Synopsis
Book by Grunwald Lisa
Extrait
1
If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.
—Old children’s song When I was ten years old, my friends and I would sneak out at night and meet in our building’s service courtyard to play spy games and exchange secrets. The courtyard was forbidden: it was dangerous; it was ominous. Purple shadows draped its brick walls like pieces of cast-off clothing. It was where the building sorted its trash and where God only knew what dangers lurked. It scared me into a hollow, cold silence, but I went anyway because I was in love with Michael Farber. He lived two floors below me, and I would have eagerly followed him into the heartless depths of a raging fire.
One night, near the dumpster, Michael found a blue plastic gem, a dime-sized circle with facets, like the kind that came in the gum-ball machines at the front of Woolworth’s and Lamston’s.
“A sapphire!” whispered Julian Becker, who lived three floors above me and was not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
“No, it’s fake. It’s only plastic,” I told him.
“What?”
“You’re such a dweeb,” Michael said, with a certainty that Julian made no effort to contradict.
Julian was the extra boy, and Michael was the one I adored, the one who made me willing to brave my fears and the purple shadows.
“What are you going to do with it?” Michael asked me, putting it in my hand.
“Me?” I asked, flustered.
“You,” he said.
“You’re giving it to me?” I said.
“You could make it into a necklace.”
Tenderly, appraisingly, he touched the chain I wore on my neck.
Then came the bang of a heavy door and the shuffle of heavy footsteps.
“Enemy spy!” Julian whispered, exultant, and pushed Michael into the corner behind the dumpster that served as our usual shield.
Standing alone, I shivered and froze.
“Come on, Sally!” Michael hissed from his hiding place.
“Quick, Sally!” Julian whispered.
But I was too terrified to move.
“Hide, Sally!” Michael shouted, and then, with a courage that would continue to move me for years and years to come, he emerged from his own safe hiding place and pulled me into the darkness behind an empty, discarded stove box.
“Who’s that?” we heard a loud, harsh voice say.
The footsteps grew closer.
I clutched Michael’s arm.
“Who’s that at this time of night?” the voice said.
Michael put a finger to his lips.
Then the box was simply lifted away from us, as if a giant were moving a mountain. As we crouched, we stared up at a large black woman whose name was Posey Rivers and who was famous in the building for the flame-shaped scar on the back of her hand. Posey was the housekeeper for a family that didn’t have any kids, but we’d seen her plenty of times, and she seemed to know all about us, too.
Under the purple shadows of this particular night, she gathered Michael and me into a hug against her huge, warm chest, which smelled, splendidly, of French fries.
“It’s cold,” she said. “You all must be chilly.”
Neither of us said anything.
“November and not a coat on you all,” Posey scolded. “Your mothers are going to catch a fit.”
Michael and I looked at each other. Pressed against Posey’s enormous breasts, we were finding it hard not to giggle.
“I’ll bet your mama,” Posey told me, “thinks you’re downstairs at his place. And I’ll be his mama thinks he’s upstairs at your place.”
Again, we didn’t answer.
“Well, but Posey knew you were here,” she said. She turned to shout over her shoulder. “And you can show your sorry face now, too, Julian Becker.”
Timidly, Julian stepped out of hiding and grinned down at his feet.
“Oh, come on, I’m not going to bite you, Mr. Molasses,” Posey said.
Julian stepped toward us, and there was something about the shy, dim look on his face that made Posey start to laugh. Posey’s laugh was a hyuk-hyuk-hyuk affair, a tropical outburst every bit as big and broad as she was herself. And it wrapped around Michael and Julian and me with the sureness and strength of her arms, until all four of us were laughing together in the purple courtyard light.
In Posey’s fragrant embrace, I felt the promise of Michael beside me, a promise both calming and thrilling; and I held and would cherish the blue plastic gem, a token that, three decades later, I would still keep in a pouch in my purse. I was safe—vibrantly, exquisitely safe—and for years to come, whenever I thought about happiness, this was the moment that would come, first and least self-consciously, to my mind.
2
I’ve got the bowl, the bone, the big yard. I know I should be happy.
—One dog to another in a Mike Twohy cartoon Lying in bed with my husband one night, I am shocked to discover that I can’t remember the size or shape of any other man’s penis.
This alarms me, but in a quiet way, as one might be alarmed to discover that the ceiling plaster is starting to crack.
“The ceiling plaster is starting to crack,” I say to Michael, because I suspect it is somewhat better than saying, “I can’t remember the size or shape of any other man’s penis.”
