How to Fall in Love with Anyone by Mandy Len Catron

Author:Mandy Len Catron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

the black box

thoughts on the stories we don’t tell

We were at Mamaw’s house one night when my aunt Cindy began telling the story of the one disastrous date she went on with my father.

“I told your dad I wasn’t about to buy his dinner.” She laughed. “Not even if I had the money for it, which I did not.” Everyone in the room was listening, and though each of us had heard the story before, no one was sure what would happen next in this version. When Cindy tells a story, we listen and laugh and assume it’s only half true anyway. “And then he just got up and drove off!” she said. “Left me at the Patio with the food. And you know everyone in Pennington saw me standing there, arms full of French fries, because everyone went to the Patio back then. I’ve never been so embarrassed in all my life. And that, girls”—she looked at Casey and then at me—“is why I’m not your mother.”

It lingers in my mind as a near-perfect moment: standing in Mamaw’s kitchen for Casey’s graduation party, CONGRADULATIONS balloons bobbing above the counter, a half-eaten Food City sheet cake sitting at the center of the table, all of us laughing as if we were hearing the story for the first time. Mom rolling her eyes, not knowing or remembering if that’s how it happened. My dad’s face bright, his squinting eyes, like mine, disappearing in laughter.

In a couple of hours, we would drive back to my parents’ house, and Mom and Dad would sit us down and tell us they didn’t love each other anymore.

Divorce is all hamartia, all human error and fallibility. But my parents’ divorce seemed like a non sequitur, like turning to page seventy-six of the Choose Your Own Adventure book and discovering you’d been eaten by an alligator.

Years have passed since that night, but I’m still hung up on the underlying question: How does one thing become another?

• • •

Physicists and engineers and computer scientists often use the concept of a black box to represent what they don’t know. The box indicates an opaque component within a system. They know what goes in and what comes out, but they can only hypothesize about what happens inside it. The point of the black box isn’t necessarily to figure out what’s inside, but rather to find a way to work around the unknown. Once you start thinking about it, you realize our lives are full of black boxes: closed-door meetings, the Google search algorithm, the mechanics of desire.

I think of my parents’ marriage—or the last few years of it—as a black box. It seemed we were all happy enough when I moved away from home. But something changed. I tried but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I couldn’t see inside the box. I was sure there had to be some agent of transformation, some dormant impulse activated, some rule violated.

For their part, my parents offered no explanation other than to say that they didn’t love each other the way they once did.

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