The Sad Truth About Happiness

by Anne Giardini

  Sukhinder exuded professional pleasure in her job. During one of her early visits, she told me that electronic monitoring was invented by a judge in the United States who had been reading a Spiderman comic in which someone, perhaps Spiderman, was being tracked through an electronic bracelet he was wearing. The judge was intrigued by the concept and had a prototype designed. But what was a judge doing reading comic books in the first place, I wondered, after Sukhinder had left. A picture floated into my mind of a brightly colored comic book, printed on cheap paper, propped up and hidden behind a massive legal tome, illicitly absorbing the judge’s interest while a trial went on. An unsatisfying image. More likely the book belonged to one of his children, and he had glanced into it idly, while tidying up the living room. But this was not entirely believable either. Do judges tidy? I wondered. More likely the judge, a wise and mature man, had been flipping through the book in a fit of nostalgia, interested in no more than a short, sweet, intense rush—a sentimental return to the joys of his childhood—and came across the idea in this way. However it happened, a comic book source makes sense to me; this form of punishment is flat and two-dimensional at best, and childish—the grown-up equivalent of being sent to one’s room.

  During the early weeks of my three locked-away summer months, I wandered the house from room to room, getting to know it, touching wood, plaster, door frames, windowpanes, tiles. I ran my hands along moldings, fixtures, stairs, and light switches, brushing them with my fingertips, the way I’ve seen women shop for clothes, pressing the fabric against their palm, inspecting for permanence, warmth, worth. I examined each room with the pads of my fingers, with the soles of my feet, and with the outer curved edge of an upper arm and the sharp leading wedge of a shoulder as I brushed against walls and furniture, up and down the stairs, and through doorways.

  I listened to the radio—talk, music, facts diced small, teased away from their context, and served up as bulletins—and I sent and received e-mail from the computer on the desk in the office. News from the world seemed almost infinitely remote; most events struck me as ludicrous for the most part, improbable at best. So much strife and random force, such mean passions and evanescent glories.

  Three newspapers were delivered, a ridiculous number, but I put off canceling any of them; I liked the dense, frank sound they threw off when I dropped them onto the kitchen table. When I first moved into the house, I had to clear away a mass of them, yellowed and curling, stacked like lumber against the front door. I read the papers in a fitful way throughout the day before tearing them into strips for the evening fire. Burning the newspapers felt like a small service to the world outside—exchanging the worst part of the day just past for a modest pile of fine, clean ashes that I carried into the backyard and dug into the garden. Surely the world benefits from even such small acts of destruction and resurrection, history stirred back into the dark earth, the worms devouring evanescent fragments.

  Over the decades, smoke from burnt logs—alder and dogwood, to judge by the stumps of trees that have been taken down in the backyard—has seeped around the mesh fire screen into the living room, shading the bricks around the fireplace into a darkened nimbus, like the negative of a halo. In the evening, when I knelt to light the kindling and crumpled newspapers in the living room fireplace, the white bow of the plaster mantle hovered over me like the outspread wings of a well-meaning custodial angel.

  I was able to go to the front yard as far as the gate since this is where the papers and mail are delivered, each into their own white wooden box, one labeled “Mail” and the other labeled “Journal” for some reason. The newspaper box is a simple long box, open at the front, closed in the back. The mailbox is more intricate. It has a roof covered in miniature shingles, a protective flap over the slot at the front and a hinged rear wall where the mail can be removed. Some days were so silent, I was startled by my name, Maggie Selgrin, on the envelopes—a reminder that the world continued to be aware of my existence. Occasionally mail arrives still for Mrs. Agnes Penny, who lived here for thirty years. I send these on to Mrs. Penny’s son in care of his Toronto office, although I have reason to believe he throws them away unread.

  The back of the property was also open to me, as far as the gate beside the blackberry canes at the bottom of the garden. The berries have just begun to turn from red to purple although they are still too sour to eat. The back gate is where I leave the garbage cans once a week. The garbage men—their job must have another name by now, not sanitary engineer, which I think was only a joke anyway, but something their children can declare comfortably in school—collect along the other side of the alley first, then turn around and do my side, one driving, the other heaving the cans. They set them down neatly, respectfully, with the lids repositioned on top, and as quietly as they can manage.

  My parents visited me, and my sister Janet and her children. One or two others. Friends. Charles’s two grown children, Roger and Sarah, came once or twice.

  If anyone comes to see me who hasn’t been before, I always offer a tour of the house, and invariably my offer is accepted. Through the rooms we go, with me in the lead, explaining.

  We start here on the front steps. Next the front porch. Then the hall. Living room. Dining room. Kitchen. Study. Small bathroom. Staircase. The white bedroom. The green bedroom. The yellow bedroom. Large bathroom. Staircase. Kitchen. Back porch. Backyard. End.