It is a Wednesday night near the end of May, the traditional month when Manhattan springtime mingles with end-of-the-school- year shock. Between us, the bedspread stretches, broad and neat, like an unmapped country. Around us, the world is in order as well. Our daughters are now nine and ten years old, and shed somewhat fewer possessions in their travels around the apartment. The books on our shelves are alphabetized. No uncapped pens clutter up the desk. The stacks of clothes in our dresser drawers rise in tidy, specific piles.
“It looks like the Mojave Desert up there,” I say, staring up at the ceiling.
“What?”
“It looks like the Mojave Desert.”
To the left, over on his side of the bed, Michael cradles his favorite cereal bowl and clicks his teeth against the spoon with each precise yet slurpy bite. He looks up at the ceiling.
“Don’t you think we should have it replastered?” I ask.
His eyes return to the TV screen, where the daily fortunes of New York’s sports teams are unfolding in brisk succession.
“It’s really starting to bug me,” I say.
He turns to me now with a marital smile, a smile filled with wisdom and depraved acceptance, a smile that says: You know that’s not what it is.
In fact, he is right, and I smile back, but I don’t know what it is.
I suppose it might be the way he eats cereal.
Or the fact that, for the fourth night this week, the girls didn’t fall asleep until ten, thus narrowing to Ginsu-knife thinness the slivers of time I can actually spend with him.
Or the fact that I didn’t manage to get enough work done today on the book I am currently researching, a book that is called, not incidentally, The History of Happiness and is due, not incidentally, in three months.
Or it might be the Acme cartoon topography of tomorrow’s to-do list, which includes glue-gunning a costume for Emily’s school play, giving my editor an update on my book, starting in on the packing list for the girls’ camp trunks, and whipping up a bowl of hummus for Katie’s Ancient Egypt Day. I do not know how to make hummus, but I suspect that large amounts of mashing will be involved.
Let me hasten, really hasten, to say that I am not expecting the Fox 5 News Problem Solvers to show up at my door tonight. Or the Hundred Neediest Cases fund.
Still, if I’ve learned anything at all from the research I’ve done, it’s that happiness has less to do with what people have than with what they think they want.
But do I know, even secretly, what it is that I think I want?
For years, researchers have been devising ever less intuitive methods for trying to quantify happiness. They have created all sorts of measures—known by acronyms, of course—such as the PWI, or Pleasure and Well-being Inventory, and the SWLS, or Satisfaction with Life Scale. Factors that have been weighed in the balance include racial tolerance, unemployment, frequency of sexual intercourse, number of television sets per capita, hours a week spent gardening, and belief in God. And yet with the exception of people living in extraordinary poverty or experiencing cataclysmic misfortune, there is remarkably little proof that any external factor has any lasting effect on the levels of personal happiness that people report.
Even Aristotle, who never stood on line at Zabar’s and marveled at how it was possible to feel, simultaneously, so blessed by bounty and so insane with impatience; even Aristotle declared that happiness, to most people, was a constantly moving target. “Ordinary people,” he wrote, “identify it with some obvious and visible good, such as pleasure or wealth or honor—some say one thing and some another, indeed very often the same man says different things at different times.”
For the sick man, Aristotle said, happiness is health, and for the poor man it is riches.
And for the forty-year-old woman in bed with the forty-two-year-old man underneath the cracked ceiling plaster, happiness is, at the moment, only something she knows she should feel but for some dim reason can’t.
I take Michael’s dish to the kitchen for him and am sincerely trying to shake off my mood when the phone rings and the real fun begins.
“She’s dead!” a familiar voice exults.
“Hi, Mom,” I say.
“She’s finally dead!”
I know without asking who the she has to be: Mom’s tenant for the last seventeen years, a tenacious Austrian analyst who had worked and lived the last part of her life in the apartment where I spent the first part of mine—the apartment in whose shadowed courtyard Michael and I had long ago played.
My mother, living now in a retirement community in South Carolina, has never been hard-hearted enough to raise the doctor’s rent. But she clearly is having no trouble now delighting in the woman’s demise.
“You go check it out,” she tells me excitedly.
“Okay, Mom.”
“We’ve got to fix it up now.”
“We?”
“I bet it’s worth a fortune.”
“And what are you going to do with the money you make? Bribe the nurses to smuggle in vodka?”
“Do this for me, won’t you, baby?” my mother asks me plaintively, and of course I say yes, because requests that come from retirement homes are not requests but commandments.
“What do you think she did to the place?”
“Listen, I have to go, Mom,” I say.
