Tania James

Guilt and Hope and Fruit and Cake

I.

You have gotten into a college of which your parents are very proud. Diplomas are delivered; hands are shaken. Your mother suggests that you call the daughter of a family friend, a corporate lawyer named S___, who attended the same college four years ago and who can give you good instructions on how to become a corporate lawyer. You don’t know when or how it was decided that you would become a corporate lawyer, but you call anyway.

S___, the corporate lawyer, is generous with her advice, so much so that you have to take notes. Major in economics and minor in applied math, she suggests. You love the hefty sounds of these majors, their gravity, their weight. You feel entirely inadequate to carry them.

There is also talk of a rape whistle. College does not seem your cup of tea.

II.

Your parents drop you off at college, where your mother promptly makes your bed. You have always slept in a bed with one of your two sisters. Sometimes all of you would pile into your parents’ king-size (much to your father’s annoyance), one of those traditions that you think of as “cultural,” though you’ll find that very few families, of any culture, share it. Neatly, your mother tucks the excess of a full-sized sheet under your narrow mattress.

While your father copies down a list of important phone numbers, all the other students are befriending each other at rapid rates. You are suspicious of these hyper-social students. They are nothing like you. They smile wide and exude confidence, like flight attendants. They speak a language of endless questions: What’s your name? Where are you from? What’s your dorm?

You and your mother are the last to say goodbye. She is crying, an event that occurs so rarely that you nearly break down in front of the library, while people pass around you as if stepping over a puddle, already on their way to BBQs and ice cream socials. She watches you walk away from her. You look back to wave. You notice that your father has awkwardly put his arm around her shoulders, the kind of public intimacy that doesn’t come naturally to them.

You reassure them that you’ll be home in four months, but your mother knows better. She left her home at 16, to pursue a degree in nursing, so she knows that, in a way, you will never be home again.

III.

As a sophomore in college, you are asked to declare your major. You remember the two formative classes of your freshman year:

Economics 10: a lecture course in which you often found yourself analyzing, in detail, the balding pattern of the boy sitting in front of you.

and for the other course:

African-American Cinema as Genre: For your first class, you watched Pulp Fiction.

You decide to major in Filmmaking, and to take some fiction writing classes on the side. Gone is the weight of Economics and Applied Math; the only math class you will take is a requirement called “The Magic of Numbers.”

Your mother can’t quite digest your new interests. Her constant query, reworded and reworked over the ensuing months and years, is: Where did this come from? And frankly, you have no idea. You wonder if you chose this path not because of your burning interest in film, but because you wanted to “subvert expectations,” as your TF would say, or in other words, to annoy your mother. You dismiss this idea and go back to watching Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.

IV.

You go to graduate school for creative writing. Occasionally, your older sister calls you to say that mom wants to know what your plan is, in case the writing thing falls through. You feign absolute confidence, lay out a five-point plan that involves grants, fellowships, and professorships, then after hanging up, eat a whole box of Fig Newtons while staring at the blank computer screen. Guilt and hope, fruit and cake: these are the fuels that drive you.

You think a lot about your mother, standing and watching you leave for college. Every mother is a different mystery, and yours has her own stories and sacrifices. She has known disappointments that you haven’t, the kinds of worries that cling in the night. Your friends insist that you must find your own happiness, but what is your happiness without hers?

V.

You attempt to join the work force. You interview at People magazine, for a job that would require you to swarm B-list celebrities at red carpet events, thrusting microphones in their faces, and asking pressing, off-the-cuff questions like: “So, Paris: at what time of day do you think you are most beautiful?” The editor asks if you would like such a job. Desperate for a salary with health benefits, you say you would love it. But you fail the rest of the quiz, which requires you to name two night clubs that Lindsay Lohan might frequent. You consider certain nouns—Butter, Bed, Wood—and strike out.

Didn’t some high school speaker say to ‘follow your passions?’ Didn’t a former graduate return to give a motivational speech full of quotes about sweat and dreams? And even though you zoned out halfway through, you don’t recall any discussion of failure, the battered side of aspiration. You fight despair, thrash against it like a fly against a window. That thrashing appears in your writing, as you attempt to become anything other than your despairing self, to sound more like those who have succeeded. It will take you years to understand how to make room for disappointment. How to shift your gaze in another direction. How to watch a movie in a theater, alone. How to read a book purely for pleasure again. You go back to the work, to thinking yourself a failure, but as you string words into sentences, there are moments when you feel this may be enough, the laying down of words like crumbs on a trail, tracing the way to your better self, the one that endures.

VI.

You acquire a literary agent. You perch on her beautiful couch, in awe of her and her apartment. Everything about her is graceful—the way she speaks, the way she hangs her necklaces from nails on the bathroom wall, a tactic you will imitate to cheap effect on a bulletin board at home. You try not to give off the stink of desperation, but the fact is, you would be willing to take her name if she asked you to.

Whenever she leaves a message on your phone, your father demands to listen to it for the pure comfort he receives from her English accent. Meanwhile, you continue to apply for job after job, including one that would solely involve making photocopies. For this, you are rejected on the basis of “not enough experience.”

VII.

Your grandfather dies.

You are enlisted to speak at the wake, because you are the writer in the family, though no published works exist to confirm that title. You speak in abstractions of love and hard work, of his three daughters and four sons, the eldest of whom is your father. But the truth is, your grandfather was a different person before the stroke that rendered him docile and vague, and you remember that earlier version only in glimpses.

What you’d really like to talk about is the spoon your grandfather used to grip in his pocket, to keep his hand from trembling, an after-effect of the stroke. What matters is how determined he was to attend your sister’s wedding, to carry himself with dignity from ceremony to reception, so determined that when he arrived back at the hotel room, his daughters found in his pocket a bouquet of stolen spoons.

This is where his humanity lies. This is what you would like to render into a story. Yet it feels somehow mercenary to consider him a character already, his body laid out before you. Maybe you will never write of him at all. Or maybe some memories need years to burrow to the forefront of the mind, to startle you when they appear on the page with such urgency and clarity.

The wake is eight hours long. At some point, you check your phone to find four consecutive calls from your agent. She says an editor would like to publish your work.

In the hotel room, alone with your family, you tell them the news. Your father acts unsurprised. Your mother bursts into tears.

You are moved by these tears. These must be tears of joy and love, cinematic and redemptive, and you grow misty-eyed in return. For once, you think, you’ve made your mother proud.

The first thing your mother says, wiping her eyes, is this: “You have no idea what you’ve put me through.”

And the truth is, you don’t know. But you will know, maybe, if someday you have children who drag you through the morass of their late teens, their early twenties. Maybe you, too, will listen to them give you their flimsy five-point plans for the future. Maybe you will question their minor rebellions. And before that, you will drop them off at college only to watch them part from you. What will you tell them, then, about the road to success, about the formula for future happiness, about Fig Newtons and failure? Will they listen?

You have no idea yet, of what they will put you through or how you will weather it, but you will somehow. Because this is the gift of loving and being loved. This is the curse and the blessing.