Playing House (26 page)

Good Luck, they say, likes to visit in threes, or derivatives thereof. I’d say this is true. The discovery of my sanity round about the age of thirty set in motion triptych after triptych of success. Previously a mental patient in a johnny, I became, in a matter of a few years, a productive author, a professor, married, a mother. Money came clattering down, as if I’d stumbled across some rigged slot machine in the sky. These were my years of butter, babies, and books. All my gardens grew. I tried to ignore the fact that Good Luck’s gifts likely came with some serious strings attached.

I won an NEA grant and a Knight Science Journalism fellowship, the prize money totaling sixty thousand dollars. Were these rewards deserved or merely bestowed? Of one thing I felt sure:
real
luck has to be earned. You can’t simply swallow it like your pills. I pictured a massive collapse, the end of my own personal Ponzi scheme. I celebrated my every milestone with one eye on the second hand of the clock. It never ceased. Time kept moving in joyful circles, like a dog too dumb to know that death is always near.

Despite my great good luck I had many nagging questions, and these many nagging questions about what I deserved led me to actions that some might call “pushing my luck,” actions that, I guess, made me the cause rather than the victim of a crash. Pre-Prozac, I dreamt of being a writer and worked hard at a craft I could never claim to have mastered with any confidence, despite my efforts. Post-Prozac, my literary posture improved. Slumped words found their backbones, stood straight, and took to tap dancing. My stories stumbled upon voice, pacing, rhythm, and thus stopped stumbling. I discovered in myself a willingness to be honest. I flaunted that honesty, my raw body, the raw form of my work, and while this was partly in response to my writer’s mandate, it was, in equal or unequal parts, a way of testing the limits, only so I could know them, only so I could avoid—or
choose—
a free fall over that sky-high cliff, thereby bringing my stellar career to an abrupt and nearly coveted close, for I did not deserve these prizes and publications and offers of Australia, and worse, it was corrupting me, the urge to write now all mixed up with the urge to win. I was lost, and found, and lost. I was like a blind man, cane tapping his tentative path, or a geologist, eyes closed, running hands over rock, palms sensing the scripted fault lines:
Delve here. No, there
.

As an artistic strategy, my pushing the limits of raw, unfiltered honesty failed. It never got me where I needed to go. It earned me a reputation, I suppose, as a
controversial writer
. It earned me faithful fans in equal proportion to determined detractors. But it did not, this pushing, describe or delineate the edges of my professional bounty so that I might better come to control it. Thus I wrote still harder, faster, riskier, only to find my confusion increasing in proportion to the amount of attention I received, and the more attention I received and the more money I made, the more sure I was that Good Luck would be leaving me soon, and how much the better if I left her before she left me.

No, I don’t know his horse’s name. Or what sort of underwear he wears. All I can say for sure is that he claimed me like a cowboy, with a whoop and a holler as he lashed out his lasso and snagged my ankle, bringing me down into the dust, me yowling like a calf, and then a cow, and then a woman who has dropped her dignity down the disposal and cannot get it in her grip.

Let’s just say, for the sake of story, that the first appearance came three years ago, when Bad Luck was delivered through the mail slot carved in the wooden hunk of our heavy antique door. I distinctly remember this event, how the man-myth and his horse came flying through the letter slot, miniaturized and disguised as lawsuit numero uno.

As with much—but not all—of what followed, I did not do anything, or much (and “Ay, there’s the rub,” as Hamlet said, feeling for his responsibility), to justify this first lawsuit. And yet, I would also say I did not do much—if anything—to justify the second lawsuit. And then again, I would also say I did not do much—if anything—to justify the third lawsuit. You see how this sounds? Suspicious, eh? When enough Lemony Snicket sorts of events start to pile up at one’s purportedly innocent feet, one would be a fool not to wonder if, or rather
where
(and then again
if
), personal agency enters the picture. Thus we come to the core of my question: Precisely how am I haunted? Back and forth I go, ping-pong turned existential and absurd.
I did it. It did it. I did it. It did it
. To rephrase the question: To what degree, if at all, am I the reason for both my comedy and my tragedy, my riches and my rags?

