Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(18)
“It’s the fulfillment that has no other source. The first thought I have every morning, and the last thought every night, is about my kids.”
“That’s my point.”
“It’s my point.”
“When do you think about yourself?”
“When I think that one day, a few decades from now, which will feel like a few hours from now, I’ll be facing death all alone, except that I won’t be all alone, because I’ll be surrounded by my family.”
“Living the wrong life is far worse than dying the wrong death.”
“No shit! I got the same fortune cookie last night!”
Mark leaned closer to Julia.
“Just tell me,” he said, “you wouldn’t like to have your time and mind back? I’m not asking you to speak badly of your husband or kids. Let’s take it for granted that you’ve never cared about anything half as much, and couldn’t care about anything more. I’m not asking for the answer you want to give, or feel you have to. I know this is hard to think about, much less talk about. But honestly: you wouldn’t be happier alone?”
“You’re assuming happiness is the ultimate ambition.”
“I’m not. I’m just asking if you would be happier alone.”
Of course it wasn’t the first time she’d confronted the question, but it was the first time that it had been posed by someone else. It was the first time she didn’t have the ability to evade it. Would she be happier alone? I am a mother, she thought—not an answer to the question being asked, and no more her ultimate ambition than happiness, but her ultimate identity. She had no lives to compare with her life, no parallel aloneness to measure against her aloneness. She was simply doing what she thought was the right thing to do. Living what she thought was the right life.
“No,” she said. “I would not be happier alone.”
He ran his finger around a platonically spherical knob and said, “Then you have it all. Lucky you.”
“Yes. Lucky me. I do feel lucky.”
A long few seconds of touching cold metal in silence, and then Mark asked, “So?” and placed the knob back on the counter.
“What?”
“So what’s your news?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You said you had news.”
“Oh, right,” she said, shaking her head. “No, it isn’t news.”
And it wasn’t. She and Jacob had been talking about thinking about looking for a place in the country. Something dinky that could be re-imagined. Not even talking about, really, but allowing the joke to linger for long enough to become unfunny. It wasn’t news. It was process.
The morning after their night in the Pennsylvania inn, a decade and a half before, Julia and Jacob went on a hike through a nature preserve. An unusually chatty welcome sign at the entrance explained that the existing paths weren’t original but were “desire lines,” shortcuts people took that trampled the growth and over time appeared deliberate.
Julia and Jacob’s family life became characterized by process, endless negotiation, tiny adjustments. Maybe we should throw caution to the wind and take off the window screens this year. Maybe fencing is one activity too many for Max, and too conspicuously bourgeois for his parents. Maybe if we replaced the metal spatulas with rubber spatulas, we wouldn’t need to replace all the nonstick pans that are giving us cancer. Maybe we should get a car with a third row of seats. Maybe one of those projection things would be nice. Maybe Sam’s cello teacher was right and he should just be playing songs he loves, even if that means “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae).” Maybe more nature is part of the answer. Maybe having groceries delivered would encourage better cooking, which would relieve the unnecessary but unshakable guilt of having groceries delivered.
Their family life was the sum of nudges and corrections. Infinite tiny increments. News happens in emergency rooms and lawyers’ offices and, apparently, the Alliance Fran?aise. It is to be sought and avoided with everything one has.
“Let’s look at hardware another day,” Julia said, slipping the knob into her handbag.
“We’re not going to do the renovation.”
“You’re not?”
“No one even lives there anymore.”
“Right.”
“I’m sorry, Julia. Of course we’ll pay you for—”
“No, right. Of course. I’m just a little slow today.”
“You put in so much work.”
After a snowfall, there are only desire lines. But it always warms, and even if it takes longer than it should, the snow inevitably melts, revealing what was chosen.
i don’t care if you cum, but i’ll make you cum anyway
For their tenth anniversary, they went back to the Pennsylvania inn. They’d stumbled upon it the first time—before GPS, before TripAdvisor, before the rareness of freedom spoiled freedom.
The anniversary visit involved a week of preparations, which began with the most difficult task of locating the inn. (Somewhere in Amish country, quilts on the bedroom walls, red front door, rough-hewn banisters, wasn’t there a tree-lined drive?) They had to find a night when Irv and Deborah could stay over to watch the kids, when neither Jacob nor Julia had any pressing work obligations, when the boys didn’t have anything—teacher conference, doctor’s visit, performance—that would require parental presence, and when that specific room was available. The first night to thread all the needles in the pincushion was three weeks out. Julia didn’t know if that felt near or far.