My American Unhappiness (29 page)

Clarence M., 46, Duluth, MN:
It gets dark so early now. I can't stand it.

Michelle B., 53, Dodgeville, WI:
Brett Favre in a Jets uniform.

Minnie Z., 43, Salem, OR:
The way that Caribou Coffee tries to make their airport coffee shop feel like a Northwoods lodge.

Vivienne G., 46, Dearborn, MI:
Victoria's Secret ads that come on during prime time, especially when I see my husband is pitching a tent in his sweatpants like he's thirteen years old. You just don't feel very sexy after you try and compare yourself to one of those ads.

Kevin G., 29, Pittsburgh, PA:
The last of the leaves. The last of the leaves. Oh, oh, the last of the leaves!

Jasper X., 53, Arlington, VA:
Assholes like you who waste taxpayer money!

Moe H., 48, Dover, NH:
This woman I used to know, she now lives in Florida with a guy who beats her, and she doesn't want to leave. How about that for sad?

Lily F., 33, Royal Oak, MI:
I saw my third-grade teacher at the mall last week and she was using a walker and she was sitting all alone inside the Big Boy restaurant, drinking a cup of coffee with shaking hands, and picking at this muffin. And she made eye contact with me, through the window that looks out on the mall, you know? And she sort of smiled, like maybe she recognized me or something. And I didn't wave. I just kept on going down the corridor. I had something to return at Mervyn's. I had this shitty sweater my aunt sent me. I hated the sweater. It made me look shapeless. Old. I don't know what it is, but I am so unhappy. You're right about that. Who are you?

And so on...

Traffic on my website peaked after the Leatherberry sex scandal broke and the GMHI made brief national headlines. For a few weeks, it seemed as if I might be on my way to starting a for-profit rather than a nonprofit. Although my office was closed, my assets were seized, my paychecks stopped, and my staff disappeared, I was open for business in a way I had never been before. Americans rushed to my site to express their unhappiness, to register their many sadnesses and laments. With such web traffic, I thought, booming ad sales were the next logical step. Of course, economically and politically, it was no time to seek investors in a fledgling web-based business that traffics in unhappiness and woe, so I decided to wait for a few months, file for unemployment benefits, and allow the website to build as a word-of-mouth phenomenon of the newest order.

It's quite possible that my decision to try and chronicle the collective American unhappiness of a generation was nothing more than a weak-minded acquiescence to the prevailing sentiment of the past eight years. The artistic sensibility in the nation became wholly self-referential—the story of
my
life is what matters, not the well-crafted and distilled art of memoir, nor the carefully compiled story (and analysis) of the lives (and problems) of others—but the story of what I am feeling, right now, right this minute. And so, I became part of the problem, I suppose, the problem of indifference to the trials and tribulations of our fellow citizens and our brothers and sisters around the world. I wonder, sometimes, if Studs Terkel, our nation's greatest oral historian, who died just a short time ago, had begun his work today, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, would he have done things the way he did them? Or would he have begun with a blog about how he felt about his own job, whatever it might be? Would he have appeared on the quirky and likable public radio show
This American Life,
and would he have told some quirky and likable story about his own childhood, or his recent trip to Tehran, or his own job digging graves in Toledo? We have always loved stories, I think, it's just that we, as a nation and perhaps as a human race, recently stopped loving stories about the other; we began to love stories only about ourselves. We love stories in which
we
are the protagonists in search of truth. I do not want to judge this. But my feeling is that we can cope with the increasing smallness, rapidness, and indifference of our changing, violent world only by seeing ourselves as noble characters caught in the struggle. We are all, as Turgenev so presciently said over a century ago, either Hamlets or Quixotes, and we must be these kinds of people if we are to endure.

We see ourselves in a struggle of epic, or at least interesting, magnitude, and so we go about documenting it ourselves, not waiting for some future historian, anthropologist, or novelist to find our tale and tell it for us. YouTube, MySpace, blogs—all of these things are ways for us to make ourselves protagonists on a very crowded, violent, and unjust stage.

