The Theory of Opposites (24 page)

“Give me one hundred crunches right now,” Ollie bellows, like he suddenly thinks we’re in the middle of a military drill.

“What?”

“You heard me. One hundred crunches.”

“In the kitchen?”

“Do you not see the floor?”

I gape at him slack-jawed until I realize that he’s serious, so I crouch my way to the rug and curl myself into a ball and hope that he accepts this as a crunch.

“That’s one,” he says.

“Ugh,” I say.

“Keep going. Only ninety-nine more.”

“I hate you.”

“You hate everything.”

When I hit 56, and it’s obvious that I do not have 44 left in me, Oliver flips a hand and says: “I don’t want to kill you before we even get going, so you can be done.”

I splay my limbs on the kitchen floor and shut my eyes and try to breathe.

From above me, Raina says:

“Ollie’s going in front of the judge on Wednesday of next week. Can you be there?”

“Where else would I be? I mean, assuming I’ve made it off this floor.”

“We’re thinking of plea-bargaining,” Raina says. “I want the whole family there to demonstrate that we believe Ollie’s a good citizen, that he got in over his head.”

I prop up on my elbows and then say to Theo:

“You think he should plea-bargain?”

Theo was never the plea-bargain type.

“I’m just here to advise, as a friend. And I think it’s a tough call. Ollie did it. There’s documentation of it. But he didn’t do it knowingly. He did it at the request of…” He consults the papers on the counter. “Yogi Master Dari.”

“Where’s Yogi Master Dari these days?” I find my way to my knees.

Ollie shrugs. “Kathmandu? Hong Kong? His Twitter feed has been quiet for weeks.”

“Yogi Master Dari has a Twitter feed?”

“Of course! Gaga retweets him all the time.”

I clutch the counter and pull myself up to standing.

“Anyway,” Theo says, “sometimes you have to accept that you broke the rules, even with good intentions. So that’s what I think we present to the judge.” He reaches over and sips my Diet Coke thoughtfully. “Judges have to listen to the law, but they also respect the fact that people are human, that even the most well-intentioned screw up, and part of the time, they don’t even know why.”

“I like that,” I say. “Even the most well-intentioned screw up.”

“Well, it’s true,” Theo says. “We do.” And then there’s that awkward beat when everyone assumes he’s talking about me, and I wonder,
Christ, is he actually talking about me
? And then Theo continues, filling the dead air: “I usually like to go for the big win, to go in for the kill, but sometimes you just have to accept that this is what the cards have dealt.”

“Don’t say that,’” Raina says. “You sound like our dad.”

“No, I’m nothing like your dad.”

He looks at me now straight on.

“It’s a good plan,” I offer, remembering how I screwed up everything by not saying Y.E.S. to Seattle. Of not asking what needed to be asked, saying whatever needed to be said. It was inertia and master plans and closed eyes and no guts. A life without a map. Then. Now. Always.

“It’s just my instinct,” he says. “It’s sometimes wrong.”

—

Raina and I check in on our father at the apartment, our childhood home, the next day.

“I’m fine!” he keeps saying, though he looks pale and shriveled and doesn’t get up from his bed. Instead, he darts his eyes over news feeds and websites and sometimes mutters something to himself that I don’t bother listening to. Aloud he offers: “It was just some blockage! I wish everyone would stop acting like it’s the end of the world.”

Raina orders Chinese food, despite the fact that my dad has been given a diet of bland and healthy foods. He insists on eating the potstickers and moo shu pork, and Raina looks at me when I ask if that’s the best idea and says:

“What? If he doesn’t care, how can I?”

Raina’s too skinny now; I’ve told her as much every night when I try to tempt her with the ice cream sandwiches she keeps on hand for the kids. And her Botox is fading, even though it hasn’t been that long. I caught her staring in the bathroom mirror the other day, squinting and tugging her hairline every which way. She saw me and said, “They said it would last four months! I blame this family and the stress it causes me for my cosmetic dermatology bill.”

“What did you think of when your heart gave out, Dad?” I say, when I’m done chewing my own potstickers, and no one else has anything else to discuss.

“I thought that this might be my time. That I might keel over on 60th Street, and if it was, it was a hell of a way to go. I’m a New Yorker after all.”

He misses my point entirely.

“You know that we were worried, right?” I press. “That you might be ready to die, but that doesn’t mean we’re ready for you to leave us.”

“William!” he says. “I know it is difficult to accept, but
everybody dies
!”

“Jesus Christ, Dad!” I unintentionally knock my half-empty plate to the ground. “If this is your best advice as a parent, it’s no wonder that I’ve spent my life convinced that I’d be a shitty one.”

“Willa.” Raina reaches for my hand, soothing me like I’m one of her kids.

“It’s true, Raina! And you know it as much as I do.”

“So it’s your hatred for me that is driving you to write this ridiculous book about me,” my father states flatly.