First, the first lawsuit, which caused the deeply dented coffers. Then, my best friend one day and entirely out of the blue stopped speaking to me, writing in an e-mail, “Stay away from me and I will stay away from you.” As if I were diseased, and, who knew, perhaps I was. I began to feel tilted, unwell. I had a huge fight with my literary agent of twenty productive years and left her, or she left me; it matters not. The point: a great gulf came. My favorite aunt, my mother’s middle sister, as sweet as my mother was not, died in an automobile accident, driving down the highway without her seatbelt, hitting the car in front, my aunt flying through the windshield, an angel going through glass. My luck turned, and I began my mourning. After my aunt died, our hot-water heater burst and flooded out the basement, destroying all my notebooks, all my earliest attempts at writing, the tiny diary I kept at the age of six, with its little gold lock and minuscule key, warped beyond recognition, this one of my last links to my old home, the one I’d left for a foster family, never to return, left just like Good Luck left me and Bad Luck appeared, pronto, in her place.

And then I was sued a second time, for something equally as ridiculous as the first lawsuit, but the thing about lawsuits is this: you can’t just walk away. You have to play the game, get a lawyer; the whole shebang cost me over one hundred thousand dollars, so we went from being well-off to being unwell and also off, but off of what? Off a ledge, an edge, a place of quiet comfort.

And then one day, soon after the second lawsuit had begun, our lawn got a weird disease and then died, and from the dead thatches of sod grew odd purplish plants I’d never seen before. They all had stout scaly stems and broad waxy leaves, and they stormed the yard, multiplying like the rabbits they most certainly were not, daily gaining ground and girth.

Soon after the odd botanical appearance, we began to find small mammals in the once-was grass, their corpses already stiffened, their bodies curled in the corners or simply splayed straight out, flies feasting. At first, we had no idea what might cause such a spree of death nor did I fully comprehend that Good Luck had left for good, so I was slow to take things seriously. My husband and I tried not to giggle through the hedgehog funeral, presided over by the high priest of my daughter and her servant, my four-year-old son, who solemnly covered the cardboard box and placed it in the grave my husband had dug, clearing a patch of the odd plant with a sharp spade.

The morning after the funeral I went outside and tugged on one plant, surprised at how freely its forked roots gave up the ground, dangling their long slippery strings. “Deadly nightshade,” the man at the garden center claimed, looking at the limp victim I held out between thumb and forefinger. He snapped on a latex glove and gingerly took the weed from me.
A latex glove?
“It’s everywhere in our yard,” I said, and I felt something soft in my throat, something, well, gushy.

“I’ve heard of occasional infestations before,” he said. “It’s a bitch to get rid of, and you gotta be careful.” He placed the plant’s corpse on the counter. “This plant,” he said, “this plant is one of the most deadly weeds on the East Coast. One bite of its berries and a child’s heart stops in a second. I’d keep my kids out of the yard.”

Berries?

In August, he told me. The plant becomes a twining vine that unpacks its petals, a fragile purple flower, the seed head stocked with millions of its descendants all dueling to duplicate. At some point mid-month the seed head bursts into birth, the flower furls and falls, and in its place, at summer’s end, grow clusters of berries. The horticulturist showed me a botanical drawing of our opponent. In the drawing the flower was long gone, the berries painted a rich red, dangling on the slender stem like a lumpy scarlet scrotum. According to the horticulturist, the berries are surprisingly sweet to the taste, attractive to all manner of life forms who know no better: raccoons, skunks, hedgehogs, minors.

It was well into summer, then, and my corner of the globe was wilted in warmth. The sidewalks sizzled. The flowers along the fences had long since fainted, their faces hanging sideways. Only the nightshade thronged. We had resigned ourselves to the necessity of chemical intervention lest the hedgehog lead to a swan lead to a prince or princess.

I spent a few hundred bucks on contractor-grade herbicide, thigh-high rubber boots, huge plastic goggles, pale-blue gloves. Sweating from every gland, I tromped around our yard, pumping the valve, poison arcing from the plastic spout and splashing with a small sound onto the thriving green leaves. The next morning, the nightshade looked, well, unsettled, as though, perhaps, every stalk was being sued. By evening, the purple flowers had rolled up and dropped off. Within a week, the stalks were dead and brown, their previously plump vines stringy, the plants arced and twisted in what seemed expressions of agony. Our yard still looked infested, but not with nightshade anymore. It looked infested with death. And not a single scream.

