by Nancy Rue
“What’s to reason? The odds are fifiy-fifiy. Of course, that changes with the number of times you flip—”
“There’s only going to be one flip. Suppose you pick heads and you live as if there was a God—if it actually comes up heads, you’ve won. Suppose you pick heads and you live as if there was a God—if it comes up tails, you haven’t lost a thing. But suppose you pick tails, you will either win or lose.”
“Fine. I’ll admit it’s reasonable, but not reasonable enough for me to believe it. I’m just being rational here.”
“Nah. You’re being irrational.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Reason is rational. Fear is a passion.”
I shook my head at him. “How is it that you can infuriate me? One minute I’m thinking you’re an amazing teacher and the next I want to wring your neck.”
“Okay, forget the wager for the moment,” Sam said, laughing through his words. “You up for some experiments? Purely scientific, of course.”
“Right.”
“This isn’t a trap. I’m clean. See, nothing up my sleeve.”
I actually glanced at the slender arms before I checked myself and said, “What’s the design for these experiments?”
“For the next twenty-four hours, examine your thoughts. See how many of them are about the past, how many are about the present, and how many are about the future. You don’t have to graph it or anything—just get a general idea.”
“I’m not a general idea kind of person,” I said. “Now, why am I doing this? What’s the projected outcome?”
“I don’t want to give you any preconceived notions. Just do It.”
“What does this have to do with my mother?” I said.
“Everything,” he said. “Do you tell your students everything you know about K-theory and expect them to understand it, or do you give them their own vector bundles to play with first?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “You realize that, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” he said. And then he got me with a grin.
But the next twenty-four hours were filled with more than me categorizing my thoughts. In the first place, it was obvious I was going to have to give up the pretense of only staying at Mother’s house temporarily.
Still, I thought I was holding my own in keeping up with things at school, but when a memo appeared in my box reminding me that I was to maintain a minimum of nine office hours a week, the adrenalin started pumping.
Can I actually keep up with all this and take care of Mother, too? I thought. Should I just be considering what’s going to happen if I don’t finish my dissertation in time to graduate instead of trying to read my mother’s soul? Maybe I ought to explore those angles, too.
That wasn’t the only time anxiety reared its ugly head. That night when Freda III left and Max finally finished saying his good nights to Mother, a silence fell over that house that was so heavy I was convinced I was in a funeral parlor. I couldn’t stand it, so I sat beside Mother while she stared out the back window of the guest room at the koi pond, lit up by pathway lights, and I droned on about anything that came into my head until she climbed into bed.
I continued looking out the window myself—taking stock. Ninety percent of what I’d thought about all day was the future. I hadn’t lost my grip as much as I’d thought.
Why, then, did I feel like hurling myself into the koi pond?
Mother was asleep by then, and the silence was maddening.
I went to the phone and dialed Sam’s number—all but the last digit—and hung up.
What are you doing? Are you getting attached to this character?
“No,” I said out loud. “He’s just somebody to talk to so I won’t keep talking to myself!”
I dialed the whole number the next time. He answered on the first ring.
“The future,” I said.
There wasn’t more than a fraction of a pause. “Wow,” he said. “Okay.”
“What do you mean, okay? Those are my test results. What are they supposed to tell me?”
“Well, let me ask you this.” His voice grew warmer. “Did you think about the past at all?”
“Yeah. I thought about how simple my life was before all this happened.”
“So you were still thinking of the past in terms of what light it might throw on your plans for the future. It’s probably the same with the present. Am I right?”
“Well, yeah. I live proactively.”
“If you want to call that living.”
“Don’t disparage my lifestyle, Blaze.”
“Sorry, sorry, I stand corrected.”
He was laughing through his words, but I had to hand it to him—at least he knew when he was being arrogant.
“All right,” I said, “I’ll play along. Why don’t you think making the future my end is actually living?”
“Because everything is about tomorrow or the next day or six months from now, so basically you’re only hoping to live.” He chuckled. “Everything you do is so that someday you’ll be happy.”
I thought about it for a second. “Yeah,” I said. “Although until this Pick’s thing happened, I thought I was already happy.”
“What is happiness, do you think?”
It wasn’t a professorial question. He sounded like he actually wanted to discuss it, as if he wasn’t sure himself.
“I never had to define it before,” I said. “I guess it’s a state of being where everything is going well and your mind is at ease.”
“Using that definition, how much of your life would you say you have been happy? What percentage?”
I tapped my fingernails on the desk. He began to hum the theme song from “Jeopardy.”
“Forget the ‘going well’ and the ‘mind at ease,’” I said. “Just stick with the state of being. Peaceful being.”
“Okay.” His voice was warming up more, and I could picture his eyes lighting up. “If happiness is a state of being, you could, theoretically, be happy right now in spite of everything that’s going on in your life.”
“Theoretically,” I said slowly.
“You want to try another experiment?”
“Sure,” I said. Please. Just give me something to keep me from climbing the walls.
“Do you have an hour?”
“Depends what the experiment is.”
