The Theory of Opposites (4 page)

I try several user names — WillaGolden; WillaChandler; Willa ChandlerGolden — but can’t remember the right one.
Sorry, this user does not exist!
Which is just as well anyway because right when I give up, Hannah texts me back.

Oops. Srry. Not for u.

There
, I think.
Accidents happen. Maybe my dad isn’t always right.

—

My father didn’t become totally obsessive about his theories on fate and inevitability until his twin brother died. By all accounts — and surveying my grandmother’s worn, sepia-toned photos in which he looks like a perfectly normal, perfectly perfect little boy, this information seems verifiable — he didn’t truly fall into the deep end of never-ending rationality until the accident. In my dad’s defense, William’s death was an honest-to-God act of total randomness, a confluence of events that came together as a perfect storm — both literally and figuratively. A road trip through Florida, a last-minute hurricane, a downed palm tree smack through the roof of their crappy highway hotel. The tree trunk landed on the right bed — William’s — completely shattering his chest cavity and killed him instantly. My father — in the left bed — jolted awake and saw that the distances between life and death, between coming out totally unscathed and having your heart crushed inward, was simply nothing more than the decision to pass out on the mattress closest to the door.

My dad spent days, weeks, months asking himself, “
What if? What if it had been a different motel? What if it had been a road trip through Tampa, not Miami? What if we’d stopped for chicken noodle soup and not driven all the way through
?”

But none of this brought William back. None of this changed anything.

So my dad pressed on with his Ph.D., and he quit trying to come up with reasons why and what and how he could have done things differently, and instead, he set about proving why, in fact, nothing could have been done differently at all. Over the years, he burrowed further and further into this hole.

My mom likes to tell me the story of when I was born: that when I came out kicking and bloody and purple, the doctor held me up and cheered, “It’s a girl!” And my mom shouted, “Impossible! She was supposed to be a boy!” She began weeping in the way that only seriously hormonal, post-birth women can — after all, she’d already painted the nursery and bought only navy onesies and beanies.

But my dad? No, this wasn’t surprising to him. By then, he was well into his third paper for the
Journal of Science
, well on his way to the next coming of Einstein. Instead, he looked at me and shrugged and said, “Well, we’re still naming her William. That’s life. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t change it now.”

My mother pointed out that now was exactly when they
could
change it, that the birth certificate hadn’t been signed, that announcements hadn’t been printed or mailed. But my father insisted, and since my mother was her own worn-down version of Switzerland, the version that comes after years of loving a man who you have realized may be completely off his rocker but also might be the most brilliant man alive, she acquiesced. They compromised on Willa when I entered kindergarten because everyone assumed I was just a boy who liked to dress up in girls’ clothing. And I might have been little, but I can still remember the joy I felt at receiving my new moniker: that after so many years as William, it was a relief to try to be something new.

4

“I need something super-awesome to impress Nicky with this weekend,” I say to Vanessa the next morning, the early June air thick with humidity, clogging our pores, matting wisps of hair firmly against our temples.

“A prostitute?”

“He’s twelve.”

“So next year.”

“Right. Put a pin in that.”

“At thirteen, he becomes a man!” Vanessa throws her arms up in the air in mock-rejoice, and a cabbie yells out his window, “Great ass!”

She blows him a kiss, and we turn a sharp right into Central Park, Vanessa’s elbows pumping furiously to authenticate actual exercise.

“You know, we’re not actually ‘power-walking,’” I say. “’Power-walking’ implies real speed, an attempt to increase your heart rate.”

“I
am
attempting,” she says. “Besides, can’t you just be happy that I got out of bed to walk you to work?”

“You say that every Friday.”

When Shawn and I married, Vanessa made me swear that I wouldn’t become one of those women who lost herself entirely to her new husband. Whose sentences always started with “we,” whose plans always had to be confirmed with the other half. (Though admittedly, with our mapped-out life plan — children and a white picket fence and that cushy volunteer job at the library — we became pretty much this exactly.) It wasn’t that she wasn’t happy for me — she was, but still, she made me promise. I assured her that she and I would never drift apart, even while considering that one can never be sure of anything that the future may hold — the future just…was. And so dutifully, we walked through the city each Friday morning: me, on my way to work; her, searching for inspiration for her writing from whatever pulsed around us.

