My American Unhappiness

by Dean Bakopoulos

  The mist?

  Midst. As in, the "midst" of everything, smack dab between the dry cleaners and the Kinko's.

  I think that's all very true, the things you say about Starbucks. You seem to look on the bright side of things. Are you an optimist?

  Yes.

  [Long pause]

  Zeke?

  I'm sorry. This is more difficult than I thought it would be.

  What?

  Conducting one of my interviews while on a date.

  Oh, right. This is pretty much a date, isn't it?

  Yes.

  Well, let's do something else.

  Minn and I stay up most of the night, drinking nearly all of the alcohol in the house. We grow affectionate and flirtatious. I recklessly hint, once again, that Lara, my associate director, will be resigning soon, and that Minn, without a doubt, should take her place. At one point, sashaying toward me with two fresh beers, Minn says, "How will you be able to focus on your work with somebody as attractive as me around?"

  "I won't," I say.

  "Good answer," she says.

  "I'm serious," I say.

  I consider trying to kiss her, and I'm about to, but she excuses herself and goes to the bathroom and does not come back. I can hear her throwing up.

  "Don't choke on your own sick!" I call from the couch as I'm about to finally pass out. I love using the word sick as a noun.

  Later, while it's still dark outside, I awake on her couch, cottonheaded, my eyes painful, my mouth dry. I find a water glass and fill it. Minn is asleep, with pillow and blanket, on the floor near the bathroom. I have to pee, but I don't want to wake her. I run hot water and pee in her kitchen sink, and then douse the whole sink with Dawn so it smells of lemons.

  I carry Minn to her bed, resisting the urge to undress her, which could be interpreted as a tender kindness or mild perversion. I go to the kitchen and get a glass of ice water and find some aspirin. I bring them in to Minn and find she has shed her clothes and they are in a pile on the floor. She is tucked under a burgundy comforter. I don't peek at her naked body, though the thought does occur to me. I do, however, once again, notice an engagement ring on her left hand.

  Just as I am leaving her room, she sits up in bed, holding the covers over her breasts.

  "Don't try to drive home," she says. "You can crash on the couch, of course."

  "I took a bus. I'll call a cab."

  "I suppose you don't want to hire me now?" she says, not opening her eyes or smiling.

  "I am as drunk as you, Minn."

  "I want to see you again."

  "Okay. Me too. I want to see you."

  "Sure. You don't have to hire me, Zeke. But you have to be my friend."

  "Okay, Minn. I want to be your friend too."

  "Zeke," she says, "I'm engaged."

  "It's okay," I say. "I saw the ring."

  "Can I explain?"

  "I'd rather you didn't," I say. "I need to pretend it's not true."

  "We haven't picked a date yet or anything. He's in Africa. He's building water purification systems."

  "A do-gooder," I say.

  "Bring me my toothbrush from the bathroom," she says. "Please. With some toothpaste on it?"

  "Okay," I say.

  She's sitting up in bed when I come back and I hand her the red toothbrush, dotted with Colgate, and watch as she moves it around in her mouth. It's hard not to smile as she rolls her eyes around.

  "A glass of water too?" she says.

  "There's one on your nightstand," I say. "But I'll get you another!"

  I go to the kitchen and retrieve a glass tumbler of tap water. She could have sent me to Alaska for fresh-caught salmon at that point, and I would have done as she asked. I was officially smitten; I was in love. I was ready to propose marriage.

  I hand her the water, which she drinks and then sets the glass on the nightstand.

  "Now," she says, "please kiss me good night."

  I kiss her slow. I kiss her as long as she will let me, worried about my own breath, but unable to think of such a charming way to brush my own teeth.

  And then I am under the covers too. Minn is naked and soon I am too. I don't ask any questions. When I leave in the morning, I see the engagement ring on the nightstand and decide not to wake Minn. Despite the urgency of my mission, it seems strategically prudent to allow her to make the next move.

