I reached over the gearshift and took my mother’s hand.
“It’s an awful business,” she said. “Loving another person.”
“It is,” I said, and for the first time in a long time, I remembered that I loved her, or more precisely, I remembered she was a person who had lived her own autonomous life full of mistakes and disappointments and judgments and thwarted love.
My mother and I got out of the car to look at the rows of promising raspberry canes. “It’s nice here,” she said. “Who would have thought?”
“You should see it at night,” I said, and she laughed. She hadn’t ever asked me what had happened in the car, probably because she thought she knew. And maybe she did know, maybe Eddie had told her, before everything between them was ruined.
When we had returned from the raspberry farm, my mother announced her need to lie down, and I found myself sitting in the den, flipping through the Positivity books. Lucas had never regained his footing after the demise of Positivity, a franchise dead in the water by 1985. It would have died long before then had it not been for my mother’s publicist tenacity. Once the series was scrubbed, Lucas spent the rest of his life pacing around the yard, or pacing up and down the halls when the weather was bad. He never could stop grumbling, to my mother or my brothers, about the unfairness of it all. To be unable to find something else to write about was one thing, surely that happened all the time, but his inability to take his own advice was a real mark against him.A stack of his books sat on some table or another in every room of the house. I hadn’t picked one up since a night in high school when Leda and I did a dramatic reading for our much younger half-brothers when Lucas and our mother were out for dinner. “Bounce on your toes while brushing your teeth!” I said in my most positive voice.
“Feel the positivity radiating up from your ankles!” Leda cried.
It wasn’t that we got busted. Lucas wasn’t there to hear us and the sweet boys didn’t tell. But when bedtime came around that night, and Christopher and Matthew stood at the sink, bouncing, bouncing, Leda and I felt like toads. Who were we to say their father was a fool? Our own father was out on a boat somewhere, pulling lobsters out of the ocean. At least their father came home.
Looking at those books now, the person I most wanted to read them to was Lucas himself:
While a positive attitude yields positive outcomes, life’s deepest joys come not from those outcomes but from the practice of a positive lifestyle. Gratitude is the garden in which the flowers of positivity bloom. Look around right this minute. What are you grateful for? Make a list, starting with your health. If you’re not in good health, focus on whatisworking, because something in you is thriving: your eyes, your heart, your hands. Pick one thing and spend an entire minute feeling a sense of wonder for what you’ve been given.
Next, think of a person you’re grateful for. Maybe it’s a child, a parent, a spouse. Maybe it’s not. Maybe it was your third grade teacher. Mine was Mrs. Smithson, who picked up leaves on her way to school. Every day she found new leaves, even if it meant taking a longer route, and the wonder she feltat the sight of those leaves spread to every student in the class.
I went out into the yard and found Lucas staring at a flower bed. “Hey,” I said, holding up his book. “Have you looked at this in the last forty years? This is good.” Sentimental and simplistic, but gently nudging the reader towards the obvious: Here you are, lucky thing. You’re alive.
“Weeds,” he said. “Look at them. I pay that gardener a fortune and everywhere I look I see weeds.”
Positivity meant solving the problems. Solving them and letting them go. Or it meant not solving the problems but coexisting with them peacefully. “So you talk to the gardener, or you find a new gardener, or you pull the weeds yourself, or you look at the flowers. What about those lilacs, Lucas?” I sniffed the breeze. “I swear, I just read a chapter about this exact thing.”
Lucas looked at the book in my hand,Positively Grateful!“That was a good one,” he said.
“It is!” I said. He was eighty-eight and I had never liked the man, but in that moment I was open to the idea that I had been wrong about everything.
“Then tell me why it hasn’t been reissued? Old books get reissued all the time. Some big shot needs to slap their brand on it. You tell me Oprah can’t get behind Positivity? What about Anderson Cooper? He’s Mr. Compassion.”
“You’re missing your own point: it’s not about getting the thing you don’t have, it’s about recognizing what you do have. You’re still in good health, you’ve got this beautiful house, your wife loves you, your sons are nearby.”
Lucas looked at me as if he wasn’t entirely sure we’d met before. The late-afternoon sun shone bright against his heavyspectacles. “Are you still teaching school?”
“I am.”
He chewed on this for a minute, nodding slowly, and I began to think that once again I was wrong about everything. Lucas had dementia. Lucas had no idea who I was. “Maybe you could get the books adopted as textbooks for your class,” he said. “Kids these days are no better than rats. They’re lawless. All they care about is what pops up on their phones, then they repost the most loathsome things they can find so that they can bring down democracy. They’re the ones who need Positivity.”
Scratch that. Not demented. “The books we read in my classes are novels.”
“So what? Think outside the box,” he barked. “Think positive for a change. A book gets onto the curriculum in one school and the other schools get competitive and order it, too. That’s what we need to get going, some real competition. Siblings, neighbors, friends. If I can get it started in one school, it will spread, especially if the kids start posting about it.” The thought of this seemed to cheer him, then he shuffled off in the direction of the garage.
Was my mother looking out the window? Was this her life every day?
The life they lived in Winchester might have begun with Positivity, but it had been sustained through my mother’s cleverness and self-taught financial acuity. She had spent their married life buying and selling and shifting things around. She took what Positivity had given her and she worked it. She’d made a brilliant deal on some beachfront property on the Cape, as well as a large, early buy in Apple.
And wouldn’t she give it all back to be married to EddieTriplett now? He could be as gay as he wanted. He could spend every weekend with Skip Hotalling. They could laugh about it all over dinner. They could laugh after a book club at the Center for Fiction, after a black-tie fundraiser for PEN. After all, Abigail and Eddie had been friends, and in the end a friend was the better person to have.
I slept poorly among the proliferation of fringed throw pillows and the high-thread-count sheets in the house of abundant guest rooms. In the morning I stripped the bed and took my sheets to the washer. My mother, who had been equally exhausted by our time together, drove me back to catch the commuter rail to South Station. I thought she might object to my leaving so early, but she didn’t. She didn’t at all. “It’s impossible to park,” she said, looking around the lot.
I told her not to worry. I kissed her and let her go. My connections were tight, but I made them.
I couldn’t call Leda from the train. Not having to listen to other people’s telephone conversations was the privilege of the quiet car, and anyway, it was Tuesday, and she would be seeing patients. I sent a text to tell her I’d survived. Proof of life.
I should have taken Jonathan up on his offer of train tickets when I was young because he was right, the train was better. When would I have the chance to see all those marinas, the water and the boats? The marshy grasslands and tidal lakes, the little shingled houses and the vast stretches of scenic nothingness were unimaginable to those confined to a bus. How was it that a weekday trip to a museum with my husband had plunged me back into childhood at the age of fifty-three? I knew what Leda would say. She would say it was because childhood never leaves us. We seal the room up and cover it in sheetrock. We dry andsand and paint, but the pocket of history remains, and sooner or later someone always winds up tapping on the wall, commenting on the way it sounds strangely hollow in there, and then the whole thing comes tumbling down.
