CHAPTER 3 #4
“How did you find out about Eddie and Skip?”
“Did he tell you this part?”
I shook my head.
“That’s too bad. I would have liked to know how he remembered it. As far as I was concerned, we had a good thing going. We were tender with one another, thoughtful. I had loved your father, but that was madness, screaming, moving out, making up, making up in every room of the house.”
I held up my hand.
“I’m just saying, Eddie and I did a better job, especially where you and Leda were concerned. We did a good job with the two of you.” She stopped. She might have been resting.
“So?”
“So Leda was still in the hospital. She couldn’t get her bowels going, there was a lot of worry about infection.
Then Eddie comes in and his foot and ankle are smashed to bits, his shoulder’s cracked.
You were good, though. Just a cut. You were such a solid, reliable child.
The car was gone. I was running up and down the stairs between Eddie and Leda, back and forth, back and forth.
Eddie had surgery, he was doped to the gills, his ankle was in a rig to keep it elevated and he was still working on some book he was editing.
He had asked one of the firemen to fish it out of the backseat before they brought him in.
All of it was crazy, but we were okay. No one died. We made it through.”
“Eddie told me that’s what you’d say.”
“When you saw him?”
I shook my head. “When we were in the car after the accident. I said you’d be upset about us wrecking the car, and he said no, you’d be too happy that we were alive.”
My mother’s chin dropped to her chest, but she smiled. “That’s Eddie,” she said. “Bright side.”
“I interrupted you.”
“They’d put a sign up on the door whenever the doctor was there to do an exam or the nurse came to give him a bath: ‘Privacy, Please.’ I’d been in the room ten minutes before and I came back.
There was something I was bringing to him or something I’d forgotten to say, I don’t remember.
I saw those two words on the door and didn’t give them a second’s thought.
‘Privacy, Please’ did not apply to me, but I should have been respectful.
He gave me everything. I could have given him that much. ”
“Skip?”
“He was sitting in the chair beside Eddie’s bed and he had his head on Eddie’s chest and Eddie had his hand on Skip’s head.
That’s all it was. Skip was crying. He must have been waiting down the hall for me to go.
Eddie must have called him and told him what happened.
He would have told Skip not to come. Eddie was no dummy.
But Skip came anyway, and he sat in the chair I’d been sitting in ten minutes before, and he put his head on my husband’s chest. And everything was over because Eddie was still gay and he was still in love with Skip.
And so I wanted Eddie gone. I never wanted to see him again for the rest of my life, but that isn’t true.
I wanted him to be in love with me. That’s what I wanted. ”
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 what is working, 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 felt at 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 heavy spectacles. “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.