One More Theory About Happiness: A Memoir (8 page)

E-V-E-R-Y L-E-T-T-E-R O-F E-V-E-R-Y W-O-R-D. N-O M-A-T-T-E-R H-O-W S-I-M-P-L-E, N-O M-A-T-T-E-R H-O-W S-E-E-M-I-N-G-L-Y O-B-V-I-O-U-S.

In class, Sharon’s job was, ostensibly, to take notes while a teacher lectured or write my answers on class work or tests. Instead, I whispered in her ear every letter of every word of every line of notes I needed for every class, while attempting to disturb no one else: my classmates, whose pens and pencils sped across the pages, and my teachers, who listened to the class-long mutter I made in her ear with growing frustration.

A biology teacher, grim and humorless, watched Sharon flail every day with increasing disdain. Before class one day, he came to where we sat. He fixed her in his flat gaze.

“I can give you my lecture notes,” he offered her, acidly. “It might improve the, ah,
situation
.”

That word was drawn from his mouth like a serrated blade, meant to cut, and he had expected it would. I could see it. He waited for her to flinch.

“Oh, no, goodness no, thank you,” she said. Her round face beamed.

He looked to me, a brief softness in the long shape of his face before it hardened for her. He began recording his lectures at night, passing me cassette tapes when class ended and she had already left the classroom. Sometimes there were hand-drawn diagrams of cellular structures, complicated explications of processes, and obsessive, enthralling passages on etymology. Language itself was a living thing and all its secrets were also its possibilities. I think my first training as a writer, as a poet, began then, though I had no idea of this at the time. Even as Sharon labored beneath the shroud of language, I grew to love what it could reveal.

Sharon’s hand would shake, scrawling out mistake upon mistake, while I hissed,
no no no
and finally
yes
. I consigned myself to watching written rubble pile up on the page.

She laughed nervously, rubbing the pencil’s eraser entirely away until its metal end tore through, making a long, pulpy accordion in the page. She would reach for another sheet, solemnly, and start over. By the end of each class, a fraction of that day’s lesson had been successfully taken down. When the bell rang, Sharon would hide for a few moments in the teachers’ lounge, where her purse was stowed in an open cubbyhole.

I followed her there once, entering the offices by another door, and from a distance watched her seated beside a humming soda vending machine, her eyes locked on the purse, as though it were a hatchling that might be blown from the nest.

I felt guilty when, after two months, I requested that we no longer work together. And I felt guilty when, the following summer, a postcard arrived from Reading, Pennsylvania.

The writing on the back of the card appeared to have been written by someone else, with none of Sharon’s blocky, all-caps lettering. The message read:

I felt no guilt when I ignored the card, letting it become buried by books and papers, and, most of all, by time. I couldn’t bear the thought of contact with her. A residual degree of frustration and anger lingered in me like a venom.

Now, that is gone, replaced with clarifying irony: she must have been dyslexic, or beset by some other cognitive disorder, none of which I am in any way qualified to diagnose. But it makes a kind of sense, or it helps me to think more kindly of her and feel, in all my fallibilities, all my incapacities, a long, latent, wounded empathy.

Days after Sharon’s replacement began working with me, I began to wonder if I had been rash, if, maybe, by the school year’s end, if I had not murdered Sharon, things might have improved. If I might have somehow been able to train her in the inscrutable mysteries of the alphabet. If all the stars and all the planets, everything strewn about the cosmos like burning litter, might have lined up like glowing cherries in a Las Vegas slot machine, hitting jackpot, with all the letters and then all the words tumbling forth in a slurry of golden sentences. I wondered this.

Hiding from her replacement in the stacks of the school’s modest library, pretending to be interested in biographies of Oliver North and Bob Dole, I wondered this.

Jennifer, or Jen as she wanted me to call her, had appeared with a mug of coffee in her hands, a voice that tittered and trilled and then softened to instant sobriety, her heart larded with grief. For me, for you, for the children she someday intended to bring forth into the world.

She could spell, quickly, perfectly, and for a short moment I felt like maybe this would be better. This would work.

But when Jennifer asked me what had happened to me, and listened with perfect gravity to my story, her eyes fattened with tears. She touched my forearm.

