Happiness for Beginners (4 page)

  Kick the wilderness's ass

  Earn a damned Certificate

I really, really wanted a Certificate.

I really, really wanted to be the kind of person who could dare to want a Certificate without seeming utterly ridiculous.

I really, really wanted a slip of paper that proved, at last, that I was okay.

I just wanted to be good at this. And competent. And tough. And, ultimately, just:
anybody but me
. I was tired of being a disaster. I was tired of being a trampled-on flower. I wanted to be awesome. That wasn't too much, was it?

My first act of business after registering had been to write down my goals, and I'd rifled through several storage boxes in the basement before I'd found the perfect paper to write them on: notecards from college with H E L E N • C A R P E N T E R embossed at the top. So far, having my old name back had been the best thing about getting divorced. Because guess what Mike's last name was? “Dull.” Okay, so the original old-world pronunciation had been “Dool.” But even the family had given up trying to correct people.

It was amazing that I'd been willing to take a name like that. It would have been so easy to keep Carpenter. But Mike had wanted us to have the same last name, arguing that we wouldn't feel like a family otherwise. And I had wanted to feel like a family with him, truly. Isn't that a reasonable choice when you're starting a life with somebody? Try to please him and hope like heck he'll try to please you back?

Duncan had teased me about the name constantly. I'd rolled my eyes, but there was no denying that it was a downgrade. Helen Dull was a terrible name. I tried to see it as a personal challenge—to prove the name wrong in every way. In the end, I failed: Helen Dull had been a much diminished version of Helen Carpenter. Though that was hardly the name's fault. It takes a lot more than just a name to bring you down that low.

So both the list and the paper it was written on felt profound to me, even though I'd made a last-minute decision to cut my name off the top of the page for the sake of anonymity. I didn't seem to have any clothes with pockets, and so I kept the list folded up in my bra, relishing both the roughness of it against my softest skin and the vague naughtiness of using my underwear like a pocket. And that, friends, is how I set off for the wilderness: with a tribute to the person I once was, and a simple checklist for the death-defying superhero I planned to become, folded up and stuffed into my C-cup.

Right then, if I'd been alone as planned, I'd have reached in to pull out the list—if only for the pleasure of resting my eyes on it. But I wasn't alone. And somewhere near Framingham, the person keeping me from being alone finished his book, snapped it closed, and decided to strike up some more conversation.

“I liked that smile you gave me back there, by the way,” he said, out of nowhere.

It startled me to hear his voice. “What smile?”

He waved in the direction of the city behind us. “Back in town. You gave me a smile.”

“Did I?” I asked. “I didn't mean to.”

“I know,” he said. “That made it even better.”

“Okay.”

“Think I'll get another one?” he asked. “Because that thing was like sunshine.”

He had to be up to something.

“I'm just saying. You should smile more.”

“I smile all the time,” I said, not smiling. “I smile constantly. From the moment I wake up until the moment I go to bed. Sometimes I get cheek cramps from smiling so much.”

He knew I was joking, but he wasn't sure how much. “I can count on one hand the times I've seen you smile,” he said, “including the night of your wedding.”

“You only ever see me around Duncan,” I said. “Who vexes me.”

“I'll say,” he agreed. “You're the meanest big sister I know.”

“I'm not mean,” I said. “In real life, I'm nice.”

“If you say so.”

“I rescued Pickle, didn't I? And I let people through in traffic. And I always clap really loud at plays.”

“That's your version of nice? Clapping at plays?”

“That's not my
only
version of nice.”

“What about nice to Duncan?” he asked. “What's your version of that?”

How had we gone from silence to this? “Are you picking a fight with me?”

“No, I'm just making conversation.”

“You weren't making conversation ten minutes ago,” I said.

“I wasn't finished with my book ten minutes ago.”

I glanced over at the closed book on his thigh. “Don't you have another one?”

“Nope.”

“So
I
have to talk about Duncan because
you
don't have anything left to read?”

“It's a long drive to Evanston.”

“And you're making it longer.”

“It just seems like a rich topic,” he said.

“Well, it's not,” I said. “It's a poor topic.”

He tilted his head at me like we both knew that wasn't true. “Is it because of what happened in your family?”

I felt a sting of alarm. Did he know about that? I glanced over. “What do you mean?”

He studied me, like he wasn't sure how to put it. “The tragedy,” he said at last.

The tragedy. So he knew about our family tragedy. Of course he would. He was Duncan's best friend.

“Is
what
because of our family tragedy?” I asked.

“The fact that you don't like Duncan.”

With that, Jake stumbled into a restricted area. “I like Duncan!” I snapped. “And I'm not going to talk about our family tragedy with you.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don't talk about it with anybody.”

“Maybe you should,” he said with a cheery shrug.

I tried to keep my voice un-irritated. “What are you,” I demanded then, “a therapist?”

“No,” Jake said. “But that's actually not a bad idea.” He considered it for a minute. Then he pushed on. “So what's the deal with you guys?”

