Gravity Is the Thing Read online

  Just as you cannot ring and say, ‘His socks were in the exact place I told you they would be!’

  I was excited about naming the doll, and suggested several possibilities, but Oscar was dismissive. He preferred to call her ‘the baby’.

  ‘Pretend the baby tries to get my sword and we don’t notice,’ Oscar instructed me. ‘And pretend you see the baby with the sword in her mouth and you say, Oh no, what’s going on here?’

  ‘Oh no, what’s going on here?!’ I obliged, with much drama and dismay. It seemed to me that a more sensible course would be to remove the sword from the baby’s mouth. But these were not my rules.

  ‘Pretend the baby has to go to sleep now,’ Oscar said next. ‘And so does the sword. Now I’ll sing a tweet for them. Do you know what a tweet is?’

  ‘Oscar!’ I said. ‘You have a Twitter account?’

  ‘A tweet is a song you sing for a baby to make them never wake up,’ he explained. He strummed the sword and sang one of our lullabies.

  ‘That was lovely!’ I said.

  ‘I know. I can do a tweet for you now, Mummy.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I hope I wake up eventually.’

  ‘You will.’

  He strummed the sword and sang:

  ‘Rock a bye, baby,

  the lightning’s falling down,

  the sky is singing to hold Mummy in her cradle,

  the sky keeps Mummy safe, keeps Mummy safe, for Osca-a-a-a-r.’

  He knows how to fade out a song.

  I thought: This is the happiest you can be.

  At traffic lights, I looked at my phone. The day he’d visited me at my café, Niall had not asked for my number. He had looked at his watch, scraped back his chair, paid the bill and left with one more smile.

  I looked at my phone, but of course nothing happened. The lightning falls down, I reminded myself, the lightning falls down. I wasn’t sure exactly what I meant.

  12.

  The next book in my stack was The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. I’d heard of this book too. In his job interview, Oliver, my chef, told me it had changed his life. He seemed to think my Happiness Café was directly related to the book. When I admitted I hadn’t read it, he breathed, ‘Do it. Today,’ and he guaranteed that it would change my life.

  I laughed and promised to read it, but did not. I still had The Guidebook then.

  Now I picked up The Secret and felt a frisson. It’s a great title. Secrets can be so tricky to uncover, but this one, I could just read!

  The key to this book seems to be that we’re all magnets. That is, we draw good things to us by thinking good things. Demanding good things of the universe, with great enthusiasm. So easy!

  The catch is that the reverse is also true. Think bad thoughts, bad things will happen. As soon as you think, Oh, I hope this car doesn’t crash! the universe understands that we are asking for the car to crash. It sets to work crashing it. The universe could use some lessons in grammar. It struggles with the negative and subordinate clauses.

  Catastrophic incidents, meanwhile—plane crashes, earthquakes, tsunamis—are all the fault of the victims. They were thinking worried thoughts.

  I closed the book and considered it.

  By analogy, I decided, anxiety, superstition, knocking-on-wood, locking doors, bringing an umbrella or a coat or extra water, basically anything you do to prepare for the worst, will make the worst come true. When I used to draft contracts, negotiate settlements, advise on Y2K, these were always based on the hypothetical, worst-case scenario. By doing that, I was inviting the worst-case scenario! By worrying that I would lose my brother to MS, I made him disappear; by worrying he’d never come back, I manifested that destiny. By fearing it had to be too good to be true, that I had found a perfect man named Finnegan, I triggered the dissolution of our marriage.

  Books like The Secret, I reasoned, along with lotteries, basketball scholarships and happy-ending movies about impossible dreams, all help to maintain the inequitable system. You are not poor because of entrenched privilege, race, class, oppression. You are poor because you emit negative thoughts. If only you allowed your light to shine, glowed with positivity, you could have anything you wanted! This is government by false or faint hope.

  I found the book ridiculous. I despised it.

  Simultaneously, I panicked with excitement.

