One More Thing (16 page)

Before long everything tumbled out: how my parents had strict policies against both sugar cereals and name-brand cereals, even the healthy ones; how I had felt drawn to the box in the store anyway; how I had, to my embarrassment now, cried when I lost, which I knew I was too old to do; that very weird follow-up contest that my father had set up for me with the dictionary and the expression he made that I didn’t know how to describe; how I had gone back to the store by myself after school; the bizarre and nonsensical things my parents had said about why it was somehow against our values to redeem the prize; how strange it had felt to be sure for the first time that my parents were wrong, and how frustrated and confused and angry it had made me; the staircase, Tom, 80-20, how the taxi driver didn’t want to let me sit in the front seat for some reason.

After I said everything, he stared at me for a second and paused.

“I can’t give you the prize.”

My mind first went to Tom, warning me that this was a trap.

“Regulations prohibit families of Kellogg’s employees from participating in this contest or claiming a prize,” he said. Then he smiled, and there was—the only time I’ve ever seen this in real life, and a phrase I had never been able to quite understand until now—a glint in this person’s eyes.

“And I’m your father.”

“I’m going to tell you a story. And then you tell me what you want to do.

“Twelve years ago, I was a visiting lecturer at the Steven M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I was twenty-nine years old at the time. I was the youngest Senior Vice President in the history of Kellogg’s. I had called up the school myself and offered my services as a visiting lecturer for one semester. I explained how it was important to give something back to the community, be a role model, to whom much is given much is expected, all that. But that wasn’t it at all. By the way, if I never see you again, and end up teaching nothing else to you—that’s the one thing I want you to have learned from me. People—even good, impressive people—always want something simple and unimpressive. Everything good and impressive that they do in their lives is a result of the impressive path they take to get what they want—not a result of wanting an impressive thing. It’s what brought me here. It’s what brought you here.

“I was really giving myself one semester—that’s only three months—to find a wife. Someone genuine and beautiful and interesting, and someone outside the circles in which I lived. This wasn’t much time, but I was an overachiever, and confident, and I was used to accomplishing major things in very set periods of time.

“On the first day of the first class, I saw her. The reason I was there—I knew that right away. Pale, freckles, hair in a messy, frizzy light poof. T-shirt. Beautiful. Last seat of the last row. She looked like she didn’t want to be there, and she didn’t: it turned out she was a French literature major, and this class was the economics requirement that she had delayed until her final semester because she hated anything that had to do with money. So I wasn’t in the best position to impress her. Which I liked, too.

“There were twenty students in the class, so I was able to
institute fifteen-minute meetings with each student individually each week. I scheduled hers last, on Friday afternoons. I was even more taken upon second sight than I was at first. She was brilliant and sarcastic; inner fire, light touch, certain of her values, which I had a sense were better than mine and which I wanted to learn from. I was sold.

“Now, there were two pretty considerable obstacles in my path. The woman was about to become engaged to the only man she had ever dated, her boyfriend of five years, a man she told me she loved definitively. And in addition to that, she went out of her way to make it clear that, separately, she had absolutely no attraction to or interest in me as a person. She emphasized these things a little gratuitously, in fact.” He laughed.

“I continued to meet each of the students once a week for the twelve weeks of the class, just to justify seeing this woman. Every week when the two of us sat down, I started with the same question: ‘How’s your boyfriend?’ ‘Couldn’t be better’ was her answer every time, and then we would run out the rest of the fifteen minutes in a conversation about basic economics that neither of us had any interest in. This was nine weeks. The tenth week, I didn’t ask my opening question, and we just talked about economics the whole time. The eleventh week, she brought up her boyfriend right away and walked me through her doubts about the relationship for the entirety of the session, which this time ran almost an hour.

“On the final week of the semester, she told me that she was questioning everything in her life, that her relationship had in fact been over for some time, and that she didn’t know what to do. We continued to talk about this for the rest of the afternoon, over dinner that night, and the next morning over a balanced breakfast.

“She stopped returning my phone calls immediately and
moved out of her dormitory. After several weeks, I tracked down her parents’ residence through a student directory to which I was not supposed to have access, and she picked up the phone in another room and delivered all the following news in the space of about a minute: she was pregnant, she was getting married within the month, and it had taken her brief time with me to make her realize that her boyfriend was and would always be the love of her life. I was never to contact her again. They were in love, she said.

“I was in love, too. I suggested that I might contact her fiancé and tell him everything, including my theories as to the timing of the pregnancy. She said she had already told him everything, that they were determined to raise the child as theirs, and that I was not welcome in their lives in any way. She raised the prospect of a restraining order against me and, more chillingly, whatever reputation-ruining accusations would be necessary for her to obtain one.

“But it was actually her passion that gave me pause, not her threats. Because while I knew I was in love, I could see that my love wasn’t as big as their love, and I decided that was reason enough for me to retreat. That’s the part that I’ve questioned since, and I’ll tell you why in a moment.

“Now, as you can see”—he leaned back and gestured around the office and to the immense window behind him—“I have an excellent career and, all in all, an excellent life. But I was right to try to act fast in that three-month semester: in the dozen years since, I have not come close to finding a person I’ve wanted to share that life with. Not anywhere close. So I share my life with no one. I am happy—make no mistake. The life I live alone is a great one. But I do wish I had a family. It’s the rare goal that has eluded me so far.

“Your parents love each other very much. From the information
I know, I wouldn’t try to argue that they are anything less than one of the great love stories of our age. That they would sacrifice everything—from money, to truth, to enjoyment of the universally acknowledged finest breakfast cereals in America—just to stay loyal to each other, and to the family they were determined to have together? It’s something. It really is.

