A tall, thin elderly woman in a loose chambray dress and green gardening clogs walked by. Leaning on a cane, with a book tucked under her free arm, she navigated carefully across the grass, her eyes on the ground, and then just as she got to where we sat, she raised her head—her white hair starry as dandelion fluff in the morning sun—and smiled at me.
“Courage, dear heart,” she said in a ringing, surprisingly young-sounding voice, then dropped her eyes, and walked on. We all watched her go, patient step after patient step.
“Thank you!” I called out to her. She paused, shifted her book to her other arm, and raised her fist in solidarity.
Once she’d disappeared, my mother and Cornelia stared at me, questioningly.
“The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” I said.
“What?” said my mother.
“Oh!” said Cornelia. “Aslan!”
“When he comes to Lucy in the form of an albatross,” I said. “‘Courage, dear heart’ is what he tells her.”
“Good grief, how you loved those books,” said my mother.
The gardening clog woman’s voice came back to me, silver as a tossed coin: Courage, dear heart. Courage. Courage. Fine. Who was I to disobey Aslan?
“I was making a list,” I explained, and once I’d eked out those first five words, the rest came tumbling faster and faster.
“I’m not proud of it. But I honestly thought it would be easy. That’s why I started it because if it were as easy as I thought it was going to be, I’d know we’d be okay. I guess it was kind of a test. God, that sounds awful. Not like a math test or a trial. More like, what’s it called? Litmus. Still bad, I know. The point is I expected the reasons to just stack up neatly—click, click, click. But then I got stuck, and even some of the items I was dead sure about seemed, I don’t know, flimsy? But the worst part is that the more I worked on the list, the more I realized how terribly, awfully much was riding on it. Which is so wrong and stupid. The whole thing reeks of betrayal, not only making the list, not only not being able to finish it, but being desperate to finish it. Because I’ve already said yes, and this ship is smack in the middle of the ocean, no getting off, and Zach’s a good person; he deserves better than a stupid list or than a-a-a fiancée who would make one. And listen to me: I can hardly even get my mouth around the word fiancée! What in God’s name will I do with wife?”
I stopped, panting and hot faced, panic charging at me from every direction. I braced myself for the bone-shaking impact of it, but before it arrived, my mother and Cornelia exchanged one glance—blue eyes locked on brown—the tiniest movement, but you could almost hear the thunderclap of it, feel the earth shift on its axis: their forces joining. On my behalf.
“You’re a natural list maker, Clare. As soon as you could write, lists, lists, lists,” said my mother, calmly. “It’s who you are.”
“But this is different,” I said.
“Would you like to share the list with us?” said Cornelia.
“Now?” As if another time would be more fitting.
“You don’t have to, but it might help to haul that puppy out of your head and into the world. We can swear to reserve all judgment, if you like.” Cornelia lifted her right hand and slapped the left onto an imaginary bible. My mother did the same.
“Maybe I want judgment,” I said, twisting my hair. “I can’t tell. I’ve lost perspective.”
“We can play the judgment by ear,” said my mother. “Judgment as needed.”
“The items are in no particular order,” I warned.
“So much the better,” said Cornelia.
“Wait,” said my mother. “Just to clarify: What is this a list of, exactly?”
“It’s a list of ten reasons why I, specifically—not just anyone but specifically I, Clare Hobbes—should marry Zach.”
“Got it,” said my mother. “Shoot.”
“Let ’em rip,” said Cornelia.
I cleared my throat.
“One: he makes a perfect egg over easy.” A goofy flutter of a laugh escaped me. “I told you they were in no particular order.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. Over easy is your favorite,” said my mother.
“And he stripes them with sriracha!” I said.
“Stripes!” said Cornelia. “How incredibly thoughtful.”
“Two: he really, really wants me to. Zach wants me to marry him more than anyone has ever wanted anything from me in my life.”
“Are you sure?” asked Cornelia, solemnly and as if she had someone specific in mind. I could guess who the someone might be, and for a second, I faltered.
