#ignorance of other people's worry may be an underdiscussed facet of narcissism

[apparitionism]

Appreciation 3

Considering the prompt “Culture/Holidays/Anniversaries/Special Occasions,” I first thought of how anniversaries are a keeping count, with the hope/expectation that the count will continue. That went nowhere, so I wondered: what makes a given day holy? How do we—why do we—sanctify? Still no luck. Then: what is a “special occasion”? Do we know it when we see it? Do we know it for what it is when we see it? Or do we perhaps resent it? That seemed a bit more productive.

The “story” for this day’s work (which follows day 1’s “Architecture” and day 2’s “Bridge,” in sequence at the very least) goes a little like this...

Worry

Adam Phillips, “Worrying and Its Discontents.” On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1993.

  [W]hat worries are used for—what kind of medium of exchange or currency they become in one’s relationship with other people and oneself—may be as revealing as what prompts them. (The question may not be “What are you worried about?” but “Whom is this worry for?”).... It is, of course, easy to forget that worries are imaginative creations, small epics of personal failure and anticipated catastrophe. They are, that is to say, made up.

  [....]Worrying implies a future, a way of looking forward to things. It is a conscious conviction that a future exists, one in which something terrible might happen, which is of course ultimately true. So worrying is an ironic form of hope.

****

“I have to go home,” Myka says, and Helena hears worry. Just a quaver.

“Has something happened?” she asks, but obviously something has, or Myka would never have said “have to.”

“Sort of,” Myka says.

Helena braces herself.

“My dad’s getting an award.”

Well. Not what Helena would have predicted, certainly, given Myka’s tone, but then again Myka does from time to time imply, and even perceive, catastrophes where none exist. A bit ironic, that, given how often she suggests that Helena tends to escalate unnecessarily.

She waits for Myka to continue, but no additional words are forthcoming. To bridge the silence, she says, “That’s... good news?”

“I never had any idea he was doing what they’re giving it to him for.”

That doesn’t seem fully responsive to Helena’s question—or is it? Keeping her voice neutral, Helena asks another: “Which is?”

“Giving books to kids. Books. To kids. Not kids kids, but older kids, and not just any books—textbooks, things they say they want to study—sciences, literature, public health, architecture, stats, archaeology, everything. I can’t believe it. Can you believe it?”

Helena knows her own belief is in no way the issue. She stays silent, and Myka continues, “So now I have to go and say ‘sorry I never knew you were doing this amazing thing.’”

Silence again, now from Myka. Helena waits, waits... then waits more, but because silence should not last forever, as she is sensing this might, she breaks it with, “How did you learn about this award?”

A break it was, for it looses a flood: “My mom called and told me. Then I went and read the press release. Because there was a press release! And then I did a whole search, and I found all these articles in the paper about this—about him doing this—for years, and it was just local to start, but then he was able to scale it up statewide, so I guess I have to say those ‘sorry I never knew’ words, not to mention, ‘sorry I assumed you weren’t capable of this kind of thing.’”

Myka doesn’t tend to pace, but she has paced throughout this overflow, walking the length of the bedroom, door to night table and back again. Helena, who has been sitting on the bed, is loath to interrupt the physicality of her thought.

As Myka reaches the door for what may be the fifth time (Helena hasn’t kept count, so unnerved was she by the pacing in the first place), she seems taken aback to find herself there, or to be faced with its implacable physicality. “No, that’s wrong, about the sorry,” she tells it. “It’s ‘sorry I never even thought about you as someone who would do this kind of thing.’” She lays her hands on the surface, perhaps in thanks for the insight, then comes to the bed and sits next to Helena. She breathes out—Helena knows that exhale for irritability—and says, “I just figured out how not to resent him so much. But now I have to appreciate him.”

“You don’t have to do anything,” Helena says. That may not be what Myka needs to hear, but Helena expects—well, hopes—that Myka’s response to her having said it will make something clear.

“What about your father?” Myka demands.

So much for clarity. “What about him?” Helena asks. This truly can have nothing to do with her own father; she is sure of that. One then-now dissimilarity Helena has been completely unable to impress upon Myka is the difference between children’s understandings—expectations—of their parents. She won’t try again now, however. “I can say he never provided books to the academically ambitious. As far as I know.”

“Ha! See? All we know for sure is that Colorado Springs never gave him the Spirit of the Springs Award.”

“I doubt Bromley has—rather, had—such an award.”

“Are you sure, though? Because you might have to do this weirdo reassessment too.” She’s trying to equate, or at least to identify cognates... but where none exist. “You might have to do it now. Let me google your dad, and we’ll see what he—”

“Myka.” Helena has googled her father. All her family members. “If I might reorient you.”

“To what?” She actually has her telephone in her hand.

