My American Unhappiness (3 page)

"It's amazing," the reporter says.

"It always makes our day," says Tammy, another barista who is working the milk steamer.

Minn just smiles at me. She never seems to not be smiling; she may be the only genuinely happy person I know.

"Anyway," I tell the reporter, "media attention would simply negate the subversive pleasure I get from this little game. People would come in to deliberately throw me off. Imitating guessers would crop up all over town, plaguing cafés with such guessing games. But, anyway, you were debating getting a pack of trail mix. You should get it. But in truth, I think you really wanted a pumpkin scone. But there's your diet to consider, especially given your profession."

Minn is laughing so hard tears come down her face.

The TV reporter gives me her card as she exits. Her name is Kathy Simon. The trail mix comment has left her dazed, as if I have plumbed an intimate region of her psyche. She is a bit more attractive now, smiling. Her gray eyes look almost blue, but no, they are gray. Her skin is pale, too, and in midwinter it will turn to gray. Soon, her hair will be gray; it's possible that she will be all gray soon. A gray woman.

"Do you have a gray cat?" I ask her as she nears the exit.

Now she just leaves, wide-eyed, near tears. Minn helps a few other customers and I go to the washroom. When I come back, Minn has my triple-shot ready.

"On me," she says.

"Many thanks," I say.

"You have a dark edge to you today," Minn says. "A sort of harsh subtext to your guessing."

"It's a gift. A useless one, but interesting: I've studied unhappiness for a long time and now I can sort of guess everybody's unhappiness before they speak. And I also note, at least among a certain well-educated demographic, Starbucks is a ritual—costly and mildly unhealthy as it is—meant to mitigate our day-to-day unhappiness."

"It's like this very focused sort of ESP, don't you think?"

"Funny thing is this: if I know the person at all, I can never guess what they'll order."

I hear my name being called, boisterously, across the room.

"Zeke!"

I nod at Minn, mumble "Thanks," and go over to the waving, suited man. H. M. Logan has obviously followed his Rotary meeting with cocktails, too, many more than the one I had, and now is trying to sober up at a corner table before heading back to his office, a palatial suite on the thirteenth floor of the U.S. Bank building from which he runs the Dorothy Logan Memorial Foundation, named after his mother. "You were terrible today," he says. "What were you thinking? You embarrassed me in front of the Rotarians!"

"Sorry, H. M. I really am, but it wasn't an ideal audience," I say. "It was like giving a lecture about cooking with bacon at a PETA conference."

"What are you talking about?"

"You can't have an attentive audience without a receptive one," I say.

H. M. is drooling a little. "What are you talking about?"

"How much did you have to drink today?" I ask.

"Look," he says, "I got a call from somebody in Washington yesterday. Apparently, my name is the contact name in their database for GMHI. I told them to call you."

"Okay."

"Why would they call me?" H. M. asks.

"I don't know. Because you're the chair of the board?" I say.

"It makes me nervous, federal bureaucrats calling me on the phone."

"It's probably nothing. Maybe Lara forgot to turn in a form," I say, which I know would never happen, as Lara is an amazingly organized assistant, but I just want to assure H. M. that nothing is wrong. He has gotten sweaty and visibly anxious, though that may be the cocktails and whatever prescription anxiety drugs he is on this week. Still, he is my major benefactor, and such a relationship requires, above all, that I offer a pleasant smile and listen to everything he says, no matter how absurd it's getting.

"I just don't like people nosing around in my business," he says. "Especially not the federal government."

The stranger H. M.'s private sexual escapades get, the more paranoid he becomes.

"Well, I'll go back to the office, right now, and find out what is going on. We'll handle it."

"Just don't let them call me anymore. I don't want anything to do with them."

"H. M.," I say, "it's not a big deal."

"I have things—as you know—that would be very embarrassing, should, you know, they come out in the press. I trusted you with my secrets, Zeke!"

"They're safe with me, H. M. Besides, I've done my best to forget them, and anyway, I don't think they're interested in your personal decisions."

"What if they inquire into my travel activities?"

