The Hypothetical Girl (6 page)

“It’s the pie, shhh.” She put her finger to her lips. “The secret pie.”

Every year Brianna made Peter a “secret pie,” and every year he played at surprise and shock and the girls exploded in giggles. This was the sort of thing Happily Ever After families did.

While Brianna stirred potatoes, Peter was out in the garage doing some manly garage thing. While on other occasions it had rankled a bit, all this busy happiness and happy business, on this day it did not. Alana actually felt happy to be there as well, a part of their buzzing world. She settled in the family room on the floor for her barrette session and colored with the older girls on the coffee table. Brianna put on some music in the kitchen. They were her family, too, she thought. Why had she never thought of it this way before?

Soon dinner was ready, and she snuck away from Megan’s tiny fingers to wash her hands. There, on a desk in his office, she spied Peter’s laptop, open and even on, casting its white glow out toward the window behind. Oh, how much she wanted to jump on it and just for a second look at Max on his bike again, with the wind in his hair and a new picture, too, Max and his dog, Ike, a hearty shepherd-Lab mix. “Ike says HI!” he wrote, in the caption.

She tiptoed in. Entering Peter’s office was sort of verboten in the house. He was very private, the author of novels that, no matter what they were about, somehow always featured hunting and deer. He worked from home.

Feeling guilty, Alana closed the door quietly behind her and was about to sit down on the big Aeron chair in front of it when she peered ahead and then caught her breath, sucked it right back in, a vague sense of electric
shock flying through her. She actually tingled from toes to fingertips.

On the screen was a woman, posed in the most uncompromising fashion. Spread-eagle. Her tongue hanging out of her mouth, in such a way that it struck Alana as slovenly, really ridiculous. It wasn’t so much her nudity spread across the screen of her brother-in-law’s computer, that wide-open beaver thing, that mortified her as it was that flicked tongue. It was a lower-class thing to do with one’s tongue, a cartoon thing, something her sister Bree would never do, never even imagine doing. She felt the tongue actually violating her sister’s home, insulting her family, the whole Happily Ever After of them on suddenly unsteady ground. Shaking herself, like a wet dog, as if she could somehow slough off the sense of shock, she slipped back out of the office. She wanted to get away from the brash, tongue-wagging bottle-blonde secret girl back to the acceptable secret chocolate pie of the kitchen, as fast as possible. God forbid Peter should see her in there.

“What is the matter with you, Alana?” her sister said. “You look like you saw a ghost.”

Alana tried to smile, feebly. “I was just thinking about Mom and Dad,” she said, trying to cover her lingering shock, the actual physical lightning bolt she had felt careening through her. Their parents had been dead for a few years; they went one right after the other, from a heart attack and a stroke (Dad, heart attack; Mom, stroke).

“You must have just seen the portrait I put of them in the den.” Brianna smiled. “It’s from our vacation, that time.”

“Yes,” said Alana. She walked out of the kitchen to take a deep breath of air and to look at it. There were the four of them, standing inside Carlsbad Caverns. Brianna and Alana holding hands. Their mother in a charcoal-colored dress with a matching sweater, wearing a sun hat, her dad in jeans and a button-down sweater. Alana walked back into the kitchen and stood beside her sister.

“Cool picture of us, right?”

“Remember how scared you were in the cave, when it was so dark?”

“Actual dark,” said Brianna, quoting the guide. “Without a drop of light.”

“Yes,” Alana said. The vision of the woman and her tongue seemed like it was floating somewhere on the newly painted yellow wall above the refrigerator, a ghost, or an afterimage, imprinted on her eyelids, flashing.

She took the spoon from Brianna’s hand. “Go play with the girls, it’s your turn—I can finish here.”

“Really, Ally? Okay! There is the recipe … on the computer. It’s shepherd’s pie, just add the potatoes on top and …”

“I can read! Really! Go!” She prodded her sister’s arm with the wooden spoon.