“Zach says he will never have a happy day for the rest of his life if we aren’t together. Not ‘I can’t imagine having a happy day,’ but ‘I will never have a happy day,’ with this total assurance. No one has ever said that to me.”
“Ah,” said Cornelia. “Yes, I can see how maybe no one would have.”
“Three: anytime he goes to someone’s house or apartment, he takes a gift. And I’m not just talking about to fancy dinners, but on any occasion. Baseball-watching parties. Study sessions. Board game nights. Drop-by-for-a-beer kind of occasions. And not just flowers or a bottle of wine. But action figures. A funny T-shirt. A copy of the New Yorker with a Post-it marking an especially good article. A giant bag of gumballs. A garden gnome.”
“How completely adorable!” said my mother, and Cornelia clapped her hands.
What I did not add was that I knew what all the gifts were because, about a month after we’d begun dating, Zach had mostly stopped going places without me. If he were invited over to a friend’s house, he would ask me to come, and if I declined, he’d smile, shrug, and stay with me. And if I were invited somewhere, he would ask to come along, so charmingly that I would forget how to say no. Eventually, because it was just easier, I accepted it all, asking people ahead of time he if could come, saying yes to him even when I was tired or had too much homework or loathed watching baseball (I always loathed watching baseball). My friend Hildy declared it hideously dysfunctional and took to kidnapping me, sneaking up on me at the library or as I was coming out of a class and whisking me off to a restaurant or a bar or to her apartment. I felt bad about not telling Zach, worse about outright lying to him, but time alone with Hildy was far beyond a guilty pleasure. It ranked up there with food and sunlight and books.
“Four: he sincerely tries to reduce his carbon footprint. He has a low-emission car but rides his bike or walks whenever possible, even in the freezing cold; checks his tire inflation obsessively; drives no more than five miles over the speed limit, ever, even on the highway; never eats beef; consumes only locally produced food. He actually taught himself how to can.”
“Amazing,” said my mother.
“Impressive,” said Cornelia. “Although I do worry about botulism.”
I didn’t say that no matter how a conversation with Zach about climate change began (fracking, Hummers, a documentary on polar bears [there being no sadder sight on Earth than a starving polar bear, all baggy skin, huge paws, and haunted eyes]), it would end with an exhortation to save the world for our future children and their children and their children’s children, my stomach backflipping harder with each generation. Zach with his long line of offspring conga dancing relentlessly into the future, while I could not for the life of me—not after an extraordinarily good day with him or a few glasses of wine—envision even a single baby.
“Five: if we’re in a fight, he won’t walk away or go to bed or hang up until it’s resolved.”
“Oh, that’s a good one,” said my mother. “Going to bed mad is wretched, like trying to sleep with sand in your sheets or with a possible gas leak in your boiler.”
I had to laugh at this; only my mother would equate the risk of death by carbon monoxide with the discomfort of sand.
“I agree,” I said. “Who could ever marry someone who would let a fight just dangle there overnight?”
Cornelia raised her hand. “I did.?
??
“You’re kidding,” I said. “Teo? But he’s the best person in the world.” It was the God’s honest truth.
“Yes, but he believes in the restorative power of silence, walking away for a while, calming down, looking inward,” Cornelia said, “which is obviously incredibly annoying.”
“Someone should smack him,” growled my mother.
“Don’t think I haven’t come close. More than that, though, he’s got this faith.”
“In God?” I ask.
“In us—which seems to amount to the same thing for him.” Cornelia rolled her eyes. “He trusts in our ability to weather any storm so much that sometimes he actually forgets we’re fighting. He’ll just walk into a room where I’m fuming and start telling me a story about how it’s so windy that he just watched our neighbor chase his trash can lid all the way down the street. And I start laughing and forget that I loathe him and everything he stands for.”
“The rat bastard,” said my mother.
“Poor Cornelia,” I said. “Number six: Zach never tailgates, ever, no matter how slowly the car in front of him is going.”
