Carrie Pilby (27 page)

“So you're
un
happy?”

“No. I guess not.”

“I don't think so,” he says. “I think things are going to change for you.”

“My beliefs haven't changed.”

“No, but I think you realize that you need to talk about them and be willing to consider other ideas. I bet if I ask you something that I've asked before, you'll give me the answer.”

“Like what?”

“Tell me what makes you cry.”

I think a bit. “Nothing. But there are some things that might make me sad.”

“Okay. What makes you sad?”

Before I can answer, Petrov says, “Don't say what you were about to say.”

“Why?”

“It was going to be sarcastic.”

I shrug. “I—”

“Don't say that one, either,” he says.

“How did you know?”

“I was right, wasn't I?”

I guess now I have to come up with a real one.

“The word ‘mommy.'”

“The word ‘mommy' makes you sad?”

“Yes,” I say. “It always has.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. It's always said by someone vulnerable. Someone who's needy. A certain kind of needy.”

“Hmm,” Petrov says. “What about ‘daddy'?”

“That's generally said by a princess who's asking for a new car. So yes, that makes me sad, too.”

Petrov laughs. “I almost had you. I almost had you talking about your emotions for two consecutive sentences.”

“Maybe we'll get to three next time.”

Petrov rubs his hands together. “You know,” he says, “one day, you might be in danger of letting someone get to know you.”

I look at him. I guess he wants to know me. That wouldn't be so bad.

 

For the two days before Christmas, my phone doesn't ring at all. No legal jobs, no telemarketers.

I decide I'll make one last call to the personals to make sure there are no more responses to my ad. It turns out that there is a lone straggler.

“Hi, I'm John,” the voice says. “I'm a thirty-eight-year-old, financially secure, emotionally secure, never-married white male who is looking for a woman to wine and dine, take on vacation, and show a good time. I'm not into head games, emotional baggage, couch potatoes or gold diggers.” I can tell he's reading from a script. “I am five foot ten, 170 pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes. I am looking for someone active and attractive, playful and sexy, with no baggage. She should look great both in dresses and slacks, in sneakers and high heels. If this sounds like you—”

I think what he should really be looking for is his own personality.

Someone should call him back and tell him that. It's scary that he's thirty-eight. Have people really been doing him a favor all his life by not telling him?

I write down his number and call him. I get his voicemail.

“Hi, John,” I say. “I wanted to let you know that I'm not going to leave you a real response to your answer to my personal ad because you were reading from notes. Also, you have to expand your horizons. You have to look for someone who's a real person with quirks and hobbies and fears and dreams, not just a mannequin in dresses and high heels. By the way, everyone has baggage. What if you find some woman who doesn't
have any, and she's beautiful and happy, and the two of you have kids, and one of the kids is disabled. Or what if one of you gets sick. How will you handle it? What will you do? Life isn't perfect, and you better learn how to revel in its imperfections before you finally come upon one and it's too late to learn.”

I hang up. I hope I wasn't too harsh. Besides, I was half giving that advice to myself.

 

After I hang up, the pre-Christmas silence is unnerving.

I use the time to think about a few things.

I think about how the word
loophole
is redundant.

I think about whether
almost
really does count in horseshoes.

I think about how bankruptcy lawyers can ever collect their fees.

I think about whether it would have been more honest for George Washington to just not chop down the damn cherry tree in the first place.

Finally I go rent movies:
The End of the Affair, Affair to Remember, Love Story, Jane Eyre.
I wonder if there's a trend here. I remember reading once that a lot of what we choose to watch or read is meant to make us feel better about our own lives by seeing other people's fumbles and failures and being glad it's them and not us. I suppose films about other people's forbidden affairs provide a sort of solace.

