The boy is just plain buoyant. Hardwired for lightness. Ollie would probably have some impenetrable scientific explanation for this, but even I can tell you that if she stuck Toby’s DNA under some ultra-whizbang, crazy-high-powered microscope (and if such microscopes exist, you can bet Ollie’s got one), she’d find the genetic equivalent of “Life’s a Beach” or maybe “Life’s an Awesome Mountain to Slide Down” stamped on every last gene. And even I can see that being Toby brings with it some distinct evolutionary advantages. Men like my little brother don’t brood or introspect or even sit still much. If they ever do hit rock bottom, it’s only to bounce off it and head skyward.
But if Toby’s guardian angel ever did have cause to swoop down and show him what life would be like if he’d never been born, there’s a huge chance that they would find his sister Cornelia in a sorry state. I’ve imagined various possible incarnations of this state, visualized the dreary particulars of each possibility, and all of them are far too dreary to regale you with. But trust me when I say that each imagined incarnation was truly, deeply, and stunningly sorry.
Toby is my litmus test. He was probably my litmus test for a very long time, but it wasn’t until one miserable evening at the end of my first and last semester of graduate school that I was fully, blessedly conscious of this. In fact, if I have anything to say about it (and really, who else would?) the Toby Brown version of It’s a Wonderful Life would prominently feature a flashback to that very evening.
I was there—on a hilltop surrounded by the plunging gorges, streams, and maple trees of central New York State—to get a Ph.D. in English literature. That’s not true. I was there to read a lot of books and to discuss them with bright, insightful, book-loving people, an expectation that I pretty quickly learned was about as silly as it could be.
Certainly there were other people there who loved books, I’m sure there were, but whoever had notified them ahead of time that loving books was not the point, was, in fact, a hopelessly counterproductive and naive approach to the study of literature, neglected to notify me. It turned out that the point was to dissect a book like a fetal pig in biology class or to break its back with a single sentence or to bust it open like a milkweed pod and say, “See? All along it was only fluff,” and then scatter it into oblivion with one tiny breath.
I’m getting worked up and metaphorical on you. I know I am. But it was a rough time. Nowadays, I want to be smart, but back then, I’m afraid I wanted to seem smart, too. I wanted to make a smart impression, so I’d do what everyone else did, no matter how wrong it felt. But one afternoon, after a British literature seminar, I sat alone in the room staring down at my copy of Howard’s End, feeling like I’d just stripped the clothes off my grandmother and sent her out wandering in the snow.
After that I stopped talking in class and started dating Jay West, the undisputed star of the program. I dated him because he was the undisputed star of the program, a fact of which I am properly ashamed, and he dated me for reasons that still remain cloudy, although I suspect they had something to do with my resemblance (which existed only in his imagination but which he related in breathy tones to me on more than one occasion) to the actress Winona Ryder.
He wasn’t unattractive. He was handsome in a gaunt, beaky, dark-browed, mop-topped way. In fact, now that I think about it, Jay had precisely the kind of looks that would play beautifully in a black-and-white film.
Imagine the scene. Early December, final exams and papers only just laid to rest. The interior of a noisy, cozy pub with long wooden tables and a stone fireplace; firelight dancing inside wineglasses and throwing shadows around the room. Six graduate students around a table, one particularly slumped, taciturn, and anemic looking (me), and my brother Toby, newly nineteen, fresh out of his first semester of college in Colorado, in town to do some hiking and then drive his nondriving sister (I know how; I just don’t like to) home for Christmas break. And, of course, in the center of everything: Jay, talking, expounding on Sylvia Plath and psychopharmacology with the part-genius-prophet, part-Nosferatu fire in his eyes that always accompanied his expounding and that sent English Department women (minus his girlfriend) and some men into varying states of swoon.