“Because the driver in front of you could be anyone—an organ donor, a war hero, a man who’s just lost his best friend, a kid with a new license doing her best,” said Cornelia. “Not tailgating acknowledges the mystery and humanity of strangers. It’s one of those small habits that speaks volumes.”
“Like how someone treats waiters,” said my mother.
“That was number seven,” I said.
“Well, bravo, Zach,” said my mother.
“Eight: he laughs at my jokes.”
“Huge,” said Cornelia. “Colossal. Immeasurable.”
“Nine: he sings all the time, even though he has a horrific voice.”
“Lovely,” my mother pronounced.
“Really?” I said. “Not a little—flimsy?”
“He’s at home in his own skin,” said my mother. “Nothing flimsy about that.”
I knew what she meant, but I also knew if I were honest with myself—and when it came to Zach it seemed I could be somewhat less than absolutely honest—including his singing on my list mostly qualified as wishful thinking. I might have declared it the exception that proved the rule, although I’ve never been sure enough about the meaning of that phrase to employ it with confidence. In any case, despite his goodness and goldenness and aforementioned obvious marriageability, Zach had never struck me as comfortable being Zach. Taut, edgy, a man of fidgeting hands and rustling energy, he was the kind of person who said something and then watched for your reaction, ready to revise, rephrase, backtrack, but so deftly that you might not even notice.
“And that’s where I got stuck,” I said. “Hence the iris.”
“A good, solid list nonetheless,” declared my mother.
“I know,” I said. And good and solid was, well, good. Also solid. What it wasn’t was luminous. Or transcendent. But I didn’t say this out loud.
“It’s true that nine isn’t ten,” observed Cornelia, “but it almost is.”
“Oh!” My mother pointed at me with both fingers. “The book thing!”
A shiver crept over my arms. I knew exactly what she meant.
“The thing he does with the books!” expanded my mother. “The thing you told me about.”
“Zach does something with books, and you forgot to put it on your list?” said Cornelia. “That’s doesn’t sound like you, Clare.”
“I didn’t forget,” I said.
“No?” My mother tipped her blond head to the side and eyed me.
“Whenever he sees me reading a book,” I said, slowly, “he buys it and reads it, too.”
“So you can talk about it together!” said my mother. “Share in the experience.”
But one glance at Cornelia’s face told me she understood.
“Every book?” she asked, quietly. “When you don’t ask him to?”
I nodded and watched the same shiver that had crawled up my arms ripple over her scalp. She slid her fingers through her boy-cropped hair.
“What?” said my mother.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s hard to explain.”
“The inside of a book is a private space,” said Cornelia. “Someone barging in uninvited is—” She shivered again. “Every book? Really?”
“Sometimes, I hide them from him,” I confessed. “I stick them in the trunk of my car, in the spare tire compartment, and go get them only when he’s not around.”
“Of course you do,” she said, waggling the ruined iris contemplatively. “And he wants to talk to you about them afterward? All of them?”
“I don’t have the heart to tell him no,” I said. “He’s just so, um, eager.” Dogged is what I’d almost said. Obsessive. “Not so much to tell me what he thinks or to argue but to know what I think. In detail. He asks question after question. Sometimes—”
“Sometimes, what?” asked my mother.
“Sometimes, I think he won’t be satisfied until he climbs inside my head and lives there.” My laugh after I said it sounded limping and fake even to me, and when I got my nerve up to look at Cornelia and my mother, I could tell they weren’t fooled, either. Worry bracketed my mother’s eyes and mouth, while Cornelia’s expression bordered on horrified.
“You know what, though?” my mother said at last. “I’ll bet he has no idea that he’s barging into your inner life and leaving his footprints all over it. I’ll bet he’s just trying to be nice. Trying too hard, obviously, or going about it the wrong way, but still truly trying.”
And—whoosh—there it was. Number ten, bursting out of the darkness. Hallelujah.
“That’s it!” I cried and threw my arms into the air in a V for Victory.