H. M. uses a GMHI credit card for many of his personal expenses, but he always reimburses the organization double. Lara and I know enough to turn the other way when the card has a questionable expense. jj's
FULL SERVICE,
for example, for three hundred dollars. Or
THE PINK ROOM
for four hundred fifty-six dollars. We know who pays our salary these days, and we quietly pay the bill so that H. M.'s wife, who handles the family finances, does not see it. And a few days later, a "donation" always arrives from H. M. for double the amount of his charges.

"Not to worry," I say, and I believe it.

It's—most likely—simply some bureaucratic quest for job-justifying information. Lara and I take such calls from the federal government at least once a week as of late. Well, mostly Lara takes them. Washington has become vigilant in all the wrong places: they chase errant nickels while billions of dollars are squandered by corporate greed and excess. I say something to this effect to H. M. and he just grunts and waves a dismissive hand at me.

I leave him sighing and staring out the window.

When I turn around, Minn is dealing with six men in suits, all of them ordering very involved beverages, and so I simply give her a brief wave and head back to the office. But en route I check my watch and discover how close it is to three in the afternoon. The girls are home from school, and I decide to head home too.

G
ENERATIONS FROM NOW,
I believe that historians will assess the first decade of the twenty-first century and declare that these years turned out to be a time of colossal bad luck and almost unbelievable failure. On a microscopic level, nowhere was this more evident than in the life of my own family, the Pappases of Madison, Wisconsin, though it's doubtful historians will remember us at all. Still, it is worth noting, as a rather inaccurate
Wisconsin State Journal
tear-jerking feature story by George Hessenfessen did during the previous holiday season, that in recent years, my family has endured a series of the most incredible and relentless heartaches imaginable.

While it'd be hard to say that we were a family who subsisted wholly on mirth and joy in the years before our tragedies, let us begin here: On September 12, 2001, my father died of a massive heart attack outside the Oscar Mayer plant where he worked, an untimely death, my mother insisted to George Hessenfessen, caused by his patriotic grief over the terrorist attacks that had occurred the day before. He had stayed up all night long, as so many of us did, watching the news, alternating between weeping and thirsting for blood. (And while it is poetic to think his heart stopped out of woe and rage and uninhibited sorrow, I blame his enlarged heart and a prediabetic condition, fueled by endless cigarettes and a diet that consisted, almost exclusively, of frozen pizzas, Funyuns, and chocolate ice cream, all of it usually consumed after ten in the evening.)

But fathers die, often from heart attacks and often in conjunction with national news events. This alone did not make my family's woe legendary. This was not the extent of my family's misfortune. It grew deeper: a little over two years after my father's death, my brother, Cougar, died while serving with his National Guard unit in the Iraq war, the victim of sniper fire near Fallujah; he had enlisted the day after my father's funeral, with my mother's blessing and against my advice. This is what I said: "Don't do it. You'll die."

I now regret my armchair prophecy.

Even so, soldiers do die, and while tragic to the nation and excruciating to the soldier's family, it is not wholly unexpected. No, what happened next, this, this is what catapulted our family's grief from the tragic to the epic: three months after my brother's death, his fiancée and the mother of his children, a beautiful but often unstable woman named Melody Leeds, drank just a tad too much wine at what was intended to be a spirit-lifting dinner party thrown by some old high school friends. Melody ended up hitting a patch of late March black ice and dying in a one-car accident on a rural road northwest of Madison. At the time, her home was in foreclosure and she was self-medicating, with limited success, her understandable depression.

Melody was a good, kind woman, a caring mother when she was sober but, if I may be blunt, an emotional wreck when she was not. My mother and I always played a somewhat stabilizing role in her life—often cleaning her house, cooking her meals, running errands for her, not to mention baby-sitting for her. My mother, in fact, seemed to have two full-time jobs—assistant manager at the east side Old Country Buffet, and nanny to her two young granddaughters.

