The Sad Truth About Happiness

by Anne Giardini

  The kitten sprang up to my lap and tested her sharp claws against the thin fabric of my skirt. I tipped her back down onto the grass and she landed lightly, shook quickly from nose to tail, jumped sideways twice, and snapped toward a dandling cluster of barnyardgrass. “What is her name?” the middle woman, Merry, asked, and I opened my mouth, realizing as I drew breath that I had not yet thought to provide her with one. “Dogbane,” I answered. The name of a weed that Hector had pointed out to me the day before leapt from my mouth with the same lightness and agility as the kitten tumbling from my knees to the ground. A successful landing. Ruth tipped back her blue and ivory and pink head, unfolded her mouth like a fan, and laughed. I smiled and felt the warmth of the day seeping from the sun-drenched grass and soil through the thin soles of my sandals and rise up into my bones.

  Basement

  I have begun to explore the basement, which is primitive and dark, with a cement floor, cinderblock walls, and small, high-set windows encrusted with dirt and cobwebs. There are shallow shelves and cupboards along the north wall. Inside one set of cupboards I found dozens of bottles of preserves lined up by kind and color. Two shelves of raspberry jam and three of blackberry. A long row of yellow peaches, with the curved edges of the fruit turned outward, mooning me through the thick, pale blue glass. Jars and jars of yellow relish flecked with green, pink cherries suspended in red liquid, cucumber pickles cut long or in disks, baby onions gleaming like dentures, green beans and yellow, marmalade, plums, and pears. Months of labor over hot caldrons invested then forgotten, like the earned and unspent riches left behind by someone hardworking but miserly. The food bank told me decisively on the phone that they could not accept home canning, so I spent an afternoon carrying the jars upstairs, emptying the contents, and washing the jars in the sink. They were the old-fashioned kind, with heavy glass lids secured by a hinged metal clasp. Angus came by with his truck, loaded the empty jars in the back, and took them to a Salvation Army thrift store to be resold. I kept behind a dozen jars in case I should ever have a yearning to can tomatoes or make mango chutney.

  Yesterday I dragged and bumped an old table up the narrow basement stairs and into the backyard so that I could get a closer look at it and see if it was worth saving. It had several layers of paint, green over yellow over cream. Much of the paint came off readily under the prying blade of a putty knife. I worked until the early evening stripping it clean of the last remnants of paint with solvent, steel wool, and sandpaper. I uncovered a solid pine table with a drawer and pretty carved legs. The top is scarred and gouged from years of use as a workbench. It is made up of only two wide boards carefully fitted together. The legs have a pattern of long parallel lines capped at the top with a crude rosette.

  The drawer was painted shut at first, but I was able to pry it free. Something had been rattling inside while I worked, and I found and fixed with two nails a bit of wood that had come loose, a wobbly runner. Inside the drawer were several handfuls of paper. Bills and letters and postcards and shopping lists, notes, and clippings. Someone’s accumulation of unassociated scraps over several years, dated, mostly, in the early fifties. Three letters were from Dudley Worthy to Irene McKay, and the others, and the postcards, from friends and relatives sent to Irene and Dudley Worthy. The bills were for coal, oil, and electricity. The shopping lists listed flour, milk, soap, raisins, potatoes—nothing out of the ordinary. The newspaper clippings all gave tips for raising roses, except one, a recipe for a kind of cookie made from peanut butter, icing sugar, cornflakes, and shortening. Still, I was thrilled as much by this prosaic time capsule as by the softly scarred, yellow pine table.

  Irene and Dudley. Dudley and Irene. Imagine, I thought, loving a man named Dudley. He would be tall and self-assured; anyone named Dudley would have to have developed a carriage of confidence. Irene would be rounded, softer, more lively than calm Dudley, a reader and a listener, a gardener of roses the size of dinner plates—excessive roses—and someone who could remember and repeat a good story, emphasizing its singularity with arching gestures of her freckled, thorn-pricked hands. Irene would have provided practical, solid Dudley with what he most needed without quite ever realizing it—an inner life.