Brianna smiled and scurried out. She was actually quite happy to have a minute with the girls. “Ask Megan
to do your hair … get the new look—it’s some kind of a punk thing … all the rage …”

Brianna laughed. Her laughter sounded so innocent and fragile, like a thing that could be smashed into pieces.

Alana spread the potatoes atop the pie and popped the concoction in the oven. Checked the temperature and time. She stirred frozen orange juice into a pitcher. She wiped the granite counter with a sponge. She felt odd, as if the photograph on Peter’s computer had somehow infected her. She washed her hands.

Then she gave in to the urge. She looked around and then clicked into her e-mail on the kitchen laptop. Up popped a new message. From Max. She clicked it open. A virtual bouquet of rosebuds appeared. Clicked on, they bloomed. “For you, my new girl!” said a note that popped up at the end. His girl. She was Max’s virtual girl. His potential Alana. And he was her potential Max.

Imaginary Max. Safe Max. Underground house Max. Nobody can hurt you if they are merely potential.

Just then Alana realized something; a fact settled in her heart like windswept soil. She realized she would keep Max just like this, as long as she could and possibly forever. Real Max could potentially lie, abuse, or use her, cheat, steal, behave meanly. He could break her heart, leave sticky piles of socks around … forget her birthday. So she would keep him right there on the screen, at arm’s length, a click away, neither dismiss him nor
invite him in closer. Max could live in her computer, under circuits and a motherboard and back inside the walls of her house, and in the electricity of the greater world, buzzing around in an infinitely coded fashion.

She thought of the picture at her sister’s house. The photograph was of the four of them, inside Carlsbad Caverns, with the cave all around them. Stalactites reaching down, like longing arms of fire. They were actually underground. And if she remembered correctly, for that brief time, that snapshot of a moment, they were happy.

R
ita’s mother called to congratulate her on the new position, tenure track (!) at the branch college. It was a big deal; there had been only a handful of positions available that spring in the entire country. After the downturn, most state funds dried up. Most college searches were canceled entirely. The only reason hers wasn’t canceled was that the economic collapse had shut down almost all job hiring as well, so there was a tsunami of student applications to state schools. Since there was nothing else to do, people were going back to school. This made for a particularly bland sort of student, prone to writing papers on their favorite television episodes.

“I hope this makes you happy,” her mother had said when she called Rita. She had always felt her daughter was a sourpuss, a person unable to see the glass half full. She had even taken to calling her “glass-half-empty girl.” “How is glass-half-empty girl today?” she might ask, when Rita called. Her sister, Martha, a life coach
in Topanga Canyon, was perpetually cheery, a fact her mother never missed an opportunity to point out.

What did it even mean to be happy? Rita thought. She knew she was lucky, certainly, to be hired at such a time. And she, without even a PhD to her name. It was some sort of rare academic coup. She was like the Urania moth of professors. The Urania was so rare everyone thought it had become extinct until it was photographed by an unknowing tourist on a hike in the Peruvian rain forest. She’d read about it in
National Geographic
at her doctor’s office.

But, as so often happens, her good news came with bad. While getting the job had constituted a stroke of good luck, her being at the doctor’s was a stroke of bad luck.

She’d gotten breast cancer and the job simultaneously. She had found a job at a time when there were no jobs, and breast cancer at the same time it seemed everyone was getting breast cancer. It was like the disease of the month. A woman next door to her mother, her sister’s best friend, two people who worked at her dry cleaner’s, and even one woman’s husband had it. The woman was the receptionist at the YMCA where Rita worked out. “We couldn’t believe it; he doesn’t even have breasts the way some men do, those man-boobs,” she exclaimed. “He doesn’t have those!”

Many famous people were getting it, too. This made everybody feel a little better—that money and fame
were no firewall. It increased its wattage as the disease du jour. They, of course, had made going bald from the chemo look a little chic and even a little beautiful when they went on
Ellen
and
Oprah
and talked about how they were getting through it with the help of their fans and frequent trips to Bali to consult native healers.