The next morning, I wake early, eager to check my website responses, and there is already a call on my cell phone. My first thought is that it's Lara, reconsidering my proposal, or H. M. begging me to join him at a Mexican villa by the sea, but it's not either of them. It's Claire Buchwald from Fitchburg Hospice Center and she gives me the news. "Hello, Zeke," she says. "I have some hard news."

"Okay," I say.

"Mother died today," she says.

"Pardon?"

"Mother died today," she says again.

"Ha! Is that a deliberate reference, Claire?"

"Pardon?"

"Is that a deliberate allusion?"

"To what?"

"Camus?"

"What?"

"When you said, 'Mother died today,' Claire, was that a deliberate allusion?"

"I'm sorry, Zeke. I don't understand."

"Camus! That's the first line of
The Stranger
!"

"Okay," she says. "I'll see you when you get here, Zeke. Do you understand what I've told you?"

It wasn't until I saw my mother that Claire's statement moved from the realm of accidental literary allusion to reality. It wasn't until then that I called Harmony and asked her if she would tell the girls and if they might get in the car and come, as soon as they possibly could.

T
HIS PAST TUESDAY
night, I sat alone in my living room, watching a newly elected president address the nation. Along with a reassuring fifty-three percent of my fellow Americans, I watched with significant joy and felt, for a moment, as if the whole of American history suddenly made sense. What, after all, is triumph without previous trials? And so, as I sat in my recliner, a man slightly drunk on gin and democracy, I wept. I wept not only because I felt, inexplicably, as if the darkness of the past eight years had lifted, but also because I was experiencing the whole event alone. I wanted, more than anything, to be with April and May, who were, I know, being raised by Republicans in Livonia, Michigan, and I wanted to be telling my beautiful and young nieces that this moment was for them, that even if we failed miserably to achieve anything in the next four years, this moment, this election, meant something for the future stability and peace of the world. Their generation might, as a result of this moment, have less hate in its collective heart than my generation, perhaps, and if that is not a triumph, I do not know what is. In truth, I even called April and May to offer this message via cell phone, but Harmony did not pick up on her end. Perhaps there were some sour grapes involved. I know, had the shoe been on the other foot, I would not have picked up a phone call from a McCain-Palin supporter on that night.

April and May had been here at the end of October—in fact, they'd done their trick-or-treating here, in their old neighborhood, and the next day they attended a simple but rather fine memorial service for my mother and their grandmother. They sat on either side of me, each clutching my arm, each crying onto my sleeve.

When one looks upon the death of a loved one from a humanistic rather than a faith-based perspective, one remembers the stories and the images and the rituals of the deceased, the way an oral historian or an anthropologist or a novelist might remember them. My house, where I now live, all alone, still smells faintly of my mother. Because she worked such long hours, she smelled, constantly, of biscuits and gravy and fried chicken tenders from the Old Country Buffet, no matter how many showers she took, no matter how much lilac-scented lotion and grapeseed oil she rubbed on her hands and arms.

When my brother was alive, my mother's main concern was my brother's well-being. After work, she often sat at her kitchen table, her laptop open, scanning the Internet for news of the war. She barely slept. She read Cougar's e-mails over and over. She wrote long, meandering letters to him that offered support and encouragement. She kept Fox News on all morning and wore an American flag pin on her sweater. She ate almost all of her meals at work, standing up, and some nights she didn't come home until ten or eleven, unless it was a Tuesday or Friday, her only days off. Last year, I remember that she asked for two days off in a row: the regional manager said no. Eleven years, and you can't get two days off in a row! This is not what the old union leaders gave their lives for in the early part of the twentieth century! This is not why striking workers risked getting their skulls bashed in with boot heels and clubs! Something I've recently admitted to myself is this: I desperately wanted my mother's life to be different, but now it's clear that it won't be different. This was it. Her story is written.