 

On Christmas Eve Day, I'm nervous. (It's so annoying to have to say Christmas Eve Day, but what better way is there to describe it?) I feel similar to how I used to feel when my father was setting up my birthday parties as a kid. I'd run to the window to see if anyone was arriving, then back to the living room to watch him set up “pin the capital on the foreign country” or “vocabulary piñata.” I stopped having parties when I turned
eight and was already too young for my classmates. I guess I never really had friends in school after that, but fans—people who needed help with their homework, people whose mothers told them to be nice to me, people who figured that at least I wasn't mean. I never really figured out how to keep friends because I never made them.

I wait at the window and see a sedan come to a stop in front of my house. I run downstairs and catch my first glimpse of my father since summer. He has always been tall, with salt-and-pepper hair and a beard, but now his hair looks much grayer. When did my father get old?

But he smiles at me and I know he's happy. He looks teddy-bearish. I run outside and hug him.

“You look so mature!” he says. I smile, and Bobby peeks out his window. I don't think Dad's seen him since he rented the place for me. “Hey, Bob!” Dad yells. “How are you doing? Keeping Carrie safe from the Village people?”

Bobby bobs his head nervously. Then he disappears into his lair.

My father's raincoat trails behind him as he heads up the stairs with two suitcases and, hanging off his arm, an insulated bag of Chinese food he picked up on the way over. He puts his bags down and we set up the plates.

When we sit down, he says, “Well, you're going to have to tell me everything about what you've been up to. Phil Petrov can't tell me.”

“He keeps an eye on me,” I say, smearing plum sauce on a rib.

“I know. I know he does.” Dad looks at me. “I need to do a better job of that. I'm going to be in New York most of next year. I've made sure of it. I'll buy dinner for all your friends.”

“That should be cheap.”

He smiles. “So,” he says, “tell me what's going on in your life.”

I pick up my chopsticks, and he does the same, even though I've always been better at using them. “Well,” I say, “there's this new church I've been looking into. They're trying to lure young professionals who are cynical and stopped going. It's better than I thought it would be. The guy who runs it seems to want people to think for themselves.”

“A church that lets you think for yourself?” he says. “That
is
new.”

“That's what Dr. Petrov said.”

“He's Jewish. He's not supposed to say that. Only we can pick on our own religion.” He pulls out a cigarette. “Mind if I smoke in your house?”

“You know you're killing yourself.”

“I only do it once in a while.”

“It'll save seven seconds of your life if you don't.”

He stops. I feel a test coming on. “If I end up living to be seventy,” he says, “what fraction of my life have you saved by preventing me from smoking this cigarette?”

He used to give me these tests all the time when I was in elementary school. I loved it. Let's face it; I love challenges. I'm like Matt. Damn.

“You've saved two billionths of your life,” I say.

He's flabbergasted. “That's amazing!”

“No it's not. I just made it up.” I run to my room and return with a calculator. “Oops. I was off by a billionth. It's really three billionths.”

“I'm still impressed that you know how to calculate it on a machine.”

“I've always liked math,” I say.

“I always wondered why. You read so much, but your best
subjects in school turned out to be math, science and philosophy. Not writing and the arts. Why?”

“Math and science are exact,” I say.

“But you like philosophy, too, and philosophy isn't exact.”

“Philosophy can be a search for the exact,” I say.

“How so?”

“There are whole passages on causality. The idea that if I let go of a ball, it'll drop to the ground. We've decided, through science, that gravity is pulling this ball. We've determined there are formulas for how fast it will accelerate, even how many times it will bounce, and how high. But that's science. In philosophy, when studying questions of causality, we ask, ‘What if, even though it happened that way in 100 billion trials, it's a coincidence? How do you know that the one-hundred-billion-and-first time, it'll happen that way, too?' Now, science assumes, and we assume, that it will. Everything, or at least lots of things, have an order to them, a formula. But that doesn't satisfy a philosopher. He wants to be even more exact than the scientist. We're talking about a field in which you have people doubting their very existence in order to prove it. A scientist says, I can tell you that the dropped ball will accelerate at the rate of 9.8 meters per second squared, because it always has. But a philosopher says, there's no way to prove it always will. It may have been a coincidence that it happened 100 billion times. Philosophy attempts to be even more exact than science. I love it and I hate it.”