“I don’t
hate
you. And it’s not ridiculous. And it’s not about
you.
”

“Of course it’s about me!” His voice is rising. “How are you so naive as to think this is not about me?”

“Dad!” Raina cries. “You cannot get upset! You can’t work up your heart!”

“If I die, I die!” he shouts. “And at the rate you’re going, I’m pretty sure that you’ll kill me soon enough!” He clutches his chest, and Raina’s on her feet, but it’s just for dramatics, just so he can yell: “You have broken my heart! Literally! You have broken my heart!”

“Your heart is broken because you ate too much crap for the past two decades!” I yell back. “And newsflash: my life is
not
about you!”

“Your life is about whatever your life is already about,” he says calmly, turning on a dime, just like that, just like I fell into his trap.

And I swear to God, I rewrite my master plan right there and then. Because every instinct in my body tells me to throw my chopsticks firmly at his head. To take aim and put one straight through his pupil. But I breathe in and breathe out, and I open my eyes and I dig deep, and I find some guts. And even if it’s only in my mind, even if I can only escape into the kitchen to be free of him for a few quiet minutes of peace, I start charting a new route somewhere as far away from here as possible.

—

We can’t leave until the “nurse” arrives.

Raina is busy on her Blackberry, so I slip off to my old room, where I morphed from William to Willa and am now just me. After I moved out, my parents turned it into a study, even though the apartment already held an office, and even though I half-heartedly asked them not to.

The once-purple walls are now covered with deep plaid wallpaper. The corner where my bed once rested now houses a bookshelf. The shelves are adorned with photos of my dad with famous people whose lives he changed: George H.W. Bush, Bruce Springsteen, Liz Taylor. (!!) I sink into the desk chair and try to remember what it felt like to be five or eight or sixteen, kept between these walls, kept so much within myself. I lean back, close my eyes and listen to the legs of the chair squeak back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Then I remember the closet off the bathroom. The door handle sticks for a minute, then gives way.

I find everything here, all the pieces of my old life, all the pieces of who I was and how I came to be. My Doc Martens are coupled together on the floor, like they’re just waiting for a pair of feet to take them around the block. My BU sweatshirts are folded neatly in stacks.

My wedding dress is lovingly wrapped and hanging toward the back. I unzip the garment bag slowly, taking my time, savoring it, unsure if it will be as beautiful as I recall it to be, unsure if I was as beautiful as I remember myself to be on that day. Because I was. Despite what has happened and all of the stuff in between. Shawn and I got married under a huppah made of fresh bamboo and green vines and deep ivory roses and willow and hydrangeas and delphinium. Like Jewish women the world over, I circled Shawn seven times, which used to symbolize a wife’s commitment to her husband, but which many people now assume to be a wife’s commitment to
family.
And I understood this, my desire for a different family. For a new start. Even if I loved my own in profound, complicated ways. The rabbi pronounced us husband and wife, and Shawn raised his foot and smashed the wine glass, and all the guests shouted:

“Mazel tov!”

And we kissed under that huppah of bamboo and vines and roses and willow and hydrangeas and delphinium. And he dipped me a little and then swung me back up quickly. And I thought:

Finally.

And he said:

“I’m glad I didn’t screw it up!”

And it really didn’t occur to me that we should have said:
I love you!
Or
Oh my God, this is the best day of my life!
Or something. Not
I’m glad I didn’t screw it up.
Not:
Finally,
even if I only said that to myself.

I unzip my wedding gown bag and hold my breath. There it is — and it
is
still as beautiful as I remember. The lace is immaculate; the beading is hand-sewn with grace; the waistline swoops like the curve of a swan; the fabric is rich and sumptuous and a bit like heaven. I try to force myself to zip the bag back up, to put the memory in context, where it belongs, in the deep unknown of what’s next for Shawn and me, what’s next for merely…me. But my brain stumbles, and my fingers tremble. And I find that I simply can’t do it. I can’t close what I just opened.

So instead, I take a step backward, out toward the door from which I entered. But before I can find my escape, I stumble on something in my path, and I land on the floor. I look down and see it then: the skateboard my dad gave me at twelve. I didn’t notice it before. Or maybe it snuck out as a reminder, with a mind all of its own.

Funny,
I think, though it’s not funny at all. I can pretend to be Willa all I want. But that may not be who I am at all. Never who I was to begin with.

27

Daring Yourself to a Better Life!

By Vanessa Pines and Willa Chandler

PART FOUR: BE WHAT YOU ALREADY ARE (BUT AIM BIGGER)

SUMMARY:

We would never tell you to be anything but you. There’s only one you, so why even bother to be anyone else? But that doesn’t mean you can’t try to shine a little brighter, try to set your sights higher on the horizon, try to leap off the Brooklyn Bridge. (See our earlier chapters.) Chandler suggests that being you is enough. And of course (holla natural beauties!), it is. But that doesn’t mean you can’t strive to be your very best version. It’s easier than you think, but harder, too. Up next: we’ll share how we leapt toward our own best selves, all the while knowing that there’s never a promise of a safety net, but that if we caught air, we might actually touch the stars.