  When I get home that morning, my mother is awake, sitting in the living room, in the dark, watching television with the sound off. She is watching an infomercial for something called the Abomizer, an exercise machine, and when I walk in, we both stare at the TV for a moment, where a parade of models are doing exercises on an orange stage. My mother flips off the television.

  "People are so stupid," she says.

  "They are," I say.

  "I can't sleep. I never can sleep," she says. "And once you start watching these stupid people..."

  I flip on the light, but my mother shields her eyes so I turn it back off and have a seat in the dark.

  "It's almost dawn," she says. "Must have been a good date."

  "It was," I say.

  "Phil Crawford told me that he spoke with you. About my will."

  "He did."

  "And Harmony seems to think that you're going to try to find someone to marry. Anybody."

  "I wouldn't do that," I say. "But there is somebody, somebody I have known for a long time, whom, well, I really, really, sort of suddenly, love."

  I picture Minn in her apartment, waking up naked, sliding on her ring, and walking to the shower. Is she smiling? Shaking her head? Is her head hung down in shame? Is she crying or laughing?

  "Well, I hope you know what I was doing with that," she says. "I was trying to be impartial and do what would be best for the kids."

  "Impartial?"

  "Well, I love you more than Harmony," she says. "You know that. She's lovely. I think the world of her. But she's not my child, you know? I don't have that kind of connection."

  I nod.

  "I don't love her the way I love you," she says. "My decision was practical, not emotional."

  "You do love me?"

  "Zeke," she says, "how can you even ask me that? Of course." She raises her hands out in front of her. "Here, help me up. Help me to my bed."

  I stand up and help my mother do the same.

  "Do you want to go out to breakfast, Mom?"

  "Well," she says, her voice already wearying, already fading to a wheeze, "that might be nice. How about when the girls get up, we all go?"

  "They have school," I say.

  "They can be late," she says.

  "Right," I say. "Where do you want to go?"

  "I'd like to go to the OCB one last time. Before I die. See my old friends."

  "It won't be the last time," I say.

  "Help me to bed and wake me up when you're ready to go."

  Once my mother is back to sleep, the sun begins to rise. I make a pot of coffee and am soon joined by Harmony, who comes into the kitchen in her nightshirt and slippers, looks at my rumpled clothes, the same ones I was wearing at supper last night, and says, "You just getting home?"

  "I am," I say.

  "Unbelievable."

  "What?"

  "You get around, that's all."

  "I was told by a shadowy albeit sexy figure that one of the nights, and I quote, never happened. So I can't be judged for a night that never happened, can I?"

  "It's still a respect issue, Zeke. You don't hop around like that."

  "May I remind you that only one of us is married."

  Harmony glares at me but says nothing. I continue.

  "The ethical thing to do, Harmony, is for you to leave Malcolm, marry me, and help me raise those beautiful little girls."

  "That's insane. My sleeping with you," she says, whispering through her gritted teeth, "had nothing to do with those girls or with Malcolm or with my marriage. It had to do with three gin and tonics and the fact that I've always found you
cute and that I was feeling incredibly overwhelmed and lonely and I thought you were too, and—do you get it?"

  "Oddly, I do."

  "Malcolm had an affair last year."

  "Oh, I'm sorry," I say.

  The girls get up then. I meet them in the living room. They are holding hands, an adorable habit they developed as two-year-olds. When they are sleepy and near one another, they take each other's hands. It is a precious, amazing, and almost instinctive thing that they do.

  "Girls," I say, "let's go out for breakfast!"

  The five of us fit easily into the booth at the Old Country Buffet, especially now that my mother is forty pounds lighter than she used to be, a shrinking bird of a woman. A few OCB team members come over to greet my mother, and to tell her how well she looks, which is absurd, and they tell her how brave she is, and how inspirational she is, and I think, She is just waiting to die! She looks terrible and scared! Why is that inspirational?