“You have been through so much,” she whispered. “So, so very much.”

“It, ah, hasn’t been so bad,” I said. In situations like this, when a stranger’s grief appears ready to ignite, I tried to tamp down their sense of my suffering.

“You are so wise,” Jennifer said, her hand still nestled on my arm. I pulled it from her touch, onto my lap, but she didn’t notice. “Let me help you.”

Gingerly, she took my arm in her hands, returning it to my wheelchair’s armrest. Anger spiked inside me. I pulled away once more. We were in the library, during a study period. Students moved about in bored circles.

“I’m going to look up some books,” I said, more forceful than necessary. Her eyes blinked. “You stay here.”

“Yes, of course, Paul,” she said, her voice wounded. “You take your time. I’ll be right here.”

As much as I had learned to inhabit my body, with all its changes and difficulties and outright agonies, I had been forced to try to respond to strangers who didn’t see me in my broken state, in pain, struggling, so much as they saw their son or daughter. As they saw themselves. For all the gentle curiosity, the questions about which batteries my wheelchair used, or how I used the bathroom, people couldn’t help their fascination with ruin. With their future selves. The downward arc of dotage. In me, they could see a rehearsal of the flesh, how it might all end.

I could say nothing to her that wasn’t suffused with heroic stoicism: in her eyes, I was a vessel for suffering. Or courage. Maybe pluckiness. Maybe all of the tired tropes which had been pinned to my life like a badge. There was nothing I hated more fervently than playing that imaginary role. A consolation to others but not to me.

And, yet, I understood it. I felt it. The urgency of grief, even when utterly misguided, when knotted in self-interest.

That spring the radio stations in town, the little ones which seemed to warble from a great distance, broadcasting thundering, disembodied Sunday sermons, began advertising an upcoming appearance by Joni Eareckson Tada. The teenager whose book I skimmed through the night before my injury was now grown, married, in charge of a large foundation and host of a syndicated radio show. My mother requested
free tickets for us both, though I had no desire to go, to participate in or be defined by disability, whether it was mine or that of someone else. My mother replied:
You’re going anyway
.

I wanted no part of going and wanted nothing from her story. I knew enough of my own injury to understand how changed I was and how set apart.

The venue’s stage was flanked on both sides by paintings Tada had completed by gripping a brush in her teeth. A lamb, a lion, a glade exploding with summer. We waited while the room continued to fill up and metal parts clanked and unseen bodies groaned and the metallic hiss of respirators went up into the air.

After a short while, a woman wheeled Tada up a ramp beside the stage and to its center where the light fell down on her. Nearly forty, she was no longer a wounded girl in a book. More than ever, I wanted to leave.

Tada was dressed in bland clothes; her brown hair was pulled back. Everyone clapped and flash bulbs began to pop throughout the crowd. Tada waited for the applause to boil off before she spoke, greeting us. Her voice was warm and practiced, every syllable liquid. Then she began to sing. There was no music. Only her voice.

Her arms swept slowly over us all. Her wrists were supported by splints. Around me, eyes began to shine with tears.

When the moment had passed, and her song was over,
she spoke a short while. God allowed to happen what he hated, she said, so that what he loved might be accomplished.

I wanted to leave, to run from the room and everything so simple and palliative, but I couldn’t.

Tada sang a lilting benediction before thanking us all and turning to sign books at a table. I refused to go up, to meet her, and moved to the dimly lit back of the room where I could watch the broken parade. My mother never quite joined the line, talking instead to the woman who had pushed Tada onto the stage.

When my mother waved me forward, she introduced me to the woman, a friend of Tada and co-host of the daily radio show syndicated around the world. The woman smiled sweetly and walked over to Tada, whispering in her ear, and pointing to me. Tada smiled and waved to me from where she sat signing her books. I smiled back but felt false, repulsed: this was not what I ever wanted to be, not for anyone, an example, a symbol.

At school, I continued to work with Jenny, though I spent much of it avoiding her. In the quiet spaces of the day, she hinted at the sadness of her marriage. I stared off, into whatever distance was available, while she morosely leaked. All I wanted was to complete my work with minimal disruption.
If I said nothing in reply to her, she returned to writing, or doodling, making small hash marks on the page, like she had been taught by experience to be ignored.

