My American Unhappiness (6 page)

"They have Aunt Harmony," I say.

"She lives so far away," my mother says. She closes the fridge empty-handed.

"It's hard to plan for marriage," I say, "without having any idea of whom you might marry. It's doubly hard to plan for marriage with seven-year-old twin orphans factoring into the equation."

"Zeke," she says. "Please."

"Zeke what?" I say. "Please what?"

"I'm just curious."

"You're being judgmental of my bachelorhood."

"Now you're just being silly," she says.

"Silly?"

"You know what I mean," she says. She goes to the sink, takes the skillet I've already washed, and begins rewashing it vigorously.

"I'm afraid I don't," I say.

The skillet drops into the sink with a clang. She stalks off, leaving the water running. I shut off the faucet, and I do not follow my mother, not even later, when I hear her in her room, maybe, perhaps, crying.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
Wisconsin dips into that beautiful period of transition from spring to summer, and in the newly warmed air, one senses that, up and down the block, good-looking couples are shedding their lightweight, moisture-resistant pullovers and Smart-Wool socks after a brisk and vigorous run, and making happy love while their children doze soundly upstairs. I imagine them then sitting around, still naked, drinking fair-trade coffee and eating tamari almonds and figs from the Willy Street Co-op. They'd shower, the children would wake, and the father would read a story aloud—something like an African folk tale in a bright, colorful picture book recently featured on NPR—as the mother prepared breakfast. This is precisely the carefree, sweaty, and familiar intimacy I long for in my own life, and there it is, all around me, plain as day.

As I think I've said, Madison is not an easy town for those of us who are single. It is not conducive to, or particularly tolerant of, the sort of melancholy that accompanies solitude. Like most college towns, Madison has all of the same brightness that comes with young bodies and rich minds. And I don't just mean the bared limbs and midriffs, the display of flesh and hipbone, but also the bubbling optimism of life at a Big Ten school: the expectation that your team will win, that life will offer you much, that you will have choices upon choices set out before you like a feast, and all you have to do is choose the kind of happiness you would like to pursue. It makes a man want his own fight song!

This morning, however, still shaken a bit by my mother's inquiries from the night before, those probing questions into my potential loneliness, I am faced with the realization that I, for the most part, am a solitary creature. And under the burden of this realization, I find that the friendliness of everybody in Madison suddenly strikes me as a problem. And when I hear my friend Mack Fences, the book salesman, calling my name from half a block away (he must be en route to his partner's bookshop), I pretend not to hear him and walk briskly in the opposite direction. Around the corner, I break into a brief sprint to increase the distance between us, even though now I hear him yelling my name.

Some mornings you simply have no desire to make conversation. You long for a reflective stroll, in which you amble along the sidewalk, gazing here and there at one of the city's lakes. Still, you see people you know everywhere—neighbors, baristas, colleagues from the university, past grant recipients, and potential grant applicants. It is difficult to see so many people you know, so many busy and active people, if, frankly, you don't care how somebody's novel, thesis, art, job, marriage, life is going, not because you are heartless or cruel, but because you simply don't have the energy to hear about other people's struggles and triumphs. Your own joys and woes are exhausting enough, aren't they? And in Madison, where everybody is supercharged by yoga, organic food, locally roasted coffee, microbrewed beer, biking to work, and classes at the Monkey Bar Gym, the energy and optimism in the air can make one weary. What is it that the Old Testament prophets say? Do not
grow faint?
Well, I realize that I have done just that on this fine morning: I have grown faint.

I enter the vestibule of the GMHI offices, where the sole remaining staff member of GMHI (other than me), Ms. Lara Callahan, is typing away at the reception desk. I am not quite sure what she is typing, but she is typing rather furiously. There is no reason for such a breakneck pace; there is not that much to do here. The phone rarely rings and the mail—other than junk mail—slowed to a one-envelope-a-day trickle, usually a form from the federal government, which she completes and I sign.