“Sit in a room there in the house—alone—for an hour. Don’t do anything. Don’t read or turn on the radio or compute logarithms in your head or whatever else you would normally do for fun.” The laughter was seeping through. “Just sit—for one hour—and do nothing.”
“Are you nuts?” I said. It slipped out before I could bite it back. I went for a lighter tone. “All right, I think I can do that. Then what?”
“Then call me if you want. Or you don’t have to. Depends on how you feel.”
“What does that mean?”
“No preconceived notions. Talk to you later.”
He hung up first. I sat there with my hands on the desktop until I realized I was leaving sweaty handprints on the finish. I couldn’t think of anything more unbearable than sitting there for an hour and doing absolutely nothing. The thought sent me straight up out of the chair and charging for the door.
I stopped with my hand on the doorknob. It was shaking. I was panicking, and that in itself was terrifying.
I don’t panic! I thought—frantically. What is wrong with me? I’m freaking out over nothing!..
I kept my death grip on the doorknob for another couple of seconds, and then I took a deep breath, straightened my shoulders, and marched back to the desk chair as if I had an audience to perform for. It was a performance, a complete act, because my heart was pounding hard.
Finally, after several minutes, I could sit down in the chair. I could breathe evenly and close my eyes without the certainty that I was at any moment going to have a psychotic episode. I was calm. Okay, I was relatively calm, in comparison to my f
ormer urge to run down the street in my pajamas.
I looked at the clock: 10:16. I rested my spine against the chair back and concentrated on my breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Inhale. Hold. Exhale.
Wait. Did that constitute—what had Sam called it?—something I normally did for fun?
No, breathing exercises couldn’t actually be defined as fun. What was fun? Fun was making Jacoboni’s mind spin without him knowing it. No, that was triumph. Fun was standing at a chalkboard with Rashad and Peter. No, that was, I suppose, satisfaction.
What did you do when you were having fun? Laugh? Mother laughed. Well, now she did. She didn’t used to. She would smile—charmingly in social situations, ironically when it was just the two of us. Now and then she would let out a deep, throaty chuckle that practically sent Max off into spasms. But now she laughed—giggled like a little kid. Giggled like she had probably never even done when she was a little kid. All I heard about was how she worked her tail off to get her father’s approval and—how the heck did I get here?
I’m supposed to be thinking about fun. No, I’m not supposed to do anything fun—I’m just supposed to sit here, in this house, doing nothing, until my own thoughts drive me completely around the bend. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars, go directly to the loony bin because if you aren’t doing something, Jill McGavock, you don’t even know who you are!
“Yes, I do!” I said out loud.
I stopped. Had Sam said anything about talking to yourself? I was pretty sure that wasn’t allowed.
I looked at the clock: 10:18. I shook my head and squeezed my eyes shut.
Thinking had to be allowed. Nobody could be expected not to think for an hour. Although Mother probably did it by the dozens of hours, by the day. No wonder she slept all day. Who could sit around with not even her thoughts to occupy her? But what if she didn’t know she wasn’t thinking? How could she think that she couldn’t think? Did she just feel it? Did she just have some sense that something that used to be there wasn’t anymore? Was that why she couldn’t stay in bed when the house was completely quiet? She couldn’t stand herself?
I looked down at the desk. There were two splashes of something wet on the cherry finish. I stood up. I realized then that I was crying.
“I don’t cry!” I said out loud. “What is this? All I wanted were some real answers, so I could make one simple, stupid decision. What happens? I turn into a basket case—and I still don’t know a thing!”
I shoved the emotional outburst back into my chest, where it stuck like an impaction. I wasn’t shaking. I wasn’t crying anymore. And I did know one truth, one real thing.
I knew that I, calm, svelte, driven-but-stress-free Jill McGavok, was unhappy. Unhappy to the very depths of my being.
TWELVE
I slept that night, though fitfully, and I woke up mad.
All right, so I’m unhappy, I thought en route to the campus the next morning. I was happier not knowing I was unhappy! That, I knew, made no sense. It was apparent that I’d been living under some kind of illusion, and that was what had my emotional hackles standing up. How had this misery crept in on my watch?
I hadn’t called Sam the night before, but he called me that morning, right before I left the office for class.
“Hey, you,” he said. “You okay?”
“You knew what was going to happen when I tried your little experiment, didn’t you?”
“Haven’t had that second cup of coffee yet, huh?”
“What do you want, Blaze?” I said. “If you just called to take some perverse kind of pleasure in my current state of wretchedness—”
“I’m sorry, Jill,” he said in a soft voice. “I really did want to see if you were okay.”
I softened my tone too. “I can’t even tell you how not okay I am. I’ve got to get to class.”
“Why don’t you meet me for lunch, over at Tresidor? I’ll even let you buy.”
“Oh, no, you’ll buy,” I said. “You owe me.”
“Twelve fifteen. That give you enough time?”
“Enough time to work up a good head of steam? Oh, definitely.”
He was chuckling when I hung up.
