What does it mean to have it all? Is it an immigrant’s desire for a better life, or the fears of a child who, in an unstable world in which her mother dies and leaves her to an abusive father,  believes money and power will protect her from future pain and loss? Wealth becomes a currency for love, and a man symbolizes a woman’s worth. If you can’t make it, then marry it—or, at the very least, fuck it.

Just before six in the morning, I return to my hotel room, confused and spent. It turns out I couldn’t fuck my boss, at least, not that particular night. I fall into bed with the ghost of Tony’s cologne haunting my skin. Top notes of bergamot and tangerine balanced with cinnamon, sandalwood and vanilla. Citrus, seduction and spice. The tom-tom drums of a hangover beat across my arid, hollow sinuses. I roll to the edge of the bed to extract three chalky, old Advil pills from the bottom of my purse, swallowing them with a mouthful of mini-bar wine. My eyes remain focused long enough to see the unworn black peignoir draped over the chair.

After Mom died, I prayed for someone strong enough to save me from my circumstances; a man with the power to swoop me away and take care of me. I suppose this faceless, nameless somebody was a proxy for my father, but the truth is, I couldn’t count on my dad from the start. I’m not sure why I’d want to set him as a mold for anything. Still, my want of him has hollowed out my insides and made its home there. It’s not so unusual, I suppose; this is how everyone learns to love. We heal the ails of our childhoods by recreating the same old dysfunctional dynamics with new partners, even as we hope for a different outcome. Funny to think, in all my fantasies, I never asked the universe for love but for wealth, power and control. And that’s exactly what I got. In the end, Tony was just as emotionally remote as my father, and I kept falling over myself to please him just as I did with Dad, only to end up with nothing. I became the same sad rag doll floundering every which way he shook me, sometimes for fun and amusement, other times because he didn’t know any other way to treat women like me.

That morning, as exhaustion pulled me under, I craved the weight of Tony’s body on me, the salty taste of his skin. What happened in Portland wasn’t likely to remain in Portland. It would follow us back to Seattle, infecting everything. I dreaded returning home to a husband I didn’t love, knowing that this passionate, forceful, untouchable man would be dangled in front of me at work every day. Our fuse had miles left to burn, but I wasn’t sure where to go with either of them, husband or love. I was glad my mother was dead so I didn’t have to confess to her what I had done and what I still hungered to do. Good girls don’t covet other people’s husbands. They don’t have affairs. They accept what they are given without complaint, and whatever boon they’re afforded is a blessing.

That morning, I had unwittingly stepped out of her footprints. For the first time in years, I could not hear my mother’s voice.

Though I didn’t consciously consider it growing up, there’s nothing more American than to grasp for the next highest rung. America is the green grass on the other side of a fence, the delayed promise of a better future. Our national heritage, built on the backs of immigrants, insists that if we could just work a little harder, suffer a little more, hold on for another minute, we might prove worthy of reward—but not until we’ve earned it. We don’t like to admit that, after all this effort, our ambitions lose possibility once they’re realized. Our salaries become swimming pools that grow algae; our new cars eventually need repair. Expensive cuisine turns into cellulite that we must work off. Our homes depreciate, our designer dogs shit on the engineered hardwoods while we’re slaving away at work, and the people we love—to whom we’ve pledged our allegiance—let us down. Sometimes we are those people. The reality of the American dream, once embodied, is as dull, plastic and empty-headed as a Barbie doll.

Our birthright, the pursuit of happiness, is how we’ve always pulled ourselves back up. Americans are not built to sit idly in contentment or lowly in disadvantage, no—we are born to dream, to revel in the quest as much as the catch and the win. Given the rumor of a better world above, we will build bridges into the sky.

My hunger wasn’t born from my immigrant family’s high standards or guilty encouragement, or even the unmet desires of my greedy eighties youth. My hunger is intrinsic to my American identity. The reason I get out of bed in the morning is the same unattainable thing I pray for each night. American consumerism is the endless karmic cycle in which I am both the dream and the dreamer, two sides of a gold-plated fantasy—an unfulfilled future that will, conveniently, never arrive. What else is there to do, then, but flip my future into the air and call it—and watch it roll beneath the sofa where it will lay abandoned, just out of reach.

 

Gabriela Denise Frank is the author of CivitaVeritas: An Italian Fellowship Journey. Her writing has appeared in True Story, The Normal School, Crab Creek Review, Gold Man Review, Lunch Ticket, The Rumpus, Front Porch Journal, and the blogs of Brevity and Submittable. Special thanks to Sonya Lea for her support and critical feedback on this essay. www.gabrieladenisefrank.com