When I’m upset, I throw myself into paper oceans. I calm myself through land and water I’ve never seen. And it works — most of the time. Sometimes nothing helps, not even a map of the world. I once tossed the whole world away, even if the world was made only of maps, of paper, ink, and glue. Embarrassing. Sometimes my emotions threaten to swallow the universe. But a lot of the time I can calm down a little in the atlas, in the names of islands.
I’ve studied the names of the islands in the Kodiak and Sulu archipelagos; the names of the Queen Elizabeth Islands, the Isles of Scilly, the Bajuni and Sa’ad ad-Din, the Madeleines and the Turku, the Cyclades, the Orkneys, and the Islands of the Four Mountains. Islands from cold (the Balleny) to warm (the Riau), tiny (Bishop Rock) to enormous (Greenland), close (Nantucket or Bainbridge) to remote (Bouvet). Island prisons (Robben and Devil’s) to islands for outlaws (New Providence). I study the names of contested islands, like the Kurils, not too far north of Hokkaido, also an island, Japan’s northernmost, one famous for volcanoes and ski resorts. The fight for sovereignty over the Kuril Islands has kept Russia and Japan from signing a peace treaty to end World War II.
Islands.
To me, Earth is an island. We’re surrounded on all sides by an ocean of space and no other habitable planets. Or none that we know of. Yet.
I’d like to live on an island. An island I can walk end to end, or the full circumference, in less than a day. I want to know I’m surrounded by water. I can’t swim, so I would be stranded until I find a boat or until the water freezes or someone builds a bridge, or I perform a miracle. Otherwise I’ll die at the edge of the ocean. I want to live on an island off the coast of Maine, maybe, or one of the two tiny sovereign French islands between Newfoundland and Cape Breton, or in Malaysia. I don’t know.
It’s easy to think people are islands. Too easy. Too easy to think I’m an island, my brother and, before they died, my mother and my father. Everyone. It’s too easy, especially when we’re sad or angry. But some have argued we can’t ever really connect with anyone else. They say we stand alone, always, forever. And maybe that’s true.
Or do we always have one connection somewhere, a thread, weak and thin but still real?
Except we want to be unique and pretend we’re isolated right up until it gets scary, until it gets lonely.
And then there’s the other side. None of us is ever truly alone and apart. “No man is an island,” blah, blah. So cliché, right? Though not when John Donne wrote it almost four hundred years ago. A lot of very smart people have decided it’s true, that we’re all connected. “A piece of the continent,” like Donne says, “part of the main.” Yeah, we want to feel attached at least to one other person, or to the spirit of the world.
Until we don’t.
Until we think we’re bored, until we want to pretend we’re alone, unique. It’s like everything else with us, with people. Our minds play tricks on us. Sometimes we feel connected, want to feel connected, and sometimes we don’t, or don’t want to. We can never really be sure of anything. We always make trouble for ourselves. It’s no wonder we’re not happy for very long.
But what if we have no brothers or sisters or parents or grandparents or friends or enemies or guardians or anyone, anyone at all, to run into over and over again? If we have no obvious connections? Then do we become islands? Or do we always have one connection somewhere, a thread, weak and thin but still real, a connection?
I don’t know if people are or aren’t islands. Maybe we are and aren’t at the same time.
Families are islands for sure. Even families living in an archipelago, on a city street, in a housing project or a planned community, living close enough to shout to each other. They’re still surrounded on all sides by water. They still have their own land and climate and geography. They are unique.
A family is a strange landscape, isolated. And we can always find wilderness.
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I read a long novel for an independent study in eleventh-grade English. Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Honestly, I picked it based on the first sentence, which I found online occupying sixth place on a list of 100 Best First Lines of Novels. I also considered Scaramouche (“He was born with a gift for laughter and a sense that the world was mad,” #99) and The Color Purple (“You better not never tell nobody but God,” which takes a little working out, at #37).
Forget about the rest of Anna K. I could have written the required 3,500-word essay about Tolstoy’s first sentence:
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
True? Not true? Tolstoy must have thought people would think it over, argue it. It’s one of those ideas with a trapdoor.
Each unhappy family … each unhappy family …
The sentence echoed inside of me. My family’s life was nothing like the unhappy lives in Tolstoy’s book, with their unfaithful, jealous, greedy lives and whatever else. But that’s Tolstoy’s point, I guess. My family’s unhappiness is different from the unhappiness of the Karenins and the Oblonskys and the Levins of the novel, but we’re all unhappy, fictional or not, each in our way.
It’s hard to stay happy for very long. Even when we’re alone, sitting by ourselves without anyone else around to mess things up, our happiness can’t last. Minding our business on our own little island, anything can go sideways at any time. We can get sick. We can get bored. We can get lonely. We can hate ourselves.
Happiness is always at risk.