“So I got the job,” she says, as we wind down past John Lennon’s Imagine Circle, through the thicket of tourists with their cameras slung around their necks, already bottlenecking the walkway in the early hours of the day.

“Job?” I ask.

“The
Dare You!
companion guide, remember?
Daring Yourself to a Better Life: How These Simple Steps Will Put You on the Road to Happiness.
” She’s stymied by a Japanese man who doesn’t seem to know if he should move left or right. “Listen, I mean, I know it’s not for a Pulitzer or anything, but it’s a huge paycheck with a pretty sweet bonus.”

I remember now. I’d loved the book’s concept in theory—daring yourself to live outside the lines and change your life from within — though probably less so in practice. Also, I didn’t really believe in any of it. But still.

“I think it’s awesome,” I say. “Who needs a Pulitzer?”

“Your dad?” she says, and we both smile.

We hit the park traverse and stop in tandem for a horse and carriage plodding by us.

“Theo friended me two days ago,” I say, knowing that I have to tell her sometime.

“And you wait to tell me until now?” She ties her sweatshirt around her waist and rewraps her ponytail.

“I’ve been distracted. For one, Adult Diapers tanked. Hannah’s going to be a mess today.”

“Because of her coke habit.”

“No. Well, that too. She inadvertently sexted me at 4 a.m.”

Vanessa emits a deep-down belly laugh. “God, what a disaster she is.”

“But she’s still going to be a mess because the meeting was as horrendous as a meeting can go. Jesus, did the universe screw me this week.”

“The universe didn’t screw you, Willa. Hannah did. You can’t expect for life to go smoothly when you spend your nights inhaling the better half of a kilo of cocaine.”

“Well, I mean, maybe she doesn’t have control over…”

Vanessa halts abruptly and flashes a hand. “Stop. Just stop. Before you even start in with that crap from your dad.
No one has a choice. We all lead the lives we were meant to live.
Oh, bullshit, Willa. Just bullshit. Hannah has a choice to stop doing coke. She just doesn’t choose it.”

If you didn’t know Vanessa, you might think that these mantras are part of her new self-help gig, like she’s next in line to be the next guru for better living. But Vanessa’s been this strident for as long as I’ve known her.
Own your choice. Live your life. Be brave. Be bold.
She had the entire Nike campaign —
Just Do It!
— tacked to her college dorm wall when we first met. And besides, why argue with her now when I’m not even sure what I’d argue in return? Vanessa is sure about her truths, but I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know about free will and fate and destiny and my father’s
New York Times
bestseller, which was hailed as “the greatest self-help book since
The Secret!,”
even though I grew up swaddled in this mumbo-jumbo, swaddled tightly enough to sometimes feel suffocated, like if I didn’t break free, I could be smothered alive. But a lot of it made sense to me all the same. And besides, isn’t it easier not to upset the apple cart?

But if I said that aloud, Vanessa would tell me that
there I go again
, not
owning my choice
.

“Well, anyway,” I say, matching her step through the park. “Today is going to be damage-control, and Nicky’s coming tonight, and I’m still not pregnant, and so I forgot to mention Theo.”

“I’m sorry about the still-not-pregnant thing,” she says, meaning it.

“Ugh,” I moan and actually shake my fists at the sky. “Fuck you, universe!” A mom pushing a Bugaboo scowls at me and makes a sharp perpendicular turn away from us.

Vanessa shakes her head and grins, and I drop my chin to my chest.

“Actually, the truth is…I’m not even devastated by the whole not-pregnant thing. I know that I should be, but…” I watch the mom stride down the path, then loop under a bridge and disappear out of view. “But…maybe not everyone is meant to be a mother.”
Maybe @nurseellen is right
, I think.