I was headed out the back door after class when I ran into Jacoboni. Literally. He was backing in while watching a pair of coeds in tight jeans next to the planter and plowed right into me.
Run for your lives, girls, I thought as I passed them. Then another thought occurred to me. Am I always that sardonic?
I checked out my thoughts the rest of the way across campus to the student union.
When I passed one of those kiosks plastered with fliers for everything from tutors to vans for sale, I spotted a brochure beckoning students to come work for Maytag. I thought, Oh, can I? Please?
When I stopped at the corner and found myself surrounded by people wearing lumpy backpacks, I thought: They all look like Quasimoto gone Gap.
When I got to Tresidor, I thought, This doesn’t look like a student union—it looks like a shopping mall! We’ve got a credit union, even a travel agent, for Pete’s sake! We’re all yuppies in training.
Yeah, I was always that sardonic. It was suddenly depressing.
Sam was already there, parked casually at a table outside, reading the Stanford Report amid the murmur of varied accents around him. Although it was almost Thanksgiving, it was still fairly warm even in the shade. There was a slight breeze blowing, but Sam seemed oblivious to the shower of tiny yellow elm leaves that floated down on him with every new gust. One leaf in particular had settled itself on a wayward dark curl. He looked up expectantly from the newspaper and grinned when he saw me.
“The laurel leaf in the hair look definitely works for you,” I said. “Nice touch.”
I reached over to brush the thing out of his curls, just as he put his hand up to do the same. I pulled my hand back so fast that you’d have thought he had leprosy. I groaned inwardly. What was this, junior high?
“Hungry?” Sam said. “I went ahead and got us a couple burritos. The lines are unreal in there already”.
I looked doubtfully at his plate, where two suspiciously soggy tortillas lay with some kind of bean concoction oozing out of either end. I shook my head.
“I’m not that hungry,” I said.
“Do you mind if I—”
“Oh, please, go ahead. Knock yourself out.”
I watched with a mixture of horror and fascination as he deftly maneuvered one of the burritos into his mouth and took a squishy bite.
“You sure you don’t want some?” he managed to say through a full mouth.
I shook my head. I was feeling heavy again. I wanted to throw my arms down on the table and bury my head. Not a good choice out here in wide-open academia, however.
“I really did want to make sure you were okay,” Sam said. “You’re not, are you? You haven’t made any deprecating remarks about my lunch choice. Evidence of preoccupation.”
His eyes were twinkling, but not teasing. I put my hand up to rake my hair, but I didn’t even feel like doing that.
“Sam?” I said heavily “What is this that you set me up for?”
“‘This’ meaning what?”
“This feeling.”
“Despair?”
“No!” I looked at him. “Yes. Where did it come from?”
“It’s probably been there all the time. You just always had plenty of diversions to keep you from noticing it.”
I grunted. “You’re calling working on a Ph.D. a diversion?”
“Not completely but maybe it was part of it.”
“Yeah, well, it isn’t working anymore, so try again.”
“It makes sense that it wouldn’t work now. Your mother’s illness has hit you pretty hard. I mean, it’s huge. It would knock anybody down. There is no diversion great enough to keep you from mourning over it. Although, I have to hand it to you, you tried to create one.”
“Work isn’t a diversion, it’s a necessity.”
“I was talking about me. Wasn’t I something of a diversion?”
I laughed. “Don’t flatter yourself, Blaze!”
“I didn’t mean me personally,” he said. Two red spots appeared on his face, one on each cheek. He had actually embarrassed himself. “I just mean this whole business of talking to me about the soul—that in itself was a diversion of sorts, kind of a sedative that deadened your spiritual nerves. Except you woke up.”
“I’m not diverted right now,” I said.
“I’m thinking that’s good,” Sam said. He took another large bite out of his burrito.
“What are you, a sadist?”
This time he had the grace to swallow before he answered.
“I’m sorry you have to go through this, but in my view—and this is just my opinion, I have no way of knowing exactly what’s going on in your head, but as I see it—”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, say it!”
His face sobered. “I think that before, you had no other way of overcoming fear except with indifference, and now indifference no longer works. It may be painful, but I think it’s good.” He abandoned the rest of the burrito and leaned across the table toward me, his eyes bright. “You finally had no choice but to look at yourself—the way we all have to sooner or later—and listen to your heart and see the great, gaping hole inside you and be terrified.”
“And this ‘great, gaping hole’ is good?” I said.
“It is when you realize that nothing but God can fill it.”
“I haven’t realized that,” I said. “Let’s make that clear. I found a pit, I’ll grant you that, but I will not concede that I have to fill it with ‘God.’”
“Then what are you going to fill it with? You only have two real choices, as I see it.”
“Which are?”
“God or yourself. And I’d be willing to bet that’s the one person, next to God, you currently fear the most, the one person, next to God, that you’re always trying to escape by not being alone with her in silence. And I know this: she’s the only person, next to God, that you can never escape.”
He searched my face for a few seconds, and then he rubbed the back of his neck and surveyed the tabletop. He seemed to realize he’d come on strong.