and filled her lungs with air, but then deflated a little, and let her breath out slowly instead of using it as fuel to turn my question into rage, into an attack, an elaborate justification.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what to tell you. But I do love him all the same. He makes me happy.”

  “Oh, happiness,” I said, half scolding and half mocking—myself mostly, but her as well.

  Lucy sat down across from me at the table and smiled. Her right hand strayed to her stomach again.

  “Yes. Happiness.”

  Front Staircase

  Sleeplessness did not have any counterpart to anything I had experienced before in life, although, of course, I knew something about it from books I had read. I hav
e always, until recently, felt about books the way people of faith seem to feel about their gods. They form a sturdy wall against which I can lean, a platform from which I can spring. Books alone, among all the diversions and facts of the world, have almost never failed me. They give me perspective, and the sense of belonging and interconnectedness that spiritual people lay claim to.

  One night I found in my bookshelf and reread Kafka’s story “A Hunger Artist.” I wondered then for the first time, although I began to feel it more keenly as the days went on, whether, in the absence of any other art, I was becoming or had become a kind of sleep artist.

  In Kafka’s strange story, the hunger artist goes as long as forty days without food, fasting not only for the art of it, but for ambition, for fame, for the drama of self-denial. But just when he takes his art to a new level, seeking to magnify himself in complete self-erasure, the hunger artist confesses to a much less exalted motive. He explains that he simply “couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.” Kafka is disturbing, claustrophobic reading at any time, but this story made me uncomfortable. I tossed in my bed and wondered about the links between Rebecca’s test and my sleeplessness, about the ropey connections and inescapable parallels between sleep and death.

  In the middle of December, a thick layer of heavy snow fell suddenly during the night. Rain had been predicted, but just before midnight, the temperature dropped several degrees and the fat drops were transformed as they tumbled into elegant six-sided crystals, each a diminutive work of the finest tracery.

  Snow is rare on the West Coast, and I could not remember so much falling so quickly before. The snow was still falling, wet, heavy, abundant, and dazzling, when I left for work on Monday morning. Because Vancouver’s climate is moderate, the city keeps a minimal fleet of snowplows, which means that when it snows, only the roads deemed most essential are cleared. The cars parked on the street were buried in snow, caught fast in drifts that were higher than their bumpers. Few of them were likely to be going anywhere that day or the next.

  I joined a growing stream of workers walking to their jobs downtown. Many of the walkers were mincing between the snowdrifts in thin-soled shoes. I saw one man who had put a plastic bag around each of his shoes and fixed them in place with masking tape around his ankles. His feet slipped and skated alarmingly with each step. I strode along much more confidently in my hiking boots, the legs of my pants tucked into the waterproof gaiters that I had bought for the one or two times a year when Luba and I went cross-country skiing on the trails at Mount Seymour, warm in a red wool coat with toggle closures, one of my father’s thrift-store finds.

  There was little traffic on Davie aside from a few laboring, slow-moving buses, already overcrowded with passengers who had been forced by the unplowed snow to leave their cars at home. The windows of the buses were steamed over on the inside with the collective breath of the passengers and frozen over outside with long, linked, branching feathers of frost. Every now and then a small area would be rubbed clear by a gloved or mittened hand, but these openings blurred over and closed again immediately like ice reforming on the surface of a frozen pond.

  The usual blustering rumble of the buses was gentled by the snow. The sun shone. The other walkers formed a bright moving picture as they made their way along the sidewalks, dressed in vivid Gore-Tex, brilliant fleece and deep-hued wools, wrapped in multicolored scarves, shepherding tiny clouds of warm breath ahead of delighted, inconvenienced, isn’t-this-amazing-weather smiles and strawberry red cheeks.

  Near the corner of Burrard and Davie, I saw the girl who had once claimed I was a spiritual person. She lay sideways on the sidewalk, in a defeated curve, like a freshly rolled drunk. Her hands were tucked for warmth between her skinny thighs. I could see her face in profile under her lank hair, and I saw a new flatness to her expression, like a partly erased sketch. A dark brown area at the top her head had spread, as the badly dyed red-blond lengths of her hair had grown out, making the top of her head look like the center of a wild poppy surrounded by ragged coppery red petals.

  I felt a shock of disquiet. The girl was not dressed adequately. Her blanket was missing. She lay directly against the icy pavement. Her skin was mottled red, blue, and white. She appeared exhausted and ill. I hesitated, then stopped and squatted on my heels in front of her.

  “Are you all right?” Ridiculous question.

