The Sad Truth About Happiness Read online

  The Sad Truth About Happiness

  A Novel

  Anne Giardini

  Dedication

  For my mother and father

  Epigraph

  Home is the normal—whatever place you happen to start from, and can return to without having to answer questions. It’s a metaphor that may seem to fit reduced expectations. We no longer seek towers that would reach to the heavens; we’ve abandoned attempts to prove that we live in a chain of being whose every link bears witness to the glory of God. We merely seek assurance that we find ourselves in a place where we know our way about.

  SUSAN NEIMAN,

  Evil in Modern Thought

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Eaves

  Gate

  Pathway

  Front Steps

  Threshold

  Front Door

  Entryway

  Hall

  Living Room

  Dining Room

  Study

  Family Room

  Pantry

  Kitchen

  Front Staircase

  Bedroom

  Nursery

  Dormer

  Spare Room

  Box Room

  Attic Stairs

  Attic

  Pitched Roof

  Chimney Pots

  Back Path

  Hearth

  Basement Stairs

  Basement

  Insights, Interviews & More ...

  About the Author

  About the book

  Read On

  Praise for The Sad Truth About Happiness

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Eaves

  In my family, which is middle-class, white, loving, and mildly claustrophobic, I was the child known for contentedness. A perfect middle child, as my mother often referred to me, a buffer between Janet, who is two years older than I and who tortured us all with her sulks and moods and whims and silences, and stormy Lucy, two years my junior. Unlike Janet or Lucy, I could be counted on to share, to give way, to make room, to forgive, to take the broader, longer-term, higher-level view. My parents, both of them also as it happens middle children, had the same equanimous traits, so Janet and Lucy were a daily reminder to them that one does not always get the children one deserves. I have heard them describing having children as a lottery, a game of chance. They do not approve in any way of gambling.

  As a very small child, my sister Janet, the oldest of us three girls, refused to eat anything other than dry cereal, cold whole milk (but not on dry cereal), finely chopped tuna, tinned applesauce, and mangos cut in half and sliced crosswise in their skins into the shape of diamonds, with the skins then turned concave, so the smooth fruit took on the appearance of an orange hedgehog. Her excessive fastidiousness with food continues to this day. She has, she sometimes pridefully reminds us, a highly sensitive gag reflex. A fleck of red in the yolk of a boiled egg makes her shudder. Anything left sitting out uncovered for longer than a minute gives her a horror of contagion. Her teeth are set on edge by even the smallest lumps left in cream soups or mashed potatoes or porridge. She turns pale when faced with food that has parsley on, in, near, or under it. Carrots must be cooked to just a precise point of resistant, tender firmness. If they are cooked past this point they feel, to Janet’s sensitive tongue, she says, as though they have been lightly coated in a particularly revolting organic slime.

  As the youngest daughter, Lucy’s parlor trick was to refuse to sleep. Her bedtime tantrums were remarked on by our neighbors, against whose walls and ears her cries of outrage reverberated. She taught herself to read when she was four—both of my sisters are very quick and clever—by leaning over my shoulder, demanding that I speak each word aloud as I deciphered it. Within a few weeks, she no longer had any need of me; she had discovered how to decode the marvelous marks on the pages on her own. From then on my mother left Lucy’s bedside light switched on after tucking her in at night. Lucy would read a book—she usually helped herself to whatever I happened to be reading at the time—until midnight, and then switch off her light herself. To all of our amazement, she would be up ready to fight her way through another day by seven the next morning. It was impossible to sort out after that whether her relentless ill temper was due to sleep deprivation or was simply her natural character, since there was never a well-rested Lucy against which to compare our daily, combative version.

  I was sometimes allowed to overhear my parents’ baffled speculations about the source of the bad dispositions of two of their three children. My parents had provided the same environment for all three of us, the same, unstinting measures of constant love, guidance that was gentle and founded on principles of fairness and reason, wholesome food, sturdy clothing, bright, educational toys, weekly trips to the library, liberal schools, excursions, diversions, and medicines when needed. But still I was rational and levelheaded, and Lucy and Janet were querulous, quarrelsome, and discontented.