“Number ten?” said my mother.
“It’s an essential fact of Zach,” I said. “Which is maybe why I overlooked it the first time around; it’s too obvious. I mean, I’d never claim to know what the central essential fact of another person was because that’s overstepping, but if I ever did decide to make a claim like that, I’d say his is this: he tries so hard to be good.”
A tiny pause riddled with birdsong. Then:
“Ah!” said my mother. “Well, there you go!”
“Good is good!” said Cornelia. “List complete!”
They were the very picture of cheerful supportiveness, their inflection, the corners of Cornelia’s twinkling cat’s eyes and of my mother’s crescent moon smile all tipping appropriately upward. But I knew their faces. If I had a list of faces I knew best in the world, theirs would make the top five. And what I read in them now was concern.
“Okay,” I said, sighing. “Just say it.”
“It’s only that, well—” said Cornelia. “Does he have to try very hard?”
“Yes!” I said. “But that’s what makes it so beautiful! It’s hard and he does it anyway. I told you how his mother died when he was a baby, and he grew up with that horrible father (sorry to speak ill of the dead but the man was a nightmare) and that mean older brother. Even his uncles and cousins are awful. All those cold, stone-faced, judgmental men. Can you even imagine growing up like that?”
“It sounds difficult,” said my mother.
“Beyond difficult,” I said. “It warps you. Wait, that sounds bad. Zach isn’t warped, but goodness has to be something he chooses. It’s not a knee-jerk no-brainer for him the way it is for people who grew up loved every second of their lives.”
I heard the note of contempt in my voice, contempt for the consistently loved, the thoughtlessly thoughtful, and even in my worked-up state, I knew I couldn’t let that stand. My voice went tender. “And yes, I’m one of those people, and I’m grateful. To both of you especially and to Teo and Gordon and everyone else. All I mean is that goodness might not always be Zach’s first impulse, and sometimes he gets it wrong, but he always feels terrible afterward and scrambles to make up for his mistakes.”
“Does he often get it wrong?” asked my
mother, evenly.
I flashed on his face, still and shadow-carved, his eyes flat as glass. A “shut up” like a slap. Mean laugh scything toward me out of nowhere.
“Not often at all,” I said. “And he’s so sorry afterward.”
“All right. But about his having to try so hard . . . Now, don’t get mad,” began Cornelia. “I just want to understand. Wouldn’t it be easier—”
“To be with someone effortlessly kind and good?” I said.
“Even naturally kind people struggle with it sometimes,” said Cornelia. “But yes.”
“Don’t you see, though? I love how much he wants to be different from the rest of his family. He could so easily have gone down the same road as the others, but he refused. He refuses all the time, every day, as best he can. That takes courage, I think, to fight what comes easiest to you. And he says I make him want to try even more.”
Cornelia stood up, walked around behind me, looped her scrawny arms around me, and held on hard. “Oh, darling Clare, girl made of sunshine, of course you do.”
I held on back. Cornelia was a tiny person, with a little angled face and child’s wrists. One of my hands covered both of hers. But when she held you, you felt instantly stronger and also like a bird in a nest.
“His sister disappearing the way she did,” said my mother, shaking her head. “That kind of loss changes a family forever.”
When Zach was ten, on a summer night, his tempest-haired, shimmering, rebellious eighteen-year-old sister, Rosalie-called-Ro, who had been his only mother for most of his life, vanished from their family’s house in Northern Michigan. No note. No good-byes. Not even a fight with her father to explain her disappearance, even though there had been many, many fights before that. Just her car parked at the lip of the inland lake near their summerhouse, the water lapping the front tires, the keys still in the ignition. Local police investigated, dredging the lake while Zach looked on, a fact I had been horrified to learn. But they never found Ro. Everyone assumed she had run away to California (a place she’d never visited but worshipped, plastering the walls of her room with photos of beaches and deserts, the Hollywood sign, the Golden Gate Bridge) or else had gotten drunk and drowned in some other body of water of which there were many nearby.