“Appreciating one aspect doesn’t mean appreciating everything. I myself am evidence of that. Haven’t I done some things worthy of appreciation?”

“Of course you have.”

That’s Myka’s “reassuring” tone, and while Helena would like to sink into its warmth, here she raises a hand to move it away, saying, “But by no means everything, correct?”

“But extenuating circumstances,” Myka says, yet with a sickly cast; she’s of course discerned where this argument is going.

Helena nods. “I’d like to imagine so,” she says, and follows it with what she knows Myka doesn’t want to hear. “Your father might claim the same.”

That earns her a peevish, “Why are you defending him?”

“I’m defending myself. If you take your critical stance to its logical end, I suffer as well.”

Myka sighs overdramatically. “Don’t make me do this.”

While Helena doesn’t want to be didactic (well, some of the time), she feels she has to say, “I’m not making you do anything. What I’m making is a selfish argument about the ethics of praise and blame.”

“Okay, supergenius,” Myka says, and her use of one of Pete’s preferred sobriquets makes her continued agitation extremely clear. “You did make the argument. You made it so well that you have to come with me. Don’t argue. It’s a rule.”

Helena had expected Myka to follow that with a softening smile, but none seems to be forthcoming, so she tries to inject some lightness into the scenario. “This seems a rule of quite recent invention. And limited applicability.”

“Do you want to fight me on this?” Myka asks, with no lightness at all.

Helena tells the truth: “Not at all. I want to observe how you deal with this.”

“Sociology,” Myka groans. “Great.”

It is sociology, and it has to do with a difference Helena has difficulty grasping fully: Myka is always anxious of going home (or “home,” for that word stands in for “my parents’ house in Colorado Springs,” a linguistic shorthand that Helena initially and mistakenly found offensive) because, as she had put it when Helena pushed her for an explanation, “I don’t like who I am there.” Helena can’t deny her interest in this strange, modern slippage (strange because modern? or strange and modern?) between child-self and adult-self... or perhaps it’s world-self and home-self. In any case, yes: sociology.

Myka says, “I know you like to watch me lose it.” It’s not quite an accusation, more an acknowledgement, a this-is-what-I-let-myself-in-for acquiescence.

“Not true,” Helena says, but she has to concede, “however, I’m fascinated by the circumstances under which you do.”

“I really need to keep it under control for this. Can I?”

Because Myka does in fact sometimes “lose it,” Helena says, in the interest of accuracy, “I have no idea. “

“Come on, don’t be like that... have an idea! Be that supergenius! Help me do it!”

Helena takes her seriously. She tries, “You might recognize that children received help. And the effect on them is most likely objectively good, regardless of the effect on you.”

It doesn’t rise to a level supportive of “supergenius,” Helena is reasonably certain... but it does give Myka pause.

After thinking, Myka says, “I was the kind of kid he would’ve given those books to.”

“As I understand it, he did give you books. Perhaps little else you found to be of value, but books, he did give you.”

“Are you defending him again?”

“I’m stating what I understand to be a fact. I believe this entire situation will be enhanced by attention to facts.”

“And not feelings?” They have had numerous facts-versus-feelings debates. Some have occurred out loud, in explicit terms... but some have been subterranean, glints off the vast waters of uncertainty that lurk between and below them.

They have yet to address so much... but for now, Helena says, “Feelings? Not if you intend to go home and take me with you. Feelings won’t help with that.”

Myka shakes her head. “That doesn’t make any sense, because I’m pretty sure feelings help me intend to take you with me. Because if not for feelings I wouldn’t intend to take you with me. I’d just go and do this thing, which I know I have to do, without you.” That sounds like everyday, resolute Myka. Then she softens. “But I’m glad—and grateful—that I don’t have to do it without you.”

She kisses Helena, as if a seal on the confession.

Not that Helena wouldn’t have known both her gladness and her gratitude to be true—but that Myka has spoken it aloud is new. And she’s done so seemingly without any of the resistance that, Helena has inferred, has adhered to Myka’s earlier, implicit acknowledgements that rigorous self-sufficiency might perhaps have its drawbacks, and consolation its... consolations.

Her inferences may be right; they may be wrong. But she is glad—and grateful--to be the person, now, whom Myka admits, via spoken invitation, to her concerns. To her catastrophes.

END

Note:

In these seven days of appreciation, I’m playing, extremely loosely, on sestina construction. I’m not writing a sestina stanza to go along with each part of the prose, but pieces of possibility are floating around in my head, so here’s what might be today’s stanza of that dream-poem (though any bit of poetry—or “poetry”—I purport to write is never anything more than a pastiche of an admired other):

“I have to go home,” she says, speaking worry and fear of the here-to-there bridge, as imagined catastrophes gnash at her voice. The family gathers as weighty architecture, each wing freighting mass on the scale, time-grown heaviness stressing the house.