  Yesterday was the last day that I was required to spend here but I decided that I would not walk out the front door and down the steps and onto the sidewalk at the first possible moment. I decided instead to sleep by choice on a cool, ironed white sheet in the narrow bed in the green room, another white sheet on top of me, with all of the windows wide open.

  The early evening’s lacy moon fattened into a full, gold disk and its gleam bathed my face like a remedy while I slept. A pancake moon was what we called a full moon in my family when I was a child. My younger sister Lucy asked my father once, when she had first started school and was having an antagonistic time of it, “What if Saturday had a fight with Friday and refused to come?” My father told her that the moon, who observes all, would simply mix up a batch of pancakes, and the fragrance of the sizzling batter and the promise of maple syrup would entice greedy Saturday to come out from wherever she was hiding.

  I am driving with Angus to Tofino for a few days, and then coming back to live here in this house and take up my old job again. The hospital where I work was persuaded that I should be permitted a leave of absence for compassionate reasons during the months of my sentence. Rebecca, who has been living temporarily in Janet’s basement, will stay here in the house and take care of the kitten while I am gone. She has been looking in this neighborhood for a house of her own to buy and has found one or two that seem promising not too many streets away. Luba has moved her father into a care home down by the quay, and she and her mother have bought a two-bedroom condo nearby. Her mother can walk to see her father. Luba keeps them both under a careful, respectful eye.

  The custody hearings and my trial were widely covered both here and in Italy, one of those odd human-interest stories that catches the public mind and eye for some reason. All of us—Lucy, Gian Luigi, skinny chain-smoking Ivetta, and I—attracted defenders and detractors, most of them more interested in the causes we were considered to stand for than in ourselves. Lucy, articulate, opinionated, undaunted, became a favorite of the more liberal media, and she now writes an oddly illiberal weekly column for the local newspaper. Her columns are about women, the workplace, raising children, any brewing political or social topic that catches her interest. She produces mostly chatter, as this kind of writing tends to be, but her columns can be fierce and each one has a crystalline core, a solid, well-thought-out, defensible idea or thought, and this gives them a certain weight.

  Early on in the debate over who should have Philip and in what country he should be raised, I came across in one of the papers a braying op-ed by a local conservative clergyman. The Reverend Shane advocated a return to traditional values—mother in the home, father providing, children doing as they are told. Just as Jesus heads the church, a father is head of the home, he wrote. A son especially needs a father; too great a price is paid when fathers are absent. Violent criminals are overwhelmingly boys who grow up without fathers. Girls who lack a father are more apt to become promiscuous or worse. Children from a fatherless home fail or drop out, exhibit antisocial behaviors, commit suicide, display the classic indicators of abuse or neglect. In short, the presence of involved fathers is unconditionally decisive if we as a society are to raise God-and-state-fearing children. He finished by issuing a direction to fathers from one of the letters of St. Paul: “If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”

  The accompanying photograph showed a handsome man in a clerical robe and collar standing in front of the broad front door of his church. He held his large head upward at an earnest angle, as if he was addressing his remarks to a rapt audience somewhere between heaven and earth. His mouth was half-open, displaying his fine, white teeth. I recognized him as the man who had explained the sta
ined glass windows to me that time that I drifted into the church next door to the hospital, and who had hailed a cab the day I fled with Philip.

  I took a short trip with Luba to the village of Tofino late last April, the final weekend before my case came up for sentencing, and I am going back there with Angus, who has spent, in the past few weeks, one or two illicit nights here with me in the house. We will throw ourselves against the wide embrace of the Pacific Ocean and invite the brisk, salty winds that sweep in from the water to scour us of staleness, inactivity, and any other lingering malaise. The climate on the west coast of Vancouver Island is infinitely changeable. During the brief half-hours when the sun comes out, it bears down hard and brilliant on the shore, and we will throw off fleece and waterproofs. But the scattered clouds soon pile up together, like sweepings under a broom. They muster and bluster, threaten and spit, then let loose a squall of icy rain, or hail the size of infants’ teeth. The rain is soon pushed over the headland by the hardworking wind, which forages in the stands of trees and shrubs as it passes, calling and searching for something that it has misplaced and wants urgently.