  I walked around carefully obeying the book’s instructions, sending out messages to the universe (rather than waiting for the universe to send them to me), asking politely for more customers, please, for an unexpected consignment of quirky coffee cups, for a glowing review of the Happiness Café in Spectrum, for Shreya to clean the coffee machine without me asking her, for my telephone to ring, for it to ring, for it to ring, even though he didn’t have my number. (An easy problem for the universe to fix.) Meanwhile, I rigorously censored negative thoughts.

  For weeks, I asked the universe repeatedly for this and that, beaming at it fondly. I took great care to rephrase all negative thoughts in the positive. Oh God, I hope Oscar doesn’t wake up in the night again, became, Dear Universe, please let Oscar have a beautiful sleep tonight. Thank you, and goodnight.

  I did not believe a word of that book, but I wanted to so badly that I played as if I did.

  13.

  There was also this.

  The night before my weekend retreat to the island, I had a dream. In the dream, I stood on a balcony and reached my arms out to the sky. A strange, powerful surge ran through me and out into the blue.

  That was it, the entire dream: a question sent out into the blue.

  I saw now that I had asked the universe, please, for love. In my secret, quietest heart I saw that the universe had answered. Redheaded, broad-shouldered man in jeans and rumpled t-shirt reaching for sliced honeydew.

  14.

  Our third class, as Wilbur had promised, was in Flight Immersion.

  Beforehand, I imagined we would all be required to climb into large black boxes, have the lids clipped shut, and then crouch quietly, thinking about flight for an hour. I don’t know where I got this idea, but I was convinced it would happen. I planned to refuse.

  Anyway, I arrived at Wilbur’s building at the same time as Nicole. She seemed happy to see me. ‘You want to ring the bell?’ she offered, even though she was right beside it. Then she laughed and said she’s so used to hanging out with her kids that she thinks any kind of button is a treat. ‘I actually felt a moment of relief,’ she said, ‘that there was just one of you, so no fighting over who gets to do it.’

  We both laughed and I said she could do it, and she said no, you can, and we went back and forth, still laughing. Then she pressed the button. It made such a sharp brrring! that I half wished I’d got to do it. ‘I want a turn,’ I said, and pressed it myself, and there we were laughing again.

  So we went upstairs in a good mood.

  In Wilbur’s apartment, the armchairs circled the coffee table. Frangipani and Pete Aldridge were already there, sitting the furthest distance from each other that could be managed in a close circle. For the first time, I noticed that their frowns matched. In the centre of each of their foreheads, between identical parallel lines, was a triangle without its base—a pointed hat, a circumflex.

  On the coffee table was a bottle of red wine and a platter of cheese and crackers. ‘So fancy!’ said Nicole as the buzzer rang.

  Niall and Antony arrived together. I wondered which of them had pressed the bell.

  There were three different types of cheese on the platter—a blue, a cheddar, and something ripe and gooey—and all three, for the record, were excellent. Throughout the evening, people kept interrupting Wilbur to praise his choices in cheese, or to confer with one another about which was the favourite. Pete Aldridge only ate the cheddar. He cut himself huge chunks of it and I noticed that Frangipani flinched each time he did. Then she would quickly slice herself a wafer-thin piece.

  Wilbur opened the proceedings by announcing that Flight Immersion cla
sses were designed to ‘accustom’ us to the sky, to ‘accept’ that we belonged there.

  ‘We belong in the sky?’ Pete Aldridge pounced, shoulders tense.

  ‘When you’re ready,’ Wilbur hastened to clarify. ‘Not a moment before.’

  I could see by Antony’s grin that he was warming up to make a joke, and Wilbur must have sensed this too because he coughed loudly and flourished his hands. ‘Look around you! See the hot-air balloons! The cloud paintings! The hang-glider prints! You’ve already done some flight immersion just by spending time in this room.’

  ‘Is your apartment not ordinarily decorated like this?’ Frangipani demanded.

  ‘No,’ Wilbur said firmly. ‘It is not.’

  Frangipani slumped back. Her eyes roamed the room. ‘That card over there has nothing to do with flight,’ she said fractiously.