  This house has seven rooms arranged in an immutable order that strikes me most days as almost unbearably hopeful. Living room, dining room, study, kitchen, and three bedrooms—one yellow, one pale green, and one white, the one I sleep in. These rooms envelop me in a way I have not felt since I was a very small girl in the house of my mother, father, and sisters. This house breaks my heart and mends it over and over. Walking through these rooms has become a conversation, an exchange of histories. My footsteps are my side of the discussion. The response is in the creaking floors and settling joists and slow shifts of shadow and sifting currents of dust. It is only a house, but it has become a consistent and rewarding friend. Its enfolding walls, responsive floors, honest corners, and hovering ceilings protect me. It has like me, a history, an architecture, and, I like to think, a kind of soul.

  My parents came one July morning bearing bundled gifts that they held clumsily and tenderly in the cant of their arms. They parked in the graveled area at the back of the lot, behind the fence, just off the alley, and came in the back way, through the kitchen door with its paint worn thin where it has been pulled, pushed, kicked, or nudged by unknown hands and feet on both sides over many years. My mother’s gift was a quilt, handmade for me by the members of her Healing Touch group, squares of green and pink and yellow stitched together and surrounded by a calico border. At first, bundled in her arms, it looked far too large for my bed, but then my mother gave the quilt a shake and a turn, and a blue-gray kitten with narrowed, cautious eyes emerged from its folds. The kitten was small and fine-boned, with a sharply pointed chin, eyes oblique and watchful, and the softest possible downy coat the substance and color of a fleeting regret. “Something for company,” my mother said.

  My first reaction was affront. I had become, I realized as I felt my face stiffen, stubbornly proud of my isolation, and almost jealous of my solitude. I could feel the severity of my seclusion crack and splinter as we watched the animal nosing its way around my kitchen, and I felt then a kind of heat seep in, gladness it could have been. I saw my mother watching me closely, my expressions clear as water to her, and I provided her with a smile. “Yes,” I told her. “A good idea. It will be good for me to have another creature around.”

  The quilt is startlingly ugly. The adjacent patches have little relationship to each other in texture, scale, or color. They were made independently and bound in an attempt at harmony in mismatched strips of calico. The Healing Touchers used pens to write expressions of support on each of the squares and in many places the ink had run and bled. I read a few of the blurred messages aloud for my mother’s b
enefit: Strength. Peace. Truth. Justice. Healing. Happiness.

  My father’s package was long and angular and awkward. I unfurled several lengths of brown paper wrap to reveal a paper kite in the shape of an orange fish with a gaping yellow mouth and many overlapping golden scales. “From Chinatown,” he said, and he pulled from his pocket a new spool of white string, tightly coiled into a perfect pattern of nesting Vs. “I thought it would give you a sense of freedom. You should be able to fly it from your backyard if you get a reasonable bit of wind. Screw the buggers, eh?” The strongest language I have ever heard him use.

  I took the kite outside an hour after they had gone, although the wind was languid, and there did not seem to be enough space, either side to side or from the house to the end of the yard, to collect enough of a gust to catch the fish’s wide, orange fins. When at last I turned with it in my arms, to take it into the house and put it away, an unexpected burst of breeze got caught like a gusty hook in the fish’s great yellow mouth. Its stomach trembled and began to swell. The rows of scales flickered, rippled, and then surged like pennants in an undulating orange flutter. The fish’s long, gold tail filled with air and began to swish and sway from side to side. Up, up the fish rose. It pulled free from my hands and up it sailed, swimming through the air, its mouth dipping and gulping, rising and tugging on the unfurling string. I felt like a fisher, fishing backward, playing out the line, letting my catch swim farther and farther away, allowing the distance between us to lengthen as it made its way up, out, into its own airy element, reaching up toward the troposphere.

  That night I woke up and heard in the dark the sound I seem to have been waiting for since the day I moved in. A rhythmic subterranean rumble. A thumping pulse. In every direction, the walls and floors and ceiling, furniture, books, and dishes were resounding to a rumble in the air. At last, I thought, at last. After so many weeks of practice, I had become attuned to the solid thrum, thrum, thrum of the beating heart of the house. I held my breath, lay still, and listened. Gradually, I came more fully awake into consciousness of a slight weight and warmth on my feet. I held on as long as I could to my aural vision, of the house as a responsive, breathing thing, alive and, like me, at ease inside its skin.

  But in another moment the illusion had lost all substance and escaped like a puff of breath into the air. I raised my right foot under my quilt, testing, and heard or felt a responsive vibration. The kitten. She rose to her feet, delicately shaking out first one paw, then the next, and so on, until all four had been attended to. She walked up the pathway of my shin, thigh, and stomach and paused on my chest, her eyes wide now in the dark. A single, cold, whiskery touch on my cheek, a contact spark of responsive electrons, and then she curled up just below my breasts, kneaded my flesh for a moment with her paw and cheek, and fell asleep. She had no weight at all, more like a bird than a cat, a scattering of down and a handful of insubstantial bones, like a sparrow, more song than substance.