“But I ask you—and I can tell you’re smart enough to grapple with a real question: is love such a strong force that it needs to be obeyed by the people who lie outside it?

“Think about this, specifically. The love of your mother for the man you know as your father is the ultimate force known to those experiencing it. Fair. Fine. But to anyone else? To me? To you? Is it selfish to impose the consequences of your love—infinite only to you—on the lives of others? If it means denying someone something as big as the life he was meant to have?”

He pointed to me with the same hand that had gestured out the window. “What sneakers do you wear? What musical instruments can you play? What languages do you speak? Have you ever been to the Olympics? Read a book in a café in Barcelona? Pretended to read a book in a café in Barcelona? What colleges does it not even occur to you to wonder about?”

I asked him if he thought, like my mother did, that this was a test of fate.

“It certainly feels like fate in this moment, doesn’t it?” he said, smiling. “But if you really think about it, it’s actually more magical, more special—more faithful, even, in the bigger way, and to say nothing of more true—to not believe in fate.

“Fate, to me, simply means that all the billions of microscopic actions we can’t calculate lead to consequences that feel right because they
are
right. They fit, they follow. We can’t see and understand all the causes behind everything, but I think it’s more magical to accept that they’re there than it is to believe
that they’re not, and that something called ‘fate’ is filling all that space instead.

“Whatever you call it, fate, not-fate—and I usually do just call this fate, by the way, just because it’s simpler, it sounds more optimistic, more true to the spirit of what I mean—it’s better branding—but whatever it was, something in your nature drew you to that cereal box in the store. The promise of bigger things, of brighter colors, better tastes. Curiosity. Chance. Fun. The promise of money. Hope. The feeling of being a part of the national experience—populism, you could call it; patriotism, you could call it. Then you were told that this cereal wasn’t something you could have—and you broke a rule. You broke several rules, and you never break rules—that’s how loud this called to you. I don’t believe it was fate that did this, to speak honestly, no. I believe it was bigger than that. Grander than that. Because these are drives that are in your blood—just the way that they’re in mine. If you were someone else’s son, these drives wouldn’t be in you, and you wouldn’t have been drawn to that box the way you were. These drives are not, with all due respect, in the blood of a philosophy professor who would say that he doesn’t believe in sugar cereals on principle. And I actually mean that phrase—‘with all due respect’—because I
do
respect it. It’s just not me. And it’s sure as hell not you. Because when you won the prize and then were told the prize wasn’t something you could have, that didn’t work for you. The exact same way it wouldn’t have worked for me. Something in your nature was telling you that the rules of your childhood home weren’t the rules of your life anymore. You broke those rules and then kept breaking them, because you wouldn’t let anything stand between you and what you knew you were destined to have. You followed an impulse. A chain of impulses. Impulses that were there for a reason. And now, here you are.

“Your parents lied, too, remember. They wouldn’t allow popular cereals into the house not because of the price or because they aren’t healthy—I could give you a stack of nutritional information comparing our cereals with the homemade pancakes you told me you eat several times a week—but because of the personal associations for them. And they wouldn’t let you claim your prize because they knew it would lead you to learn the truth. They knew that sweepstakes of this kind are never applicable for family members of company employees and that even the most perfunctory background check by the company, especially with a last name as distinct as yours—even Beverly, at the desk, whom I’ve known for twenty years, noticed it—would lead someone in some department to take notice and allow us—force us, by federal law—to not only deny you the prize, but also blow up this family mythology they already sacrificed so much in order to invent and protect. Look, I can’t blame them. You’re an extraordinary young person.

“So, as I’ve said, I can’t offer you the prize. But I can offer you something else.”

A part of me wondered if he was going to pull a dictionary down from the wall.

“You can be my son.”

He handed me a business card.

“Think it over. Think about who you are and how you see yourself going forward. And if it makes sense to you, give me a call. Don’t let your mother see this, of course.”

He shook my hand again, just as hard.

Tom leapt up off the couch when he saw me cross back into the lobby.

“What happened? How did it go?”

“It’s called the Promotions Department, idiot,” I said. “Not the Prize Department.”

On the bus ride back to Grand Rapids, I stared out the window for the hour and a half.

I imagined what Michigan would look like—or what it would feel like to look out at Michigan—if I were the kid of the executive, and then if I were just the kid of my family.

The two feelings felt very different.

I liked them both.

I liked the feeling of being able to switch back and forth in my mind, too.

I wished the bus ride were longer.

“How was Tom’s? How was pizza?”

I forgot all about the lie I had told my mother, that I was having pizza at Tom’s. It seemed quaint, and cozy, and sad.

“It was good.”

“What kind did you get?”

“Pineapple.”

“Yum! You have room for dessert?”

“Yes,” I said. “Why?”

“What do you mean, ‘why’?” my mother laughed. “In case you want to have dessert with us!” I looked over into the kitchen and saw my dad in his sweater, making a pot of mint tea the way he always did after dinner.

I loved my parents so much.

“Go upstairs and put your things away,” said my mother. “It’ll be ready in about five. Ice cream sundaes.”

I went up to my room and took the business card out of my pocket. I noticed that it was now completely crumpled from how tightly I must have held it on the bus ride back.

I put the business card in the dictionary and came down for dessert.

My father set out three teacups and three ice-cream bowls.

“Would you like some tea?”

“Yes, please,” I said. “Thank you.”

“It’ll go well with the ice cream,” said my mother. “Hot and cold.”

I noticed a tub of frozen yogurt on the table.

“Is there ice cream?”

“This is the ice cream,” said my father about the yogurt. “You put whipped cream and sauce on this, and all buried in a sundae, you don’t know the difference.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Except there’s no whipped cream,” said my mother.

“Then why did you say it?” I asked.