In an even crazier trick of fate, Rita had found her lump the same day she got the letter about the job. She told everyone about the job, but told nobody about the lump, which felt nothing like a lump at all. A
lump
was a large and nebulous thing. What was inside her felt exactly as if someone had buried a pea—a secret pea, like the one the princess could feel under all those mattresses—only her pea was right under her nipple. The problem, as she understood it from the doctors she had spoken with so far, was that this pea might sprout and begin to grow, filling her body with pea plants, leafy and muscular, curling their little tendrils all around her heart, her organs, the twin engines of her lungs, filling her with peas, everywhere, until she was more pea than she was Rita. A walking invisible vegetable garden.

Had it not been for that little novel she had written two summers ago (accidentally, almost—while helping her mother clean out the attic, she had found all those old journals of her great-grandmother—it practically wrote itself), she would have never gotten the job. As for the breast cancer, it was mysterious to her.
Who had planted that first pea there?
she wondered. Was it
something she ate? Something she breathed in? Something she drank that contained the smallest-ever particles of cancer pea?

“Spectacular,”
The New Yorker
had raved, about her book. “Absolutely,” said the oncologist, who had done the final and definitive test. “You’re hired,” said the dean of Arts and Science, at the branch college. And, with those words, her literary, academic career and her new identity as a cancer patient were born. Funny, she thought, how a teensy novel and some teensy words and a teensy pea of cancer could change your life so much, in ways both good and bad.

“Good morning, class,” she said, the first day she began teaching. She handed out the syllabus she had carefully put together. It had the reading list and the assignments that would be due, one by one, in a list down the left-hand side. One student put his head down on his desk after glancing over it and made an audible sigh, as if it was so much work he had already grown tired. Another asked: “Are
all
these books in the bookstore already?”

“Yes,” said Rita. “They are all in.” What did they think, these college students, that they would not even be reading any books in an English class?

The branch college was a small one in a very small town in a far-flung place, almost at the Canadian border. A place she had begun to call “the edge of the known world.” She thought she was like the Magellan
of assistant professors, sent to seek out and colonize young minds with interesting thoughts here in the hinterlands—while simultaneously, inside her, a small colony of its own had taken hold. One she must stamp out with the help of the oncology department at the hospital in the new town.

“I’m happy, I’m happy already,” she had replied to her mother. It would be far too upsetting to tell her about the breast cancer. Besides, she thought if she could just keep it a secret, it would hardly exist, this little pea starting its life inside her. If she told her mother, soon everyone would know and it would give that little pea more legitimacy, its own cheering squad almost. In front of her class she wondered if anyone could see it, this illness beginning its life. Did it show itself to certain people, perhaps? Or make her seem vulnerable?

“We will read a book every two weeks. We will discuss them in class and then you will write two-page papers on each of them,” she said. “There will be a final.” She felt like adding,
Can you handle that?

After teaching she would head to the YMCA and sit for a long time in the steam room. She had the feeling it was cleansing her somehow, inside and out. Sweating out bad molecules, bad thoughts. Bad stuff (mood leftover from whiny students, evil cancer stress vibes) out. Good stuff (heat, water) in.

Happy, schmappy
, she thought, in the steam room. You could certainly not be happy when you had cancer,
could you? The word itself had a sort of silly sound to it even. Happy. Like the name of a clown or the punch line to a joke in a children’s book. What do you get if you mix sappy with a sneeze? Ha—ha—ha—happiness. What do you call a man who likes to pee? Happy. Get it, TWO “p”s? Bad jokes from the kindergarten set.

Rita had always thought happiness was overrated, anyway, the emotion for the masses. Something advertised daily on national television. This new car, or that vacation or this food or that medication … voilà! Happiness!

She was much more interested in other human sentiments. She particularly cultivated irony, sarcasm, sardonicness (was there a “ness” on the end? She would have to look that up), and even a freckle or so of out-and-out despair. Despair, after all, was appropriate when you lived on a planet on the brink of collapse in a society that insisted on declaring war every ten minutes on places so far away most of her students had never even heard of them, and with a disease that could begin to sprout and grow inside you at any given moment. Happiness was the drug they fed you to keep you from noticing all this.