The days are slow for her. The ten million dollars we received from the federal government is mostly gone: with a rubber stamp from the board of directors, I have generously awarded grants, hired promising scholars, assisted rural libraries and urban community centers in building campaigns, and I have run the ship aground, so to speak, by giving generously and enthusiastically to worthy causes. I believe there is about twenty thousand dollars in federal money left, a few months of operating expenses at best. The truth is, this is
exactly
what I was supposed to do: give away federal money. But the second part of my charge was to raise significant private funds that would make the GMHI a sustainable endeavor. On that front, I have failed.

Frankly, I probably do not need Lara's assistance anymore, but I keep her on the payroll because she is thirty-six and is the single mother of two. And, if I may admit this without sounding like a misogynist, I enjoy the sexual energy she brings to the office—her shapely, smooth legs, the faint scent of lavender, the glistening dampness on her forehead when she returns from a vigorous lunchtime walk. When my mother brought Lara up as a potential
prospect,
she was not voicing a thought that I haven't considered many times myself.

With the generous federal funding, I am able to pay her fortysix thousand dollars a year plus benefits, and she knows she will not be able to make that kind of money elsewhere. She is very bright, a wonderful receptionist, an excellent writer of correspondence, and she keeps the books tidily and brilliantly, even alerting me, weekly, to the fact that I have spent nearly all of our money and cash reserves. She is a few inches taller than me. Her skin is fair, in the way of those milky Irish lasses I so love to see in movies, and her hair is short and dark, and I would gladly spend a week of my life kissing her extravagant legs, hips to toes.

Certainly, her legs are one of the main reasons to make her, as my mother urges, one of my
prospects:
her intelligence, bluntness, efficiency, and grace are other reasons. I see her five days a week, and she sees me. We are both lonely. Some days, I am sure, that is enough. In truth, it's hard for me to think of anybody on earth who knows me better than Lara. But isn't it hard to tell with coworkers, especially those you supervise, how much of the extended kindnesses and smiles and tender gestures are intended as deference and how much of them come from a real and deep well of friendship?

Never mind. It is better, as I have told my mother, not to mix work and love. My work is, and always has been, the dominant actor on my life's stage.

I breeze by Lara's desk with the ease and purpose of a busy man.

"Good morning," I mutter, a tight smile on my lips, and walk briskly to my office and shut the door.

I hear her say, "What's the matter with you?" as I walk past her, but I do not acknowledge it. Normally, I greet her with a bit of chatter, so much so, in fact, that once she asked me to limit my morning conversation with her to fifteen minutes.

At this moment, as I wait out the last of the GMHI funds, I am still working, with great passion and discipline, I assure you, on a project that, though this may sound trite, may actually, in truth, be my life's work (if you will pardon the dramatic weight of that old phrase):
An Inventory of American Unhappiness.
This project has become the sole focus of the GMHI. It is my hope to finish this project before the money that funds the GMHI runs out, and then use the amazingly strong critical and public reception of my project as a catalyst to raise more funds. At this date, however, the mountain of work atop my desk is high; the balance remaining in my federal grant is low.

The thinking, the rationale, the philosophy, behind my project is this: Americans are fundamentally unhappy, and they are fundamentally unhappy because they suffer from institutional addiction. If you consider the comfort (for most), the wealth (relative), and opportunities (many) with which Americans have matured, it is mind-boggling to consider that anybody here could be unhappy. But everywhere I go, I can see it, such unhappiness, such an overwhelming need to be drugged and distracted, lest a moment of silent, melancholy self-reflection pierce our fragile hearts!

We are, at our heart, a nation of rugged individualists. Not in the absurd, capitalistic manner of an Ayn Rand protagonist or a blue-blooded intern at the American Enterprise Institute, but certainly in the manner of our philosophical forefathers—Emerson, Thoreau, Jefferson, Paine. These men all advocated a nation, a way of living, where men and women are free to march to the beat of their own drummer, empowered by self-reliance, by an abundance of practical skills, and by an economic and political system that champions pluck and innovation over size and institution.

How quickly has such an American ideal faded! Now, we are all slaves to institutions. Educated in them from the age of five, or younger, and often imprisoned within them, accumulating piles of debt, until we are pushing thirty. At the end of our educational process, we know what? How to plant a garden? Build a home? Repair and maintain machines? Hunt? Fish? Camp?