We can do our best: study, sleep eight to ten hours a night, stay away from drugs and alcohol and dangerous sex and screens and phones and apps and Netflix. We can eat less sugar, less salt, or more sugar and more salt. Drink less Coke, drink more Coke. We can exercise. We can volunteer, or work, like Key and I do, for an actual paycheck to put toward food and bills and college and clothes, or to help house and family.
Family. Other people.
We can’t avoid thinking about other people no matter how much we might try to think only about ourselves. We can be fair. We can never say anything mean or cruel. We can steal from the rich and give to the poor. We can stick up for others or fight for a better world, protest, sign petitions, whatever. We can love.
We can do all these things to be good. But still we can be unhappy. We can be hurt. We can lie. We can scream and yell. We can be betrayed. We can betray.
Our happiness can last only as long as we can avoid screwing something up or escape everything in the world that can hurt us, including ourselves. We’re imperfect no matter what, always imperfect.
And if it’s hard to be happy by ourselves, then it’s got to be harder to be happy with someone else, even with someone you love. If I want to see any horror movie, no matter how bad, over any drama, no matter how good, but someone else, someone I love, like my suddenly ex-girlfriend, Jacqui, who would always take a drama over horror, then —
I’m sorry. I’m not really sure how Jacqui popped into my head there.
It’s maybe even a simple, probably stupid example anyway.
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
There’s only one way to be happy and an infinite number of ways to be unhappy. To be happy, everything has to go right. But to be unhappy, just one thing has to go wrong.
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I figure most families are happy and unhappy at the same time. Sometimes they lean more toward happiness than unhappiness, or the other way around. They can go on like that, constantly tilting one way or another. This is the truth of family.
We see happy families and unhappy families, though, and we know the difference.
A happy family eats a breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast for dinner. A happy family sings around a piano. Or maybe a happy family picks up trash from the sidewalks and gutters on weekend mornings. One happy family camps together in a r
emote forest in Labrador every June, and another has two hundred cousins and aunts and nieces and nephews all sit down once a year to a reunion feast of boar and buffalo and ostrich, roasted corn and potato salad and egg salad, marshmallow ambrosia and chocolate-covered crickets. Maybe a happy family eats anchovy and onion pizzas on Fridays. Another pans for gold, and another takes turns reading aloud from the dictionary by candlelight. One binges on Hulu, and another prays ten times a day, and another keeps four dogs, six cats, a mute parrot, a giraffe, an iguana, and a two-headed goat.
All of this makes for a particular, sometimes strange happiness — not everyone prays, pans for gold, or keeps a menagerie — but we can’t deny the happy family its happiness. That family, no matter what, feels safe with each other.
The unhappy family is made up of actors, sometimes really good liars who occasionally pretend happiness in public, like the cast of a sitcom who seem to love each other on camera but loathe each other when the camera is turned off. They can’t eat a meal backstage together without an argument. We can’t necessarily see where the danger or the unhappiness in a family comes from. It may be hidden from us, but that family knows the facts, even if they’re not telling. We see the unhappy family, and nothing stops us from making up the story of its misfortune.
I don’t want you making anything up about my family. I’ll tell you what you want to know.
The family Key and I were born into included a man, my father, named John William Schoe (pronounced shoo), and a woman, my mother, Diane. My mother died when Key and I were nine.
She was walking to work early in the morning when a tire struck and killed her. The tire belonged to a dump truck. It came off as the truck barreled down the avenue. According to two witnesses, the tire traveled almost three hundred yards before it swerved toward my mother.
My mother died on the street just as the paramedics arrived. They found her already gone. Around 6:15 a.m.
After the tire struck my mother, it tore through a storefront and destroyed a deli, seriously injuring the owner who had just begun to unwrap his daily trays of cheese.
Before my mother’s death, we were happy. Or I think we were. Unhappiness can ruin happiness so fully that you wonder if you were ever happy at all, even for a second.
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No. We were happy, the four of us. I can tell you about it. Won’t take long.
We didn’t have a menagerie or pan for gold. We didn’t sing together or go camping, and we had no cousins or aunts or uncles, since my parents were the only children of only children. What we had was a family that had fun. And nothing says fun like a family of four trying to set world records that no one else on earth can prove or disprove.
Who will say the four of us did — or did not — over a long Thanksgiving weekend simultaneously juggle for a half-hour each day on the busiest downtown street corner? Key and I were seven years old when our father taught us to juggle. Key was a natural. Even now he’ll keep up five balls, five kittens, five bricks, five anything. Me? I can get my three tennis balls up, and that’s where it ends. But over that weekend, my mother, Key and I juggled three balls each, and my father four cleavers, all on the street in front of a curious public. I dropped a ball once, maybe twice. And once my father let the four cleavers clatter to the pavement when a buddy passing by (no longer a buddy) called out my father’s name to distract him. Better to drop the cleavers than lose a digit or two, a tragedy that would come later with another stunt. Over the two days we made $450 from all kinds of people tossing bills and coins at our feet. Our parents gave my brother and me each a hundred to open savings accounts.