After my father's early and unexpected death in 2001, I thought my mother might find, in widowhood, a sort of melancholic but fulfilling freedom. But each time I tried to have a serious talk with her, urged her to find new, meaningful work or rest more than she did or eat better food, maybe even take in a lifelong learning program sponsored by the GMHI, my mother changed the subject. She only wanted to give me a rundown of my brother's life in battle: Cougar's got the flu and spent the day reading magazines in the sick bay. Cougar saw a man get his hand shot off today. Cougar ate a special fried chicken dinner last night. Cougar didn't get to sleep all night. Cougar has a rash on his thighs. Cougar's unit got a surprise visit from the Hooters girls last week. Cougar could use some energy bars, some Carl Hiaasen paperbacks, some moist towelettes: why don't you send him a package?

Once Cougar and Melody were both dead, my mother's attention turned to the twins, the orphaned daughters, and rightly so. She nurtured those girls with a warmth and tenderness and selflessness that warrant canonization, in my humble opinion. I assisted where I could assist, but she was the backbone of those girls' lives. I'm not saying this was in any way a bad arrangement; I only regret that my mother died without any chance to live for herself. Selflessness is both a virtue and a vice. In between mind-numbing and grueling wage labor, she cared for my father, for me, for my brother, and for my nieces. Then she got sick. Then she died. The humanist in me doesn't argue if this is fair or not, because it's obviously not fair, is it? Divine justice, spiritual struggle: this is the domain of theologians. The humanist in me simply wonders why some people have lives like this. What can we learn from them about our own lives? What can we do to prevent such lives, or is it futile to do so? Or even worse, is it supreme arrogance to do so, to cast judgments on the happiness of others?

My mother's service was sparsely attended, I'm sad to say, though I, against all of my long-standing anti-funeral principles, did go. I wanted to be there for April and May. We were a poor, huddled mass, and I, the mass's grief-stricken anchor, was devoid of answers. The pastor read from the Gospels. Whoever believeth hath eternal life, that kind of thing. My mother's favorite hymns, "Amazing Grace" and "Old Rugged Cross," were sung. Her coworkers from the Old Country Buffet were there, the ones who could get the time off, at least, and some of them were crying. A few of our old neighbors were there too, people we used to know on the north side of town, all of them grayer and paler than I remembered them. I couldn't remember their names; they were nameless to me, lost in a buried corner of my brain. People I'd seen every day as a child, now ghosts. The huge sanctuary of the vast church seemed ridiculously empty. The pastor's sermon echoed superfluously from the walls, an afterthought, an obstacle for him to hurdle before lunch.

And this is what I thought about that Election Day evening as I sat alone and watched history unfold. It was the first time in my life that I have ever longed for the company of younger people, for the hope I was feeling in my heart to be something I could express to somebody just making his or her own sense of a senseless world.

There were, I know, in Madison, many places I could go to feel part of the collective crowd—this was an election that was watched and celebrated in taverns and cafés and the student union. But I am now a man who lives alone, a man with only a few friends, with almost no family left, with, for the first time in years, no coworkers or colleagues, and it is time that I begin to live that way. Stillness, loneliness, the quiet and long hours of the evening in the latter half of autumn, these are now the things that will define a great deal of my days.

There, I've said that.

A few weeks ago, I drove to Ely, Minnesota, to sign some papers that Valerie had her lawyer draw up, and I officially annulled a long-dead marriage. I admit, for at least a few days, I considered the possibility of reconciliation. Perhaps Valerie was an answered prayer. Perhaps the fact that I was, at least technically, still married might reverse the terms of my mother's will, and the custody of the twins would revert to me, and perhaps, perhaps even Valerie would love me again, in a way she once did, long ago, and we would make a sort of family together. I thought about this possibility for a long time on the long drive, but when I arrived in Ely, Minnesota, I knew this scenario would simply not work. I knew that this strange and hopeless scenario was not something that could ever really happen. In fact, I only spoke with Valerie's lawyer; she didn't even come to see me. I found that extraordinarily offensive and hurtful, but in truth, perhaps I could not bear to see her again. Perhaps she did me some unasked-for kindness. A few weeks later, a Google search of the Ely newspaper informed me that Valerie had married a man named Sven Olson who ran a small resort in Little Marais, Minnesota.