He looks impressed and concerned at the same time. “Well,” he says, “I suppose that's why ignorance is bliss. We'd all like to believe the sun will rise tomorrow.”

“And that the Bible is right, and there is a heaven, and we have to be good to get in,” I say. “And that we all know what good means, and what bad means, and that we know the answer to every question of morality and behavior. But then, the lines
get blurred, and we're not so sure we want these absolutes after all.”

Dad puts down his chopsticks. “I'll never get this,” he says.

I hand him a fork.

 

Dad and I watch the last fifteen minutes of
It's a Wonderful Life
together—the rest is a colossal bore, so each year for the last five years we've purposely just watched the last fifteen minutes—and then he asks if I want to sit in the kitchen and talk. Even though we talked through dinner, I think he has something more serious to discuss. We haven't had a really long talk since the hurricane. He makes cocoa and we sit down.

He rubs his face with his hands.

“About the ‘Big Lie,'” he says.

I shake my head. “I—”

“I thought it was true when I said it,” he says. “I thought—”

My plan has always been to make him feel guilty about the Big Lie. For some reason, that made me feel better. But now that he starts talking about it, I feel bad. I don't want him to think everything's his fault.

“You had every right to be disappointed,” he says, looking down at the table.

“Maybe I took it too literally,” I say. “At the time, I thought you meant that people in college would be
exactly
like me. I wanted it to be true
so
badly. I couldn't wait to finally find a place where I'd fit in. I didn't realize there would be such a gulf, that I'd have to work so hard to understand people.”

He looks as if he's straining under the weight of raising someone for most of their years and still not knowing the verdict. “In elementary school,” he says, “you were so far ahead of your classmates. Your teacher and your principal agreed it was best to move you up. Once we figured out the appropriate grade level, you thrived academically. So yes, I assumed once you got to col
lege, with all those brilliant students, you would thrive socially as well.”

“I started off in college only feeling a little bit different,” I admit. “But I did expect the people there to have boundless intellectual interests and devotions and a clear set of moral views. As they began to get closer to each other, they changed more and more. The more they changed with no explanation, the more I felt like a freak. And then I wondered, Why am
I
the freak?”

Dad puts his chin in his hands, but he's smiling at me. “You're a good person,” he says. “You know that? I didn't know what kind of person you'd turn out to be. But you're a good person. And I'm glad. I don't think you should compromise on the good that's within you.” He sits back. “But what I failed to do was teach you how to become friends with kids your age. If you won't compromise your own standards, can you also accept others who aren't just like you, intellectually and morally? Can you accept sinners and not their sins?”

He's right—this is one of the biggest things I have to work on now. But even if I stop expecting people to be just like me, I know that they're still going to push me to be just like them. Why is it that liberal people believe no one has the right to pass judgment on their liberality, but it's perfectly fine for them to censor other people's rigidity?

Dad is looking at me in a strange way. Finally, he says, “You remind me of your mother sometimes. More and more, the older you get. Maybe that's obvious.”

He doesn't talk about my mother easily. I don't say anything.

He says, “She and her sister read everything growing up—literature, history, everything. You know that none of the women in her family had gone to college. But your mother decided at the last minute to save money to go to school so she could teach English. She got an administrative job at our firm,
and I wouldn't have even paid attention to her, but one night, I was having an argument with some of the men in accounting about British political history. One gentleman kept arguing a point and trying to make me look like an idiot. So your mother came up to us. I thought she was going to ask something about work, but she just said softly, “That's not true.” She gave a whole peroration on why my colleague was wrong. The more she talked, the more I fell in love with her. And not just because she was taking my side. Every day, I waited at work for everyone to leave so I could talk to her. At first it was nonsense, but we talked for hours. She was amazing. She'd say whatever she felt to anyone. She would have told off the head of the company if she'd felt it was right. I couldn't hold a candle to her as a person. And God, what a mind.”