On the year’s final day, while students darted everywhere, manic to be done, we sat in the hallway chatting. Weeks ago she had informed me she wouldn’t be back to work with me again and I had almost swooned with relief, though I feigned a dim regret.

“I want to tell you something,” she said while looking downward. “I said there were things I needed to better focus on in my life.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “You said that.”

“That’s not exactly true,” she almost choked out. “This is hard for me to say. Very hard. Please don’t think I’m strange. I couldn’t stand that.”

I didn’t say anything. She went on.

“I—I’ve—The best way to put it is—” She broke off. “I have developed feelings for you. Serious feelings.”

I still said nothing. My mind had lit out for a sane place in the world.

“
Emotions
,” she said. She imagined, I think, that her voice in that crucial moment was italicized. I just blinked. She stumbled on.

“I’m seeing my pastor.” She blushed. “I mean, he’s guiding me. I told him a few weeks ago. He told me I had to quit. Please don’t be angry with me.”

She was close to sobbing now. She vibrated pitifully.

“I’m—uh—not,” I said. “Not angry.”

“I’m so happy,” she cooed. “I’m so happy—”

“I’m leaving,” I interrupted, already in motion. “I have to go. Good-bye.”

At the sidewalk’s far end, behind the long snout of a cargo van, I hid, even though the June sun stabbed and I soon felt ill in the heat. Students pulled away from the school in their shitty cars, stereos pounding the air, tires smoking expertly as they accelerated, while all around me an emptiness grew.

I think now of my first kiss. Not the ordinal kiss of childhood, planted on my lips like a solemn playground dare. No, I was fifteen, a high school freshman, on the yearbook staff, working with a partner, a girl named Kelly, after school in the yearbook room, a small closet that was mostly drawers and shelves stocked with layout pages and red wax pencils. I didn’t care for it, and when the year was done, I wouldn’t stay. Nearing a deadline, we were forced to stay late, to finish our assigned pages. All the school was emptied out and no one cared that we listened to a radio. That we accomplished mostly nothing.

She was tall, red-haired, denim-draped, always. I hardly knew her, except that she was kind to me, watchful. She was
the type of girl to come to school with a bruised eye, the mottled flesh seemingly so ordinary, so daily, she took little effort to conceal it. It would come and go, a chronic mark.

I didn’t notice when she drew close, not until I felt on my face the heat of her neck. I turned to face her, dropping the mouth stick I type and turn pages with.

You
, she said. And nothing more. She touched my face with her hand, black polish on her nails chipped away in places, white-pink beneath. There was the tang of bad cigarettes.

She kissed me, sweet and chaste, rubbing the back of my neck. I returned her kiss, half in terror, half in confusion. Then it was time for us to leave.

I watched her climb into an old lime Ford Torino. Her boyfriend peered into the distance, unaware she had opened the door, sat down, until she touched his face and they began to sign, making words with their hands because he was deaf.

The sky was huge, almost spring, surrendering to the night. They kissed lightly and he eased from the curb. Kelly turned to look out the passenger side window. She saw me, a long and lengthening distance away, and mouthed what I thought was a silent
no
. Her hands were still.

The first poem I ever wrote came to me like an accident of the mind. A blip, noise that had no apparent cause. Bored in class, watching classmates perform group activities near the end of the school year, when teachers were as desperate for escape as we were, I was thinking of nothing particularly literary, watching the sky and the visible world happen outside the window, when I began to hear in my head the rhythms of language, the propulsive patterns of a poem, and though I had no idea why, it was suddenly imperative that I write it down. Typewriters still populated the world in relative numbers back then, and it was easy to find one in the library, and blank paper beside it, ready to be covered. I began typing with my mouth stick what I heard, as well as I could render it, and when I finished it, a part of my brain had lit up, or switched on. Sitting there, that’s how I explained the sensation to myself as it galvanized me. There was no doubt, none, that I had stumbled on to something essential about myself, who I was and who I might become, and all around me the future seemed to crackle like a storm.