THE LESSON

THE LESSON

Janet’s grandfather moved in from the Hills.  When the last of his children was old enough to leave the home, he left it too, and bought a small country house in the Black Hills, where he and his wife lived happily until she passed.  Then, finding himself lonely, he accepted one day the often—reiterated invitation to go live with his eldest, now herself a working mother of four—all girls.  Her husband had left her and she was managing the house and her daughters alone, had no interest in remarrying, and wanted her father for the conveniences having him around would bestow.

     The youngest of the four girls was named Janet, and she was not what one might call a looker.  She was so much not, that her sisters had taken to calling her Plain Jane.  As is so often the case with plain people, though, what she lacked in physical attraction she made up for with imagination.  In addition to being a mathematician, she was an artist, a novelist, an astronomer, an actress, a brain surgeon, an astronaut—the list goes on—all by the age of ten.  There was no holding Janet down.  Her three sisters were, by contrast, garden slugs.  They moved at sub-light speeds next to Janet’s warp drive daily life.  The one thing they had over her was their rather common prettiness as girls—they were not beauties, either, having no remarkable characteristics to make them stand out—neither jet black hair nor platinum, neither shapely breasts nor erotic hips.  And so “Plain Jane” stuck to Janet as a product of her sisters’ malice.  Curiously, Plain Jane herself rather embraced the name and wore it proudly.

     Her grandfather found it hard not to favor her, partly because of her sisters’ hostility, which he didn’t understand, and partly because of her whimsicalness, but also partly because Plain Jane was spindly and half the height she should be for her age.  She was still small enough to cuddle on his lap when he could get her to slow down enough to sit there.  The other girls were too grown up for that.  So it was natural that, in the absence of a father, grandfather and granddaughter should have developed a special bond.

     One day Janet had decided to become an optometrist.  It was just after she had gotten her eyes checked.  She consulted the encyclopedia, found web sites, drew for herself an anatomical sketch of the working of the eye, made an eye chart, and had asked her grandfather to be her test subject.  She asked him to hold an old postcard over one eye and read the chart she had made and stuck to the wall behind the table.  The kitchen was small, and the old formica-topped table had to be pulled out and the chair on the wall side removed. 

     “I thought you were joining the Air Force,” he said as he read out the big top letter, “E.”

     “That was yesterday.  I decided I would get bored.”

     “Doing eye charts is more exciting than flying planes?” he asked.

     “It’s not that, Grandpa,” she said.  “It’s fixing eyes.  Eyes are exciting.  Not eye charts.  Read the next line, please.”  She pointed from behind the table at the line in question, looking back at him in her best professional manner.

     He read it and then read all the other lines, then did it again with the other eye, and repeated the whole procedure with his glasses on.  The older girls found it hard to conceal their irritation at what their sister and grandfather were doing, coming into the kitchen to raid the refrigerator and finding it cramped, its narrow spaces made all the narrower by the table and chairs being displaced.  In sarcastic tones they warned their grandfather that tomorrow she might want to be a heart surgeon.

     “If I did,” Janet said to her older sister, “I’d cut out your heart not Grandpa’s.”

     One evening, after diner, he had gone to sit in the stuffed chair by the lamp table in the living room.  The girls’ mother was upstairs getting ready to go out for the evening, the three older girls were in their room doing homework or watching television, and he was resting back with Janet in his lap.  He asked her what was the one thing which, if she had it, would make her happy, and which, if she didn’t, would make her sad.  She rattled off things so fast, without pausing to think, that the list threatened to become “My favorite one hundred things in the world.”

     “Stop, stop, stop,” he said, laughing, “that’s not what I was asking.  Stop and think, now.  Concentrate!  Is there one thing, a one and only thing, without which, your life would not be happy?”

     She leaned back comfortably onto his chest, one leg hanging on each side of his knee, and stared up at the wall over the couch.  He, of course, wanted her to say, “Yes, Grandpa, that’s you.”  That’s all he was fishing for.  But she didn’t think that.  She was far from thinking that, taking him as so much a natural part of her life after her father left that living without him didn’t enter into her calculations.  Instead, she began a meditation on the question that would continue for a long time, and when she concluded it, her life would not be the same—so much out of nowhere, out of the impulsive and unpredictable urges of everyday life, do the things come that haunt us, alter us, shape us into the creatures we become.

     Everybody noticed the change in Plain Jane.  Whereas formerly she was busy inventing new lives to live, learning about them, talking about them, endlessly searching them out on the internet, dressing up in their garb—making hideous costumes out of her mother’s, sisters’, and grandfather’s clothes, now she moped in silence, spending whole afternoons after school in her room, coming to table at supper and leaving afterward without so much as saying a word, that her sisters took to watching her for signs of lunacy and sending prayers of thanks heavenward for the transformation that had come over her. 

     A transformation had come over her.  Her grandfather’s question had started her meditating the condition of happiness and what was required to make it and sustain it.  She thought at length about her father and his leaving and what she felt when she saw him.  The image she called up of his face filled her with mixed feelings of hostility and confusion.  She had never thought about him in this way before.  She thought about her mother.  At ten years old, she had never asked herself if her mother was happy.  She realized she didn’t even know what happiness was.  She supposed her mother was happy.  Now she was doubtful.  But more than anything else, she realized she was ignorant.  Once she got passed the word and looked into things, she realized she didn’t know anything about it.

