Breathing has never been my strong suit. I’ve never been very good at breathing. When I was young, I was afraid that if I stopped remembering to breathe, I’d have cardiac arrest. I was always much better at holding my breath for long periods of time, the length of the pool, or of the tunnel that leads to the Golden Gate Bridge. At the age of two, I used to hold my breath in public until I passed out. My first memory is of coming to on the planks of the boardwalk in Tiburon, my father nudging me from way high up, with his shoe. Then he reached down kindly and pulled me back to my feet. He had been dead several years before his sister told me that he used to hold his breath and pass out on the streets of Tokyo, where his parents were Presbyterian missionaries. I think he was a little angry: held breath is the ultimate withholding; you’re not taking anything in, you’re not putting anything out.
I am a little angry, too. I feel that we began witnessing the end of the world in Super SloMo once George W. Bush became president, and some days it takes everything I can muster not to lose my hope, my faith, and myself. One out of six women in my area is now being diagnosed with breast cancer. My son is in his teens, and I am in menopause: I have not felt this clueless and tired since Sam was a colicky baby. We are both more testy now on a regular basis, quicker to anger, and in my case, to weep and reevaluate the meaning of life. Sometimes I feel like the big possum who has been coming into our driveway lately, worried and waddly. I hear that the stress hormones possums produce are off the charts. Possums live only a few years in the wild. I suppose that if I had two penises and still fainted a lot, I’d be stressed to the max, too.
I am fifty, and have only now figured out why you are supposed to have babies when you are young: so that by the time your child is in his teens, one of you is stable some of the time, and you the mother are not racked with back pain and Alzheimer’s. Sam has grown tall and muscular. I have grown wider, stiff, and achy. I trip a lot and hit my head on cabinets I forgot were there. I get into the shower with my glasses on. And whereas I always had a slim waist, I suddenly have two stomachs—a regular tummy and another one below that, which I call the subcontinent. This older body is both amazingly healthy and a big disappointment.
Jack knotted a number of blessings into my cord last year when he tied it on my wrist, to protect me from the values and judgment of the world, from the disaster of my own thinking, and to allow me the forgetting of myself. I tug at the red cord constantly: it was an anointing of sorts, and I will take all the anointing I can get. My pastor, Veronica, explained recently that in the Twenty-third Psalm, when David says that his Shepherd anointed his head with oil, it referred to the fragrant oil a shepherd would put around his sheep’s mouths to prevent an infestation of flies. Otherwise, the flies would lay their eggs in the soft tissues of the sheep’s mouths, and when the eggs hatched, the sheep would go crazy, butting their heads against trees to dislodge the infestation. When my head is filled with worries and resentments, the cord helps me remember that I was anointed. I am safe, even when my cup is not exactly runneth-ing over.
I used my red string as an audiovisual aid last Sunday when I got to give the sermon at church. First I walked around, letting everyone see it. Then I spoke briefly about the red cords that gave us life, that connect us to our sources: the image of Christ’s blood, and the umbilical cord that stretched from my mother to me, and from Sam to me, cords carrying life. Then I moved on to the story of Rahab, from Joshua 2 in the Hebrew Bible, whose life was saved by a red cord. She was one of the bad girls of the Old Testament, a prostitute in Jericho, at the end of the Israelites’ wilderness journey. Joshua was their leader, Moses’ anointed successor. When Rahab’s story begins, Joshua and his army are camped on the River Jordan across from Jericho, which they are about to invade. He sends two spies into Jericho to find out how strong the opposing army is.
The spies want to blend in, so they go to stay with Rahab, the most infamous prostitute of her time, figuring that if they go to the local Travelodge, they’ll stick out, but that at Rahab’s, half the men in town will be there, and no one will notice them or say anything. It is like, “If I see you in New Orleans, I won’t see you in New Orleans.”
Rahab lives in an apartment built just inside the walls of Jericho, like a Pueblo or Anasazi dwelling; her windows are built into the outside wall.
