All This Heavenly Glory (18 page)

Like the von Trapps?

Without the singing or Christopher Plummer plus some drinking. You have no frame of reference for this based in reality, do
you?

I really don’t.

This is where the story kind of drops off.

They never went out.

They ran into each other a few more times and continued flirting but that was about it until Charlotte said,
Okay, let’s move it along or just be friends,
which was arguably a preemptive strike (and possibly indicative of progress on her part at least inasmuch as she tended to
wait for them to bail on their own). At one point there was an elaborate fantasy sequence here, in which Charlotte and Russell
start dating, and he starts wearing better sweaters, and better than that tolerates all her many weirdnesses (including varieties
of meltdowns about things she can’t control, which is possibly everything but let’s just list here things such as trains that
are very very late or leftover soup containers that won’t open while somehow releasing a considerable amount of soup onto
the counter, which she then has to throw on the floor, or accidentally breaking the last saucer from the set of dishes her
parents bought in Germany when they first married [the likes of which can tend her into a total tailspin because she rarely
breaks things and in spite of the fact that her inventory of Mom/Dad related memorabilia is vast, as well as being distributed
across several states, that short of some nationwide natural disaster there will never be a deficit, although to continue
the tangent and also to get back to the original idea, each of these little saucer-type losses tends to remind her that one
of the Mom/Dad people is gone, which decreasing physical evidence thereof makes her worry that she’ll forget, which seems
to come under the heading of things not in her control, which worry is arguably needless because she seems in no imminent
danger of forgetting, presence or absence of evidence notwithstanding], or people telling her to pray for god’s will and exactly
how and then won’t let it go until long after her ability to be polite disappears and she has to yell at them [the whole on-your-knees
thing has been another source of god-related angst for Charlotte, who wants to believe in a god you can talk to in any position]).
And what if you disagree with god about what’s good and he punishes you and let’s say her worst fears are true about that,
like that the entire explanation for her disastrous love life to date is that she broke up with nice guy Eddie Greenfield
in high school and god was like,
I gave you a nice one, see how you like this
kind-of-thing. Or worse, possible punishments having to do with her parents getting sick and exactly what Charlotte might
have done to cause that, and it seemed pretty obvious that she hadn’t done anything to cause these things to happen, especially
with regard to her dad, who wasn’t one to worry about things when sometimes there was cause for worry, e.g., not going to
the doctor for seven years because he just forgot was his excuse (and also because he was constantly saying,
I’m going to live to be a hundred like my parents,
mostly meaning to be funny but kind of thinking he really would, and why wouldn’t he, except they for sure went to the doctor),
and then coming down with prostate cancer, and then Charlotte having to not yell at him because it’s not really a good thing
to yell at someone after they’ve gotten cancer, especially considering she thinks she should take some blame, since she would
have told him to go to the doctor if she had known he had forgotten to go to the doctor, which she should have somehow psychically
known, anyway now she yells at him to ask the doctor questions, which he doesn’t like to do because he doesn’t like to bother
people, which also makes her want to yell at him, which she tones down to writing e-mails in big capital letters and making
sure to say how much she loves him and wants him to stick around but which she’s very glad she did because in the course of
this he was also diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, which he wouldn’t have known about if he hadn’t gotten the cancer probably,
which brings up the whole confusing everything-happens-for-a-reason issue, which tends to cause her brain to fly out of her
head, because of course she

a) wants to know the reason

and

b) can always come up with too many possible reasons and then how do you know which one it is,