I can’t possibly tell all the terrible things that happened to me. By now I’d been through two of the three lawsuits that came my way, an infestation, the toaster caught on fire. We went in search of sunshine, to Florida, and all our luggage got lost and was never found, so to this day our brown bags are somewhere circling and circling the globe. I started fighting with my spouse; this was—what—2006? And then 2007 came in a gust of mild garbagey-smelling January wind, the winter melt laced with brown, sloppy dog turds on every city sidewalk. The paths around our more rural home smelled as though they’d been made from septic sludge. I felt my words wobble when I wrote. Periods turned into question marks, which marched off the page and stood sentry in my head.
Was this word right was that word right was this word right?
It finally became clear to me that, at some point I could not quite determine, Good Luck had definitely—and with finality—departed, on to bigger and better pastures. Previously a veritable font of authorial productivity, I felt my spouts close. The blank page is, in fact, far from blank. Stare long enough into its creamy smother and you feel yourself start to gasp.

Less, I’m sure, is more in situations of negative abundance. Thus I’ll try to do this quickly. Our house began to rot. Or maybe it was always rotting, and I began to realize it. During an unseasonal rainstorm, a chunk of our foundation came loose, and when the wet weather passed we found the chunk on our neighbor’s lawn. Slates slid from our previously sturdy roof. Water dribbled down our walls, the color of rust sometimes, and then sometimes the color of soot. I’d always loved our house; we’d been living in it, a small saltbox with a single stained-glass window in its narrow hall, for over three years now, a house set on acres and acres of pasture and forest, the trees so tall and old a man’s huge arms could not circle their massive majestic trunks.

Good Luck and Bad Luck have similar plot lines. They start slowly, gather motion, roll, then rise to a crescendo, and, following the basic laws of physics (Remember this from seventh grade?
An object in motion remains in motion unless
. . .), stop only when acted upon by an outside force.

Thus my panic, for what would the outside force be if not Bad Luck’s sole equal and opposite—Good Luck—with her honey hair and high heels, long gone from me now, involved with her new clients.

Humanoids emerged on this earth two million years ago, and since that time there have been on the order of a quarter-million regal philosophers who thought through issues as diverse as time and grief, evil and isolation, the blessed and the cursed, the whys and wherefores. The great playwright Sophocles dandled luck in his lap and wove it into every act, and still, in the end, he could not name its ingredients or its origins. If the most noble philosophers pondering the issue for, say, the last twelve thousand years have not been able to unpack luck, why on earth, so long as I’m on Earth, would I? Sometimes giving up is a form of grace.

My cognitive revolution occurred in—so appropriate—the sweet rainy spring of 2009, when the clouds emptied themselves of their water weight and emerged, come June, as lean, clean lines of white and the palest of pinks. The rain-drenched earth yielded up its goods in excess, so ripe strawberries, as nubby as tongues between large green leaves, emerged everywhere in our garden, the weeds washed away, the loam beneath as black as melted chocolate, the fiery-yellow flowers standing in stark and gorgeous contrast to the ground. In June, the flowers bobbed and nodded when the breeze blew, as if agreeing with me. Yes. Call it quits. Enough wondering why. Or when. Or if. Enough examination.

And yet, what does one
do
after quitting? I’d been struggling for so long, puzzle piecing for so long, meditating for so long on my fortune and its reversal, trying for so long to woo my ex–best friend back to me and to repair what was beyond repair with my literary agent, working and working, chewing and chewing: how to give all that up and simply sit? I have never liked meditation. The mandate to breathe always makes me feel like I am choking. The practices of Buddhism are not my strong suit.

“Let’s build a pond,” I said to my husband that summer, and he, perhaps sensing that I needed a project other than myself, agreed, and so we took up our shovels, together for the first time in a long time. In the abandoned, weed-eaten field behind our rural home, a field the prior owner scraped of its top soil to sell for a fat fee, we excavated the hard earth, hurling sharp spades into its stone-studded skin, splitting it sideways, subsoil yielding up the glossiest, wriggliest worms, and those stones, everywhere, flat and round, veined and mottled, but all, every one, mysteriously smooth, as if they’d been pounded for millennia by the sea. “Perhaps they have,” my husband said, holding in his palm a gorgeous purple globe, a red arterial scrawl just visible beneath its opaque, violet skin. “After all, this was once the ocean,” he said, gesturing with his hand to the land all around us, the tall grass in the healthy far fields rippling like the hide of some huge beast; picture that. We were once covered. It comforted me, for a reason I can’t say. You find your blankets; ultimately, you do. I pulled the sea around me, a salty shawl.