The king’s spies visit Rahab’s—on official business, no doubt—and report to him that Joshua’s spies are staying with her. The king sends his soldiers to Rahab’s to demand that she turn over Joshua’s spies.
But word has it that the Israelites are under the protection of a loving God: everyone has heard about the Red Sea’s parting, and that God has cared for the Israelites in the harsh desert for forty years. In that dark and scary time, with war about to break out, and no standing in her own community, Rahab feels something in her heart that tells her to align herself with the people of God. So she lies to the king’s soldiers, and says that by the time the gate to the city was closed at dark the night before, the spies had already gotten away. Actually, she hid them on her roof, in stalks of flax.
Why did she hide them, since, by the calculus of the world, that act endangered her?
She did it because she was desperate, and so she listened to her heart. In my experience, there is a lot to be said for desperation—not exactly a bright side, but something expressed in words for which “God” could be considered an acronym: gifts of desperation. The main gift is a willingness to give up the conviction that you are right, and that God thinks so, too, and hates the people who are driving you crazy. Something spoke to Rahab through her heart, or through what Mel Brooks, in “The 2,000 Year Old Man,” refers to as the broccoli: “Listen to your broccoli, and your broccoli will tell you how to eat it.” Something told Rahab that if she aligned herself with the people who had been brought so far by faith, she would be safe as well. This gave her the radical conviction that she should be cared for. Rahab believed that God was trying to get her attention, and she listened.
I try to listen for God’s voice inside me, but my sense of discernment tends to be ever so slightly muddled. When God wants to get my attention, She clears Her throat a number of times, trying to get me to look up, or inward—and then if I don’t pay attention, She rolls Her eyes, makes a low growling sound, and starts kicking me under the table with Her foot.
Rahab got the spies of the Israelites to swear that if she didn’t rat them out, they would spare her and her family.
She let the spies out the window and down the wall by rope. And they gave her a red cord to tie in the window. They returned to tell Joshua their news; and Joshua moved his great army across the Jordan and, in the words of the old spiritual, fit the battle of Jericho. And the walls came a-tumblin’ down.
But Joshua’s soldiers saw the scarlet cord in Rahab’s window, and spared those she had gathered inside, and all because she turned to the spirit within her, the secret place that, as Robert Frost wrote, “sits in the middle and knows.” She went on to live a life of great honor, marrying an Israelite and becoming one of the four women mentioned in Matthew’s genealogy from Abraham to David to Jesus.
You’ve got to love this in a God—consistently assembling the motleyest people to bring, into the lonely and frightening world, a commitment to caring and community. It’s a centuries-long reality show—Moses the stutterer, Rahab the hooker, David the adulterer, Mary the homeless teenager. Not to mention all the mealy-mouthed disciples. Not to mention a raging insecure narcissist like me.
When I finished my sermon last Sunday, everyone clapped like mad, and I felt like Miss Spiritual America, with a red cord and an invisible tiara. I greeted everyone after the service with humility, ducking my head shyly and all but pawing the ground with my foot. A few of the older women teared up when they thanked me, remembering the wreck I’d been when I first started coming to St. Andrew, a year before I got sober.
Then I went home and had a huge fight with Sam.
It’s hard to imagine th
ings can get so ugly so quickly, just because the word “homework” has come up, but they do. I was savoring my morning in church, while making us sandwiches, when Sam innocently mentioned in passing that his science report was due the next day, but he had left his binder in his locker at school, and would automatically be docked a grade for lateness. He’d had a month to complete the assignment, he’d given me his word that he was on top of it, and I was furious.
I spluttered and fumed in the kitchen, and stormed down the hall to my own room, like a Cossack—or like my mother used to do when she headed down the hall to my older brother’s room to bellow at him because he hadn’t done his homework. I would flatten myself against the wall and stop breathing, or huddle in my younger brother’s room, trying to distract him from the chaos.
Sam shouted that I was turning out like my mother. He can always find the soft parts of me, where there is no turtle shell for protection.
