The Sad Truth About Happiness Read online

  We didn’t have a television when we were growing up, since my parents identified it early on as a capitalist tool designed to inculcate bourgeois, consumerist beliefs and behaviors. (Television programming has since proved to be far more trivial than they feared.) My sisters complained, but I never needed one. My sisters provided all the entertainment I needed, and, when they were too much, I could always retreat into books. So long as I was careful not to be scorched in the emotional bonfires Lucy and Janet set everywhere they went, the flames and furor were often thrilling. I was able to manage all those years at home by tolerating their moods and ignoring their more extravagant behaviors and by burrowing through books brought home from the library located a convenient seven blocks north of our house. I learned to let much of what they said and did wash over me, in the same way that when you are caught outside in a cold rain shower you pull your hood closer around your face and keep on trudging, not unconscious or unappreciative of being protected from some of the storm’s fury. In somewhat the same way, it seems to me now that for several years I allowed my life to wash over and around me, as if I were carrying the spark or essence of my true self cupped within my hands like a small bird with a minute and shuddering heart, moving slowly to preserve whatever it was that I was trying to keep safe from being jarred or shattered or frightened.

  Gate

  It was in September, the month the world rouses from summer languor, gives itself a shake, and begins to change its camouflage from green to gold, from stasis to evolution, that I began to take a different approach to life. Eventually, I discovered what I might have understood all along if I had only known where and how to look. How the pieces fit together. How to live more directly. How to create and shape my life, and be a part of it, instead of gazing onto it at an angle like a bystander, like a person skipping rocks onto the flat surface of a pond, like an onlooker watching an experiment in which she cannot take part for fear of influencing the outcome.

  We were, my roommate Rebecca and I, thirty-two years old, solvent, housed, gainfully employed, partly out from under the tidal pull of our families, and between boyfriends, in fact beginning to wonder whether having them at all might be a thing of the past. Rebecca is a freelance writer of sorts, and I was in my first year working as a radiation technologist.

  Several years ago my two sisters and I each inherited a medium-sized amount of money from a childless great-aunt. Enough for Janet to make the down payment on her house, for Lucy to spend what was to have been a year in Florence learning Italian and studying art, and for me to quit my job as a receptionist at a downtown law firm, after a period of indecision, and go back to school. I was waiting to hear whether I had been accepted into the Ph.D. program in the English department at the university when my friend Luba called to tell me that she had found a lump in her left breast. She described the mass to me on the telephone as hard and resistant under her fingertips and about the size of two lentils, leaving me with a stubborn image of her lump as disk-shaped, sharp-edged, and a malevolent shade of orange-brown. I went along with Luba to her mammogram appointment, and I sat beside her and held her hand while she had a small bit of follow-up surgery. The lentils turned out to be a simple cyst, free-floating, benign, swiftly removed, no more than an alarm, one of life’s blind alleys. But I was struck—no, more than that, moved—by the brisk efficiency, the manifest usefulness of the crisply efficient woman who administered the mammogram. She had sleek, very fine brown hair pulled back and tied in a broad yellow velvet ribbon, and a manner that was calm, serious, accommodating, careful, and discrete. A few weeks later, I withdrew my application at the university and signed up instead for the radiation technology course at the Institute of Technology, acutely conscious that I was swapping a white-blouse future for a blue.

  This decision pleased me and my parents, and unsettled my sisters Lucy and Janet and Janet’s husband John. John spent hours trying to talk me into sticking with literature. “There are entire lives in there, Maggie,” he argued. “One long afternoon with Proust, or Flaubert, even Mallarmé, will allow you to experience infinitely more of the world than a year in any medical clinic.” John, who has a degree in modern languages from McGill and an M.B.A. from one of the better eastern universities, runs a bookstore in one of the not-quite-yet gentrified areas of downtown. He has a higher opinion of French writers than anyone I know. I like and admire John, in fact I adore him, and I longed to give in, to lean into his older, doubtless wiser judgment, but I could not be convinced. I could see no reason to change my mind. What I wanted—intensely as it turned out—was to do something manifestly practical.

