I was surprised one night, before bed, when Vincent came to me. He wanted to ask me a question, but not in front of girls. We sat on the floor in my office, and he asked me if it was true, had I really wet the bed when I was a boy.
“Yes,” I lied. “Right around when I was your age.”
“Did you ever sleep over at someone’s house?”
“A few times, sure.”
“When did it stop?”
“Oh, it didn’t last very long.”
“How long?”
“Are you afraid it’ll never stop?”
He nodded his head yes.
“Believe me,” I said. “It will.”
“But how?”
“No water or juice before bed.”
“We tried that.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to tell you the secret method, but first you have to promise never to tell anyone.”
“Promise.”
“Double promise?”
“Double promise.”
“It’ll take practice,” I said, “but eventually it’ll be easy. Not too many kids know about this. Here’s what you do. You realize that wetting the bed is impossible. It simply can’t happen. You couldn’t wet the bed if you tried. Then,” I said, “you want to lie in bed, close your eyes, and feel how dry the sheet is, you want to imagine waking in the morning with the sheet just as dry. You want to close your eyes and see it in your mind. We can practice now, if you want.”
He closed his eyes.
“Imagine how great it feels to wake in your own bed,” I said. “Your sheets are dry, your pajamas are dry. Keep your eyes closed,” I said, “and really feel what that’ll be like. Pretty good, huh.”
He nodded yes.
“Now, before you fall asleep, I want you to keep imagining yourself waking tomorrow in a dry bed. If you find yourself getting worried, just say to that worry, ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t want you right now,’ and go back to imagining what it’s going to be like in the morning.”
“I don’t want worry,” he said.
“That’s it,” I said. “That’s the secret.”
“Easy,” he said, and in the morning we found Lucy in Vincent’s bed.
“Dry,” he said, his first words upon waking.
Later, during breakfast, he said, “Do you got any other secrets?”
“Who has a secret?” Lucy said.
“Me and him,” Vincent said.
“I want a secret, too,” Lucy said, and Cary said she’d tell her one later.
“So,” Vincent said, “do you got any more?”
“That,” I said, “is the only secret you’ll ever need to know.”
But Lucy and Vincent had their own secret; they told me one February morning, the day after we returned from Martha’s Vineyard. We’d taken them to Lucy Vincent Beach; Cary told them it had been named for them, and we carved their names into a rock.
We were home in Brooklyn, sitting by the window, watching squirrels leap from tree limb to tree limb, when a plane passed overhead; we watched it disappear into the clouds, reappear, then disappear again.
Lucy walked away from the window.
“She’s scared,” Vincent said.
“You should be scared, too,” Lucy said.
“Well, I’m not.”
“Why are you scared?” I asked her.
“Because it’s going to fall,” she said.
“I don’t think it’s going to fall,” I said.
She ran back to the window, looked up at the plane as it moved out of view. “There are three people on that plane.”
“Probably more than that,” I said.
“Three,” she said. “And it’s going to fall, and they’re going to die.”
“My father died,” Vincent said.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry,” Lucy said to me. “You’re not on the plane.”
“Neither are you.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Lucy,” I said, “you’re right here.” I put my hand on her head as if to prove she was really there.
“Vincent’s on the plane, too,” she said.
“Stop saying that,” he said.
“It’s nice when you go up,” Lucy said, “but then something bad happens.”
“Tell her to stop,” Vincent said.
“Lucy,” I said, “your brother’s getting upset.”
“It was a long time ago,” Lucy said.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” Vincent said.
Rigby didn’t confess until she’d been clean for eight months. If she stayed clean until the end of the year, and held on to her job—she was waiting tables at a Polish restaurant on the Lower East Side—she’d be able to regain custody of her children.
“The second time I was here,” she said, “I put it in my bag. Didn’t look at the title until I got home. I was like, Shit, of all the books I could have stolen, I get a self-help book.”
“But why steal a book?” I said. “Why steal anything from us?”
“Not sure,” she said. “I’d been doing all these destructive things for years, and I’d had to give them all up, except smoking, and maybe something inside me was just like, man, I have to do something bad, even if it’s tame like stealing a book.”
We were sitting in the courtyard, where she could smoke. She finished her cigarette, then lit another; she took a long drag, and ash fell from the tip before the drag was done.
“As soon as I saw the title,” she said, “I threw the book under my bed. I don’t read books like that—you know, here’s how to fix your life in three easy steps.” After a pause: “No offense.”
“None taken.”
“But listen,” she said. “One night I was out of cigs, and I was looking around for an old pack. I found one under the bed, two stale cigs left, and there was the book. That was the first time I noticed your name. So I said, Let me read the first few pages. And, you know, I just kept going. I mean, at first I was like, this is not for me. But, hey, two days later I’d read the whole thing.”
It was the chapter about gratitude, she said. The exercise where you treat everything that happens to you, and everything that has ever happened to you, as a gift. “It’s the opposite of how I normally see things,” she said. “Everything’s a curse, everything’s out to get me, everything’s holding me back, everything’s responsible for whatever lousy place I’m in. I was like, well, that’s not working for you, so let’s try this. Today, I told myself, everything’s a gift, everyone’s my teacher. Let’s see if this guy knows what he’s talking about.”