“Fuck Prozac. Fuck lithium. Fuck Haldol and clozapine and TCAs and MAOIs. Fuck selective fucking serotonin fucking reuptake inhibitors. Thank God Plath was born when she was. If she were around today, we’d pump her full of all manner of shit to keep her ‘happy’ and ‘functional.’ For what? So her kids would grow up with a mommy? That wouldn’t be medicine. It would be barbarism. Because we need Ariel, and only a frenzied poet on the brink of suicide could write Ariel. We need Plath’s suicide. We need her to stick her head in the oven while her kids sleep upstairs. We need Ariel. We deserve Ariel more than those kids, more than any kid ever deserved a mother.”
I’m not kidding. This is how he talked. Like he was auditioning for the role of Moses in some cheesy, profanity-laced remake of The Ten Commandments. Like no one in the whole history of the world had ever considered the positive impact of mental illness on creativity.
“You don’t even like Ariel.” I said this. Why I bothered, I have no idea.
“What?”
“You called it thin. And obvious.”
Jay looked as if he’d just found gum on his shoe. Fresh gum.
“I don’t have to like Ariel. Liking is irrelevant. What’s relevant is the splash and the outward rippling concentric circles of water. Ariel may be thin, by my standards. It may be obvious. But it made a splash. I don’t like the New Testament particularly. I’m not a believer. But I happen to find it tragic that if Jesus Christ were alive today in the United States of America, he’d end up with a pretty wife, 2.5 kids, and a split-level home in the burbs. He’d be a shoe salesman because we, in all our barbarism, would have tamed him with anti-psychotics and lithium and who the fuck knows what else.”
Silence. Then my brother Toby said, “Yeah. But probably we wouldn’t have, like, crucified him.” He grinned and took a big slug of beer.
Jay didn’t laugh good-naturedly. No one did. He didn’t even look at Toby. Instead he looked at me, ruefully, shook his head, and said, “My poor girl.”
I didn’t stop to analyze this inscrutable comment, because first, I was smiling. Then I was laughing, not because Jay was a pompous, ridiculous idiot, not even because what Toby said was really quite funny (quite insightful, too), but out of pure joy. Because right at that moment, I knew I would leave. It would be hard. I wouldn’t do it right away. I would come back from break and tough it out for two more pointless weeks. But there in the bar, I understood with absolute clarity that someday soon I would pack my bags, give up my fellowship, and head for home.
If Toby hadn’t come along, I might have stayed. I had always been an excellent student. In all my life, I had never quit anything nearly as important as graduate school, and when I quit, I fell into a pit—a fairly shallow pit, but a pit nonetheless—of self-recrimination and embarrassment. But eventually, I climbed out and walked away with my soul intact and with a secret weapon in my arsenal, my litmus test: Toby could be—and usually was—exasperating and boneheaded, but he was also exuberant and bighearted, and anyone who could not like him was gone, gone, gone.
Toby was in love.
He sat with his feet and a sweating glass of Gatorade on my new coffee table and described it to me thus: “I was just going along, minding my own business, and the girl blindsided me. A total body slam. I was like, ‘Dude, you’ve gotta be kidding me!’”
Lest that flight of rhapsody cause you to pigeonhole Toby a hopeless romantic, let me assure you that while he was—and is—certainly hopeless in numberless ways, he had never been, not in all of his twenty-nine years, in love. Not even a little. Not even in high school, if he could be believed, and I’m pretty sure he could.
He’d always dated a lot. A lot-a lot. I have no hard numbers, but my mother’s theory is that when it comes to counting Toby’s girlfriends, it’s best to ap
ply the same method scientists use in estimating populations of okapis or pygmy marmosets or whales: for every one you meet, assume there are three hiding somewhere nearby. (Actually, my mother may be wrong about scientists using this method. It sounds sort of unscientific, but it also sounds sort of right, doesn’t it?) And I’ve met plenty. While there have been a wide variety of types—preppy, crunchy, outdoorsy, athletic, even, occasionally, tattooed and pierced (although not excessively, nothing they couldn’t cover up for a visit from Grandma)—there’s also been a certain uniformity: all were sweet and upbeat, all worshipped the Dave Matthews Band, all were what Toby describes—with profound admiration—as “fun girls.”
