Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

  I woke before Sam and lay in my bed in the cool, white adobe room, filled with memories of my first day there the year before. I remembered calling Pammy and my lover that first morning, how they gasped with pleasure to hear my voice. I lay there thinking this time that I had made a dreadful mistake to return, that I was not ready to laugh or play or even relax, and I wondered whether God had yet another rabbit He or She could pull out of the hat. Then my Oedipal little son woke up and hopped over to my bed. He patted my face for a while and said tenderly, “You’re a beautiful girl.”

  The year before, when I dropped him off at the thatched child-care unit, we’d walk holding hands, and on the way he’d cry out joyfully, “Hi, Sky, my name is Sam. I yike you,” because he couldn’t say his l’s. “Hi, Yeaf,” he’d say happily to the leaves, “my name is Sam. I yike you.” It seemed very long ago. This year he looked at me all the time like a mournful fiancé and said, “I want to kiss you on the yips.”

  On the third day in Mexico, Tom told me that Jung said, sometime after his beloved wife died, “It cost me a great deal to regain my footing. Now I am free to become who I truly am.” And this is God’s own truth: The more often I cried in my room in Ixtapa and felt just generally wretched, the more often I started to have occasional moments of utter joy, of feeling aware of each moment shining for its own momentous sake. I am no longer convinced that you’re supposed to get over the death of certain people, but little by little, pale and swollen around the eyes, I started to feel a sense of reception, that I was beginning to receive the fact of Pammy’s death, the finality. I let it enter me.

  I was terribly erratic, some moments feeling so holy and serene that I was sure I was going to end up dating the Dalai Lama. Then the grief and craziness would hit again, and I would be in Broken Mind, back in the howl.

  The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it, like a nicotine craving, I would discover that it hadn’t washed me away. After a while it was like an inside shower, washing off some of the rust and calcification in my pipes. It was like giving a dry garden a good watering.

  Don’t get me wrong: grief sucks, it really does. Unfortunately, though, avoiding it robs us of life, of the now, of a sense of living spirit. Mostly I have tried to avoid it by staying very busy, working too hard, achieving as much as possible. You can often avoid the pain by trying to fix other people; shopping helps in a pinch, as does romantic obsession. Martyrdom can’t be beat. While too much exercise works for many people, it doesn’t for me, although I have found that a stack of magazines can be numbing and even mood-altering. The bad news is that whatever you use to keep the pain at bay robs you of the flecks and nuggets of gold that feeling grief will give you. A fixation can keep you nicely defined and give you the illusion that your life has not fallen apart. But since your life may indeed have fallen apart, the illusion won’t hold up forever, and if you are lucky and brave, you will want to bear disillusion. You begin to cry and writhe and yell and then to keep on crying; and finally, grief ends up giving you the two best gifts: softness and illumination.

  Every afternoon when I’d pick Sam up at the kids’ club, it was as if he’d spent the day in a workshop on Surviving the Loss of Your Mother. When I’d appear Lazarus-like to take him back to our room, his joy was huge. We always stopped to watch the iguanas that gathered on the grass near the lagoon, the giant adults like something out of Jurassic Park, the babies from Dr. Seuss. They were so wonderfully absurd and antediluvian that it was like communion among you and them and something ancient.

  We spent a lot of time in our room, too. It was air-conditioned. Sam, so solemn and watchful, frequently brought up the last time he had seen Pammy, on Halloween, three days before she died. He was dressed as a sea monster, and he sat on her bed and they sang “Frère Jacques” together. He went over and over the facts of the evening: “She was in her jammies?” “Yes.” “I was in my sea monster costume?” “That’s right.”

  I thought a lot about the effect of Pammy’s death on Sam, my own stunned attempts with that, the worry he voiced every few days that if Rebecca’s mother could die, then wasn’t it possible that his could, too? I somehow felt that all I had to offer was my own willingness to feel bad. I figured that eventually the tectonic plates inside me would shift, and I would feel a lessening of the pain. Trying to fix him, or distract him, or jolly him out of his depression would actually be a disservice. I prayed for the willingness to let him feel sad and displaced until he was able to stop slogging through the confusion and step back into the river of ordinariness.

  The sun beat down, the hours passed slowly to the drone of the air conditioner. I kept starting to cry and then falling asleep. Sometimes grief looks like narcolepsy.

