Truth in Advertising Page 0,112
you happy?”
“You asked me that already. Yes. I’m happy. I’m very happy.”
“Are you happy?”
“You asked me that already.”
“But you didn’t answer me. You lied. What makes you happy?”
“My friends.”
“Who? What friends? You don’t really have friends. You have acquaintances. You don’t let people in.”
“I have almost two hundred friends on Facebook. How many do you have?”
“Over three thousand. Are you happy?”
“Stop!”
“You had plans when you first moved to New York, didn’t you? You were going to try new things. You wrote that the first New Year’s Eve you were here, didn’t you?”
“Don’t read my journal.”
“You’ve written it every year since, haven’t you? ‘Try new things. Be fearless. Take a class in something. Change careers.’ You wrote those words. You’ve written those words every New Year’s Eve for seven years. And yet you’ve done none of it. Why?”
“I don’t know. Time slips away.”
“Do you have regrets?”
“Not using Brian Williams for this dialogue.”
“Are you a happy person?”
“I’m begging you. Please leave me alone.”
“You name me Barbara Walters.”
“Yes.”
“You name me Oprah or Terry Gross.”
Yes.”
“You give me names and let me savage you.”
“Yes.”
“And yet you know who I really am.”
“Yes.”
“So answer me. Are you a happy person?”
“No.”
“Then change that.”
“I don’t know how.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Let me go.”
“I can’t.”
“Stop crying, Finny. Let me go. Forgive me.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Pain. Guilt. Shame.”
“You ruined me. How could you do that to us?”
“Don’t say that. You know it’s not true.”
“I’m nothing. I’m a fake person. We’re not a family anymore.”
“You have a chance, every day, to change. If you want. One beautiful thing.”
“I don’t know how.”
“Yes, you do. Let me go. Forgive me. Because if you don’t let go, then this is it. This is your life. Are you happy?”
“I’ve never been happy.”
“Okay, then. Let me go. Both of us. Your father and me. Let us go, Finny. Please.”
I stare at the ceiling, the hot tears streaming down the sides of my face, into my ears.
ONE BEAUTIFUL THING
They called it a boat, not a submarine, and it was 260 feet long and back then it ran submerged during the day and surfaced at night to recharge the batteries, which needed air to operate. Bow to stern: the forward torpedoes and the forward battery, which was a bank, five feet high, of forty batteries. Then came the control room, the after-battery, and the engine room, which consisted of twin twelve-cylinder Nelsico engines. Then came the motor room. I read this online. It’s the kind of thing he might have told me about if we’d been close, if he’d stayed. Perhaps he told Eddie. Perhaps he shared it with my mother on one of their early dates. “What was life like on a submarine?” she might have asked. It was an all-volunteer service. There was extra pay. Better food. There was also diesel rash, when fumes from the engines caused your skin to break out. You couldn’t sit up in your bunk; you had to slide in and out. Four years in a submarine. At night in the dark, at war, bombs going off, locked in the motor room with a dead man in your lap. Fascists wanted to take over the world. Young men, teenagers, said, Fuck you. Over my dead body. My father was one of those men. He served. Not for himself but for a principle. He was also angry and hit Eddie, hit Kevin, verbally abused my mother, abandoned his family, left us ruined people. What narrative do we choose to live by?
• • •
The plane is half full, an early morning flight to Hawaii. Keita has the window seat. He was waiting in the lobby when I came down at 6 A.M. Our seats are in the back, by the toilets. I hold the FedEx box on my lap.
“You can’t do that,” the flight attendant had said, pointing at the box. She hated us on sight for some reason. You could feel her bad mood. A fight with her husband or boyfriend, her surly teenage daughter who now can’t stand her mother, where once they sat close, watching Sesame Street together. How painful that must be. Her makeup was too heavy and it looked as if she hadn’t slept well.
I smiled. “I’m sorry?”
She didn’t smile. “You have to put that package in the overhead.”
It seemed logical enough. But I had visions of a section of the roof popping off and the FedEx box being sucked out into the thin cold air, falling into the Pacific. I’d read just a few weeks ago of