  When I wavered, which I did now and then, I summoned to mind, and this served as a warning, a cautionary tale, the memory of a doctoral candidate who had been a teaching assistant for one of my first-year undergraduate courses. She was large-boned and confident, with an impressively thick and gleaming helmet of close-cropped, uncombed, copper hair. She wore many-colored tunics and flowing scarves flashing with peacock hues, trailing a rumor of creative brilliance in her wake through the narrow corridors of the English department like the plume of a jet stream. But, when I asked her one day for directions to the student union building, she couldn’t do it; she couldn’t even point me in the general direction. She hadn’t a notion either where it was or how I might find out, although its bright red roof could, I quickly learned, be seen from the wide, unwashed windows of the main lecture hall. I didn’t want to become like her—all exquisite sensibility but with no common sense, thinly rooted in the world, living life narrowly, brilliantly, but ineffectively and theoretically.

  There was a clamoring demand for radiation technicians when I graduated, as there still is. The school’s placement officer, an intense, efficient Asian woman with sleek black hair, a wardrobe of red sweaters and short black knitted skirts and tights, and a frequent, shrill laugh that struck me as somewhat out of keeping with her role of directing newly trained students into suitable places of employment, told me about a job at the new mammography clinic that had just opened at St. Matthew’s Hospital downtown. I had good marks, and references that were solid and burnished, and was hired immediately. For luck I tied my hair back in a satin ribbon when I went to St. Matthew’s for the interview. I always wore it that way at work after that. Smartly tied hair. A brisk, intelligent manner. Competence. Assuredness. A single well-learned skill. You can accomplish a lot, and command respect and a respectable salary with very little more than these.

  Two days before graduation, and feeling like an impostor, I took myself to a store on Willow Street that specializes in uniforms for medical professionals. Under the counsel of an officious saleswoman, I acquired two long jackets that resembled lab coats, one pale green and loosely cut, the other plain white and sharply tailored. In a nearby store, one with more indolent staff, I bought two pairs of comfortable shoes, one of which—bone-colored, lumpen, thick-laced, constricting at the toe, spongy at the heel—I wore only once. The other pair, a sort of supple clog made of softest calfskin and dyed the same pink-ivory color as the under slope of my breasts, proved perfect for the hours on my feet and the treks along endless tiled corridors. Never underestimate the importance of good footwear for work that involves a lot of standing and walking.

  At about the same time that I started to work at St. Matthew’s, I took over an apartment on Beach Avenue from my friend Dana who had decided to move to Quebec to woo, successfully as it turned out, a dry-humored, red-haired civil engineer who taught at the Université de Montreal. Dana and I had been close friends since high school, but we both knew perfectly well that the keenness with which I would feel his loss was tempered by the opportunity to take over his apartment, which was high-ceilinged, airy, and spacious, and which I had always coveted. The rent for Dana’s apartment was close to double what I had been paying for my old place on West 12th near Oak, so I put a notice up at the community center on Denman Street, seeking a nonsmoking roommate, no pets. Rebecca was the fifth person I interviewed
, and even though she wasn’t perfect—I would have preferred someone who had an office to go to every day—she seemed to be a reliable, unobjectionable sort of person. She was the only person I interviewed who turned the meeting into a two-way process, with each of us appraising the other. I liked the respectfully probing questions she set for me as much as her calm, assured answers. Both questions and responses had an expansive subtlety; she conveyed her firm understanding of boundaries as being vitally important but reasonably mutable. Two adults sharing an average-sized apartment must be skilled in social navigation on the smallest scale; each must be able to discern that behavior that was perfectly appropriate yesterday might be entirely out of place the next.

