Fortune Cookie

We live in a fragile world, it seems.  Each week I receive a chain letter via email from one extremely intelligent friend or another, promising sunny outcomes and miraculous good fortune if I will simply forward it on to 25 others.  If I break the chain, I do so at my peril—disasters of major proportions will certainly ensue, not only for myself but for the all the others who took pains to forward the letter before it arrived in my inbox. White magic, black magic, each chain letter is a talisman against the complexities of the unknown. Anne, a woman who has a doctorate in early childhood education, apologizes along with the forbidding email, like so many others who have sent similar missives, “I don’t really believe this stuff, but felt I had to pass this one along. Just in case.”

In case of what?  In case, I suppose, it turns out we exist at the mercy of impossibly fickle gods and goddesses, who require us to spam one another on a regular basis. Or a world so frail and unknowable that a cheap virtual life preserver might just come in handy against a cataclysmic event.

I wished on stars when I was small, and I still think it’s a nice habit, a tiny act of  faith. I throw pennies in fountains and wishing wells, amazed to gaze down through murky water to the copper-covered bottom, revealing all the sparkling testaments of my fellow believers winking up at me in the sunlight. On birthdays past, I’ve never been able to blow out a candle without making a silent mental request, maybe for world peace, or just for Ruth’s brother to ask her for my phone number.
We don’t know how faith works, or if it works. Long ago I held parties in a lovingly appointed house in the Berkeley hills with a sweeping view of the bay. Once I dressed up as a fairy godmother in a white satin dress and silver heels, a sparkly dime-store halo on my head and a be-ribboned magic wand in hand to wave over my guests.

“Make a wish,” I told a shy woman standing by the wine table. “Don’t tell me what it is or it won’t come true.”  I smiled until she smiled back, and then waved the wand over her head. Soon I had a line of men and women waiting earnestly to get their wishes anointed. No one ever dared divulge to me what they hoped for, so as not to spoil the magic. Wishes are wishes; someone might be up there granting them this very night.

The last party held at the Keeler Street house was a humdinger. Dolores showed up with a ladder to help me tack strands of delicate white lights and colorful streamers along the ceiling edges, and Emily popped in a couple of hours early in a red silk dress, with Brie, bourbon and baguettes spilling from her arms. There was no precise occasion to celebrate, just an impulse to take the chill off a winter week and dance and flirt and drink. Maybe I knew somehow that I’d be moving soon, would have to bid a reluctant goodbye to the striking three-bridge view, the French doors which opened from the patio onto a cavernous living room, the huge old-fashioned kitchen.  

At least 80 people were en route to this celebration—ex-boyfriends and friends-of-friends and someone’s theater troupe and a group of guys from Silicon Valley who’d heard about the party at work. When I scanned the burgeoning list I’d made of the people who’d promised to come, I saw to my dismay that there were far too many single men. I desperately needed more women to balance out the equation, or we’d have too few on the dance floor and too many at the beer cooler.
As luck would have it, a colleague from Hospice called on a work matter just as I was frantically rifling through my address book with pesto-covered fingers.

“Rose! I must’ve mentioned there’s a party tonight? What are you still doing at work? I hope you’re planning to join us!” Dolores, stirring a pitcher of margaritas next to me, raised her eyebrows, and I grimaced at the horrifyingly syrupy tone in my voice. Having deliberately steered clear of inviting people from my office, now I was pretending it was only an oversight. But the last-minute phone invitation netted spectacular results. Rose would come, and Sheila and Marlys from Human Resources, and Debbie from Patient Relations; at least five nurses would swing by as well when they’d finished their shifts.

The evening was magical, by anyone’s standards. Under the glow of the soft strings of lights, wine was poured, laughter billowed up and beyond the French doors onto the candle-lit patio, dancing began in high heels and continued barefoot long into the early morning.  My ex-boyfriend’s debonair friend Tom, an incorrigible ladies’ man, surreptitiously eyed Debbie from Patient Relations from his spot on the sofa and brought her a chocolate fortune cookie from the bowl on the table by way of introduction. She received it, grinning, almost as if she already knew what it would say.

Flash forward a few years to the christening of their second child. Tom looks much as he did at his wedding—vulnerable and handsome and awestruck at his luck. He still can’t take his eyes off his wife, the woman who chose him when he couldn’t choose anyone, the woman who almost didn’t come to the party at all.

Picture Debbie and Tom. Picture a blank fortune cookie with a marvelous unexpected message which only you can read and only you can trust. Forward to 25 people you know, or just once to yourself. Nothing bad will happen if you don’t.

Stacy Appel is a writer in California whose work has been featured in the Chicago Tribune and other publications.  She has also written for National Public Radio.

~Stacy Appel