I slammed the door and started hitting it with my fist. Then I lay facedown on the bed. The kitty tried to comfort me but accidentally started chewing the red cord off my wrist. Jack came into my mind. What would he do?
It’s hard to tell with him. Once I called to say hello, and he was making liver and onions. Usually he suggests that I be kind, and breathe, and take a walk. So I did.
It was drizzling outside, but I was so miserable and without a plan that I put on a raincoat, called Lily, my dog, and headed outside to the open-space hills behind my house. I go up there almost every day with Lily. It is a quiet and holy space. My family scattered my mother’s ashes there last year, two years after she died: it had taken me that long to stop being mad at her, for having been such a mess my whole life. On the hillside is a mysterious concrete piling where I like to sit when there is dew on the ground, or a mist, so my pants won’t get wet. I have a 360-degree view of my town and the mountain and the foothills. In the early morning, I can see the sun rise above the nearest suburb, and when I come at dusk, the sun sets out toward the farmlands of rural Marin and the Pacific Ocean. Your senses are bathed in smells and sounds and visions, whether you want to receive or not, because the only walls are the tall eucalyptus to the east. You feel unprotected and small and buffeted by the wind, and this defenselessness is a crack through which fresh air and water can enter.
I sat on the piling. The drizzle had stopped, but the air was still moist—a warm, windy spring evening. The willows, hectic in the wind, were sticklike and gray, their leaves not quite out, yet you could feel them pushing through.
I fiddled with my red cord, separating the rings of laundry lint: I can’t figure out how these rings could have formed on the cord, as I have never removed it; still, there are three knots, and seven rings of lint.
When he finished tying it, Jack said that the cord was my new transcript. “You have gotten an A-plus, Annie, for your work during this life.” But Jack feels this way about everyone, and it almost ruins it for me that he thinks we are all doing so well with such difficult material as being alive, having parents, kids, bodies, minds, certain presidents.
All wise people say the same thing: that you are deserving of love, and that it’s all here now, everything you need. There’s the memoir by a Hindu writer, It’s Here Now (Are You?), and one of my priest friends says the exact same thing, so I think it must be true—that when you pray, you are not starting the conversation from scratch, just remembering to plug back into a conversation that’s always in progress.
There I sat on the hill, hands folded in my lap, eyes closed, and I started to relax. But then I made a cardinal mistake: I started to think about how holy I was acting, in the face of teenage contempt and shirking; how grown-up, spiritually, emotionally. And this pleased me.
And it was bad.
It was like, “Batter up!”
First the dogs arrived, three of them, from out of nowhere, barking at Lily and me until their owner stepped into the clearing and commanded them to be quiet. I smiled and waved, but closed my eyes so that she could see that I was in holiness mode. “It’s windy!” she cried. I opened my eyes. She had a walking stick, and looked like a shepherd, of bad dogs.
“What’s your dog’s name?” she shouted. I told her. “What kind of dog is she? Where’d she get those ears? Here, Lily! Here, girl.” The woman sounded like someone from the shouting Loud family, on the old Saturday Night Live.
I hung my head and smiled to myself.
“I forgot your name,” she shouted. I told her, and she waved and headed down the hillside. I closed my eyes, breathed in calm, and grass; and then, the pièce de résistance: the smell of dog shit filled my nose, sharp as ammonia, and foul.
God, I thought, self-righteously: This woman brings her barking dogs into this open space, and they shit all over everything, and she doesn’t clean up after them. I stood to move away, but when I looked down at the grass, there was nothing there. Then I looked at the sole of my shoe.
My entire childhood passed before my eyes—kids holding their noses in schoolyards, parents commanding us all out of the car, demanding that we check our feet. Nothing isolated you so instantly as having stinky heat-lines wafting visibly off your foot, like in the cartoons.
It’s a miracle that more of us didn’t shoot up our neighborhoods.