—

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Oliver Chandler invited you to join the group: “Say Om Innocent”
(3 hrs ago)

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Shawn Golden has been tagged in two pictures
(12 hrs ago)

(click)

The elusive Erica Stoppard has tagged Shawn in both photos, and I am grateful that she hasn’t thought to change her “friends of friends” privacy settings. They are on a golf course, the blue sky behind them, the greens sprawling out in front of them. Shawn is tan and grinning, happy in the way that I used to make him, with one hand tucked around her waist, and another on the shoulder of a guy I don’t recognize but who is tagged as “Peter Chin.” And Peter Chin slings his own arm around “Nabov Slotkin.” I look at them, pull the screen close to my face and stare. Erica is striking, with long legs and rich almost-black hair, with dewy skin and straight, white teeth. She has dimples on both cheeks and smiles at the camera like she just knows that she can crush all the men in a round of eighteen holes. She looks confident. She looks assured. She looks nothing like me.

Right then, Nicky knocks on my door, and I snap my laptop shut quickly.

“Looking at porn?” He flops on my bed.

“What?”

“I’m twelve, Aunt Willa. I know what porn is.” He rolls over and cradles his head in his hands, his elbows splaying to the sides.

“Okay…well…that’s maybe something to discuss with your uncle.”

“I don’t need a porn expert,” he says.

I turn magenta. “I didn’t mean to intimate that your uncle is a porn expert.”

He shrugs. “It’s cool.” But then he lingers. “Can I ask you a few things? About…what’s been going on with me?”

“Anything.” I’m surprised to find myself so open, and to find that the openness comes so easily to me with him. But to be sure, I amend: “I mean, not about porn. I don’t want to discuss that with you.”

“Are you and Uncle Shawn getting a divorce?”

I smile. “I thought you meant questions about…your life. Or…puberty.” I sort of pray that he doesn’t want to discuss puberty, but his mother is somewhere on the African continent, and if he needs to hear about a woman’s menstrual cycle, I guess I can explain it to him without dying of embarrassment. Until I realize that I’m probably not the expert. I filter through my brain and try to track my own period, when it’s next due, what it means in context of a broken condom. The dates are murky; the math not adding up. I file it away.

“It’s just that everyone’s wondering.”

“How nice for them.”

“Okay, how about: is Grammy Minnie a lesbian now? I think that’s kind of awesome.”

“Nicky,” I chide.

“Okay, fine.” He sits up and leans back against the headboard. “I guess I have some questions about my dad.” He chews his lip, and for a moment, reminds me so much of the kid he was when I first met him seven years back when Shawn and I had just started dating: more innocent, less complicated.

“I’ll try to answer them,” I say quietly. “I know your mom’s pretty far away. But maybe the subject of your dad is better meant for her?” Puberty I might be okay with; I’m not sure if I’m emotionally proficient enough for this.

“I dunno. My mom’s sort of a mess herself. Trying to save people all over the world. I mean,
I’m
right here.”

I push his bangs away. He looks at me with those big eyes, just like he did back at five.

“Okay then, ask away.” I say, hoping I don’t totally screw this up, screw him up forever.

“I guess…I just…I mean, I don’t really get why it happened. Why he had to die. Then. Like that.”

“Oh buddy.” I reach for his hand.

“Do you believe in karma?”

“Hmmm,” I demur. “That’s hard. If you’re asking if I think your dad did something to deserve this terrible thing, then of course not. He was a good man. Your Uncle Shawn thought of him like, like a brother, I guess. He told me this story about how your dad once took Uncle Shawn camping…and you know that Uncle Shawn is
not
a camper…”

“We actually went camping overnight when we were in Palo Alto,” Nicky interrupts.

And I say: “Really? Oh.” I fall quiet but then resume the story because this is about helping Nicky, not about how wide the divide has grown between my husband and me. “Anyway… just before they got to the campsite, your dad swerved to avoid hitting a squirrel. Ran the car right off the road and flattened the front against a tree. And Uncle Shawn was freaking out, checking himself for broken bones and debating calling 911, and all of that. But your dad…the first thing your dad did was hop out of the car to check on the squirrel.”

I pause. I hope this all doesn’t sound dumb. I’m relaying it, and it sounds sort of dumb, even though Shawn marveled about it for weeks later. That Kyle was the type of guy who swerved for a squirrel. Shawn wanted to be that type of guy too, and when Nicky was born, he embraced it: swerving for the figurative squirrel whenever Nicky found himself about to be run over. Which, given this kid, was often.