It was difficult the first few days, she told me. Especially waiting tables. “A man asks three times for a new water glass,” she said. “No hair in the water, no floaters, he just doesn’t like the glass. Three times, and I was like God knows what this guy’s here to teach me. Maybe patience, fine. Deep breath, here’s your water, let me know if you need anything else. Same with the lady who talked on her cell phone while ordering, didn’t say excuse me, just looked away as if I wasn’t there—you know the type, has money to eat fancier but is trying to be cool by lunching at this Polish joint, wants to tell her friends back in Jersey about this great place. All these angry thoughts going through my head,” Rigby said, “and I was like, wait a sec, I’m going to stop judging her, I’m going to assume she’s actually a nice person, or maybe she’s had a difficult year, a difficult life, and while she was yakking on her phone, making me wait, my anger reached a peak, you know, and then poof, it was gone. I could have stood there forever with my pad and pencil and been happy. I didn’t need anything else, didn’t need to be anywhere else. Then the woman got off the phone, looked at me, smiled, and said, ‘That was rude, I apologize,’ and I said, ‘That’s all right, it was actually nice to stand still for a minute.’ She left me a huge tip, and I didn’t even resent her for it. I have this thing,” she said. “I hate when someone stiffs me, but I hate even more when someone overtips. It’s li
ke they’re showing me up or something. I’m working on that.”
“I’m really glad you stole the book,” I said.
“Don’t be too happy,” she said. “For every moment I feel grateful, there are a dozen I still feel cursed.”
“You’re doing the best you can,” I said.
“That’s what I’m going to say to God when I die,” she said. “I did the best I could.”
She lit another cigarette, took a drag. “Not that that wouldn’t be a lie,” she said.
She took another drag, and another. “Not that I believe in God,” she said.
IN FALL, IN the day’s first light, Cary would gather leaves to use as bookmarks. Just this morning, before I sat down to write this memory, I found a leaf in a book of poetry about garbage, a book my father might have liked had he liked poetry. I’m tempted to look for more, but I’d rather ration. I don’t want to find that I’ve already found the last one. I prefer the possibility of surprise—a preference the man I’m writing about wouldn’t have understood. Once dead, always dead, some might say, and so the leaf, and so the man who wrote the poem about garbage, and so my father. But some might say that the poet is alive through his words, and my father through my reading the poet’s words, and my wife through the leaf, even though the leaf is dead.
Cary breathed beside me; the twins whispered in the next room; the dog twitched on the floor, chasing a dream squirrel she’d never catch.
I closed my eyes, inhaled deeply, and created my day: everything I could ever need, every person and experience to make my intentions manifest.
I had everything I wanted, so my intention was to keep: wife, children, career, faith.
I’ve heard it said that we keep nothing. I’ve heard it said that it’s good to lose what we’re most afraid to lose.
Peace and safety, I thought. Abundance and joy.
Sounds like prayer, but it’s not. Prayer, at least the kind I practiced in my Catholic boyhood, felt more like begging. Felt more like please. Whereas this was a making, an act of creativity, of authorship. Prayer felt like turning the next page of a novel and hoping everything turned out all right. I preferred to be the author of my life.
Peace and safety, abundance and joy. A mantra during my run. My body grew stronger with each mile, an extra lap around the park, seven miles instead of five, the wind keeping me cool, fast up the final hill, I could have gone three more miles easy, could have run to my mother in Queens and back, and with this thought I remembered what day it was, why so few people were on the street. Thursday morning, but no one on their way to work.
After breakfast I took the children with me to the bakery. Most stores were closed, but not the bakery, not the butcher; in small ways the day revealed its identity. A Thursday that feels like Sunday except no church bells. Long line in the bakery, already out of pumpkin pie. A cheesecake, then. And a black-and-white cookie for the kids to share. They bickered over the vanilla side—Lucy complained that Vincent had taken too large a bite—and left me with chocolate, the consolation prize, if you ask me, of the black-and-white cookie.
It made sense that I might forget what day it was. After all, I woke every day giving thanks. For years Thanksgiving had been me and my mother, sometimes a widowed neighbor who was childless or whose children lived across the country. Every few years my mother would invite someone new (there was never a lack of people about whom my mother could say, “She has no one”), and at its peak, the year I started college, we had eight guests, none related to my mother by blood but by tragedy. A few men, but mostly women she knew from church or the supermarket or the bus, the youngest a divorcee in her early forties, the oldest a ninety-year-old man who, until his recent stroke, had taught piano to children in the neighborhood. After I moved out, when I was eighteen, my mother sent letters updating me on Mr. Keller’s heart surgery or Mrs. Grimm’s daughter’s car accident, as if I remembered these people, some of whom had joined us only once. My mother’s letters, which arrived every month or so, even though I saw her just as often, gave the impression that she was writing to a son who lived in Rome or Paris rather than a subway ride away in Manhattan. My mother has lived in New York City all her life but has never, as of this writing, taken the subway; I might as well have been across the ocean.