No one but us can say for sure that all four of us jumped on our parents’ king-sized bed for thirteen minutes and fifty seconds without stopping. We would have gone longer — much, much longer — if I hadn’t fallen off and broken my wrist or, really, if the bed hadn’t broken, sending me to the floor. I’m actually surprised the bed lasted as long as it did. Four people jumping together? How stupid. Key and I were eight for that one.
Who can say we didn’t walk a mile together in less than twenty minutes, backwards?
Only four people on the planet know how many ears of corn my family once ate in fifteen minutes. And only four people know how many pumpkin pies — my father eating two pieces for every one of Key’s — we polished off between 2:00 and 4:00 the afternoon of one November 14.
There were more grand attempts at private greatness, and some spectacular failures. We once blew up a toilet and flooded our basement. We lost a rental car in an Arkansas lake. My mother all but lost her voice forever during a singing marathon. And my father lost a pinky toe and the tip of a second toe to frostbite. That was during what my father called the Idiotarod, our version of dogsledding across Alaska. Some events ended in tears.
My parents would save money for this or that idea and take their risks with vacation and sick days, ask for time here and there. They would pull Key and me from school if they had to, but mostly we played within the rules and law. My father joked that when Key and I turned eighteen we would go on a crime spree, robbing banks and knocking over convenience stores, but the family didn’t last that long.
Not that we would have turned to crime.
I don’t think.
My parents had fun with each other before they married, and it mattered to them to keep a sense of adventure and goofiness after they married and gave birth to twins. They could get testy over logistics, moody over money, grumpy over my father’s insistence that we carry out every ridiculous idea no matter what. But I only ever saw them fight once. That story has to wait.
It’s important to know that my brother and I trusted our parents through all of our escapades, even the ones that ended poorly. We were a happy family.
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I’m not so much telling a story as taking you somewhere. I’m taking you to an island, and you’ll either come the whole way or leave off somewhere and turn back. I want you to come with me, though. I want you to come along until we say goodbye. Then I’ll go my way and you’ll go yours. I’m building a bridge, a wild bridge with arms, and you’re walking it with me. You’ll cross the water by the same bridge back to your land, to the country you know better, to your home. You’ll have traveled a little. It’s good to get out.
The biggest problem I have, whether or not I’m telling a story or getting you across a strait of water to an island, is picking the straightest route. I leave things out, too. Like what happened on my way home after I felt my brother’s fear. The morning I saw my father’s broken body. It took me twelve minutes to get home from the path at the bottom of the ravine, but it should have taken less than seven. Where did those minutes go?
For a minute, maybe more, I forgot what I was supposed to be doing, forgot where I was headed as I watched two black dogs wrestle in the grass. Growling, snarling, snapping, scraping.
Then, two minutes or so went to a series of one-sided texts I sent to Jacqui.
Me: I don’t think we said everything before. At least I didn’t.
I waited.
Me: I’m heading home. Something’s up with Key. But let’s meet in a couple hours, please.
Waited. Waited.
Me: OK Jac. I get it. You’re upset. I was wrong to get so angry. We should talk. I’ll talk. I promise.
And there’s the business with the flashing lights and the accident scene that may or may not have happened.
Near the dead end where we live, far down the road, I saw flashing lights. Fire trucks, police, ambulances, I’m guessing. I couldn’t tell.
Maybe if my brother wasn’t going through some sort of terrible crisis I could feel, maybe if I didn’t get sick again and have to retch into the curb — Key — I might have walked to the lights.
But what could I have done?
Nothing.
And to be perfectly honest,
there might not have been an accident, nothing terrible at all.
Now and then, ever since the morning my mother was killed in the street, I imagine the scene. I imagine it from the distance of one of the witnesses who watched a truck tire fly down the street and, as if it had a mind of its own, kill a woman walking to work. I imagine the trucks and lights, and I imagine the disaster. I imagine my mother broken and bruised, crushed and shocked.
It took me a moment to take in the far-off lights, get sick on the curb and recover.
Maybe another minute or more. And then, home.
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I sit at the kitchen table across from Key, who stares into his glass of water. He’s just told me he killed our father, and I’ve finished cleaning up the pitcher I threw against the refrigerator.
We are surrounded by ghosts.
“You’ll die young,” he says. “Your emotions, Rad. They’ll shorten your life.”
My brother has foretold my future, a future entirely different from his, and I don’t know what to say.
“Your heart eats at your brain. Or the other way around. It’ll take years from you.”
“I guess we’ll see.”
“You’ll have whole years swallowed up by anger. You’ll torture yourself, and you might torture everyone around you. But the anger —”
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