and most of all because

c) such a similar thing had happened with her mom insofar as she only discovered she had the cancer after breaking her hip,
which at the time seemed to be happening for the reason that maybe they could cure the cancer, which they couldn’t, and ultimately
leaving the e.h.f.a.r. issue as murky as ever, unless you consider the one and only thing that makes the concept at all palatable
for Charlotte which is that maybe she doesn’t always get to know the reason, which it should be clear now is particularly
problematic for her as she has always been extremely fond of the question
Why?
in spite of the probability of its ever being answered to her satisfaction. (Plus she never forgot what she heard at a meeting
one time, where this issue is regularly debated, although Charlotte perceives a disconcerting weight on the pro side, in any
case, the dude said,
Well, I don’t know if everything happens for a reason but I know that everything does happen.
Point taken by Charlotte that since it’s kind of up to the individual to elicit meaning from any given [sucky] thing, it
might be useful to extract something positive, to do you-know-what with the lemons, as it were.) Recently she watched this
whole episode of
Nova
about string theory and of course really didn’t understand any of it except for the vague idea that there are, theoretically,
these tiny little universes, strings or whatever, inside of the inside of the inside of atoms, more or less, is the best she
can explain it, except as she’s watching it she wonders why none of these genius string-theorizing scientists on the show
bother to bring up the issue of god, or any other unanswerable questions, like okay, it’s great and all that you’ve discovered
this limitless space where millions of tiny little people could be living, tiny little people we could be walking around crushing
with our slippers without ever even knowing it, but of course there’s no more proof of this, except for a whole bunch of equations
and theorems or what have you, than there is of god, and it seems to Charlotte like someone ought to be mentioning that in
spite of how spectacular this all is, the very fact that it’s unprovable might indicate something bigger and more spectacular
still, than even, you know, science. Anyway, you’re probably better off if we save for another story all the illnesses her
stepfather’s been through since her mother died, which are equal in number and gravity, about which you can believe many more
prayers were said. Why it’s only occurring to her now to wonder whether this is all in vain is a mystery considering that
there was evidence going back as far as when she was maybe seven and had prayed that her dad would come to New York because
she hadn’t seen him since she and her mom moved, and then he actually showed up at her school, but it was kind of terrible
because he wasn’t really supposed to see her, he was only there for a meeting with the lawyers, and she had to promise not
to say anything to her mother in case she got upset, which was pretty much a guarantee, and so saying goodbye to her dad ended
up being arguably worse than if she’d never seen him at all, and so then she had the thought, at seven, to pray even more
specifically, for her dad to come to New York so they could actually spend time together, and then about eight years went
by in which she stopped thinking about god at all and needless to say forgot about the prayer until this whole weird incident
in which she got a late-night call from her friend Jenna asking if she was okay, and saying of course she was okay and why,
and Jenna saying,
Because your dad called here from O’Hare asking what was going on at your house—he said you called him all upset and wanting
him to come get you
(which was both like her dad insofar as he didn’t question things sometimes and not at all like her dad insofar as he had
no tendency to be impulsive), and Charlotte/then Charlotte Anne Byers saying she never called him and telling Jenna to tell
her dad to call her directly if he called her back and not bothering to ask why he didn’t just call her instead of the Ritters,
which she figured was both because he thought she was in some bad trouble and also because as a rule he rarely called Charlotte/C.A.’s
apartment, mostly so that he didn’t have to talk to C./C.A.’s mother, and also because he thought he already spoke to her,
which was kind of fascinating and marginally’ irritating to Charlotte/ Charlotte Anne because she couldn’t imagine how he
didn’t know it wasn’t her voice, which he later explained was because the girl was so upset it was hard to tell who it was.
When her dad did call just a little while later she told him it wasn’t her and she was fine and he should go home and even
though he sounded so sad and tired, Charlotte/C.A. Byers didn’t quite know what to think until just this moment remembering
it, when she looks back on it kind of heartbroken for both of them for having lost a whole bunch of years together not to
mention having prayed he’d come to New York not once but twice and having it turn out poorly both times. Suffice it to say
all this has messed her up with regard to prayer, and she has experimented with it over the years, ranging from
Help
to the long and involved prayers, although surprisingly she only stopped praying altogether during one brief period when
she heard maybe the most heartbreaking news she’d ever heard (unrelated to family members for a change) and said to god,
Fuck you, god. Fuck. You. I don’t even know why I curse you, god, considering you’re not even there. But fuck you anyway.
I’m done. You know where to find me.
That was her last prayer for about two weeks. Which turned out to be an interesting experiment because at the end of the
two weeks she felt really sad about the idea of not believing in god at all and decided she’d rather commit to acting like
there was a good god than act like there was no god at all, because think about it, how could that hurt, even if you don’t
know what it is, and who does, really, Charlotte wonders, with any certainty, it seems like the whole idea behind faith is
that it requires faith, that doubt is almost a critical element of faith, really, at least a little doubt, otherwise it would
be called certainty, and so it seems generally more useful to believe in something good that you aren’t certain of than in
something bad, or in nothing, and so at this point you can see how the thinking is maybe not terribly productive with regard
to god, that said, she does believe in something, she feels pretty good about god when she’s staring at the sky sort of just
past dusk but more convinced if the wind’s blowing, and she’s well aware of the hokiness of god being in the wind, it’s not
whispering to her or anything, and yet regardless of the hokiness, does seem like it’s a good representation of this thing
you can’t see but yet you can, can’t touch but you can feel it comfort-type thing.

Not forgetting that we started with a fantasy, Russell eventually discovers she’s not as healthy as he originally imagined
her to be (see ¶ above), and it turns out that her character flaws aren’t anything as wholly intolerable as she secretly fears
but are in fact somewhat run-of-the-mill, which is curiously a little bit of a disappointment to her. Anyway so in the fantasy
they move in together and everything’s great and he proposes but there’s a whole weirdness starting with the ring, basically
what happens is it turns out to be his ex-fiancée’s ring, which freaks her out until she finds out that it was also his mother’s
ring, and so they still almost get married, until he becomes kind of wiggly and then fades out at the altar and it turns out
that he’s a mirage. This sequence was ultimately rejected because Charlotte decided she wanted one of her fantasy sequences
to go right for a change. So she decided to pray for a happier fantasy, that maybe it would help her to go a step backward
and pray to just be able to have a happy fantasy before she prayed for a real and actual normal guy, which gets back to the
whole thing about praying for anything other than god’s will, like work, or normal boyfriends, or even for the interest in
having and/or willingness to have, or the ability to even recognize, a normal boyfriend, or dads coming to visit, because
it might have been noted earlier that prayers like this frequently come with the same warning, the essence of the reason why
you’re supposed to pray for god’s will, which at least in theory is better than anything you might think to ask for, which
is be careful what you wish for. That being said, given both her recent good fortune and that she seemed to have at least
gotten the willingness part, with regard to the normal thing, she had reason to hope that at some point her prayers might
come true.