You've Been So Lucky Already: A Memoir

by Alethea Black

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle. What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel. What I thought was an injustice turned out to be a color of the sky.

Sometimes you feel that you’re already dead and everything that happens has happened already.

Because time is a lie. We’re just not moving fast enough to see it.

It’s October when I first start noticing things, mysterious things, disturbing things I can’t explain. I like October—the slanted light, the soft taps of dry leaves skittering against the sidewalk—so I’ve been spending a lot of time outdoors.

I read about Max Planck’s experiment in which photons behaved intelligently—choosing the quickest route, rather than the shortest.

I know everything is painful right now, and you probably think it’s going to go on like this forever, but there are things you don’t understand, things that haven’t happened yet that are going to change you the way a struck match changes the air.

“There’s plenty going on we can’t see!” he says, suddenly more alive. “Wavelengths of light we don’t register, particles too small for our eyes. Just as there are sounds we can’t hear—there are radio waves coursing through this room right now. But that’s just it: they’re beyond human perception, so there’d be no way for me to experience them.”

In British lit class, I’m assigned to write a paper on the poetry of William Blake.

I turn to face the rain-streaked window. Outside, the cars all have their headlights on; the wet morning is as dark as night.

“Your whole life, I want you to know that you can always come to me and ask me anything, and I’ll do my best to give you an honest answer.”

“You don’t have to believe in fairy tales. The truth is the greatest miracle there is.”

I often feel much less lonely when I’m by myself than I do with other people.

Inside the house, the air around me whispers; something feels incomplete.

He forgets where he put the car keys; he searches for the right word; he walks into a room and can’t remember why he’s there. He tries to make a joke of it—“Do you remember why I came in here?”—but I can tell it bothers him.

“I tell myself he doesn’t change; he just gets a little absentminded, a little distracted as he ages—it happens to everyone. And I mostly believe it. He forgets where he put the car keys; he searches for the right word; he walks into a room and can’t remember why he’s there. He tries to make a joke of it—“ Do you remember why I came in here?”—but I can tell it bothers him. Even though he goes to bed early, he’ll sometimes nod off midsentence. One day he can’t recall the name of our next-door neighbor and friend, the one he’s always liked so much. He calls her Emily, but her name is Elizabeth.”

It’s a gusty October afternoon when I decide to call. All week, the wind has been whispering. Every time I spin around, the brown leaves swirl in circles. It’s in these haunting autumn afternoons, beneath the surface currents of life, that I’ve sensed a deeper truth: my father isn’t gone; he’s here, and he still has something to tell me.

In church, after the sermon, you do not wonder aloud: Where’s Lazarus now? Dead again. That’s where.

As you exit, when the excessively cheerful clerk says: “Have a nice day!” you do not say: “I’m afraid I already have other plans.”

You do not recall the day you said to her: “Please don’t tell me anything bad about coffee, because coffee is the only reliable source of pleasure in my daily life,” and she said: “Coffee is one of the most heavily pesticided crops on the planet.”

“If you dig deep enough, you’re always going to hit that sadness. That sadness is like the water table.”

In the middle of the night, when you can’t sleep, you do not get up and go for a walk and try to remember who it was that said in New York City you could walk the streets weeping, bleeding, and naked and still be invisible.

It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”

On this day, you remember your high school science teacher, the one who told you that fate was like a carousel and if you miss your horse the first time it comes around, or even the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth times—if you’re a person who’s really good at missing things—it will come around for you again.

You had not thought it possible to capture sunlight from a particular era on film, but apparently it is, because all of a sudden you remember that you were a child once, and it must have been in the 1970s, because you remember walking around in that light.

On this day, when the movie ends, the other people get up and file out of the theater, talking and chewing their gum, as if they haven’t just been present at a miracle.

“On this day, when the movie ends, the other people get up and file out of the theater, talking and chewing their gum, as if they haven’t just been present at a miracle. Because that’s the way it always is: first, miracle, then: time to make the chicken. But on this day, you don’t get up. You don’t get up because you don’t want it to be over. So you continue to sit there, silently holding your Kit Kat wrapper in your seat at the back, long after the music has stopped and the lights have come on and everyone else has gone home.”

Before he dies, my father tells me he isn’t afraid, he’s had a good life, his only fear is that he’s letting me down.

“Before he dies, my father tells me he isn’t afraid, he’s had a good life, his only fear is that he’s letting me down. This is in June—on Father’s Day—and he will die at his home in New Canaan a little over eight weeks later. His cancer of the base of the tongue / floor of the mouth is already stage four when they find it, and when he calls and tells me the news in a soft, halting voice, he delivers both punches at once: “I have cancer. It’s terminal.””

I don’t realize that, often, by the time you’re ready for something, you don’t need it anymore.

I slam the cab door and check my watch, cursing again, again the victim of my lack of an alarm clock. If only I were still in contact with my future therapist, I might ask her where she got that cunning little device that made such a pleasing yet authoritative bing.

The only problem with Pulp Fiction, I tell her, was that I kept laughing when no one else was laughing, and then, when everyone else was laughing, sometimes I wanted to cry.

