One Two Three

by Laurie Frankel

We don’t need something to have happened to talk about it, though. Teenage girls don’t get enough credit for this, their ability to see the potential import of everything, no matter how insignificant it seems, and analyze it endlessly. It’s written off—we’re written off—as silly, but it’s the opposite. We understand instinctively that, like me, change is slow. If you’re not paying attention, you’ll miss it.

“The world is smaller than it ever was,” Pooh said. “And no matter what town they’re in, sixteen-year-olds want to leave it. Nowhere in the world is big enough to satisfy a teenager.”

“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.” “That is why you have to label things carefully,” I told him. “Sure. But when those things aren’t things but people, it’s not just a question of careful. People are complicated. They’re more than one thing. They’re less than another.

We all choose the terms of the desperate bargains we make with the powers that may be, which baseless beliefs and decaying wisdoms we cling to, and which we discard as superstition or sorcery or the ravings of misguided zealots. Which is to say: it may not make sense all the way, but it makes sense enough.

“Children are a pain in the ass. Look at your poor mother. No offense.” “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.”

“Other places have more people,” Pooh said, “but the problem with people is lots of them suck. You limit the population, you limit the assholes too.”

“It’s the only thing that works. Legislation doesn’t. Corporations like Belsum just ignore it, knowing enforcement is years away, if ever, or they buy politicians and, with them, favorable policy. Citizen pressure doesn’t work. These issues are impossibly complicated, way too complex for the public to understand, and besides, Belsum can spin it and sound bite it into anything they like. Public shaming doesn’t even do it. People’s memories are too short. Corporations just wait for everyone to get over it, and we do, quickly. What works, the only thing that works, is simple math. It has to cost them more to ruin your life than it costs them not to.

Love stories are only love stories if they go somewhere. Really, that’s true of all stories. They require a beginning, a middle, and an end. Rising action, climax, denouement. Conflicts sorted, strife overcome, or challenges succumbed to. Plot. Change. Lessons learned. That’s what makes a story. Otherwise it’s just a description. Otherwise it’s just conceit.

If you look closer, if you go slowly, there can be story even without progress or plot, life in small change, like Dante and Beatrice, like fish swimming hard against the current just to stay where they are. They’re not getting anywhere, neither Dante nor the fish, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t effort, growth, triumph, and beautiful poetry.

There are so many people who have sinned a little and a lot. There are so many people who deserve some of the blame. But that means there is never anyone whose responsibility it is to take responsibility. There is no one who must make it right, no one who must make amends. There is so much, therefore, that stays wrong and unmended.

She smiles at us, one of those smiles that somehow means sad. “But people move on.” I consider her husband who cannot work and her children who cannot be born and her life which cannot ever be what she had every right and reason to believe it would. I consider how “move on” is exactly what she cannot do. “Some things are terrible enough it’s better to forget if you can.” We’re staring at her with our mouths open. “What?” “You teach history.” That sad smile again. “History and memory are unreliable narrators.” I think back to that first assignment, how galled I was to have to write it over still-summer, how much everything has changed since then. “It’s hard to remember when it’s so painful. It’s hard to remember when you’re dead.” “I guess, but if—” “It’s hard to remember the past,” she interrupts, “when it won’t pass.”

I have learned that home is not just where you live. Home is also where you want and need and are meant to live. Home is also the people who are there with you, who are the people who will help you live, who are the people who will do the best they can, not just for themselves, but for you, their neighbors and friends, as well.

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.

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.”

The truth is, it wasn’t a vote. Not really. You can’t ask people to vote if they can’t make a choice.

Suggesting, as it does, that you are destroyed not by other people’s shortsightedness, other people’s greed, or other people’s deciding you’re disposable, but by being yourself too slow, morally compromised, wicked, and weak. Goliath is not at fault in this story. Goliath is just a giant, following his giant nature, laid low by nothing more than a lucky shot. And David, David’s just a boy with a sling and a stone, kind of whiny and moralistic, a little bit of a pissant.

It’s not our mother—our mothers, the last generation—who can fix this. They can’t. It is up to us now, the daughters, to move our town forward, to save us all, to tell a different story.