  Ancestors were hauled out of the attic for scrutiny, their histories examined closely for signs of inheritable ill temper, egotism, or willfulness. My father’s grandfather, Hiram O’Sullivan, had been a Book of Revelations–obsessed hellfire-and-brimstone preacher from a particularly acid-soiled, rock-infested, bog-damp patch of Ireland. Hiram moved to Aurora, Ontario, in 1881 to take charge of the white clapboard Church of the Rose of Sharon. But his admonishing sermons, two and three hours long, taxed the patience of the practical farmers of his new community. They had nearer goals than the heavenly gates—another quarter-acre, a new plow, a two-storey brick house—and little time in any case to stray from the straight path. Or it might have been that their enchantment with the larger, better, and new made them resistant to the sulfurous anxieties with which old Hiram sought to bind them to his thrall and that his crabbed ministry was predestined to whither under the boundless skies of the hopeful new world. Ousted by a civil but resolute committee, Hiram returned home to Ireland to await the Day of Judgment—surely imminent!—only to find that the flock that he had abandoned there had irretrievably (and no doubt gladly) scattered to more genial churches. His comely wife (several photographs of her survive as evidence: she had thick fair hair piled soft and deep, wide dark eyes, a conscienceless brow, and a smooth chin that was round and downy and cleft as a peach) proved unexpectedly willful. Amelia refused to return with her dour husband to his stony land. Instead she moved their four children, the oldest nine and the youngest (a girl, Charlotte, who would grow up to become my grandmother) only a year or so old, to a house in the High Park area of Toronto, neatly solving the growing problem of how to pay the rent by putting it about that her husband had been sadly drowned on the way back to Ireland, declaring herself to be a widow, and marrying the elderly landlord in a brief civil ceremony at the old city hall.

  It was a match that lasted seventeen years, no doubt longer by a dozen years than Amelia had predicted. But she stuck to her side of the bargain until finally with her own death at fifty-nine did them part. Her putative second husband lived on for another fifteen years, to age one hundred and four, irritatingly attributing his long life not to happiness but to clean living. He had, he told a reporter from the Toronto Star on his hundredth birthday—my parents have the yellowed clipping preserved in a photo album—never smoked or touched alcohol, he read the sterner passages of the Bible out loud every night, and every Sunday he took himself to church (then staid Queen Street Presbyterian, now a United Church that offers weekly services for gay and lesbian members). He died friendless, deaf, and blind in a house infested with mice, bats, squirrels
, and raccoons, forsaken by his stepchildren and unloved by his step-grandchildren. He was not noticed missing for two months when he was found in the basement on a cold morning in January by the boy who delivered the coal, who noticed that none had been used up since the load before. There is a second clipping, much shorter, with no photo, describing how the old man had one hand clutched round a small lump of coal that he appeared to have stooped to retrieve from under the hod.

  People are said to have remarked on the fact that he was as much a father to those four children as if they had been his own, by which they meant that he was as hard on them.

  At about the same time that Amelia was marrying her peevish landlord without benefit of divorce from her jeremiacal husband, my mother’s grandmother, Begthora, was taking to her narrow plank bed on the family farm in Iceland. She had not yet risen from having given birth to her fifth child and only son, Thorvaldar, when he coughed three times, turned yellow, and died. He was five days old. Begthora took a fever, weakened, then languished on her comfortless bed for nineteen years until she achieved what may have been her goal all along—to join her son wherever it was that he had gone. Begthora became addicted during that time to a blood restorative provided by a local doctor in whom her pale languor must, it has occurred to me, have inspired a sexual charge or disturbance. When the old stone house was torn down in the 1940s and replaced with one of yellow bricks, hundreds of thick glass bottles were discovered in the root cellar, most of them still unshattered, the exact size and shape of rum flasks, and of the same opaque green colour, but with the peeling yellowed labels of the patent medicine. There are no photographs of her. Her husband, a fisherman, sought more active company in a nearby village where a second, half-acknowledged family of four girls was hatched and raised in happiness by their mother. So there was a happy set of girls, and an unhappy set. All four of the unhappy ones made their way to Canada to settle in the snowy fields of Manitoba, near the town the Icelanders named Gimli, which means paradise in Icelandic, and, over time, became less unhappy. The happy girls remained behind.

