Dorothy Zbornak Is Happy

James Tate Hill

Someone once told you happiness is a genetic trait, that one’s happiness or unhappiness doesn’t fluctuate much with life-changing events, good or bad. You’ve considered this theory every few years, and it pops into your head with regularity while separated from your second wife. Not long after moving into your new apartment, divorce feels inevitable, but you’ve done this before, a thought that’s as reassuring as it is unsettling.

Most evenings, you spend a few hours with your favorite sitcoms. You don’t feel much like laughing, but that’s what the laugh track is for. Thirty years ago, you turned to familiar movies and shows when you lost your sight. Back then, you needed the memory of faces and sets you could no longer see. Now it feels like you’re hiding from new experiences. Every few days, some essayist reminds you that nostalgia comes from a word meaning unhealed wound, but sometimes a forty-third viewing of Road House is just a forty-third viewing of Road House.

The Sunday after Thanksgiving, you meet a girl at a party. You weren’t going to go, but your therapist confirmed your hunch about new experiences. You and the girl both studied writing at Hollins University, missing each other by a few years. Later in the evening, you note her use of the word boyfriend, not that you’re ready to date.

You become Facebook friends. Your comments on each other’s posts might be flirting, but none of hers refers to a boyfriend. It’s been two months since the party. She sees you at a bookstore event while on a date but fails to get your attention. She tells you this in a private message, letting you know it had been a horrible date.

You ask her out—another bookstore event—in language so ambiguous she isn’t sure it’s a date, or that others won’t be joining you. After the bookstore, you grab dinner at a Korean restaurant. Your server offers ranch dressing and ketchup with your Japchae and Bibimbap. The laugh you share when the server leaves feels like an inside joke, like possibility. You close down the restaurant and a bar after that, but she’s coming out of a relationship, and if you’re being honest with yourself, you have no idea how much healing lies in front of you.

Here you are, in fact, writing another essay in the second person. It’s been three years since the publication of your memoir, three chapters of which you wrote in this point of view you once called distracting and pretentious. When you finally wrote about losing your sight and the misguided years you tried to hide it from everyone you met, switching from I to you seemed the best way to convey how lost and unmoored you felt at times in your life: the early months of deteriorating vision; living on your own for the first time; your marriage to the first wife who came to resent your disability; the years after that divorce when you finally acknowledged, to yourself and others, who you are. It was a happy ending, the self-acceptance and the second marriage, but life is not a memoir. Life, it turns out, keeps going.

***

A stronger argument for happiness, for that theory of happy people remaining happy people throughout their lives, might be the sitcoms to which you keep returning. Take your favorite series, The Golden Girls, a show you love so passionately it appears in two of the five blurbs on the back of your memoir. Four previously married women become roommates later in life, forming deep and unexpected friendships. You were eight when The Golden Girls premiered, and most of the jokes about women your grandmother’s age having more sex than anyone you knew in college must have gone over your head.

More than humor, the lifeblood of the situation comedy, at least the ones you love, is familiarity. Unlike characters in novels and movies, the best sitcom characters never change. Any lessons learned will be forgotten by the next episode.

Blanche Devereaux, the youngest of the roommates—if not as young as she believes—loves sex and herself. When Rose Nylund isn’t sharing Scandinavian aphorisms, she’s blurring the line between innocent and dense. Sophia Petrillo, a generation older than the others, rages against the cruelties of aging. Then there’s Dorothy Zbornak, Sophia’s daughter, the Golden Girl with whom you’ve always identified, and not only because of your shared decades as English teachers. Most of the show’s punchlines boil down to Blanche’s promiscuity, Sophia’s age, Rose’s naiveté, and Dorothy’s unattractiveness, but you’ve always seen more in Dorothy. Her sarcasm and caustic takes at the expense of other characters remind you of your own quips dating back to elementary school. Rewatching the series in college, you sympathized with the gauntlet of medical tests Dorothy endures to diagnose a rare illness several of her doctors haven’t even heard of.

After the failure of your second marriage, another difference between Dorothy and her roommates resonates. Dorothy seems, more than the others, desperate for love. Blanche and Rose consider their share of marriage proposals, but Blanche seems content with physical connection, Rose with companionship. When eighty-something Sophia remarries her husband’s old business partner, it’s her late husband she really wants.

A successful marriage, as the joke goes, ends with one of the two spouses dying. Sophia, Blanche, and Rose are all widows. Dorothy alone is divorced. The laughs Dorothy’s ex-husband, Stanley Zbornak, provides throughout the series tend to obscure how awful a husband he was. Sophia, Blanche, and Rose might have lost their husbands, but they have memories of happy marriages. Dorothy spent thirty-eight years with a man who cheated on her multiple times. His marriage proposal when they were teenagers came after he got her pregnant on their first date.

***

You exchange messages with the new girl two days after the date, but the unbridled enthusiasm from Friday night is missing online. Turns in the conversation suggest you might have misread her first message, the one you took as an invitation to ask her out.

“I’m not saying you misread anything,” she says, disclosing that her break-up is more recent than she led you to believe, weeks rather than months. She would love to hang out again, but that’s all she is able to do.

Same, you think but do not say. The new girl says things she feels. You are not someone who says things he feels. You write things, but you do not say things. You are an only child who listened more than spoke; when you were growing up, people in your rural area did not share their thoughts and emotions; you spent fifteen years not talking about your blindness and removing yourself from any situation where it might be noticed. More than anyone you’ve ever met, the new girl makes you want to talk, but you’ve probably said too much already.

