One More Theory About Happiness: A Memoir (7 page)

When school was over, the short bus would lower my chair by hydraulic lift into the street. At our front door, my mother waited for me to come up the long ramp to the porch and let me inside, though there was little room to freely move about. The hallway to my bedroom was so narrow both sides of my wheelchair dug long trenches into the sheetrock. So that I could enter and exit my bedroom the frame around the doorway had to be removed. Inside, there was a hospital bed with rails pushed up against a wall. I had a small desk, high enough for me to roll under, and an old typewriter. To the right, the other wall. If I turned around in the room, I
had to be careful of my toes: they would hit the bed or the desk or the wall.

And there was less room when Chan began to sleep on a small mattress on the floor beside my bed. Every night for almost a year we slept this way. The room had been his. It had always been his. Downstairs, where the den and my old bedroom were dug into the earth and were always dark and cool, he had never been comfortable. He was a child, eight years old, quiet and shy. One night, soon after my return, he wanted to watch a late-night movie with me. He never left.

At home, my mornings began, even earlier than they had at Shepherd, with exercise while I was still in bed. First, my mother stretched my legs as best she could, straightening them, rocking my hips from one side to the other. Then she helped me raise my knees and immobilize my feet: I lifted my bottom from the mattress by flexing my quadriceps. It was hard work for me, and harder for her, a small, compact woman. After thirty minutes she dressed me and because the bathroom in the hallway beside my bedroom was too small, I brushed my teeth in the kitchen sink and washed my hair in a plastic basin on the kitchen table with thick towels wrapped around my neck and in my lap to catch all the spillage. It was no good, but it was the best way we had.

Across from the cramped bathroom I couldn’t enter, on the wall hung a rustic frame, and in that frame was a painting of an old tree, its limbs arthritic and dense with foliage, standing a crooked guard beside a dirt road which rutted off into a dark distance. Carved into the tree’s scarred bark were my parents’ initials: JG & PG. James and Paula. When I was a boy, awake before everyone, I would sometimes stand on the tips of my toes to better consider it. Their names, right there, set into both the wood and the paint, fascinated me. Warm with the breath of a heating grate, I could not be hurried from them.

The town they grew up in is dead now. Dead, though it’s caught between the last gasp and whatever follows after it. Or doesn’t.

Along its main boulevard, used car lots loiter beneath ragged banners. Adult bookstores wait behind mandated facades, identified by their facelessness. Pawnshop windows dump neon light into the sullen day. Check-cashing services promise not to take your car.

But on the corner was an ice cream shop, a greasy spoon, the sort of place in which all things were sallow chrome and smelled like grease, grease forever, and onions and beef cooked in common on a grill, right there in front of you, by some kid who, as the story goes, is going to get out of here, somehow, some way, or an old woman with her silvering
hair bound up in a net, with her arms like hams and her face not much different and her cough rattling around inside of her like a baby’s toy.

When I was a boy, I would go with my father to vacuum his car. Loose coins in the blue hoses clattered and I loved that noise. A fastidious hail. Perched on a block while he worked, I waited for him to be done, to take my hand and lead me across the street to the ice cream shop, which seemed ancient to me, a relic from outside everything I knew and was.

We ordered swirled soft-serve vanilla, injected into sugar cones, and sat atop stools with swiveling seats at the grimy bar. The hiss of grease sang out.

Outside, in the quiet street, a lone car might trundle past, slowing, almost as if the driver were lost, searching about for crumbling landmarks, a sign which pointed away.

Another image, this time a photo of my parents, senior prom, my father in rented tuxedo with wing-wide lapels, and my mother, seated, her hair longer than I have ever seen it, a dark wash down her back. Fake backdrop behind them, they’re beautiful. Untouched. Burdened by nothing.

When I was seven, I begged for cowboy boots until my mother relented, and then I slept in them and would not
stop, though I woke every morning with feet soaked in sweat and my body so hot I felt ill. Too expensive to subject to the playground minefield, the boots stayed behind when I left home, old sneakers on my feet. I loved the boots, and had wanted them after months of comic book back cover advertisements. In them, O. J. Simpson struck an unbothered, post-disco pose, and whatever he said, whatever pablum devised by copywriters, meant nothing to me, except that these boots, all leather heavy, were what I wanted more than anything in that world.

Never very good at most sports, not baseball, slow enough that I vanished into daydream and caught nothing, and not basketball, which proved physically foreign in a way I could never master, every shot comically errant, I could, however, play soccer. The local recreation league games were held on autumn Saturday mornings, when dew was still on the grass and the sun was low in the sky. I tended to slip into the stiff cleats, having left the laces loose, and when I struck the ball one cleat would sail across the field like an oblong bird, shot mid-flight.

