“In Which She Is Involuntarily Successful”

It started ordinarily enough. Most things do, anyway, despite what some books would have you believe. Those books start abruptly, desperate to capture and hold attention; fighting such easy diversions as facebook, television and myspace. Even google satellite maps can be diverting in dire circumstances. In this case however, the plot wouldn’t thicken any considerable amount until chapter two. This, as you know, is chapter one.

It was December, and it was cold. This was ordinary. It was very cold, and so were the people waiting for the bus. They were cold, but especially were their fingers and noses and toes cold. It was a climate harsh on extremities. It was a climate in which a torso was glad to be a torso. But when it’s really very cold, even a torso wishes to be indoors under several blankets. Layers of sweaters and coats cannot suffice when conditions reach what they are wont to do in cold harsh winters.

One girl at the bus stop was set apart from the other prospective passengers by the fact that her destination was a massive, expensive house. Not to imply that the other passengers were necessarily impoverished. They had college educations, some of them. They had jobs that were just starting to enable them to save up and become independent of the public transportation system, some of them. We cannot rule out that some of them might have had cars in the shop and that was why they were obliged to take the bus in the frigid month of December. Maybe some of them just enjoyed the fraternity of their fellow citizens. But only one of them lived in the biggest house that wasn’t quite in town.

For a crowd waiting for the bus, they were a remarkably fit and healthy group of people. They were also a small group. Eight very cold, but relatively healthy people. This was because persons with weak constitutions, no matter how generous of heart, cannot afford to be out in certain kinds of weather, even if to buy Christmas presents.

Now, why was she, possessor of large house, obliged to take the bus in the frigid later days of the month of December? Was her car in the shop? Had you asked her, she would have pulled trembling gloved fingers out of coat pockets and pulled a woolen scarf away down from her nose and mouth in order to answer you. She would have wistfully sighed, maybe be distracted by her frozen breath for a moment and then perhaps reply that she wished her car was in the shop. She could not meet the expense of owning a car, and she was rather fond of speaking in italics.

The house was inherited from her late uncle. The kind of uncle in those abrupt books who is always conveniently dying and leaving unsuspecting and deserving relatives (who had perhaps never met this uncle, or never knew they had an uncle) large sums of money, or as in this case, houses too big to do anything with. Unlike those other cases, she had known her uncle, and even had great affection for him. Maybe she wasn’t overly deserving, but hers was a small family, and at the age of twenty three she was sole relative to the old man.

In life he had had heaps of money in addition to the grand house, but the large majority of these heaps he left to various charities. His niece was not financially well off, but she was certainly not starving, and if she chose to sell the house she would have a large chunk of change in addition to the several thousand he left her.

But she found herself unable to sell the house. So she used the money for utilities and general huge house upkeep.

When she came to town for the funeral service, and stayed in the house with a few of her uncle’s former business partners and former friends and then found that the house was hers, she knew she could not go back to her unfriendly flat. This house was something. This house was worth looking for a new job. This house was worth starting over in a new town. Again. This house was worth taking a forty-five minute bus ride to the city.

She thought about the situation, and it occurred to her that success was measured unconsciously by most people in spurts of possessions and acquisitions. Cars, apartments, educations and degrees, honed skills, jobs, spouses, families. Certainly houses were later on most people’s success meters, but wasn’t a house more important than a car? Before she hadn’t had a car or a house, and now she had a fatty, huge, house. She had skipped a step on the success meter. (Kind of a vital step, but she promptly ignored this thought.)

She was not an overly ambitious individual. She had put herself through college, and supported herself and wanted a better job by and by, but deep down she was a lazy soul. She wasn’t really having fun unless she wasn’t doing much. So she had never thought about the success meter before. She wasn’t an enthused climber of the corporate ladder, but when success was thrust upon one, one smiled and was grateful.

She smiled gratefully.