One Two Three

by Laurie Frankel

“Everyone needs air, water, food, shelter, and clothing all the time, Monday. Everyone needs care when they’re sick or hurt, love when they’re sad or scared, someone to tell them no or stop when they’re being unsafe. Everything else people need sometimes—and it’s a lot—is special. All of us have special needs.”

“I like labels because they mean organized and order and control and correct.” “Sometimes they do. And sometimes they just give you the illusion of those things. Giving something a label and putting it in a box makes you feel like you’ve understood it and accounted for it and can keep track of it, and that’s great for things like paperwork or books, but sometimes things get mislabeled or misfiled, and then they get misunderstood or misaccounted for.”

And this is her central tenet: They did fuck us. Therefore there must be evidence of this fact somewhere. Therefore she has only to find it. Then justice will be served, the wicked unmasked and punished, the good and faithful rewarded for their patience and fidelity. Why else do people believe in God?

“I’m not a pain in her ass,” I protested. “Oh, sweetie, I love you, but of course you are. That’s the whole point of children—they keep you grounded, but another way to say that is they weigh you down. Grandchildren are probably better, but it’s not like you can start with them so you have to lie.” “Lie?” “To your kids. If you let them know how much they wreck your life, your kids won’t make you any grandchildren.” She stopped pulling at her fingers and pointed one at me. “You remember that now, Mab. That’s good advice I’m giving you.”

The list of irritatingly misapplied clichés people utter would take me more hours to type out than I have left to live, but near the top is the conversational gambit “There are two kinds of people in this world…” There are two kinds of people in this world: the ones who split the world into two kinds of people, and the ones who know that’s reductive and conversationally lazy. With this exception: There are two kinds of people in this world. People who can expect to, strive to, feel entitled to be happy. And people who cannot. The rest of the dichotomies are meaningless beside that one. Look through history for the latter. Look around your town or city. You will find us everywhere. We are legion.

It was only a few years ago it occurred even to me to wonder how—literally how—I will someday live when Nora does not. Maybe I’ll go on her heels, like a brokenhearted lover, from grief but also lack of care. I need a lot of help to be me. It’s not that I couldn’t hire people. I could, of course. It’s that no one on earth could ever do it as thoroughly and thoughtfully and devotedly as Nora. Mother love is a powerful force. She is so essentially a part of me—like a limb, an organ—that maybe without her, I will simply cease to be. But it’s bigger than that. Maybe we’ll all find Bourne was only ever for a little while, and as our beleaguered parents age away, the next generation will peter into nothing. We’ll leave if we can, stay if we can’t, but many of us won’t survive, won’t live without our platoon of parental carers, won’t have children of our own, and Bourne will shed its citizens softly like trees do their October leaves, green fading to gold fading to brown, then quickly, quietly, returned to dust. The remaining shops and suppliers will go, the post office and Tom’s depot. Some of us will die almost at once without meds, filled G-tubes, emptied catheter bags. Some of us will go up in flames when there’s no one to help with the stove or herd us away from steep stairs or run baths with no more than four inches of not-too-hot water. Others will go more slowly as our wheelchairs shudder to still without anyone to repair, push, or recharge, as our implants stop whisperin...

Part of the perspective she means is If Mirabel can smile in the face of such soul-crushing constriction, my dead end doesn’t look so bad. But it is true I look for bright sides, not because I am an optimist by disposition, not because I don’t know any better—I do—but because I am so slow. It takes me so long to do everything I do. And if you go slowly enough, every moment of the day becomes its own journey, either its own triumph, which you get to celebrate, or its own failure, which you get to move on from, by definition, in the very next moment. If you operate at speed, each word is not a victory, each swallowed piece of food or sip of water is not a conquest. If you operate at speed, you need bigger things to vanquish than a sentence or a muffin or a single line of King Lear. It’s not that slow is not also frustrating—for me, for Nora, for my sisters—but frustrated is what people are supposed to make their sisters feel, what teenagers everywhere are always provoking in their mothers. It’s not that slow isn’t painful, maddening, restrictive. It is all of those things. Plus it’s not like I have a choice. But slow is also one of the blessings of being me. Mixed blessings. Slow is one of the mixed blessings of being me.

But the other thing about Romeo and Juliet? Both only children. Not a sister between them. And you can tell because even when you’re happy and don’t want to hear it, sisters won’t let you settle a blood feud or fake your own death. Sisters don’t care how he’s magic or how it feels when his hands touch your face and his eyes meet your eyes or how much he changes your life and opens your world and everything in it, especially you. They won’t green-light your ill-founded, life-ruining plan just because you’re in love. With sisters, at the very least, you’re going to need a much better reason than that.

I am betrayed by my eldest sister who also told what she shouldn’t have, who also chose someone else over our family, though at least in her case it was because of love, at least some of it was. But mostly it is this: We have shared a room, a life, a heart all these weeks and months and all the years before these weeks and months, and she has fallen in love without ever once noticing that I have fallen in love as well. Worse than not ever once noticing. Not ever once imagining. We communicate, Mab and I, without language, without motion, without space, passage, sense, or sometimes even purpose. We are so much the same—for two people who navigate the world so differently—it is appalling that she could love another and not realize that I would—of course I would—do the same.

“That is not enough,” my Voice says, and we are both stopped by it, for it is heartbreaking and it is worse than heartbreaking. And it is true. It is not enough to be loved by your mother. It is a good start, and you wouldn’t want to do without, and it helps, but it is not enough. You need also the love of your community, the love of friends and admirers, the love of strangers who don’t know you but still wish you well, the love that comes from passion and from commitment and from someone who will never, never betray you and not just because they’re related to you. You need more love. We all need more love. And here—in this town, in this body—love is abundant but it is not sufficient. It is not enough.

And this is Nora’s permanent, impossible bind. If her children are perfect just as they are, then why is she so angry at Belsum? If they’ve caused such damage, where is her proof? And if the proof is us, doesn’t that mean we are broken indeed? She sees my skepticism, or maybe it’s my scorn. “It’s possible to want two things at once, you know.” I do, of course. “Even opposite things. Even things that contradict and contraindicate. We don’t talk about that enough.”

“It is because of you I do this,” she allows, “but not the way you think. I want you to know you can fight. I want you to know you should fight. You will be treated carelessly and cruelly, unfairly and maliciously, shortsightedly and selfishly in this world, and when you are, I want you to know you do not have to take it like you deserve nothing better and you’re powerless to protest. I want you to know you can win.” Another impossible paradox: how to show your children they can keep getting up when all they ever see is the part where you fall.

The truth is, it wasn’t a vote. Not really. You can’t ask people to vote if they can’t make a choice. The question was not was Belsum culpable all those years ago. It was not are they repentant and reformed now. It was not do we believe improvements were made and operations are safe going forward. It was one thing. Are we more angry or more desperate? Which is a measure of our souls. It may be a question, but it isn’t a choice.

Our road trip makes me see that needing help doesn’t mean there aren’t other places to get it besides home, other people who can provide it besides family, that having limits doesn’t mean I cannot—must not, maybe—bewitch and bewilder, range far and wander wide and wild. For home is like black holes—no matter how small, no matter how humble, they capture everything in range and trap it inside. The only way to escape their draw is to be far enough away.