When my first season ended, and there was no tournament future for us, we were invited to a party at the coach’s house. He lived in a neighborhood that rolled up and down, every lawn and driveway a minor slope. After food, after blistered hot dogs and canned pork beans served cold to us on paper plates, we went down into the garage to find ways to pass the time because, really, we hardly knew each other,
appearing once a week to run around in half-coherent fashion and be yelled at by a stranger, some man who acted as though he had power over us, and when the inevitable realization came that we were children, and not him, not him at all, the yelling faded out and the game ended soon enough, just as the day grew warm.

His son had a skateboard and began surfing down the driveway. A few times before others joined in, rolling to a stop in the gravel, jumping off, tumbling, laughing and running back up the driveway to start it all over again. I watched, laughing, hooting for those who kicked the board’s nose up and ground its tail into the asphalt, stopping.

I knew this was nothing I was any good at. Boys waved to me from the bottom of the hill while one of them ran back up the hill with the skateboard held out in his arms.

Come on! One time! Chicken!

I took it from the boy and considered what to do. I wanted to do it because I loved velocity and plain motion. I loved to watch the movement of the world: cars blurring past our home in hot gusts of wind and boats splitting the waters of a river and the shifting procession of clouds in the summer sky. I felt called to it, always.

I lay down on the board and pushed off from the launch of the garage, rolling low to the ground, faster than I had expected. All the boys yelped: none of them had expected this.

My face was inches from the asphalt and my arms hugged the skateboard to my chest. There was now the question of stopping and I had no answer for it.

Later, when the party had ended and our dispersal had begun, I climbed into my mother’s waiting station wagon. It was dark, night fallen fully down in the crisp air. I entered through the front seat, the car’s dome light igniting as I climbed over the front seat and into the back. I was tired, bleary, already tugged at by sleep as I tumbled into the back, propping my boots on the passenger side’s headrest. As she turned to back up, her eyes fell on the ravaged toes of my boots, burned through when I had dragged them like anchors down the driveway.

The car stopped and she roughly turned the boots to her face.

“What did you do to these?” she demanded, looking down to where I had fallen behind her seat. “Take them off, give them to me, let me see them now.”

I shucked them off meekly, terrified and sad: I had not realized what had happened to the boots, how they had been ruined. I’d had no idea.

Screaming, she threw one. It thudded against the back window. And then the other came down, missing me by inches.

I gathered it up in my arms and cowered on the floor-board, holding it like a trophy of my own foolishness. We drove home.

That night now seems like a precursor to the morning of my injury, when I did not know enough to avoid damage, when I wanted so badly for my body to be other than it was, but not, if I could have known, what it would become, when nothing could protect me from myself, not even my parents.

Junior high dances were loud pageants of melancholia, held in the school cafeteria, darkened, festooned with glittering tinsel, loud with heavy metal, a prelude to the suffocating sway of pop ballads. I went alone but tried to speak to friends, yelling above the decibels. It felt like torture, like something inside me with deep roots was slowly being pulled out.

The air was dense with noise and hot: the ecosystem of the young. From a corner, I watched couples pair off, draw close when the ballads played. Teachers threaded through the crowd with flashlights, clicking them on when someone
danced too close to their partner, when kissing began. Weak bursts of light winked through every song.

I longed to join them. To participate in the communal swoon. But in another body. Not the one I had. I refused the half-measure of attempting to dance in my chair.

Because it would be no more than that: an attempt.

There were times I could have. When the Trundle sisters, already matronly, faced me on both sides, clumsily writhing, suggesting sensuality, I shook my head, shouted them away, hating them for even trying to involve me. We were strangers and we always would be.

A girl who had a crush on me, a sweet, attentive soul who always spoke in the halls, who passed me handwritten notes declaring her feelings, once came to me in the dark while everyone else pressed their bodies together, and knelt beside me. She spoke into my ear.

“Would you dance with me?”

I didn’t say a word. I was unable. All the breath inside my lungs stopped. She put her warm arm around the back of my neck and touched her forehead to mine.

For as long as that song lasted, she touched me that way. Not moving. Quiet. Her arm around me. As the song ended, I thought to kiss her forehead.

To press my lips to her skin like an apology.

But I did nothing and when the music began again she stood up, smiling sadly, and walked away, back into the crowd, where she vanished, though I tried to see her.

And then, it was over: the dance, the night, and soon enough, junior high, where I learned that longing is the body’s true lesson.

The hair of Bob Burnes recalled the weirdly inviolable, spray-shellacked dome of a television evangelist. He had been the principal of my elementary school at the time I broke my neck, a devastated, weeping visitor in the first days following my injury. Three years later, at the start of high school, he would be my principal again. That summer, in the days before classes began, I thought of what it would be like to see him, a reminder of my past, and felt indefinably blank.

No part of my injury had been his fault, though it happened at the home of one of his teachers. I’d known him in the way any child feels he knows a teacher, or visible administrator, which is to say that when I saw him in the hallways of my elementary school I thought,
He knows me but no one else
. I am special. I will be remembered.

And I would be, of course.