Now, with Cary and the twins, my mother had no need for others; plenty of tragedy at the table already. There was my father, of course, there was always him, and to keep him company was Cary’s family (“Father, mother, sister, wiped out, just like that,” my mother told people, seeking their faces for sympathy she could pretend was for her) and the twins themselves (“Poor things, their mother has problems, you know,” and she’d leave it for others to complete the rest of the story), and so my mother no longer invited others, though she’d watch at the window to see which elderly neighbors had been “left all alone” and would make sure to visit them the next day.
Always a walk to the cemetery, never together. My mother would leave the house first thing in the morning, without me. Ten minutes later, from my bedroom window, I’d see her laying flowers at my father’s grave. Those first few years, when the loss of my father was new, when my guilt was most unbearable, this was the worst, most subtle form of cruelty.
Too many thoughts in the shower, memories I didn’t want. I stepped out and began towel-drying my hair, and only then did I realize that I hadn’t rinsed out the shampoo, so I had to turn on the water and find the right temperature and rinse my hair, and when I stepped out of the shower again, I remembered that the towel had shampoo on it, but there were no more clean towels in the bathroom, so I called Cary, but she couldn’t hear me, and I walked wet down the hallway and found a clean towel in a pile of unfolded laundry, and on the way back to the bathroom I slipped.
It was Lucy who found me on the floor. She pointed at me and laughed. I wrapped the towel around me.
She walked over to me; she wanted to know why I was crying.
“I’m not,” I told her. “My face is wet.”
“That’s crying.”
“Not always,” I said.
“Laugh big,” she said. This was a game Cary had taught her, a game Cary had played as a girl with her father.
“Okay,” I said. “Do something funny.”
“Just laugh big.”
“Make me.”
“Laugh big!” she said, and stomped on the floor.
I closed my eyes, held my stomach, and pretended to laugh really hard.
She looked pleased. “Now laugh small.”
I chuckled quietly, and this satisfied her.
“Cry small,” she said, and I made a sad face and sniffled and gasped a little, and she said, “It’s okay,” and I stopped pretending, and then she said, “Now cry big!” I closed my eyes and covered my face with my hands and shook and made the sounds of crying—sounds anyone but a child would know were fake—and Lucy pulled my hands away from my face and said, “No! It’s okay! Stop crying! Please stop!” and I smiled to let her know that I was all right.
“Open sesame,” I said, and the kids knew what that meant; we’d played this game before.
We were in the center lane, eastbound on the BQE; we hadn’t moved much in ten minutes. Below, in Calvary, the dead slept, whispering reminders where we were going. Any cemetery, not just the one behind my mother’s house, felt like home.
“Any second now,” I said. “Like the parting of the Red Sea.”
“What’s the parting of the Red Sea?” Vincent said.
“A miracle,” I said, and traffic in the center lane, and only that lane, moved.
Vincent kicked the back of my seat. “Again!” he said.
“No need to,” I said. We were going forty, fifty, sixty, and the other two lanes hadn’t moved.
Vincent’s laugh sounded like choking. He was so loud we didn’t notice at first that Lucy was crying.
“Honey,” Cary said, “what’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” she sobbed.
“A
re we moving too fast?”
Lucy managed to catch her breath. She said, “I don’t like miracles.”
“You seem really upset, sweetie,” Cary said.
“Yes,” Lucy said.
Cary reached back and held Lucy’s hand, but said nothing. She believed in allowing children—adults, too—to feel whatever they were feeling. Crying was good. Tantrums were allowed, even encouraged. Difficult emotions were not to be fixed; they were to be witnessed. Our most important job as parents, she believed, was to listen.
We pulled off the expressway and drove through Queens. Lucy was trying to catch her breath.
The lights. A game that soothed me. Red to green, one after another, timed to my thoughts, timed so that the car would never have to stop. I imagined the car had no brakes. Green light, green, green, just in time. Then yellow—extra gas, through. “Slow down,” Cary said, but I raced toward the next light, already yellow—a moment of doubt, then gas, through the red light. “Eric, please slow down.” Cary touched my arm, and I turned to her. Then she yelled, “Watch out!” and without looking I pressed the brake and the car skidded to a stop.
A girl, maybe twelve years old, had pushed a stroller into the street. Now she stood frozen in front of our car, gripping the stroller’s handle; she was so close she could have reached out and touched the bumper. Blond hair, braces, red high-top sneakers. A young woman, short and thin enough to pass as a girl herself, probably the girl’s mother, ran into the street, pulled the girl and the stroller onto the sidewalk. She glared at me.
I got out and said, “I’m sorry, it was my fault,” but the woman seemed not to understand.
“It wasn’t her fault,” I said.
The woman reached into the stroller and pulled out a baby; it wasn’t moving. Then I saw that the baby was a doll. The drivers behind me were beeping their horns. The woman yelled something at me in Russian. I got back in the car and drove the final few blocks.
The Book of Why Page 10