I sighed. Between “Duncan” and “the Tragedy,” Duncan was no doubt the lesser conversational evil. “The deal is,” I said, “Duncan's a pain in the ass.”

“Granted.”

“And he makes me crazy. He doesn't make you crazy? The way he loses his keys? The way he never arrives anywhere on time? Or finishes what he starts? Or keeps a promise?”

“Not his strong suits,” Jake said. “True.”

“But you've been best friends for five years.”

“Six.”

“Why?”

Jake thought about it. “He has other good qualities.”

I knew he did, of course. But I couldn't call them up at the moment. “Like?”

“Like he is hands-down the funniest person I have ever met.”

I frowned. There was nothing funny about Duncan. “That can't be right,” I said.

Jake shrugged. “Sometimes he makes me laugh so hard, my lunch comes out my nose. Once it was a full-length spaghetti noodle.”

I pushed away that visual to scan back for a memory of Duncan making me laugh, ever. “Duncan never makes me laugh.”

“That's because you're always mad at him.”

“Not true! There are lots of times when I'm not mad at him. I'm not mad at him
most of the time,
in fact.”

“As long as he's nowhere near you, you mean.”

He had me there. “Fair enough.”

He smiled. There went those dimples again.

“You seem to get along very well with him, though,” I said, shifting the focus.

He shrugged. “I don't have any brothers or sisters.”

“So you picked Duncan?”

“He picked me, actually.”

I hadn't known that.

“He dared me,” he went on. “He bet that I couldn't throw a Ping-Pong ball against the side of the gym and catch it in my mouth.”

“And could you?”

“I could.”

“And did you?”

“I did.”

“That's how you became friends? On a dare?”

He nodded. “Sure. I can never resist a dare. Plus, he offered to teach me how to juggle.”

“I didn't know Duncan could juggle.”

“He can't. But by the time I figured it out, it was too late. We were already pals.”

“A bromance,” I said, just to see if it would irritate him.

He nodded. “Of the highest order.”

“And Duncan's a good friend?”

“The best. He always defends me.”

I couldn't imagine Jake needing to be defended. “Against?”

“Myself, mostly,” he said, giving that half smile.

“And what do you defend Duncan against?”

Jake frowned. “Death, I suppose.”

I coughed. “Death?”

“Oh,” he waved, “you know. He wants to jump off a roof at three in the morning, and I suggest it might not be the best idea. Or he wants to throw a match into a box of firecrackers to see what will happen. Or he wants to stare into a flashlight until he has a seizure. That kind of thing.”

“See, now,” I said, “I always thought those were your ideas.”

“Nope. That's all Big D.”

“So you're the straight man.”

He thought about it. “In terms of not getting killed, I am the straight man.”

“But you're not always the straight man?”

“We take turns, I guess,” he said.

He was so earnest. So thoughtful about it all. He was nothing like what I would have imagined, if I had ever thought to imagine him.

“So Duncan brings near-death experiences to the relationship—” I began.

Jake nodded. “That's his area.”

“What's your area?”

He shrugged. “Everything else. Talking to girls. Swing dancing. Harmonizing. Accents.”

“Why would you have to do accents?”

“I don't
have
to do them. It's just fun.”

I had known so little about Jake for so many years that almost everything he said surprised me. He could do accents? He could swing dance? He could talk to girls? Who knew?

Without meaning to, I shifted into Q & A mode, asking him question after question like we were on TV. Partly, it was an offensive play to keep the focus off me. But, I must confess—I'd also suddenly become curious. As we cruised west on I-90, I gathered a whole raft of trivia about Jake. Like he was allergic to almonds and pecans, but not peanuts. He'd double majored in English and pre-med, writing his thesis on Nathaniel Hawthorne. He just got in to medical school but had decided to go see the world, instead—starting now. With Wyoming. Then, off to Baja to pet the whales. After that: The ice caves in Juneau. The Tianzi mountains of China. The ruined mines of Cornwall. The Black Forest. The Taj Mahal. The northern lights. Not necessarily in that order.

“You're taking a year off?” I asked. “Before med school?”

“Actually,” he said, “I'm just not going.”

“What do you mean, ‘not going'?”

“Not going at all.”

There he went again, surprising me. “You got into your first-choice school,” I said, “but you're not going? At all?”

“That's right.”

“Why on earth not?”

He looked out the window. “It just turns out not to be a great fit.”

This was the vaguest answer I'd heard from him all day. “You've spent years doing coursework and prerequisites, you've taken the MCATs and gone to the trouble of applying, and you've
gotten in
—and now you decide it's not a great fit?”

“That's about right,” he said, like we were done.

“But what changed?”

“I changed.”

I was ready to press him for more. It was, as he himself had pointed out, a long drive to Evanston, and if he could make me talk about Duncan then I was happy to make him talk about anything I pleased. But he must really have wanted to change the subject, because before I could ask another question, he caused a diversion.

“You know what?” he said. “I need to pee.” Next thing, he was rolling down the window and emptying out his half-full water bottle.