  One afternoon in our room I had been crying a little, while Sam dozed in his own bed. Then I fell deeply asleep. I woke much later to find Sam standing by my bed, tugging at my sleeve, looking at me earnestly with his huge googly extraterrestrial eyes. He cleared his throat and then said something I guess he must have heard on TV. He said, “Excuse me, mister.”

  It made my heart hurt. I thought I was going to die. In “Song of Myself,” Whitman wrote, “To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.”

  There was a man at the resort with a prosthetic leg. I’d seen it lying around by the pool a few times before I actually saw him, and when I did, he was climbing a trapeze ladder in the circus grounds. Circus school was held at the resort every afternoon at three, on the lawn between the haciendas and the beach, using an elaborate rig of ropes and swings and netting. The man, whose name turned out to be Steve, was wearing shorts, and his stump was visible an inch or two below the hemline—and I’ve got to say that this kicked the shit out of my feeling self-conscious in shorts because of my cellulite and stretch marks.

  He climbed the ladder with disjointed grace, asymmetrical but not clumsy, rung by rung, focused and steady and slow. Then he reached the platform, put on his safety harness, and swung out over the safety net, his one leg hooked over the bar of the trapeze as he swung back and forth, finally letting go. A teacher on the other trapeze swung toward him, and they caught each other’s hands and held on, and swung back and forth for a while. Then the man dropped on his back to the safety net and raised his fist in victory. “Yes!” he said, and lay there on the net for a long time, looking at the sky with a secret smile.

  I approached him shyly at lunch the next day and said, “You were great on the trapeze. Are you going to do it again?” And I had this idea that he might, so that I could do some serious writing about spirit and guts and triumph. But all he said was, “Honey, I got much bigger mountains to climb.”

  Life does not seem to present itself to me for my convenience, to box itself up nicely so I can write about it with wisdom and a point to make before putting it on a shelf somewhere. Now, at this stage of my life, I understand just enough about life to understand that I do not understand much of anything. You show me a man with one leg climb up a trapeze ladder, and the best I can do is to tell you that when I saw him, he was very focused and in a good mood.

  The next day I saw his plastic leg lying on a beach towel at the far end of the beach, where the windsurfing lessons take place. Oh dear, I thought. The shoelace of the expensive sneaker on the foot of the plastic leg was untied. I went and tied it, and then sat down in the sand. I really wanted to ask how he’d lost his leg and how he got back on his feet, when one was now made of plastic. I remembered how, a few months before Pammy died, we read a line by the great Persian mystical poet Rumi: “Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.” Pammy and I talked at the time of a sunken ship on the bottom of the ocean, full of jewels and gold; it was there in the heightened sense of existence and of the sacred that we felt in the midst of the devastation of her illness. It was there in the incredible sense of immediacy and joy we had felt some days toward the end, cruisi
ng malls and parks, Pammy in her wheelchair, wearing a wig, lashing me with a blue silken scarf to go faster. I sat on the beach hoping to see the man again, thinking of how much we lose yet how much remains, but it was getting late and I needed to go pick up Sam, and I left before Steve returned.

  My new friend Pat had gone snorkeling almost every afternoon and loved it more than any other activity, although because of her weight it was impossible for her to climb back into the boat unaided. On the day before we left Mexico, I decided to give it a try. The snorkel boat left at three in the afternoon and took a group of people to a cove twenty minutes across the bay. Over lunch, though, I started to chicken out, until Pat said I had to go, that we couldn’t be friends if I didn’t. “Then tell me what you love most about it,” I said. She thought for a while, and a faraway, almost sensuous look came over her face. “I like picking out the guys who are going to help push my big, wet, slippery body back up the ladder onto the boat,” she said slowly.

  Tom and I ended up going together. The little cove was hidden around the corner from a beach with grass huts and umbrellas on the white sands; cactuses on the ancient neighboring hills framed it all. We donned our gear and jumped in. The water is not crystal clear, and there are not a million brilliantly colored fish to watch, but if there is a heaven—and I think there really may be one—it may be similar to snorkeling: dreamy, soft, bright, quiet.

  At first my breath underwater sounded labored and congested, like the Keir Dullea character’s in 2001: A Space Odyssey when he’s in the pod outside the mother ship. I floated off by myself. Then, in the silence, I felt for a while as if I were breathing along with everything in the world. It is such a nice break from real life not to have to weigh anything. Beautiful plants swayed in the current; funny little fish floated past.