Hardly. Rather, we leave these institutions with only one small skill—trading commodities, analyzing prose, ceramics, welding widget A to widget B—and we immediately need to find another institution to take us in: General Motors, Yale, the Federal Reserve, the UAW, Target, any place that will allow us to put food on the table.

Once food is on the table, we must find shelter, often for a growing family, and instead of having any idea of how to build a shelter, we must buy a shelter, and because the costs of shelter are so absurdly prohibitive in comparison with actual wages, we must move immediately into the debtor system Thoreau likened to slavery. We must move into a home that is owned by an institution—Bank of America, Countrywide, CitiFinancial—and we must make ourselves adhere to a payment schedule. We must then secure health care coverage from a large institution, finance transportation through a large institution, deficit-spend based on the leverage of a large institution, worship the Lord at an approved institution, and then, one morning, our children enter a federally mandated pre-K program or a twenty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year private preschool. And the cycle begins again. You can almost hear the tiny hearts of America's children breaking as they gather around the story circle or line up for a carton of milk. Slaves!

Thus, for most Americans, life becomes a series of debts and dependencies on entities much larger, and much more powerful, than ourselves.

The paradox is this: in the middle of such indebtedness and dependence, we are bombarded with an apparent array of choices, are we not? Walk into a Walmart, surf Amazon, pull off at the Des Plaines Oasis, and you instantly are given the illusion of freedom. You can buy anything you want! Read anything you want! Eat anything you want! What a country!

But in our quietest moments, these very choices become so bewilderingly superficial that they bring with them insurmountable gloom. The fact is, by the time we are old enough to comprehend the magic and bounty offered by the wider world, we are so indebted to institutions, financially, spiritually, and otherwise, that we have no real choices.
Listen,
the internal memo bellows from our soul's central office:
You have no options. You wont start that business, you won't open that café, you wont live in Costa Rica, you wont come out of the closet, you wont write that novel, and you wont ever have a threesome.

And this is the epiphany, the realization that makes us so alarmingly unhappy. I am not the first to editorialize about my generation's abundant choices, or its accompanying debt, but few people, if any, have expounded on this troubling irony: throughout our lives we will have many choices but little by way of means. By the time the average American is able to grasp the choices and opportunities that Jefferson and Paine and his ilk so desperately fought for and advocated, they will not have any means or freedom with which to pursue them.

But, I'd argue, our sadness goes even deeper, punctuated by a crippling lack of the time, space, silence, energy, and/or capacity for critical self-reflection that life in the twenty-first century has brought upon us. In this culture, one discovers an alarmingly high rate of unhappiness. Some of this unhappiness is chronic; one finds some subjects to be wholly unhappy. For many, many others, most of my subjects, in fact, the breakneck pace of change in the past eight years, coupled with national leadership that is fumbling, frustrating, and frightening, has made them absolutely terrified of reflection. Pausing to think—i.e., unplugging the computer, the phones, the BlackBerry, the Facebook—is horrifying. When one does such a thing, one is visited by unhappy images, thoughts of doom and woe, the thumping footsteps of melancholy, and the assurance of global tragedy and destruction. Quickly, the self-reflection impulse is stifled. And that lack of self-reflection makes it nearly impossible for us to find our authentic selves and our true callings, especially ones unfettered from institutional hierarchies and dependence. Thus, we sit, like scores of drug-addled teens with distant parents, inundated with college catalogs and ineligible for financial aid.

I have many other secondary hypotheses about our unhappiness—it stems from constant war, environmental degradation, chemical toxicities and food additives, the underfunding of cultural programs, the student loan industry, et cetera. The companion essay for the oral history project was supposed to be a five-page overview but has become a three-hundred-and-sixteen-page document titled
Why So Vague?: An Introduction to the American Unhappiness Project. Why so vague
is a question I once heard a man ask the author Charles Baxter at a fiction reading (GMHI mini-grant #02-898:
Surprised by Joy: The Unhappy Midwest of Charles Baxter
). The open-ended obtuseness of the question has always stayed with me: yes, so much malaise, so much heartache, a mountain of woe—but who can define it? Why so vague? Indeed!