“Is there one thing,” her grandfather asked, “a one and only thing, without which, your life would not be happy?”  At first, she thought there were hundreds of things without which she would not be happy.  In the hours she spent in her room after school, she made up a list of things she thought she would be unhappy to not have.  When this list grew so long as to contain virtually everything she knew, from McDonald’s to her red sweater, she began to think maybe she wasn’t doing it right.  So she wrote the question down: “Is there one thing, a one and only thing, without which, your life would not be happy?”  She thought and thought and thought.  But nothing came to her.  “Maybe I have to be older,” she finally concluded.  But once she began to search for an answer, she could not stop.  It was not in her nature.

     She began to cross things off her list that she could live without if she had to.  She read an item and asked herself how her life would change if she could not have it, and then, if she thought she could live without that item, she would put a line through it.  At the end of this exercise, she had put a line through every one of the items she had put down on her list.  She was unnerved, because the thought of living without all those things on the list was absurd. 

She had begun to observe people as a substitute, with the idea that maybe she could learn something about what they thought.  At first, it was her sisters and her mother and grandfather.  But the effort expanded to include everyone she came in contact with—at school, on the streets, in the neighborhood, at church.  She talked with her friends at school about happiness, but they had even less an idea what it was than she did.  She had already dismissed all the things they talked about. 

Once, she asked her teacher in the classroom, and the teacher responded almost without thinking, as though the answer were obvious, saying happiness was doing good.  Janet, never considering that kind of thing before, thought about it, but then dismissed it, reasoning that if happiness was doing good, then people who did bad should be unhappy.  But she didn’t think that that was so.  She knew, in fact, that it wasn’t.  Doing bad made a lot of people happy, even her sisters.  Even, she thought, herself.  She had her ways of getting even with her sisters, subtle things she did that messed up their heads.  She would smile wickedly and feel oh so good.  No.  Teacher was wrong.

Then one sunny day, lonely for his granddaughter—everyone else busy with her own thing—her grandfather sought her out and knocked on her bedroom door.  Anticipating the room looking like a tornado had swept through it, he prepared to make some mocking comments as he opened the door and peeked in.  But the room was tidy, a sure sign of the depth of the transformation that had come over her, and she was on the bed with her hands under her head looking at the ceiling.  He pulled up a chair, not having to dump, as usual, two weeks worth of dirty clothes off it, and sat beside her. 

“What’s troubling you on such a pretty day?” he said gently.  The change that had come over her was making him sad.  He missed the heedless, capricious, perverse, and perservering girl she used to be.  “Shouldn’t you be outside doing things?”

She rolled over on her elbow and looked at him.  Then she said, “What would make you unhappy if you didn’t have it, Grandpa?”

“Oh!” he said, “Oh! I see,” and then fell silent beside her.  “You’ve been thinking about that all this time, have you?”  

He looked at her.  Thoughtful and troubled, he knew that what he said to her now should not be said lightly.  He tried to remember that night when she sat in his lap and they talked about happiness.  It was the last time she sat in his lap.  He didn’t connect the change that had come over her with that conversation.  He didn’t realize she had taken it so seriously, not taking it so himself.  He knew he had to say the right thing, so he hesitated and thought about it.

“You know, Janet,” he said after contemplating her awhile, “it’s not one thing; it’s not the same for everybody and even for the same person at different times.”

“But you asked me what was the one thing that would make me unhappy if I didn’t have it.  That’s what you asked me.”

He felt a stab go deeply into him. 

“True.  True, Janet.  That’s what I asked.”

“Why did you ask it?  Why did you!”

She said that last in a rising voice, a touch of anger in it. 

“There was a reason,” he said.  “Do you want to hear it?”

She nodded, sitting up, cross-legged, looking soulfully at him.

“I wanted you to say that I was what made you happy, that without me you would be unhappy.  It was selfish of me to put you in that spot.  But, you see, that’s the way I felt about you.  And therein lies the lesson,” he paused and looked at her, and she didn’t disappoint him.

“What’s the lesson?  Tell me,” she said, demandingly.

“Don’t you see it?  Think about it.  It’s not hard.”

She thought about it but without success.  She frowned and fought back tears.  He could see from her face how seriously she had taken the whole matter and how hard she struggled with it.  But he thought maybe it would be best if he let her come to see it on her own.  So he gave her a nudge.

“When Grandma died, I lost the person who loved me most.”

Her eyes rounded as she grasped his meaning.

“It’s me, then!” she said. 

“Yes, for me,” he said, smiling.

She beamed at him, “And me, too!” 

“It’s just for us.  It’s not the same for others.  Don’t you see?”

He offered her his hand and she took it.  She crawled off the bed and together they went outside and took a long walk, during which they talked about many things, especially her father.  The lesson came to her quite clearly—each of us finds something without which our lives would be unhappy, and that something is different for different people.  She knew she was not it for her father.  Nor was she it for her sisters.  She clasped her grandfather’s hand.  “Some of us are luckier than others,” she said.  The recognition of this left its traces on her, for afterward she wore an expression, a new acquisition which became permanently affixed, of watchfulness, a kind of “which are you?” query in the look of her eye that made people feel a little uneasy in her presence, especially her sisters.