Lights in the Darkness
Laurie Frankel’s One Two Three is the story of Mab, Monday, and Mirabel Mitchell, triplets (they call themselves One, Two, and Three) in the town of Bourne, which was ruined before they were born by a chemical plant that poisoned their water. Townspeople got sick and died, including their father, and the girls themselves were affected at varying degrees of intensity in utero. Their mother has devoted her life to a futile attempt at making the plant pay. But when the girls are 16, a new family moves to town to start a very old story all over again, and now the girls each have to decide how to define right and wrong, how revenge is best served, and how best to play the hand that has been dealt to them.
I strongly identified with their mother, Nora, in her fight for what’s right against the plant. Right and wrong often feel so black and white to me. I am enraged by injustice and by selfishness...and sometimes blinded to the existence of these things in my own life and actions. Events lately have left me really struggling to see past the end of my nose, and to imagine how it is anything but right to be angry with the people who disagree with me.
By the end of the book, I was reminded of what I used to tell my students: it’s hard to hate somebody you know. While I disagreed with the stance of the chemical plant owners, after knowing some of them and their motivations, it was hard to dismiss them out of hand, and it was impossible to argue with the decisions made by many of the townspeople, although I’d like to think they weren’t the decisions I would have made. I thought about the things I’ve been so angry about and remembered again that the people who have enraged me the most are people just like me. They have fears and families and lives that matter. Seeing others as people I know is a good step toward loving them.
The other big thing that I couldn’t stop thinking about while I read is from the Bible: love is also about turning the other cheek. When their neighbors and friends made different choices, and when Mab, Monday, and Mirabel made choices that were in conflict with each other, the easy thing to do would be to hurl the anger at the others, to batter them with it until they broke, and the story naturally had its share of anger. But love says, “Your choice hurts me, and you are my neighbor anyway.” I’m not great at this, and the characters in the book aren’t great at it, but it’s what they were reaching for, and it made me want to reach harder too.
One Two Three is a book I will be turning over in my mind for a long time. The things that happen to us aren’t fair. But we are each lights in the darkness, lit by the bravery of our souls to exist in a fallen world, and when we team up, even when it feels more natural to avoid working together, our single lights become a torch that makes it possible for everyone to see and to move forward.