The One-in-a-Million Boy

by Monica Wood

Certain things, examined in the frozen light of retrospect, were simply unforgivable.

He reminded her that she’d once found people fascinating. That she’d lived more than one life.

Last time I heard a warbler I was seventy-two.

Madame Calment’s life, like most lives, comprised a pileup of ordinary days, but that didn’t prevent her, like most people, from bestowing advice.

Since her birth she’d witnessed the advent of automobiles, airplanes, automatic washing machines, atomic bombs, space shuttles, disposable diapers, and Touch-Tone, had received them all as a matter of course, her capacity for wonder peaking around 1969 with the moon landing; but this old-timey boy who carried a phone the size of a baby’s rattle and plucked information from France out of a machine in his bedroom presented quite the conundrum. She smoothed her hands over her head, as if to tidy up the technology it had already absorbed.

A young receptionist greeted him with a buoyancy born of an excellent benefits package.

“You paid for magic. I gave you magic.” That she refused to pity him—that she was, in fact, furious—made him feel a little less bereft. He

On the fifth Saturday, the boy arrived with bad news: Ona was a spring chicken.

I was a big-boned girl and he had no more heft than an August potato, but still he had to be cut out of me.

It took me a time to sort out that she wasn’t beautiful. Too plain for a rich man, too bright for a poor one.

Her body went hot—like a hot flash, really. She felt fifty again.

Dievas davė dantis, Dievas duos duonos. God gave us teeth, God will give us bread.

“I could go to war with this hair,” she said. “It cost me forty dollars.”

people like Quinn, always running from themselves, loved the road.

Let’s agree that “sometimes” is the correct answer. But not everything has a correct answer. You’re going to have to learn that someday.

How women cemented alliances over less than nothing impressed him anew.

He wondered if all good-deed-doers felt this insulted when they didn’t get to pick the exact specifications of their charity. “I

Oh, that awful place, filled with old crocks who’d quit their lives with no more fight than a grasshopper gave a house cat.

She examined the underpants as if excavating her lost womanhood. It had been over fifty years since she last bled. She stepped into them and hiked them up, half expecting a genie to appear with an offer to restore her menses.

but you got the feeling it made her more of what she already was. . . .

“Wouldn’t you expect a successful surgeon raised in the lap of loving kindness to come up with a happier ending than wheeling himself around a nursing home with a pair of binoculars?”

I’d rather have you be actually absent than virtually absent.” Bleary

But certain others, they move in and make themselves at home and start flapping their arms in the story you make of your life. They have a wingspan. . . . I

in short, made him appear better than he was, which kept him from becoming worse than he was.

Convince is for thought; persuade is for action. You couldn’t convince me that taping my horrible old-lady voice was a good idea, but you persuaded me to do it anyway, didn’t you, you little dickens? . . .

which is where “To be or not to be” comes into the picture. . . . Because he’s wondering if death, which is an undiscovered country, might be preferable to life, with its known drawbacks. . . .

Oh, but I’d never especially minded being alone. When you’re dancing in the arms of your only girlfriend, however, and this dreamy song comes on the radio, sung in this dreamy way, you cry. You just do.

Ona received a sunslanted glimpse of her hand, the spotted ruin that retained a gentle taper, an echo of girlhood, as if to lay bare the futility of physical beauty. Its brevity. Its useless invitations.

Can memory be revisited to allow us to see now what we didn’t see then?

Can you see the iceberg coming? No one will love you more than they love themselves.

He’d made her see through his eyes: her age, her fright, her balding head, her piddly size. The only possible revenge would be not to mind. But she did mind. She felt slight and ugly and gawked at: a trifling nobody. Just yesterday—Or was it this morning? Time had gone gluey and soft—Quinn had seen her in this light when he’d caught sight of her skinny, accordioned, eyeball-white legs. The greasy-haired intruder had confirmed her as a dusty, frightful, genderless shell, and she hated him for it.

They were like Louise, these women, multiplied many times over: energetic people who enjoyed a crisis, who easily rose to righteous outrage, who revealed stores of affection at the least expected times. How had she lived here so long without knowing this?

He made a frantic, involuntary, interior leap away from his own pain but it found him anyway, knifing him with a clean, clarifying memory: not of the boy, but rather a photograph of the boy, the one sent by the boy himself to his rented room in Chicago. The effortful smile, the starched uniform, the fake backdrop of a barnyard fence.

Longest time spent standing. 17 years. Swami Maujgiri Maharaj. Country of India.

Because I missed you this week. Which led me to realize, in a way I had not realized for quite some time, that I live alone. And so, I don’t feel talkative.

It took me most of a century to learn that. I’m giving you the great benefit of hindsight.

A busload of pilgrims today on journeys they never chose, having once believed themselves born for more than this.

He’d played a hundred songs, five hundred, a thousand songs that made people bite their lips and bob their heads, recalling a place they once lived, a person they once loved, a version of themselves they’d forgotten.

Perhaps the shock of seeing Laurentas required a bruised place in which to settle.

You should have asked me for help from the start.” “No, no,” Ona assured her, looking up. “We so enjoyed the hunt.” Ona

We’d parted on sorrowful terms indeed. But Louise could move reality around the way some people move furniture.

“I miss it. I’m suddenly homesick for a place I don’t recall.

He will ask this of his father, who will say to himself: You can’t make a simple D chord, how do you know about changing keys? I listened, he’ll answer, and his father will realize how ardently he’d paid attention all along, how carefully he observed, how hard he tried. He will tell his father that the morning chorus sounded like something rising out of the breath it took away. To which his father will respond, All right, then, my friend; let’s make some music. The ten parts of Miss Vitkus’s story will end with bird music in a key she can hear, a big surprise that he will present to her next Saturday, exactly nine months and twenty-six days before her actual birthday. Miss Vitkus will want to meet his father, who lowered the key of birds, and they will all become friends. He cannot know that the thing he thinks of as his friend’s amazing life, ninety minutes on tape, will momentarily break from his hand and slide down the street to be crushed beyond seeing by the first squad car at the scene.

From Guinness World Records 2006: RECORD: Oldest matron of honor RECORD HOLDER: Ona Vitkus, age 104, USA