After Melody's death, caring for Cougar and Melody's twin daughters, my nieces, two-year-old girls named April and May, fell to my mother, Violet, who excelled as a grandmother, but who was terrified at the prospect of being the sole means of support—financial, emotional, and spiritual—for such bright, energetic, and needy orphans. Although April and May—so named because the former had been born on April 30 at 11:58
P.M.
and the latter had arrived on May 1 at 12:01
A.M.
— received survivor's benefits from both the Social Security Administration and the military, my mother was quickly overwhelmed, on an emotional and financial level, by her charges. In particular, her new duties as a primary caregiver made her unable to continue to work the fifty or sixty hours a week she was used to working as a salaried employee at the Old Country Buffet. By necessity, she went down to an hourly wage, slashed her hours by nearly sixty percent, and was forced, by a rather crippling amount of debt left behind by Melody, to move in with me and become a part of my household. I am a generous man, and think very little of hoarding wealth, and was in fact quite happy to become the financial provider for this new and loving, if fragmented, family.

I suppose it could be said that my mother had had a harder time accepting my generosity than I had extending it. But she needed help, quickly. There was no time to explore options. She sold her house, paid off all the debts (hers and Melody's) that she could, and arrived along with a large moving truck from Smitty's Specialty Movers. It was not a joyful day for her, but she could see that the twins loved their Uncle Zeke, and ever since that move-in day, I have ended my evenings by telling three bedtime stories to the girls. My mother, often exhausted by the twins' eight o'clock bedtime, always seems to sigh with relief when I am home from work.

That is how, despite my mother's objections to the Kerry-Edwards sign that I'd posted on my lawn, my mother and two nieces moved in with me in the fall of 2004. We celebrated Christmas together that year in our shared living room, my once spacious and spare rooms of Ikea-esque clarity now cluttered with the happy detritus of life with children: toys, dolls, gift wrapping, and small discarded half-empty bags of dried fruit snacks. A fresh-cut Fraser fir looked remarkable all lit up and festive against the backdrop of oak built-in bookcases.

Shortly after my mother and the twins moved in, I went with my mother to see her pastor one afternoon, in the hope that she would see that I had a respect for her beliefs and that she would soon show the same respect for mine. In truth, I suppose I didn't have respect for her faith—she'd begged me to come along, despite my well-known unbelief—and her new pastor, Revered Ty Willis of the New Promise Church, which has usurped my mother's Catholic faith, encouraged us to read the book of Job. I'm not sure if my mother read it—to her, church, in her post-Catholic phase, was a bit of a social club more than anything—but I did, and I was less than comforted. The horror of the Lord engaging in high-stakes bets with Satan, and the absolute lack of comfort that Job's so-called friends bring to his grief, did change my view of God. The book made me feel as though God, if he existed, was sort of capable of being a major, reckless dick. Christians in the Midwest are fond of saying, "Everything happens for a reason." The book of Job illustrates, I think, that that's not the case at all.

I have never been a dutiful son, nor have I ever fit in particularly well with my family. As a boy, I spent long stretches of time alone, in a small basement room that I had cleaned out and furnished with garage sale items and called my "study." My father thought of me as a sort of freak. My brother, though younger than me, considered me to be a boy of great weaknesses and useless pursuits, a spineless, though kind and generous, sad sack. My mother took most of my actions personally, as a judgment of her parenting and moral character, especially when, graduating early at the age of seventeen, I turned down a scholarship to the University of Wisconsin, in my own backyard, and headed "out east" as my father liked to say, to the University of Michigan, which I did because I desperately wanted to do something that my family did not understand in a place they had never been.

Years later, lighting that Christmas tree for the first time with my mother and the twins, I felt as if I finally belonged to the Pappas clan, now severely decimated by tragedy. My mother looked at me, playing with my nieces, and I think she felt it too: I, her only remaining son, am not a bad man. And, I must admit, she is not a bad mother.

I told her that after the tree was lit, and the girls had fallen asleep underneath it. I brought her a cup of Constant Comment tea and poured myself a small tumbler of bourbon. And then I looked at my mother and said, "You're amazing. The girls are lucky to have you."