Until Miranda.
“Miranda’s a lot like you,” said Toby, throwing a throw pillow at me for emphasis, “except taller. And younger.” He grinned. “And, you know, curvier.”
“I do not know,” I said coolly, slipping a coaster underneath the glass of Gatorade. “And I’m fun.”
“You are,” agreed Toby, nodding, “you’re fairly fun. Fun’s just not the point of you.”
As I considered the implications of this, Toby began, “I like to be around Miranda—”
“You love to be around Miranda,” I corrected, gloating.
“Watch it, corndog,” he warned. “But yeah. I love to be around Miranda, it’s fun to be around Miranda, but not because she’s fun. Just because she’s…”
“Miranda?” I suggested.
“She’s smart. She’s—what’s the word—contemplative. She has these great, chocolate brown, serious eyes, and you can just tell that she’s, like, studying the world, not just cruising around it like a, a…”
“Dune buggy?”
Toby has Windex blue eyes. He rolled them at me now.
“You can take the girl out of Barbie’s Bungalow Beach House but you can’t take Barbie’s Bungalow Beach House out of the girl,” he said, which didn’t quite make sense, but was clever all the same. Fairly clever.
“You were two when I stopped playing with Barbies,” I said. “They must have made quite an impression.”
He ignored this. “And she reads everything. And has excellent taste in, like, everything. Wine, movies, clothes.”
“You’re right,” I said, seriously, “she is a lot like me.”
“Yeah, she even loves those flowers you love. Your favorite. Those big fluffy ones.”
“Miranda loves peonies?” I was touched that my little brother remembered my favorite flower, even if he didn’t, quite. He remembered I have a favorite flower. Truth be told, I was touched by the whole conversation. I got up from my chair and walked around the new coffee table in order to kiss Toby on the cheek.
“Peonies. Yeah.” He laughed and pretended to wipe off my kiss. I settled myself down on the sofa next to him.
“Tell me more,” I told him.
So he did. He told me that her name was Miranda Bloom, no middle name. He told me she was Jewish. He told me that she had an older brother named Philip who played the oboe for the Boston Symphony. He told me that she would turn twenty-three the day after Christmas, although he was quick to add that she didn’t celebrate Christmas, which was not terribly surprising to me. He told me that she was studying to be an occupational therapist. He told me that she had grown up in Detroit and, of her own volition, had practiced vegetarianism from the age of six to the age of seventeen and had double-majored in psychology and art history and wore scarves and kept her shoes in the boxes they came in and laughed her brains out at Looney Tunes and looked amazing in a sweater and loved French and Vietnamese food, stinky cheese, chocolate cupcakes, Sancerre, all sushi with the exception of sea urchin, and Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk straight out of the can.
“And you,” I added, “she loves you.”
Toby gave me the faux-suave look he’d been using since he was eleven years old, pretended to twirl his mustachio, and said in horrifyingly accented French, “Mais oui, ma soeur foufou! Naturellement!” But I’d seen something skitter across his face right before he said it. Anxiety maybe. Or self-doubt. Either of which would have alarmed me because neither had ever, to my knowledge, skittered across his face before. Somewhere in all this love I’d been hearing about there was a hitch.
“So you and Miranda have been together for how long?”
“For the best seven months of the girl’s life.”
“Seven months,” I said, in what I’m positive was a neutral tone, although I admit that the neutral tone may have been somewhat undermined by my adding, “And you’re moving in.”
“Whoa, sister,” said Toby, pulling in invisible reins. “Aren’t you the girl who took, like, thirty years to figure out you were in love with a guy who’s obviously (a) the greatest and (b) the best-looking human being in the entire history of the world? The girl who didn’t even think he was attractive for thirty years? And then married him, like, two days later?”
“Twenty-seven years,” I corrected. “And four months later. And, yes, I am that girl.”