  A card stood on the TV table. Happy Birthday to the Greatest Guy to Walk the Planet, the card declared. The print looped around a cartoon Earth.

  Surprised, we all turned back to Wilbur. Here he was, our teacher, and we had never for a moment suspected that he was the greatest guy to walk the planet. Nor that he might have a circle of acquaintances outside this circle of armchairs, or a friend or even partner who considered him the greatest guy on earth. I’d never even thought he might have birthdays!

  Wilbur waited patiently, his elbow on the arm of his chair, chin on his hand, spark in his eye, allowing us time to adjust.

  ‘Neither does cheese have a thing to do with flight,’ Pete Aldridge snapped suddenly, ‘and yet, here it is!’ He slapped his hand on the table.

  We all jumped.

  Then Niall said in his reasonable voice, tracing his long-lost accent: ‘Well, and this chair I’m sitting on, does it fly?’ After which we all began pointing out objects unrelated to flight in the room. We kept turning to Frangipani for a reaction. An interesting thing happened. Her irritable expression faded and an impish grin appeared. That is exactly the word: impish.

  Wilbur breathed in deeply and his voice soared above our chatter: ‘For today’s class in Flight Immersion, I will tell you how an aeroplane works!’

  And, quite honestly, that is what he did.

  Or, rather, he outlined the basics of aeroplanes. I cannot remember much of it now, but I know he took a large sketchpad and drew diagrams to illustrate his words. He sketched a childish plane with arrows all around it, and he labelled these arrows: THRUST, LIFT, GRAVITY and DRAG.

  Thrust is what you need to get the plane going. If you have a glider, you start high—that’s the key—and gravity provides the thrust. Otherwise, you need an engine.

  Lift is what keeps it in the sky, I think. You get it by shaping the wings a certain way. They should be flat underneath and curved from the front to the back on top. As you travel forward, air passing over the top has further to go because of the curve, so pressure above is reduced. High pressure below and low pressure above generates lift. The faster you go, the more lift you get.

  ‘The principle of lift,’ Niall stated.

  ‘Yes,’ Wilbur agreed.

  ‘Nothing to do with two pairs of sneakers hitting the ground at the same time.’

  ‘No.’ Wilbur shook his head. ‘I think,’ he admitted, ‘that my parents may have been confused.’

  He carried on.

  Gravity is good if you have a glider, and it’s good when you want to come back down, but otherwise is something of a nuisance.

  Drag is caused by the frame of the aeroplane itself as it tries to push its way through the sky.

  Wilbur spoke in a relaxed, conversational voice, leaning back in his chair. He reminded me of a German literature professor I’d had in first-year university, who used to smoke a pipe in tutorials. Only Wilbur did not have a pipe.

  He also talked about the Wright brothers, and praised them for having figured out how to control an aeroplane. Here I recall that Wilbur used words like roll and pitch and yaw, and he confessed that he himself had been named after the Wright brothers.

  ‘Which one?’ Frangipani asked.

  Everyone turned quickly to look at her.

  ‘Well not Orville,’ Pete Aldridge grumbled. ‘Obviously.’

  ‘Oh God, I’m an idiot,’ Frangipani announced, which surprised us all.

  ‘No, you’re not,’ Nicole soothed, falling into mothering again. ‘Don’t ever let me hear you saying that. Here, have some cheese.’

  15.

  The next book in my stack was a little manual of happiness. It was full of sensible, snappy advice about being cheerful and friendly, getting enough sleep and exercise. But I was mostly struck by the Chinese proverb used as its epigraph.

  If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap.

  If you want happiness for a day, go fishing.

  If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune.

  If you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody.

  I’m not one for naps. I wake feeling cranky.

  Fishing does not interest me at all. It would certainly not cheer up a vegan.

  Inheriting a fortune: well, that depends from whom I inherit it. My mother? That would not make me happy for a year; it would make me want my mother back.

