Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After
Heather Harpham
For my mother,
Jessica Flynn, artist of loving kindness
PROLOGUE
My best friend from college, Suzi, has accused me for years of not remembering well, or enough. Parties we went to, men we kissed. Girls we gossiped about. A trip we took to Southeast Asia. I know we were in Southeast Asia for ten months, and that on a boat between Sumatra and Bali a fist-sized flying cockroach landed near Suzi’s ear. I know I was unable to say anything except “big bug, Suzi, big bug.” I know we went to parties where we kissed men and gossiped about the girls. (We didn’t have the foresight or sophistication to kiss the girls and gossip about the men.) But most of the details are blurry or nonexistent.
It’s not that I’m a drunk, I barely drink. And it’s not that I don’t want to remember, I mostly do. It’s that my brain is wired for the present. By vocation, I’m an improviser. A person trained to pay attention to the here and now. I know exactly what’s happening as I write this. I am with a group of friends in New Mexico, on our annual retreat. Two of them are writing by the light of a single yellow bulb, out on the porch. Between them is a green vase holding four chrysanthemum blossoms. One friend is using a gleaming gold fountain pen. She’s European, she’s rich. Everything she owns gleams, and she’s often trying to give it to you. The other friend is writing with the stub of a pencil; it has bite marks and most of the yellow paint has flaked off. That friend is American and brilliant and has no money. Against the sound of their instruments moving across the page, crickets are constructing a multirhythmic evensong. Next week, if you ask me to describe this moment, I might retain the crickets. The rest—the gold pen, the stubbed pencil, even the diffuse feeling of contentment that comes from being close by, but quiet, with good friends—will recede.
My memory captures the shiny, pretty, easy things and lets the rest drop away. It’s finicky. For instance, I remember the night I met Suzi. My college boyfriend and I were driving the thin, snaking road to our campus on a Northern California hilltop. Suzi, striding the middle line, was a slim silhouette beneath a billowing nimbus of hair. We pulled over to offer her a ride; this girl I kept hearing about was suddenly real, in the backseat of my car. I turned to say hello. Her face was lit intermittently by the streetlamps, flash, high cheekbones, flash, rosy Irish skin, flash, kind eyes. Big eyes. Kind eyes.
I don’t remember every Indonesian island we visited together in 1991, but I know exactly what Suzi looked like on one night, in the fall of 1987.
Memory is stubborn, revisionist, and fickle. Everything I’m about to tell you is subject to persuasion, bias, and desire, as much as any history is. It is singularly one-sided. Time molds things retroactively, usually into what we wanted them to be. I’ve tried to remember everything that mattered, even those things I didn’t want to remember. I’ve read and reread the notes I took along the way, which reflect point of view as much as recorded fact. Most of all, I’ve tried to figure out how to tell a story that is not strictly mine.
TWO COASTS
1
My first child, my girl, was born just before seven on a spring night, perfect. She was compact and fully formed, a little over five pounds. She smelled like sliced apple and salted pretzels, like the innocent recent arrival from a saline world that she was.
But the midwife was worried. “She’s small for gestational age,” she kept saying. “Any problems or issues during pregnancy?”
I wanted to ask her if heartbreak counted. If sharing a bed with a good-hearted dog, rather than the baby’s father, might do it.
“Also,” the midwife said, “she looks a little jaundiced.”
“That’s just the Greek side,” my mom cut in, “we’re all yellow.”
The midwife finally handed her over, a waxy, pinched little thing. Gory and unkempt. Not serenely smiling like the dolls of my youth. But a real baby, mine.
When I breathed her in, a straight, bright synaptic path lit up the center of my brain. Every neuron said to its neighbor, yes, yes, yes, yes, this is the one, yes. This reaction is hardwired. Animals identify their offspring by scent. But to me, it felt like magic. Smelling her elicited euphoria akin, I imagined, to the unadulterated delight of smoking crack cocaine for the first time. After a few hours of life outside the womb, she began to smell less like apples and more like an element, tin or iron. Something practical, a garden tool or an old coin, sprung from dark soil and delivered into the palm of my hand.
After months of waiting to see who this child would be, after fending off the broad hints of a sonographer who was dying to give away the mystery of her gender, after sleeping alone in a thicket of unhappiness, after praying to skip over incubation to active motherhood—here she was. A little football of a person, tucked into the oval between my arm and torso, breathing on her own, making minor noises. Preoccupied with the job of being alive. Under a fringe of downy hair, at the base of her still soft skull, I found a pale pink birthmark, strawberry shaped.
For the next ten hours I lay awake, breathing her in, stunned to find a small human body nestled against mine. I couldn’t figure out where on earth she came from. The biology I understood; I knew about the genome, the dim lights, the Richard Buckner music, the curved helix of DNA. But none of that could account for her. Her birth was both an utterly quotidian event (245 new children are born into every minute) and a jaw-dropping miracle to rival loaves and fishes. There was no one. And then, poof—her.
I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t sleep; I didn’t want to miss anything. What if she sighed or pursed her lips or splayed her fingers or jerked her arms upward?
I was still awake, a little before 3 a.m., when a gentle-faced nurse came in. He didn’t seem surprised to find me up, smelling the baby. Typical new-parent behavior. He said, casually, that they’d like to take her to the nursery for a few tests. The oddity of routine tests at three in the morning didn’t register. It was obvious that my child was totally healthy; what harm could tests do?
Healthy babies were all I knew. The array of placid baby dolls I’d spent hours clucking over as a girl had smelled faintly of vanilla. They had coy smiles and carefully molded plastic hair. I tucked them in. I burped them. I crooned into their plastic ears. None of them ever ran a fever or broke out in hives. Even baby Jesus (the biggest celebrity baby of all time) was a robust little soul. Holy infant so tender and mild.