A few weeks before the start of the school year, I visited the new campus to inspect it for any issues with accessibility. I roamed empty halls, more interested in battered lockers and old textbooks stacked in precarious columns. Rounding the
blind corner of an enormous trophy case, filled with fading jerseys and retired numbers, trophies, plaques, and photographs from other decades, I almost ran over him. We had both been distracted but we stopped, exhaling before we spoke.

“Isn’t it good to find you here,” Bob Burnes said. He seemed to be speaking to himself, repeating something to himself that was, in fact, gladdening. He touched my shoulder, lightly, afraid I might suffer from any touch. “I’m glad to see you.”

“It’s been a while,” I said. “Are you liking it here?”

He had just been promoted to the high school. He sat down on a wooden bench, looking down the long, featureless hallway, turning something over in his thoughts.

“Promise me one thing, Paul,” he said, his voice still far away. “In four years, when you graduate…”

He trailed off, weighing the thing he wanted to say. I waited for him, though a dread began to build inside of me. I didn’t say anything.

“When you graduate, I want to see you walk across that stage,” he said, facing me now, very much present, his eyes wet and bright. “Can you promise me that?”

I said the only thing I could. I promised to walk across my graduation stage.

By any reckoning, it was an awful thing to ask, as though all that had held me back in the three years since breaking my
neck was a cringe-inducing request in a high school hallway. As if I had been waiting around for the right challenge, as if a high school graduation ceremony were the glory of my youth and I should cross it in full stride.

When I promised him I’d walk again, it was a promise I knew I’d never be able to keep. Enough time had passed for me to know, for me to feel in my body, that I’d come to the ends of any real physical improvement: no more strength was going to return to any part of my body, at least nothing that would be of practical use.

No morning would come when I’d wake and find my arms restored from the atrophy that had already taken place. My legs wouldn’t bear me up like a miracle.

I had reached the end of the body’s capacity to heal itself. There was no more. Though this was something too painful for loved ones to hear, who kept a vigil in their hearts for me, I had made my peace with it. This was my body and this was my life.

A new school brought a nearly maddening chain of new assistants. The night before the first day of classes Sharon called our home to see if she could come by for a visit, to meet before the next day’s first bell. When she arrived, my mother invited her into our living room. She sat primly, clutching a purse, absently touching her hair like she was nervous, on edge. My mother asked her where she was from.
My mother prided herself on detecting any hint of a person’s birth.

“I’m from Scranton,” Sharon said. “Pennsylvania. Not far from Philadelphia.”

“It’s cold there,” my mother offered.

“That’s why I like it here,” she replied. “Nice warm weather. We were ready for a change. Me and my husband.”

It was the sort of talk I hated. Idle and weightless, going nowhere. I imagined it five days a week, and my eyes wanted to cross. I stared out the window at the lawn, which was withered in the summer heat, the last of it, before autumn’s onset. After a while, I realized I was being discussed.

“Paul wears a leg bag,” my mother said. “Are you familiar with what one is?”

Sharon shook her head stiffly. Her dark beehive of hair floated above her like a hint of bad weather. My mother reached over to me, raising the left leg of my jeans to expose the plastic bag, half filled, strapped around my calf, and the tube with a valve hanging down.

“You might have to empty this sometimes,” she said breezily. “If it gets full. With urine. His urine.”

She nodded blankly, watching my mother.

“Don’t worry, it’s easy,” my mother said, standing up. “Let me show you.”

She walked away. Sharon, who appeared to be shrinking with every minute, smiled approximately. I imagined her like a character in a comic book, with a thought balloon
rising up from her mind, except there was nothing in the balloon. Nothing.

When my mother returned, she was holding a Mason jar. She knelt on the floor beside me and sat the glass jar on the carpet by my left foot.

“This is what we empty Paul’s urine into. All you do,” she said, “is take the tube and it has this plastic snap—”

Urine puddled on the dark navy carpet. She had opened the valve accidentally.

“Oh, shit,” my mother said brightly. “I wasn’t being careful. No big deal. I’ll just get a washrag and scrub this right up. That just happens sometimes.”

The woman looked over at me, miserably. I felt a little sorry for her. Soon, the spill was cleaned up and the jar returned to the bathroom. We resumed our meeting.

“I should be going, I suppose,” the woman said.

“Oh, don’t rush off,” my mother said, patting my knee. “Would you like some sweet tea?”

“No, thank you very much,” she said. “I do have two questions. Well, one is more of a statement and the other is a question.”

“OK,” I said, listening sickly.

“The first thing I should tell you is that I can’t spell. I can’t. You will really have to help me on that.”

“I imagine we’ll work that out,” I suggested, spotting my mother in the corner of my eye. She wouldn’t look back, a forced smile on her face.

“And my question,” Sharon said, her face very serious now. I tried to think of what she wanted to know, ran my mind through the usual catalog of queries:
What happened to me? Had I been born this way? Did I have a personal relationship with the Lord?

“Go on,” I said, bracing myself for whatever she wanted to ask.

“Will there be someplace where I can keep my purse?”

I had the same cheery rictus as my mother and the thought balloon which rose from my head like pale smoke read,
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
.