When I was young, I wore camel’s-hair coats when I took the bus to San Francisco with my mother to see the dentist, and then drown our sorrows in coffee-toffee cake at Blum’s. Back then everyone dressed up to go to the city. I wore patent-leather shoes and white gloves. I had a felt hat, with a red grosgrain ribbon around the brim, and tucked into that, a feather: can you imagine? Sam would die laughing if he could see how I dressed, like a rebellious Amish girl. But I felt so beautiful. However, not even finery, not even feathers, could protect you from dog shit. You’d instantly be stuck in a game of Chutes and Ladders, feeling beautiful and proud one moment, people holding their noses the next.
I got up and pawed the offending shoe against the wet grass, then sat down on the concrete piling and looked at my shoe. There was an enormous amount of doggage embedded in its elaborate treads.
Muttering, I searched for a stick in the grass, and once I found one, started picking out the shit, but it was pebbly, and stuck. Trying to dislodge it was like picking burnt batter out of a waffle iron.
It took forever. Then a light drizzle started up again. I kept at the sneaker, and two things happened: First, the project turned out to be strangely satisfying—I’m really good at this sort of work. And second, after a while I found myself in a state of joy. I was focused, and it was beautiful up there, and the shit was nearly entirely out of my shoe. That’s a lot. I don’t know why God won’t just spritz away our hardships and frustration. I don’t know why the most we can hope for on some days is to end up a little less crazy than before, less down on ourselves. I don’t know why we have to become so vulnerable before we can connect with God, and even sometimes with ourselves. But by the same token, I don’t understand how I got rings of laundry lint on my red cord.
I guess we’re simply not meant to understand some things. Bono, of U2, who is a Christian, says that his favorite song is “Amazing Grace” and his second favorite is “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” and most of the time, I have to let it go at that.
I prayed for Sam and me. And then I called for Lily and headed back home in the drizzle.
I took off my shoes outside the front door, because I wanted to wash the soles off. Sam’s shoes were on the front step, too, so muddy and worn that you might expect to find just one of them, at a flood site, or at low tide. This is how the guys wear them.
Sam was lying on the couch watching TV when I stepped in. I could tell he was still mad, because for a moment he did not look over. I closed the door behind me.
“I’m sorry I was awful,” I said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me sometimes. Everything gets to be too much, and I can’t breathe.”
He looked over in wounded silence. Then, as he actually saw me, there w
as an almost imperceptible shift in his face, as when he was a baby, first waking from a deep sleep: you could see his inside eyes open before he blinked awake, as if something inside him had floated to the surface from far away. “Look at you,” he said, amused, parental. “You’re all wet. Where you been? And where on earth are your shoes, dude?” Then he rubbed his forehead, wearily, but smiling, just like my mother used to do.
three
sam’s dad
We have recently returned from another holiday with Sam’s dad. It feels like a miracle to be able to say that, and it feels that way every time his father and I spend time together with Sam, watching him ski or draw or sleep. Because for me to be able to write that first sentence seemed, for the first seven years of Sam’s life, an impossibility. I want to tell you the story now, of how Sam and his father met, because in these dark and scary times, it always makes me feel hope again. I’ve said this before: When God is going to do something wonderful, He or She always starts with a hardship; when God is going to do something amazing, He or She starts with an impossibility.
I have written about being a single mother but have rarely mentioned Sam’s father, except in a memoir of Sam’s first year, where I said things that made me sound perhaps a little victimized by and merciless toward his father. In early December 1988, I got pregnant by a man named John, whom I had been dating, in the biblical sense. We did not sit around all day making moo-goo-gai-pan eyes at each other, but we hung out and loved to talk and go to movies and libraries. It was very nice. Then I got pregnant, and John, who already had two grown children, was ready for independence and travel, while I was ready to have a baby. I was thirty-four and could not face more abortions, and my eggs were getting old, like eggs you’d get at the 7-Eleven. I decided to have the baby, and everything between John and me turned to shit, and he went his way and I went mine.