  In the woods of cedars, hemlock, fir, spruce, and alder, and the undergrowth of salal, red huckleberry, salmonberry, and blueberry, the colors are as variable as the weather, but within a narrow, infinite palate of greens and browns. The flashes of shapely yellow beside the paths look like oddly shaped lilies from a distance, but reveal themselves to be odorous skunk cabbage up close. A forest of cedars, tall as ships, as vast around as giants’ pudding bowls, festooned with epiphytes, rises up only meters from a boggy marsh in which trees just as venerable—hundreds of years old—stand no taller than my mother, crabbed by the acid soil.

  At the shore, sharp-edged shells are gentled by the wind and salted water until they take on a softly fluid gleam halfway between sand and water. Rough-hewn cedar logs are tossed and polished by the waves to a slippery, animal-pelt sheen. Sea lions, ponderous as pianos, move with the grace of ballerinas on the rough rocky outcroppings. Standing, watching, and listening in the midst of all these fervent doings, it becomes abundantly clear that we will become who we will, and we will be as our nature guides us no matter how hard we may strive.

  During our stay in Tofino last spring, Luba and I were standers-by when an accident began to unfurl in front of us. It was at the end of a day of whipsaw weather. We had after some deliberation decided that the early evening sun would go unchallenged for at least an hour and we set up Luba’s small portable barbecue at the First Street Dock to cook fresh halibut purchased from a fisherman who was selling his day’s catch from the side of his boat. Another family was picnicking in the same spot. One of their children, a disaffected girl of fifteen or so, went to listen to the local radio station in her parents’ minivan, and she somehow dislodged the gear shift. The van began to roll down the sloping parking lot toward a steep embankment that dropped directly into the cold, deep, black water.

  “Jump!” everyone shouted to her, but there was no time and, in any case, providence played its trickster hand. The van had only half completed its backward climb over the concrete barrier at the bottom of the lot when the open driver’s door struck and dug itself deep into the side of another parked car. The van came to a precarious but final stop, its rear wheels overhanging the barrier by a good half-meter. Only metal and dignity were hurt.

  Had we all benefited, I wondered, from the benediction Luba and I heard earlier that day on the car radio as we listened to the local station during a drive from Tofino to Ucluelet. The young man who was serving as d.j., and who was playing music as casually as if he was in his own bedroom, announced between songs that a young Cuban boy had been snatched away from his relatives in Miami so that he could be returned to his father in Cuba.

  “It was really rough, man,” he mused. “Guns and everything.”

  “Well,” he concluded, after a long and brooding pause. “We send loving peace to them all.”

  I will be leaving at nine this morning with Angus, and now I am half-dressed, sipping from half a cup of tea and keeping half an eye out for his car. I’ve been up since first light and have gathered a collection of documents of various kinds, including Irene and Dudley’s correspondence and newspaper clippings about the custody battle and my sentencing. They will all fit into a single cardboard banker’s box, which I’ll seal shut with packing tape and store on one of the empty shelves in the basement.

  I found seven more jars on a dark bottom shelf when I was cleaning the basement yesterday, all of them filled with buttons. One jar had a hundred or more small, neat, trim, two- or four-holed buttons, the kind that are used on men’s dress shirts. The face of each of these was a variant shade of white, but on the other side the plastic was flecked with random dots and streaks of color—tiny, round metaphors I thought for the way men so often conceal their characters beneath a conventional surface. The other jars held buttons that had been classified by color—black, red, blue, yellow, green—except for the last, which held a miscellany of buttons that could not be easily sorted. I poured these out onto my bedspread and admired them and play-acted a miser, heaping them in my cupped hands, letting them trickle through my fingers, delighting in their profusion, savouring the rich feeling of abundance and a bolt of joy that sprang from nowhere I could precisely pinpoint. I’ll put this last jar of buttons in the box, as well as Sukhinder’s hairpins and the plastic sandwich bag, still sealed, that holds Janet’s long-ago gift of three multisided little pills. The pills are beginning to crumble and will soon be yellow dust, but the sympathy of her gesture still makes my heart contract.