  Despite their forebears, all of my four grandparents were steady and reliable, exemplars of the kind of peaceful, orderly, prudent, self-ruling, tax-paying citizenry simultaneously prized and taken utterly for granted by successive Canadian governments, and my parents were, as I have indicated, models of their kind, so there was nothing to explain my changeable sisters. Lucy and Janet remain, while cherished, an unsolved puzzle to my mild, well-intentioned parents. My disposition, however, has always been satisfactory, seldom commented on, never questioned. I am clearly my parents’ child, although of their three children I look least like either of them. Both Janet and Lucy have our father’s height and thick, dark, straight hair and my mother’s narrow waist and hips. I have my Icelandic ancestors’ high brow, light hair that I have always worn long and usually loose, although I tie it back when I am at work, and fair skin covered faintly in freckles that I have always believed make me appear much less serious than I consider myself to be. My shape makes me feel a close kinship to the curves and cambered balance of egg timers, since I have broad hips, and my breasts are a size or two too large. When I stand still, I often rest my hands on my hips, thumbs behind, spread fingers forward. My body is a comfortable one; I inhabit it with the same ease with which I lived under the broad, sheltering eaves of my childhood house.

  My parents are both librarians edging these days toward retirement. They met at university in Waterloo, Ontario, in 1964, when they were fellow members of the Young Socialists League, and they are socialists still, although of the most benign sort. Since neither of them has the sort of temperament it takes to change the world, or even to ask it to change, however diffidently, they have compromised by undertaking to at least do no harm. They have been vegetarians for many years. My mother decided one day when I was about twelve that she would no longer allow anything to be cooked or consumed in the house “if it once had a face.” Any meat we girls ate after that we bought and barbecued for ourselves on a blackened, stubby-legged charcoal hibachi that my parents kept tucked out of sight in a shed behind the house. We were at our most complicit then, turning the chunks of flesh over the gleaming coals with kitchen forks and consuming them with our fingers in gulps, hunched like Neanderthals on the back steps. The greasy streaks of animal fat made their way onto our clothes when we wiped our hands on our jeans, and into our hair—oily evidence, we thought, of our increasing independence. We would make different choices from those our parents made, and have lives different from theirs in ways we were certain of but could not predict.

  My parents’ Vancouver house, the one I grew up in and where they still live, was built in 1914 from a kit sold by Eaton’s. The advertisement has been preserved, along with the original plans, in a cupboard built high into one wall of the upstairs office. The entire kit cost $4,500, including the lumber, shingles, and nails, even the sink and tiles in the bathroom, all but the wallpaper, paint, and furnishings—although Eaton’s sold these too. The original owners left the house to their son, who lived in it single and strange, until he sold it to my parents, who were drawn to its simple, straight lines and open spaces. It has absorbed our natures and lives, and I have sometimes felt that it knows us better, and with more kindness, than we know or think of ourselves.

  My mother goes to yoga twice a week, not power yoga, but the traditional kind. She has a certificate in healing touch, and is neither skeptical about nor a believer in its powers, but maintains a balanced interest in the possible benefits of its application to the ill and bewildered. My father belongs to a running group that meets on Sunday mornings. The runners wear unstylish gear and take their bad post-exercise coffee in a dimly lit café named Joe’s run by a succession of guys named Jerry on an unfashionable side street. Several times a year they take part in races that raise money for a good cause—cancer, muscular dystrophy, marmots, or refugees. They all sponsor each other, so after each event a flurry of checks is exchanged. Both of my parents do volunteer clerical work at the local Oxfam office on Thursday nights, deftly folding leaflets and stuffing envelopes and affixing labels—skills acquired from decades on the political margins translated perfectly to an organization set up to assist the economically marginalized.