  The girl blinked at me very slowly, but she didn’t answer. The surface of her eyes was flat and glassy. Up close, she looked as if she were under water, drowning and freezing both at once, while people hurried past detouring to avoid her twisted knees.

  “I am on my way to the hospital,” I said, speaking loudly and slowly, as though the girl had gone deaf or spoke a language other than English. “I work there. Why don’t you come with me and let them check you over? You don’t look well.”

  She blinked again. Drugs? I wondered. A bad trip? Or had she been beaten, robbed? Her skin had gone dead white; the only color was a pale blue just under the surface, the thin shade of skim milk.

  “You can’t stay here,” I insisted. “You’ll freeze to death.” My voice was louder now, with the weight of the responsibility I was mustering. Several people passed us on the sidewalk; I imagined their relief at seeing that someone had acted, thus allowing them to walk by without any unpleasant tug of scruple.

  The girl’s eyes rolled up at me, and I realized with a shock that she was past being able to speak, much less make a decision for herself, that she would not be able to release me from having to take charge. I hesitated. The hospital was only two blocks away. It didn’t seem reasonable to ask one of the passersby to call an ambulance. But I certainly couldn’t carry her, and she looked too weak to walk, even with my support. I didn’t want to leave her. It seemed to me that her presence on the street was no decision, but the result of many betrayals and failures, of the absence of constancy, and I didn’t want to resemble even for a few minutes the many people who had abandoned her before.

  In a novel or a movie, someone would have come to my rescue, or the girl would have closed her blue fingers around my comforting hand, delivering herself up to my charge, perhaps struggled to her feet to allow me to support her the length of two city blocks, a feral cat tamed by milk and kindness. None of these occurred. After a minute or so of indecision, squatting there patting her cold hand both as an apology and as reassurance to us both, still unsure whether she was sick or letting some substance wear off, I noticed a small patch of red-black under her hip. The stain was growing slowly larger and redder. Blood. I felt my own blood respond by rushing with force into my face and hands.

  “I’m going to go for help,” I told her. “Don’t move.” I took off my coat and put it over her.

  “You,” I held my hand up toward the chest of a woman of about my own age who was about to step to one side to make her way around the girl on the pavement. “You stay here with her. I’m going to call an ambulance.”

  I sprinted across the street, leaving the woman and girl together. I looked back once and saw the woman obediently standing to one side of the girl’s curled up body. She had begun to smoke. Her hand holding the cigarette moved in broad sweeps, her feet shuffled. This girl is nothing to me, her gestures said. She was acting out the scene of a woman who had picked an unfortunate spot to wait for a friend to drive by and pick her up.

  I ran to the cashier booth at the gas station on the corner and asked one of the two young boys working there if he would run to the hospital and tell them to send someone to help me get the girl to emergency. He declined, explaining that he was under strict orders from “head office” never to abandon his post, but he did agree to dial 911, and an ambulance soon came at ordinary speed south toward us along Burrard. The distance was so short that the siren let out only a single, abridged admonitory yelp; there was not time enough for it to break into its osculating, full-throated yodel.

&
nbsp; The ambulance came to a halt on the street beside where the girl lay. I had returned to her side. To my surprise, the smoking woman stayed put, standing like a sentry at her post, although she moved a small distance off to one side.

  Two paramedics dressed in white got out of the ambulance. They were professionally slow and deliberate and serious, and it was all I could do not to urge them to hurry, hurry, couldn’t they see that the girl was dying, would die within moments, and weren’t we all culpable?

  One of them began to examine the prostrate girl, and the other turned to question me. It was rapidly established that I knew nothing of any use at all about the girl. I was discounted, set aside, of no more interest to them than the nearby news box with its batch of fresh papers stacked neatly inside.

  The girl was raised up easily between the two attendants, one male and silent, the other female, hippy, murmuring wordless encouragement. The girl was not much heavier, it appeared, than the red-and-white plastic bag that billowed and scudded against the brick wall behind us, then was swept from sight by the brisk wind. She was unresisting except for a despairing, tender, exhaled moan. The girl was inserted neatly between white sheets on a stretcher, bundled under a gray blanket, thrust into the cavern mouth of the ambulance, and carried away under a second short warning blast of noise.

  Left behind were the patch of bloody snow, now mostly melted to ice water, and a wrinkled and creased paper bag. I looked inside the bag and found a white comb, a piece of soap, and a small, sample-sized bottle of shampoo. The comb was dirty and broken, the soap a sordid sliver, the shampoo a faint film of gold at the bottom of the bottle, so I crammed the bag into a garbage container.