  I will step out of this house, which, like the final jar, is full of small, commonplace, abundant riches. The key will turn under my hand and the tumblers in the lock will jostle and shift and spill. At the moment, I do so, it will be just possible that I and most of the people I know well are happy, even my two malcontented sisters.

  Lucy is at her word processor, waxing acid this week about midwives and doulas and the birthing practices of the self-indulgent.

  Janet is in the middle of a morning game, striking the ice impatiently with the blade of her hockey stick, signifying her readiness for a pass. She has joined a hockey team that plays in a women’s house league, and she has as a result, at least in my opinion, cut back on her pills. “They didn’t seem to be working any more,” was all she told me.

  My parents are considering swapping their house for a suite at a new cohousing community over on Main Street, one that has rain barrels, a rooftop vegetable garden, solar panels, and a composting and recycling program. Lucy and Ryan just might buy my parents’ house from them and are already talking of dormering the upstairs.

  I am certain that Oriah alone, who I have not seen or sought, is not happy, and I wonder if she is of a different tribe, one for whom happiness is trivial, and thus despised, or who have a kind of allergy to contentment, and who feed on sorrow and discord like those bacteria that feed on tarry oil spills.

  I’ve had several letters from Leo, who moved to Kosovo in the spring to take up a position as a legal adviser to the peacekeeping force there. He has recently been transferred to Bosnia-Herzegovina, where he lives in a trailer and has, some days, a single functioning phone line for calls and faxes. In his letters, he sounds worldly in a wide-eyed way, committed and exuberant, optimistic and disillusioned, juggling an excess of demands with purpose and joy.

  Even this house seems happy to me this morning. For the few hours after I leave and before Rebecca arrives, it will have its rooms and shafts of light and creaks and imperceptible entropic forces to itself. Dust will fall in random whirls, producing its own minute music. The glass in the windows will creep downward into vitreous puddles that will not become apparent for another thousand years. The floorboards will enjoy a vacation from my tread. The house will delight in the pleasures of my absence as it found contentment in my arrival after a time of emptiness. I think of the happiness it has contained and imagine that its joys p
arallel my own. Delight in family members and pleasure in their departure. Serenity in times of quiet and elation in the midst of music and laughter and talk. The bliss of being admired. The thrill of going unnoticed.

  Happiness is more ephemeral than thought. It can’t be observed without changing its nature. Its ingredients are subtle, and there is no guarantee that a formula or recipe for joy can be written out or passed on or repeated even once again. Happiness evades capture, dissolving like a melody into the air, eluding even the most delicate, careful grasp. It frustrates any systemic search, responding better to random fossicking and oblique approaches, and its rewards are infuriatingly arbitrary, stingy or abundant by purest chance.

  Life is perhaps after all simply this thing and then the next. We are all of us improvising. We find a careful balance only to discover that gravity or stasis or love or dismay or illness or some other force suddenly tows us in an unexpected direction. We wake up to find that we have changed abruptly in a way that is peculiar and inexplicable. We are constantly adjusting, making it up, feeling our way forward, figuring out how to be and where to go next. We work it out, how to be happy, but sooner or later comes a change—sometimes something small, sometimes everything at once—and we have to start over again, feeling our way back to a provisional state of contentment.

  I used to float along in all of this, like a leaf on a coursing stream, but I am heavier now, less easily moved, more resolute and steadfast. I am no longer in pursuit of happiness. As I stand here at my front door, key in hand, I think it is just possible that happiness, at least for now, today, this hour, may be in pursuit of me.

  COURT TO DECIDE

  WHETHER ABDUCTED

  CHILD SHOULD BE RAISED

  IN CANADA OR ITALY

  Gian Luigi Potenza has come all the way from Italy to claim custody of his newborn son, a child he has yet to meet.