  The two of them bicycle each day from their small house near the top of the westernmost rise of West 16th Avenue to the university, where they work, my father in the fine arts library and my mother in the medical sciences library. In order to keep their proletarian credentials untainted, they have taken pains over many years never to be promoted. They have lunch together every day at one or another of the student cafeterias, and they cycle home together in the evenings. They are so equitable-minded that in the morning my mother leads the way and on the homeward trip she follows. Even their gardening is responsible and democratic. On fine evenings, they sit in uncomfortable Adirondack chairs (purchased from a workshop that employs the mentally handicapped) in their backyard, which they have strewn with wildflower seed and planted with native grasses that never need watering. In the springtime, the pollen from the grasses makes them sneeze. In the autumn, their wildflowers, which are little more than brash and brawny weeds, go to seed, catch a ride on the passing breezes, and self-sow throughout the neighborhood. I have no doubt that their neighbors would protest if they could, but I have never known anyone aside from my sisters who could voice more than the faintest reproach when face-to-face with my mild, sincere, gently blinking parents. They live in a haze of determined goodness.

  Although I was an easy child, I don’t believe that I was any happier than average. I had the usual sorrows and fears, all of which I felt it was important to conceal from my parents, who I believed were counting on me. For example, from the time I was eight, I was acutely afraid of the dark, a mistrust that has never entirely left me. It isn’t the darkness that worries me, but what it might contain, the thing or person or beast that might, with a sudden inhalation, a low growl, and a scurry of nails against
the floorboards, as the only dreadful, brief forewarning, spring out to seize me, then pull me limb from limb or worse. A fear of the unknown, unseen, unseeable. I do my best to rationalize away the remnants of this fear that still lingers, and I am usually successful.

  Another worry was my conviction, for at least a couple of years, that my parents would move away while I was at school, neglecting to tell me or leave behind their new address, forgetting, in fact, all about me, although they might, I hoped, at least retain some impression of having had at one time quite a nice little girl, whatever could have become of her? There must have come a time when this fear ebbed, when reason overtook it in size and credibility, but I cannot at this distance of years identify the day the worry had finally lifted and I could walk nonchalantly through the front door after school, confident that the familiar furniture and my sisters and the sitter would be there.

  Since I was the ideal against which my two sisters were measured, it is surprising that I was and have remained on good terms with both of them. It would be easy enough for them to dislike me, to blame me in some way for having been the pattern on which my parents frequently sought to focus their attention. But each has usually treated me as her friend, courted me in fact, partly to preempt the other, it’s true, but mostly because, I think, they are both genuinely fond of me. They have never, however, got on well with each other. Chalk and cheese my mother often calls them, which isn’t true now that I think about it. They have more in common with each other than they have ever had with me. They are both subject to urgent, irresistible compulsions to put their own needs ahead of everything else. They are similarly self-indulgent in the transcendent respect they have for their own feelings, and in the effort they devote to ensuring that their needs and desires are fulfilled. Both Lucy and Janet refuse to consider that the whole world might not be as concerned as they are with ensuring that their evanescent moods are understood, their cravings sated, and their spiky passions appeased. Janet, rising on a bright morning after an overnight rainstorm, will call everyone’s attention to the exact manner in which the howling of the wind, as if with focused, specific malice, pierced during the night the thin, insufficient fabric of her sleep. Lucy is more subtle; she will spend the morning picking fights, finding fault, relentlessly complaining, until someone (it is never her) figures out what it was that put her in a bad humor. Together, they are incendiary, although they do make more of an effort now than they did when we were girls, when they made no effort at all. Then, they were certain that any conflict was entirely the fault of the other, and they nursed grudges for weeks and months, making sure that everyone else was aware of the source and magnitude of their grievances.