It was true. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve known Mateo Sandoval since I was four years old. I’ve loved Mateo Sandoval since I was four years old, but until my relatively recent headlong, irrevocable, and utterly unforeseen plunge into being in love with him, I had spent years and years nearly oblivious to his charms. I say nearly oblivious because I knew like I knew my own name that he was kind and funny and smart, and I suppose I knew he was handsome—I have eyes, after all—but while these facts existed in my consciousness, they never weaseled their way into my unconscious or under my skin or into my soul or wherever those kinds of facts weasel in order to make your heart race and your breath shorten. Before he became my sun, moon, and stars, Teo was just Teo.
“Your point being?” I asked.
“Maybe you’re not such an expert on timing? Maybe your own sense of timing is a little—what’s the word?”
“Off?”
“Askew.” Toby was teasing me, but I could still see faint footprints of the skittery doubt and worry all over his grinning face, so it didn’t surprise me when he dropped the teasing voice and the grin and said, dolefully, “Anyway.”
“Anyway what?”
He took a breath, gearing up, but then let it out and shrugged. “Anyway, seven months is a loooooong time. Could be a record.”
I looked him in the eye for a few seconds, then said, “That wasn’t what you were going to say. Was it?”
Toby looked back at me. “Nope.”
After a gulp of Gatorade, Toby leaned his curly-haired head to one side, then the other, as though whatever he had to impart required a thoroughly limber neck. He turned to me with a toothy, half-rueful, half-mischievous smile. “She doesn’t exactly know I’m coming.”
The hitch. Not a small hitch either, in my opinion, although you wouldn’t have known it to look at Toby. He laughed.
“Relax, Cornelia. It’s not a big deal.” He rolled his eyes. “You know how women are.”
“No. How are they?”
“When Miranda left for graduate school, she came down with a mild case of ‘I love you, buts.’ It happens.”
I stared at Toby in confusion for several seconds, then said, “Miranda’s pet name for you is Butts?”
Toby is prone to immoderate, explosive laughs. I was only thankful that the question hadn’t hit him midsip or my sofa would have suffered under a deluge of antifreeze-colored sports drink.
“Butts!” spluttered Toby, his face purpling. “Butts! Now that would explain a lot, wouldn’t it?”
He kept laughing. I sighed and looked at my watch.
When the guffawing petered out at last, Toby explained. “‘I love you, but I’m only twenty-two.’ ‘I love you, but I need some space.’ ‘I love you, but I’m not sure I can see a future with you.’ ‘I love you, but I need to forage a life for myself first.’ Like that.”
“Forge,” I said, distractedly. If Miranda was saying she wasn’t sure she could see a future with Toby, it didn’t sound like
she had a mild case of anything. In fact, all those “I love you, buts” seemed to add up to one very large “I don’t love you enough.”
“Sic,” said Toby.
“What?”
“You know, ‘forage [sic].’” He made brackets with his hands. “As in she didn’t really say that. My mistake.”
Part of my brain marveled at the fact that Toby had a working knowledge of “[sic],” but most of it was too busy worrying about his impending heartbreak to notice.
“Butts,” he chuckled, softly, shaking his head in wonder.
I sighed. Miranda Bloom was about to blindside and body-slam this sweet blue-eyed boy again, so hard his teeth would rattle, and he had no idea.
“Toby,” I began, carefully. Then a thought hit me. “Toby, there’s an SUV chockful of your personal belongings sitting in my driveway. You were just planning to show up at her new apartment tonight with all of your…crap?”
Toby winced, ducked his head, then swiveled his eyes up at me with a look I’d seen him use before, a winsome hybrid of sheepish and beseeching. Unlike the rest of the kids in our family, who learned early on how to verbalize our myriad desires (legend has it that my first full sentence was this request for buttered toast: “I want a grilled cheese sandwich with no cheese,” which various family members flaunt as early and damning evidence of my roundabout linguistic style), Toby spoke not more than two intelligible words until he was all of two and a half. Instead, he developed a full-bodied, wordless eloquence, and toddled around emoting like a tiny male Mary Pickford, a talent that remained even after the onset of speech.