  It was the way Rebecca is put together that made me trust her as much as anything she told me. She is sturdy, long-limbed, and muscular under her pale and amply freckled skin, with a face and features that are discernibly larger than usual and generous hands and feet, like a tennis player or Eastern bloc Olympic swimmer. She gave every appearance of being rooted, stable, dependable, steadfast. Rebecca was moving out of another apartment a few blocks away on Pacific, where she had been living with a boyfriend who hadn’t worked out, and was able to move in on a Saturday morning in the spring, only a few weeks after I had moved into Dana’s apartment myself.

  “What if she’s messy, or needy, or irritating?” Lucy warned me over the telephone, her voice low and urgent. “Where will you go if she gets on your nerves? There’s no room for you to stay here. You know how little space I have already.”

  “What will John and I do if we need to leave the children with you overnight?” Janet wanted to know. She had stopped by Dana’s apartment while I was unpacking and she stood in the center of the living room pushing at a pile of foam packing chips with one toe of her shoe. Janet has perfect size 6 feet, one of her several vanities, and wears beautiful soft leather shoes in colors that cannot be easily named—bronze with a hint of purple, pearly gray-black, peach with a golden cast. She picked up several of my just-unpacked possessions one by one as she spoke, turned them over and over in her hands, and then set them down again without looking at them. My hardbound copy of To the Lighthouse with its fraying red ribbon marker. A green glass fishing float with a tiny chip that Dana had left behind. A framed photograph of our handsome grandmother Charlotte wearing a high-necked lace evening gown and smiling guilelessly. A rounded, cream-and-blue crackle-glazed vase that had been a gift from my friend Luba and that had always reminded me of a neat, still bird with its head tucked under its wing.

  “Have you done a criminal background check on this woman? This is not something on which you should simply trust your instincts. She’s a complete stranger to us. You are just too naïve, Maggie. Everyone takes advantage of you.”

  “It will be good for you,” my father said. The pupils of his eyes came into focus on me for an instant, then softened into their usual deep brown worn-velvet pools. “Your mother and I loved living in shared houses back when we were students in Waterloo. There’s always someone to talk to. You’ll never be lonely.”

  “It will be nice to have someone to share the chores,” said my mother. She reached up and gave my shoulders a quick, encouraging squeeze. “I am sure you picked someone practical and useful. You have always had such good judgment.”

  “How do you see this working, Maggie?” Rebecca asked. It was just after eight on our first Monday morning together in the apartment. She had already been up for several hours, on the phone and stabbing at the keys of her gently humming computer, and was taking a break. She sat on a stool at the kitchen counter, sipping from a cup of coffee. I had begun to gather together my lunch and umbrella to walk through the rain to St. Matthew’s. I liked to get to my desk a few minutes ahead of time to put my papers in order and get ready for my first appointment. I felt careful of Rebecca, and anxious not to do anything that would put her off this odd arrangement, two strangers living together in intimate proximity. I had also identified in myself and was struggling to overcome a slight, sharply unpleasant tang of territoriality about the apartment, a sensation that left a small, metallic taste in my throat and mouth. The apartment still felt as though it belonged to Dana, and to me by extension, since it had come to me by means of our friendship. This bloom of irritation over having allowed a portion of my space to be invaded was disquieting, like the bitter smell of scorched wool or the slight, gritty chaffing of sand in a shoe. My annoyance was unreasonable, I knew, and, since I have always despised unreason, I was certain that I could overcome it.

  “What do you mean, this?” I answered, searching for my keys underneath the newspaper sections Rebecca had distributed across the counter. She had begun to generate clutter, although so far about the right amount: not so much that I felt overwhelmed; not so little that I might feel impelled to be neater. I couldn’t tell yet if she was on her best behavior. It would take me a while to learn that Rebecca is always measured, always precisely and carefully herself. She lacks the chameleon skill that most women have of being able to change to suit her surroundings. She has no illusions about herself that I have ever noticed; her store of self-knowledge seems limitless. Everything she does is quiet, self-contained, assured, and judicious.