  It's not that I don't acknowledge that what my mother is going through is extraordinarily difficult and sad. But it seems sort of demeaning to me to pretend that there is any sort of dignity to her fight. There's not. It's simply death, slow and painful and premature. It's an injustice, an outrage, a crock.

  I take April up to fill her plate at the buffet and Harmony takes May. My mother stays in the booth, requesting that I bring her some sliced peaches and maybe some yogurt. There's a steady stream of OCB cooks and managers and bussers coming by the table to say hello to my mother, and I notice that quite a few of the customers stop and chat with her too. A few of the customers look stricken by sadness, and for the first time in my life, perhaps a clue to the density of youth, I realize that, through a job I considered demeaning and meaningless, my mother had a broad and vast world all her own.

  I eat my breakfast rapidly, fueled by a lusty appetite that I hope deadens my sorrow. April and May and Harmony are engaged in a conversation about the differences between fruits and vegetables.

  "Tomato?" May says.

  "Vegetable," Harmony says.

  "Not true!" I say, a little more loudly than I mean to say it. April and May look a bit scared. "I mean, I'm sorry. It's a fruit. It comes from a flower. That makes it fruit."

  "Cucumber?" April asks.

  "Fruit," I say. "Fruit."

  After breakfast, Harmony and my mother go back to the house, and then I take the children to school and stop by the principal's office to let him know that the twins' tardiness was my own fault. At seven years old, they have already entered the reward and punishment system of public schools, and I do not want them penalized for having a pleasant—well, fairly pleasant—morning off with their dying grandmother. Then I head back to my office, the unpleasant aftertaste of lard and eggs on my tongue. I find some peppermint schnapps tucked away in my legislative relations file drawer—no, find is the wrong word, I knew it was there—and have a generous draw from the small bottle. Immediately I feel refreshed and reborn, a new minty beast, and I check my voice mail, find nothing, and go back into the lobby, seeking Lara. Finding her desk still empty, I pace my way back into my office.

  I do not do well in meditative states, especially under stress. The office is entirely too quiet. I direct my web browser to Pandora, a streaming music site that has become increasingly important to my sanity, and I scroll through the stations I've created, finally deciding on the Van Morrison station. This makes me want a Bloody Mary, so I pause the music, go to the small staff kitchen where I keep enough ingredients (tomato juice, Tabasco, olives, pickles, vodka, pepper, and salt) to make exactly that. Returning to my office with a generous pint glass, I sit back at my desk and continue the music. If one cannot relax while sipping a cocktail and listening to Van Morrison, then one is beyond the state of relaxation. I am treated to the song "Wonderful Remark," which is one of my favorites.

  In order to send my mind off in a different direction from my own pressing worry and woe, I check the e-mail account I use to get responses from the Inventory of American Unhappiness project's web page. I have three new messages.

  To: inventory@americanunhappiness.org

  From: melindalarson@justpress.com

  Re: Inventory of American Unhappiness

  I'm unhappy because of the rain today. My unhappiness is always linked to the weather, and I am very hard to please, weather-wise. I hate rain and clouds, detest the heat, find the bitter cold intolerable, and consider high humidity a plague. So, in fact, for nine weeks, each autumn, I find myself deliriously happy and then, near Thanksgiving, the first bitter winds emerge, the first snow hits, and there I am again, despairing. I'm serious. If there was one place on earth that had autumn every day, I'd move there. But there is nothing like that—there are places on earth that have summer all day or winter all day, and I suppose several places like San Francisco or San Diego, maybe, I don't know, I've never been, feel like spring all year round, but there is no place to go to be continually cradled in autumn's bosom. Thank you. This feels better.

  Melinda, 37, Boise, ID

  To: inventory@americanunhappiness.org

  From: dobiegillis123456789@yahoo.com

  Re: Inventory of American Unhappiness

  Hey. This is a cool project. Um, okay, I guess that insincere people make me unhappy. And curlers. When I see old ladies in the CVS drugstore with curlers in their hair, and you can see their scalp, and they look so old and tired but they are still trying so hard, buying makeup, hair products, I think that makes me unhappy. Put on a scarf, you know? CVS drugstore in general, that makes me pretty depressed. Especially when I see somebody buying food there. Once, I saw this guy at the CVS drugstore and he was buying a can of Manwich and some white hamburger buns and a carton of chocolate milk and a canister of corn chips and I was like, oh, man, this is not easy to watch.