“The only problem with Pulp Fiction, I tell her, was that I kept laughing when no one else was laughing, and then, when everyone else was laughing, sometimes I wanted to cry. For instance, that scene when Uma Thurman overdoses. I found that to be very upsetting and stressful. I did not think that was funny at all, yet everyone in the theater was laughing maniacally while I worried for her life and wondered why none of the bozos on-screen were doing something more to help her.”

For some reason, I think it’s hilarious. I think it must represent the absolute nadir in the history of something. Perhaps this is the lowest moment of my life.

“A few days later, I learn that the movie theater does not want to hire me. They send me a rejection letter in the mail, which I save. I actually tie it to a piece of string and dangle it from the fan above my mattress, so I can look at it whenever I want. For some reason, I think it’s hilarious. I think it must represent the absolute nadir in the history of something. Perhaps this is the lowest moment of my life. Then again, maybe it’s just another slip in a long, downward slide.”

Only Tasti D-Lite isn’t ice cream; it’s something else, for skinny people who don’t want to eat ice cream.

It’s nearing Christmas, and a busy time of year for bus riding.

“It’s nearing Christmas, and a busy time of year for bus riding.” Reference Black, Alethea. (2018, Oct. 1). “You've Been So Lucky Already: A Memoir.” Kindle Edition. Part I. Reason to Stay, p. 49 of 192, 26%.

When she told me the ring was lucky, I said, “Oh, good! I could use a little luck!” but the gypsy woman fixed me with a sharp stare and held up a mirror. “You’ve been so lucky already,” she said.

Only much later, when the shock has worn off and I’m safely consuming a quart of coconut ice cream with Famous Chocolate Wafers in bed, do I begin to feel bad for that kid, my mugger.

“Only much later, when the shock has worn off and I’m safely consuming a quart of coconut ice cream with Famous Chocolate Wafers in bed, do I begin to feel bad for that kid, my mugger. Imagine being so desperate that you nerve yourself up to steal from a lonely girl at two in the morning, and then, out of all the possibilities in the world, you pick the one person in this part of Manhattan who has nothing in her purse but a bus pass, a notebook, and Virginia Woolf’s diary.”

After my mugging, I stay in my apartment for a while, holed up like a mouse.

You know he’s vomiting, and she’s hyperventilating . . . if I just start sobbing, it really isn’t going to be helpful.

In July 1967, my father was madly in love, and his comely new bride was begging him, with tears in her eyes, not to make her get on a plane again. So he didn’t. They canceled the rest of the trip, spent the weekend in New York City, and used the leftover money to buy their living room furniture, which they forever after referred to as “the honeymoon divan” and “the honeymoon love seat.”

Nothing looks familiar because I not only have the wrong cemetery, I have the wrong state.

And, sure enough, even though she’s ready with her snappy riposte, it turns out the nice lady from the DEC can’t help me, either.

But, before he’s disappeared from sight, I grab my camera and snap a quick photo—not so I can brag about my Saint Patrick exploits, but so I can look up what kind of snake he is and determine if he’s poisonous, because, if he is, I still might have to move.

There’s a performative aspect to nonsolitude that comes naturally to me—I’m high empathy, and I can sense how to please—but it’s draining. It’s only when I’m alone that I feel most relaxed, most myself.

When I finally had my hair, urine, and blood tested for mercury, I had more than three times the average amount the CDC has found to exist across the population.

Now the inspectors come in their protective clothing and show me all the types of mold I have, all the colors, where it hides.

“Now the inspectors come in their protective clothing and show me all the types of mold I have, all the colors, where it hides. They do not use the phrase “toxic black mold,” because all the colors of mold are toxic, they explain, and while I do not harbor every color of mold in my house, I have a wide variety, with especially high numbers for aspergillus.”

I find my college roommate unspooling her yoga mat in the hall. Before commencing she has fixed herself a Bellini with the leftover champagne—a ritual she refers to as a “pretox.”

“I’m making steak with organic vegetable stew for dinner,” he says. Before he leaves, he stops. “For God’s sake, would you go see a professional?”

So this is what it feels like to lose everything.

The Chinese woman also practices something called Reiki, and asks if I’d like to try it. Reiki is not what I came here for, but sure, if she wants to Reiki me, have at it.

I wend my way through Massachusetts, taking a driving tour of my youth, and end up near my childhood home.

I used to love days like this. October in New England used to be my favorite time of year. I still love it, but I can’t feel it anymore. That joy, those currents of affection that used to course through me—where’d they go? After losing every other thing, must I lose that, too?

There will come a day, a few months from now, when I will find out what’s been making me ill. It will be a word I’ve never heard before, and when I hear this word, and learn what causes it and what can be done to cure it, everything will finally begin to make sense.

But here, on this glorious autumn afternoon, in the middle of the sidewalk, none of this has happened yet.

“But here, on this glorious autumn afternoon, in the middle of the sidewalk, none of this has happened yet. I do not yet know the word for what’s wrong; I have no idea that a diagnosis and successful treatment are winging toward me. All I know is the supersaturated light, the impassive pavement, the sooty boots of passersby.”