  “I mean meals,” she said. “Would you like me to make you dinner?” She reached over and began to help me by straightening up the paper. I noticed that she matched section B carefully to the back of section A, and then C behind B. Good.

  “Oh, I see.” I found my keys under a supermarket flyer and hooked them on one finger. “No. I’ll look after myself or pick something up. I usually make something simple. Sometimes I just have a sandwich or a bowl of soup, I’m afraid. I’m not much of a cook.” I walked past her on my way to the door, swinging the keys into my purse, my mind already advancing down the hall toward the elevator.

  “Well, I am.” Rebecca swiveled on her stool to face me. “I like to cook. And since I start early, I usually stop working at three o’clock or so. All of my editors are back east, so it’s easier if I start and end my day when they do. Why don’t I cook dinner for both of us?”

  “Today, you mean?”

  “No. Every day. Or, at least, how about four days a week? Mondays to Thursdays. I’d like to. It’s no fun cooking just for myself. And I’m not a bad cook. I won’t poison you. We can split the groceries if you like. On weekends, we’d be on our own, or any evening we have other plans, of course. Why don’t we try it for a week and see?”

  “What if we don’t like to eat the same things?”

  “What don’t you like?”

  “I can’t think of anything. Except salted peanuts. And the obvious things like Cheez Whiz and Spam.”

  “And I like just about everything except kiwi fruit. They’re too fuzzy and mucousy. And canned soup. All that salt. Let’s try it, OK? Unless you really don’t want to.”

  “It wouldn’t be fair, though. You’d be doing all the work.”

  “I cook for myself anyway, and it’s no more work to do it for two. You can clean up, if you think that would make it fairer. You’ll be doing me a favor. I need someone to practice new recipes on.”

  We agreed that Rebecca would take on the cooking. I did the dishes. We split the food bills. I paid for a cleaner to come in once a week and Rebecca kept things picked up in between. Rebecca could work her way around the apartment with a dust cloth while talking to an editor or interviewing an expert, the telephone tucked between her shoulder and her chin. We were apart most of the day, and in the evenings we had the same level of desire to accommodate each other without either of us having to make any significant changes to how we were already living.

  Part of what made things work was Dana’s apartment. It was a quarter-floor of an older building, one of the large, square, half-timbered imitation Tudors they built back in the 1940s. The building was elegant, permanent, and plainly superior to the badly aging stuccoed low-rises that had been built all around the neighborhood and painted in Florida colors that
faded and streaked in the city’s frequent rains, looking like they were slowly melting away, like giant slabs of Neapolitan ice cream left sitting outside on a warm day. Some of these newer buildings were in fact already being consumed by rot, and spent months shrouded in enormous green tarps while mysterious repairs were conducted underneath. When the tarps were finally whisked away, the ice-cream buildings would reappear, like a magician’s trick, jaunty and freshly painted.

  Dana had lived in our building for years, and over time, as other tenants moved up or moved away, he had worked his way from a basement suite at the back up through each of the floors to one of the two apartments on the top floor with a partial view of the water. There were two bedrooms, a large living room, a dining room with wainscoting and two built-in china cabinets with leaded-glass doors, a kitchen big enough to hold a drop-leaf table and two chairs (a narrow ironing board dropped out of a slender door fitted into the wall), and a boxy storage closet off the hallway that Rebecca converted into an office by installing a desk, shelves, and an overhead light. She found it easier to concentrate there than in her bedroom or the living room, both of which had a view of the bay. Rebecca brought her grandmother’s oak dining room set out of storage, and I had bought some very good living room furniture from one of the lawyers at the firm where I used to work when he moved back in with his wife—not that their entente lasted very long—so between us we had everything we needed. I got the larger bedroom since I was there first, and Rebecca had the use of the closet for her office. The kitchen was also mainly hers. I went in there to make toast and tea in the morning and sometimes a snack at night.