“Where?” she asks me petulantly.
“What do you mean, where? To bed, Mom,” I say.
“It’s only eleven-fifteen.”
“Past my bedtime, Mom.”
“You’re not going to watch Leno?”
“Mom,” I say.
“I’m sending you the keys,” she says.
“Fine,” I say.
“Federal Express,” she adds pointedly, her unprecedented use of overnight shipping the clearest sign yet of her urgency.
There is nothing in the world like a conversation with my mother to make me want to fling my arms around Michael’s shins.
“Your mom?” he asks when I come back to the bedroom.
“Of course,” I say, climbing into bed.
“Let me guess. You never send her pictures of the kids.”
“No.”
“She bought Microsoft at seven twelve years ago.”
“No.”
“What, then?”
“Real news. The renter died.”
Michael clicks off the television and looks at me warily. “And your mom’s going to want you to handle it?”
I nod and pull the covers up to my chin.
I think about a purple light, a blue plastic gem, a courtyard. I think about the view from the window, the front hall closet, the bathroom tiles. I remember the walls of the hallway, which my father collaged with snapshots. Black-and-white for a few years, then color. A time tunnel, mosaicked by the past. I wonder if it is still there, or if the tenant painted over it, or had it scraped off the walls.
I know that my to-do list has just grown longer by countless items, but my mood is unaccountably brighter.
Michael sighs and gets up to follow his nighttime routine. I know the sounds so well. They are as mild and constant and comforting as the words of a lullaby: The eight squeaky steps across the old wood floor to the front door. The two snaps of the upper and lower locks. The twenty steps into the kitchen, all burners off, one light left on. The last look in at the girls, the redimming of their night-lights, which always, like an old worry, seem to grow stronger as the night wears on.
“Did the woman not have any family?” Michael asks me as he gets back into bed.
“Nope.”
“So all this is on you?”
“It’s okay,” I say. “I can handle it.”
I slide down between the sheets beside him, like a secret letter slipped into the safety of an envelope. And dream of ancient places, where everyone is young.
So this is how it’s supposed to work in the mornings:
Up at 6:30, shower, coffee, wake the girls, make them breakfast, kiss Michael good-bye at the door, take the girls downstairs to the bus, come back up, drink coffee, make beds, read the paper, put up the laundry, and sit back down to work.
To which I can only respond: Oh, please.
If it works that way one morning in ten, it’s time for my own private Mardi Gras.
This morning, Mom calls at seven.
“Did you get the keys yet?”
“Mom,” I say, pulling on some jeans. “It’s seven o’clock in the morning.”
“I know. But I sent the package by the Federal Express.”
My mother has a tendency to overuse the definite article.
“Federal Express, Mom. Not the Federal Express.”
“They told me it would be overnight.”
“It’ll get here. It’s not supposed to come until ten.”
“You call me when it comes.”
“Mom.”
“Call me.”
By the time I hang up, the girls, hair unbrushed and possibly unbrushable, are engaged in an apartment-wide hunt for Katie’s baseball cap; the unsweetened, rejected cereals from the Kellogg’s variety pack are all I can offer for breakfast; and Michael is probably already taking his first patient’s pulse before I realize he’s gone.
The girls and I sprint to the corner.
“Don’t forget my costume!” Emily shouts from the window of the school bus, her hair slipstreaming into the air behind her as she turns to resume her seat.
The girls’ morning departure usually provides me a moment of light liberation, and I mean to go quickly back upstairs to work. But instead I find myself standing to watch as their school bus pulls out and moves down the street. The large yellow rectangle shrinks until, like a tiny knot on a long thread, it is woven into the city’s fabric. Something like fear overtakes me, a hint of the separation to come. The girls will be going to sleepaway camp for the very first time this summer, and I will be left with Michael and a nonfiction search for happiness that I’ll have no excuse to avoid.
The play is You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, and Emily has the part of Lucy, and I have been asked to provide something little- girlish, preferably with polka dots. Since inspiration struck a week or so ago, and I retrieved an old pregnancy shirt from the recesses of my closet, all I’ve done is put some pins in the hem. Back upstairs, I plug in the glue gun, without which I believe Manhattan motherhood itself would dissolve, and I heat up my coffee and settle down to work at the kitchen table.
Our walls could use a good paint job, and someday it would be nice to redo the cabinets, but the kitchen is in order, and that is not an insignificant fact. The kitchen is the largest room in our typically cramped Upper West Side apartment and is wired just well enough to support the necessary appliances for a mother and wife a...
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