“According to you, everyone is meant to be whatever he or she’s meant to be,” Vanessa says. It does sound ridiculous when she puts it that way.

“Touché,” I say. My shoelace has come untied. I crouch to fix it. “Also, I think Shawn might be cheating on me. But that’s probably insane. It’s probably nothing. Just, you know, an overreaction on my part.” I don’t meet her eyes until I find that I have to.

She holds my eyes for a beat, then offers me her hand, pulling me up.

“Sweetie, you never overreact. It’s not in your gene pool.”

I exhale and lose myself for a minute, staring at the expanse of buildings in front of me, their steel, their power, their unquestioning architecture.
Life should be like that,
I think, fully aware that my dad spent a lifetime proving this theory: one brick on top of the next, each with its place, each with its purpose. Eventually, you reach the highest floor, and you can stare down with the understanding how you got there.

There I go again, agreeing with my father. I find myself doing that sometimes, even when I wish that I knew better.

—

Hannah looks uncomfortably warm when I arrive in her office. She’s wearing a navy turtleneck better suited for February, and her cheeks are too pink, like the underbelly of a pig. For a second, I imagine her as bacon. Her hair is matted to her temples with a sheen of perhaps both sweat and some sort of day-old gel or mousse, if anyone still uses mousse anymore.

Hannah’s gaze rolls off me and moves to the files on her desk.

“Let’s not talk about the text,” she states flatly.

“Consider it never spoken about again.”

I fumble with my hands and try to think of something to say to make this any less awkward than it already is. But before I can, she starts:

“So when I told you to knock the pants off Dependables, you knew that I meant, like, do a
good
job, not a totally shitty one, right?”

“Pun intended?”

Her already puffy eyes narrow to slits.

“Sorry, sorry. Bad timing. Shawn made the joke last night.” I pull back the chair in front of her desk and sit. And that’s when I notice the empty boxes stacked in the corner.

“Are you moving offices?”

“If you call it that.”

She reaches for a poster that’s she’s torn down in haste and unceremoniously dumped on the floor. The masking tape loops now stick on the wall, limply hanging at half-mast. “Do you see this, Willa? Do you see this? Do you know what it says? ”

She shakes the poster, with its image of New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington, in my direction. And though the poster is crumbled and fraying now, and moving to and fro and actually totally unreadable, I know that I should nod my head and say yes. Besides, I
do
know what it says, what it reads: the image has been taped to her office wall since my first day here. She shakes her poster more virulently.

“Live free or die, Willa! Live free or die!”

She stands suddenly and throws the poster to the ground, kicking it for emphasis.

“I’m sorry, Hannah, I’m not following.” I think she may be suffering from a psychotic break?
(“
There is no such thing as a breakdown in psychosis. Our psyches have been developed to withstand nearly any sort of physical or emotional strife. Do not let anyone else tell you otherwise! Any classification of ‘psychotic break’ is simply a diagnosis not to be able to confront reality! But reality is exactly what we must confront!
” — New York Times bestseller,
Is It Really Your Choice? Why Your Entire Life May Be Out of Your Control, p. 58.)

“No, of course you’re not following. I told you to knock their pants off, and you so thoroughly did the opposite that they dropped us,” she shouts.

“Dropped us?” I offer meekly.

“You lost the account, Willa. William. Willa William Willabee. And I hold you solely responsible!” She has retrieved the poster from the corner to which she ceremoniously kicked it and has now started shredding it into teeny, tiny pieces, tossing them around her desk like confetti.

“I, well, I’m not sure that’s fair…I mean, you weren’t even….”

“Oh it’s fair! They said you were texting through half the goddamn meeting!” she shrieks.

A quiet falls on the cubicles outside. I can hear it — I can sense them all turning to stare — just as she balls up the remainder of the poster and aims it at my head. She misses, and it bounces off the glass partition behind me.

“And even if it’s not fair, too bad for you. Because I just got canned. And so that means that you are getting canned too!”

She exhales and flops into her chair, like she has literally just performed an exorcism.