For what it’s worth, you’ve never been more certain that someone was not rejecting you because of your blindness. You weren’t sure if she knew after the party. You weren’t sure if she knew about your separation either, but mutual friends apparently filled her in. As for your disability, someone at the party had mentioned your memoir, prompting the new girl to google you.

Every time you back away, put the ball in her court, she sends you a text. You offer to make her dinner, a risky move, but she accepts. Fortune favors the bold, your best friend once told you, though he was explaining which title for your new novel he preferred.

Dinner leads to a Saturday night production of Othello at the university where you teach, her idea, and speaking of bold, wine after Othello leads to your first kiss.

“Are we doing this?” the new girl asks, smiling slightly as your faces draw closer.

But your lips feel confused, hers and yours, actors on stage who have forgotten their lines. The first kiss does not lead to a second.

***

Endings are hard. Most television shows don’t get a bona fide finale, are canceled unceremoniously after low ratings. Some shows start strong and fade over time, as was the case with your second marriage, you suppose. Shows lucky enough to get a sendoff often disappoint, the finale too preoccupied with good-byes to give viewers a satisfying episode.

Many series overstay their welcome, and the finale is little more than a perfunctory wave. This is not the case with The Golden Girls, although one could call it guilty by association. Blanche, Rose, and Sophia tried to make a go of it in a spin-off, Golden Palace, but three-fourths of The Golden Girls was not The Golden Girls.

Sitcom finales are especially tough. It’s tempting to abandon laughs for sentimentality, a fate The Golden Girls avoids with irreverent humor until the very end. But eventually there is an end. There has to be.

***

The first kiss with the new girl did not lead to a second, but the next week you’re eating dinner together at your favorite Indian restaurant. Later, she reaches for your hand on your sofa while you talk until the small hours of the morning. Conversation with her feels like the best video game you’ve ever played.

You’re holding hands again on the walk home from dinner two nights later, but she doesn’t come inside. One of her two cats might be sick. She hugs you twice before getting into her car.

You’re leaving in the morning for a weeklong conference in Seattle. It feels too presumptuous, too hopeful, to make plans for when you get back.

“I’ll see you next week,” you say.

“Inshallah,” she says.

“What does that mean?”

“Sorry. It means God willing.”

“Inshallah,” you say.

***

How many dozens of men has Dorothy Zbornak dated over the course of seven seasons? The married gym teacher wouldn’t leave his wife, no matter how unhappily married he had been for decades. Certainly she never seriously considered the sculptor or soap opera star after their passes at Blanche and Rose; ditto the priest or FBI agent on stakeout at the girls’ house, or her old English teacher, or Ted Zbornak, Stan’s younger brother, Dorothy’s former brother-in-law, but her heart breaks all the same when Ted chooses, like Stan before him, a younger woman. Dorothy thinks her lawyer beau is about to propose, and what a lovely couple they would make, but his big news is that he’s leaving law to become a clown. And how many times does Dorothy consider giving Stan another chance?

You don’t watch sitcoms for what will happen next. You watch sitcoms because nothing ever happens. No episode will disturb the comfortable order of the previous week. Characters on sitcoms don’t have to change, but endings need closure.

***

You text each other while you’re in Seattle. Busy as you are, your pulse flutters whenever your pocket buzzes with a new message. She texts you from the pet pharmacy, updates you on how poorly her cat is eating.

By the last day of the conference, you’re still jetlagged and pass up an offer to grab drinks. You’re climbing into bed when she texts to ask if you’re awake. It’s only nine in Seattle, midnight her time. You talk on the phone for four hours. The vet is coming in the morning to euthanize her cat. An hour before you hang up, the new girl says,

“I miss you.”

“I miss you, too,” you say after some hesitation. It couldn’t be more true. You haven’t shut up about her all week. Your hesitation is only fear.

Next Saturday, you have her over for dinner again, this time risotto. Before she arrives, pancetta sets off the fire alarm. Your building has the kind that summons the fire department. If you believed in omens, evacuating your apartment might be a bad one. If you believed in omens, you might have told the new girl that Whitesnake’s “Is This Love?” was playing on your phone the last time she texted.

After dinner, she lays her head in your lap.

“I’m thinking you should kiss me again,” she says.

You smile. You don’t know what to say, but she always does. You kiss her for the second time.

It’s different from the first kiss, familiar and completely new. The second kiss leads to a third.

***

In the hourlong series finale, Blanche’s uncle, Lucas, is in town. Blanche has a date, typical Blanche, and pawns Lucas off on Dorothy. She lies about a mutual crush, convincing them to go out. When they realize what Blanche has done, they plot revenge. Dorothy and Lucas pretend to fall for each other, shocking Blanche with a fake engagement.

Except, Dorothy and Lucas really do fall for each other.

“Dorothy, will you marry me for real?”

“For real?”

“For real.”

But Dorothy’s wedding means closing the chapter on these last seven years. The girls’ time together seems even longer for everything they’ve been through: health scares, the loss of loved ones, entire lives relived over cheesecake at the kitchen table. Dorothy delays good-bye as long as possible, bursting through the door for a second and third farewell. Blanche is in tears. Rose is in tears. Sophia has decided to stay with them and give Dorothy a fresh start. She couldn’t be happier for her daughter, but she, too, is in tears.

“You’ll always be my sisters,” Dorothy says through her own tears and exits one more time. Her new life awaits.

The other three glance expectantly at the door, drawing one final laugh from the audience, but Dorothy does not come back.

“No feeling is final,” writes Rilke in a poem the new girl, now your fiancée, reads you one evening. She means how sad you both were when you met.

But what about love? Can’t that feeling be final?

The show has ended. After a lifetime of longing, Dorothy Zbornak has found real love. Rose and Blanche will always be her sisters, and Dorothy will always be happy.