  At the end of July the heat of the summer settled in. The sun baked the grass around the house to a pale green-yellow; the blades became thin and brittle, scarcely able to conceal the dry dusty earth. The air at night was still and dry. All of the windows in the white bedroom were painted shut years ago, so I began sleeping in the green bedroom, which has a bank of twinned windows in a long row along the outside wall. The lower half-windows can be pushed up so the room can breathe; they are heavy, substantial, and deliberate on their ancient sashes. Hector Wong, a widower and my neighbor to the west, came over to introduce himself and I took him around on the usual tour, which interested us both equally, since his house is, except for variations in color and in the different deletions and accretions over the years—a different front door, window boxes on his house, shutters on mine, a gable over his back door—essentially identical to this one. He explained to me that my green bedroom, like the same room at the back of his house, was once an open sleeping porch, that our houses date from a time when illnesses, often fatal or permanently disabling, could strike without warning, and it was imagined that exposure to the bracing night air might strengthen the lungs and build up resistance to germs and bugs. In later years, as families grew and notions of what was healthful changed, these rooms were invariably closed off to be put to better use. Hector showed me the places where the lines and materials of the original house gave way to construction that was simpler and rougher. “In the war years,” he sniffed. “No one took pride in their work.”

  I sat outside on the front lawn yesterday after dinner, with a book and a tumbler of beer. The night was a long, slow time coming. At about eight, a translucent moon, round and blank as a mirror, rose up in the bright sky, a scrap of chalky lace floating in a bowl of milky blue. I pulled at a desiccated dandelion and its large, brown, carrot-shaped root came up in my hand, easily twice the length of the shriveled, pale-green stem. Under the tutelage of Hector Wong from next door, I have been weeding the front flower beds, working to free the rampant wisteria and tumbling peonies and spiky rosebush from the invasive green tentacles of morning glory. The morning glory vines, with their innocent white trumpet flowers, appeared out of nowhere in early June, and spread rapidly to smother the other plants. “Bindweed,” Hector calls it. “You have to pull out every last root and sucker from underneath the soil,” he told me. “It is necessary to be very thorough; you can’t leave even a centimeter behind.”

  We found a heavy, wooden-handled, rusted hoe leaning in a dark corner of the shed at the end of the backyard, and Hector showed me how the sucker roots of the bindweed run like a complicated nervous system under the soil. The suckers are rubbery, ropey, cold and disgusting to touch, but pleasurable to pull at, like pulling perforated paper apart along the serrated tear line, until, invariably, they snap and I plunge my hands into the soil to search for the broken end. I have spent hours up to my wrists in dirt, overturning ants and woodbugs and displacing worms and slugs from their snug, dark homes for the kitten to snap at.

  In this last week, the number of visitors has begun to increase. People brought the outside world with them when they came. It was caught in their clothes and hair and conversation and interests, carried in under their fingernails. Their breath was laden with it. My seclusion of the past few months was irrevocably breached; it sprang countless pin-prick leaks. Light, activity, motion, and purpose forced their way in, displacing the stale, unsatisfactory temptations of self-absorption.

  Three women came on Monday morning from the church, the one I used to drop into during my morning runs in the city last fall. I was surprised to see them at my door, and concerned that I was about to become the target of a salvation mission, some well-meant effort to raise up a fallen sister. But it was not like that at all.

  “We read about you in the papers,” one of the women said. “And we were worried that you might lose heart.”

  “We have nothing to offer, really,” the youngest of the three added. “Except curiosity—we have been wanting to hear your side of things—and our own stories, if you would like to hear them.”

  I had tea made and cooling in the yellow pitcher, and we sat in the backyard on folding chairs drinking from sweating glasses in which the ice cubes jostled and fractured. I was out of practice as a speaker, so I mostly listened. I found the fluidity of the conversation astounding. Each woman opened her mouth in turn, and words spilled out like rows of knitting, sentences within stories, perfectly strung together and leading, like a clew, to other worlds.

  The eldest woman, Ruth, surprised me by revealing that she was a retired pediatric oncologist. To the extent I had considered her at all, I had thought of her as a generic church lady, old, a grandmother several times over, and useful in domestic matters such as how to prepare crustless sandwiches and other dying arts like tatting and the making of tea cozies. She spoke of how quickly they had lost children in the early days, when treatments were few and doctors often limited to alleviating such pain as they could.

  The youngest woman, aptly named Merry, was a
theological student in her final year and considering a posting to Peru, to a village without a well, a school, or a church. “Think of the thirst,” she said, marveling, and she gave the liquid in her glass an emphatic jostle.

  The third said that she was just a housewife, but Ruth and Merry protested. They held up their hands and counted off on their fingers all of the other ways she could define herself, as a mother, a volunteer, a musician, a singer in the choir. I recognized her only then as the soprano whose face had for many days floated inside my former buzzing, sleepless head. Her bakery-made chin and cheeks had disappeared. “Oh,” she said, holding her hands up to frame her face. “I gained sixty pounds—imagine!—when I was pregnant with Gideon.”