  Doug, 23, Redford Township, MI

  To: inventory@americanunhappiness.org

  From: starboard555@wilsontech.com

  Re: Inventory of American Unhappiness

  This seems to be a very counterproductive, self-centered project. I stumbled across it while searching for a speech I heard, years ago, given by a young Robert F. Kennedy. You, sir or madam, would be wise to hear that same speech:

  http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/rfk-mlk.htm

  Stanley, 66, Morgan, IA

  I click on the link sent to me by Stanley of Morgan, Iowa. It is the famous speech that RFK gave in Indiana on the night Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. I hit Play and watch the speech. The moment Kennedy reveals the news to the crowd, and the collective gasp leaps from their throats, I start to weep. In his speech, Robert F. Kennedy quoted the playwright Aeschylus: "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

  How amazing that once upon a time our leaders were so well versed in the humanities. Oh, even Bill Clinton was well read—for all his Bubba-ness, for all his lechery, the man's favorite author was Arturo Pérez-Reverte. Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar. Oh, if only intelligent and curious men and women could lead us. Maybe this is precisely why we are so unhappy, Stanley, you sixty-six-year-old crank from Morgan, Iowa. Because our nation has been hijacked by buffoons who send our brothers and sisters off to reckless, endless wars, because the nation has lost all capacity for critical reflection, you asshole. Because nothing has any weight anymore, Stanley, you fucking piece of shit.

  I leave my office for some water and a restroom break and find Lara at her desk.

  "Good morning, dear," I say.

  "Good morning, Zeke."

  "My dear, I may need your assistance in a few moments. I have that idea for a new position here at GMHI that I'd like to discuss with you."

  "A new position?"

  "Yes."

  "Given our financial woes and the federal scrutiny we're under, you may want to hold off on that, Zeke."

  "My dear..."

  "Stop it, Zeke."

 
"Stop what?"

  "Calling me 'dear.'"

  "Fine."

  "How much have you had to drink, Zeke?"

  "That's quite enough," I say.

  "Jesus, Zeke, it's not even noon!"

  "My mother is dying!" I say. "My mother is dying!"

  That evening, I arrive at the far west side Starbucks with a great deal of hesitation. I don't want to appear to be some sort of stalker; Minn knows how to reach me if she wants to reach me. At the same time, I don't want to appear callous. Minn and I enjoyed a perfectly acceptable night of drunken lovemaking in her bed, and I do not want to appear as if the episode meant nothing to me. Not only do I still very much want to hire her, I also want to marry her. I figure I will stop by her place of employment and discreetly let her know at least one of those wishes. (Marriage, I suppose, should probably not be brought up until a second or third lovemaking session, at least as a general rule, but I must say that given the extraordinary courtship and accelerated relationship that blossomed the previous evening, swiftness and boldness may work to my advantage. If a woman is to agree to marry me before my mother dies, it will have to feel, at this point, like an insane and unavoidable matter of fate. She will have to believe that we have a destiny, of sorts, and that we have found each other for some mystical and inexplicable reason.)

  But I do not see Minn at the Starbucks, so I drink a cup of coffee at a corner table for a while, hoping she'll appear from the back room or the restroom, but she is clearly not working. I decide not to ask at the counter (why rally the suspicions of her coworkers?) and instead head over to her apartment complex. I ring the buzzer several times; I get no answer. I do not have her phone number or her e-mail address, but when I get home, I resort to that last-ditch effort of twenty-first-century communication. I search for her on Facebook, find her quite easily (a picture of her with someone else, a man with dark skin and dark hair, and they are standing in front of a setting sun), and send her a "friend request."