  Help somebody: I suppose this refers to charity and digging wells. It would feel good to dig a well. But would you carry that feeling for a lifetime? Only if you kept on digging. You’d get so tired. Weighed down by problems surrounding well-building—ground too hard, ground of clay, broken spades, insufficient funding—and you can never dig all the wells you need, help all the thirsty people, so you are constantly faced with moral quandaries about priorities, and you just keep on helping, helping, and the sand sucks up your help, your skin dries in the sun, your bones ache and crack, and nobody ever helps you back.

  I helped my friend-from-university Natalia and her sister Tia move house once. This was not long after I’d met my eventual-husband Finnegan at a party at their place, so I felt affectionate towards the sisters and the house itself. I spent a long day packing up their kitchen for them, wrapping bowls and glasses in newspaper, Spray n’ Wiping the cabinets, running up and down flights of stairs with cardboard boxes. It was fun at first, but I grew increasingly weary. Finn came by and hefted bookcases and beds, even though he had lower back issues at the time. I remember seeing him wince and pause, right as Tia pivoted around a corner and sang, ‘TV next, please!’ Here, I experienced a flash of fury, and recalled that both girls earned good wages and could have paid movers. Also, I did not find either of them sufficiently grateful, they were so caught up in the tizz of their move. I kept hearing them on the phone, telling people they were, ‘Doing it all on their own!’ while I was there on their kitchen floor, scrubbing away, thinking: What am I, chopped liver?!

  Helping Natalia and Tia to move did not make me happy for a lifetime.

  16.

  Oscar came into my room at 5.23 am, waking me from a pleasant dream. I can’t remember the content of the dream, only that it suffused me with pleasantness. I know that it was 5.23 am because the first thing I do, when Oscar wakes me, is look at the clock. That way I can determine whether I should feel bright and awake, or desperate and weary. I reserve my response until I see the clock.

  5.23 am. Not desperate, but weary.

  Oscar had Baby tucked beneath his arm. ‘Mummy, can you take me to the toilet?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh,’ I said into the grey light. ‘You can take yourself. It’s not dark.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m scared.’

  ‘Baby will keep you company.’

  ‘Baby’s scared too.’

  So we walked across the hall to the bathroom. Then he climbed into my bed, cheerful, chatty, bright and cuddling, the sharp bends of Baby pressed against my chest, and I said, ‘Okay, let’s go to sleep now,’ and closed my eyes, but each time I drifted his voice drew me back. Sometimes I thought, This is lovely, this is how it’s supposed to be, chat with him, cuddle him; other times I thought, Oh God, plea
se let me sleep.

  Eventually I opened my eyes to the day: Choose happiness!

  I breathed in the happy, and breathed out the sad.

  I scrambled eggs for a healthy, protein-rich breakfast, and chopped grapes in half. Oscar shared his grapes with Baby, which seemed a waste.

  He announced that today he would bring Baby to day care.

  ‘But what if you lose Baby?’ I asked.

  I meant: what if the children tease you, a boy with a baby doll, and the strides we are making in gender-neutral play slam into a brick wall?

  Don’t worry! I exhorted myself. Go with the flow!

  ‘You want to bring Baby along? Sure! Why not?’

  His face lit up and he grabbed my forearm and kissed it.

  I drove Oscar to Blue Gum Cottage.

  At the gate, I paused. Be in your life! This was a good thought. Far better to be in your life than outside it.

  I looked through the fence to the slopes of artificial green, the raised wooden paths, the little girl named Amber who was leaping, exuberant, from the path.

  Look at her leaping into life! I thought. I encouraged my heart to leap in sync with Amber, but then she fell and began wailing, and I hastened to get my heart away from her.

  I signed Oscar in, hung his satchel on its hook, and led him back outside. The children were now sitting in a circle and a teacher was handing around Sao biscuits. Another teacher, Leesa, was quietly teaching Amber, still tear-stained from her fall, how to have a thumb war.

  This is beautiful! I thought, pausing to consider the roses (by which I meant the children eating Saos). Leap, fall, but then learn thumb wars!

  Beside me, Oscar adjusted Baby in his arms. The children turned towards us, chewing, slow gazes falling from me to Oscar, from Oscar to Baby in his arms.