  I daydreamed about Pammy. Near the end she said of her young daughter, “All I have to do to get really depressed is to think about Rebecca, and all I have to do to get really joyful is to think about Rebecca.” I floated around slowly, crying; the mask filled up with tears—I could have used a windshield wiper. I felt very lonely. I thought maybe I wouldn’t feel so bad if I didn’t have such big pieces of Pammy still inside me, but then I thought, I want those pieces in me for the rest of my life, whatever it costs me. So I floated along, still feeling lonely but now not quite so adrift. I starting thinking of Pat, big and fat and comfortable enough to wear a swimsuit in front of us. I laughed, remembering what she’d said about the ladder, and I accidentally swallowed water. I watched the small fish swim in and out of the feathery sea plants, and I thought of beautiful, wild, happy Rebecca. This made my heart hurt, too, yet I felt a little lighter inside. And just then Tom came paddling over, and I was aware of his presence beside me although I couldn’t actually see his face, and for the longest time we lay there bobbing on the water’s surface, facedown, lost in our own worlds, barely moving our fins, side by side.

  Forgiven

  I went around saying for a long time that I am not one of those Christians who are heavily into forgiveness—that I am one of the other kind. But even though it was funny, and actually true, it started to be too painful to stay this way. They say we are punished not for the sin but by the sin, and I began to feel punished by my unwillingness to forgive. By the time I decided to become one of the ones who are heavily into forgiveness, it was like trying to become a marathon runner in middle age; everything inside me either recoiled, as from a hot flame, or laughed a little too hysterically. I tried to will myself into forgiving various people who had harmed me directly or indirectly over the years—four former Republican presidents, three relatives, two old boyfriends, and one teacher in a pear tree—it was “The Twelve Days of Christmas” meets Taxi Driver. But in the end I could only pretend that I had forgiven them. I decided I was starting off with my sights aimed too high. As C. S. Lewis says in Mere Christianity, “If we really want to learn how to forgive, perhaps we had better start with something easier than the Gestapo.”

  So I decided to put everyone I’d ever lived with, slept with, or been reviewed by on hold, and to start with someone I barely knew whom I had hated only for a while.

  I’d had an enemy—an Enemy Lite—for some time, the parent of a child in Sam’s first-grade class, although she was so warm and friendly that it might have astounded her to learn that we were enemies. But I, the self-appointed ethical consultant for the school, can tell you that it’s true. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew she was divorced and maybe lonely, but she also had mean eyes. In the first weeks of school she looked at me as if I were a Rastafarian draft-dodger type and then, over time, as if I were a dazed and confused alien space traveler. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I had a certain amount of trouble adjusting once Sam started first grade. I couldn’t seem to get the hang of things; there was too much to remember, too much to do. But Sam’s first-grade teacher was so kind and forgiving that I just didn’t trouble my pretty head about schedules, homework, spelling lists, and other sundry unpleasantries. Nor was I able to help out in the classroom much. There were all these mothers who were always cooking holiday theme-park treats for the class; they always drove the kids—including mine—on their field trips, and they seemed to read all the papers the school sent home, which I think is actually a little show-offy. Also, it gave them an unfair advantage. They knew, for instance, from the first day that Wednesdays were minimum days, with school out half an hour earlier than usual, and they flaunted it, picking up their kids at just the right time, week after week.

  I somehow managed to make it into October without figuring out this scheduling quirk.

  Finally, one Wednesday, I stopped by Sam’s classroom and found him—once again—drawing with his teacher. The teacher said gently, “Annie? Did you not know that school gets out half an hour early on Wednesdays?”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “Didn’t you get the papers the school mailed to you this summer?”

  I racked my brain, and finally I did remember some papers coming in the mail from school.

  And I remembered really meaning to read them.

  Sam sat there drawing with a grim, distant stare.

  Well, my enemy found out.

  She showed up two days later all bundled up in a down jacket, because it was cold and she was one of the parents who was driving the kids on a field trip. Now, this was not a crime against nature or me in and of itself. The crime was that below the down jacket she was wearing spandex bicycle shorts. She wears bicycle shorts nearly every day, and I will tell you why: because she can. She weighs about eighty pounds. She has gone to the gym almost every day since her divorce, and she does not have an ounce of fat on her body. I completely hate that in a person. I consider it an act of aggression against the rest of us mothers, who forgot to start working out after we had our kids.

  Oh, and one more thing: She still had a Ronald Reagan bumper sticker on her white Volvo, seven years after he left the White House.

  The day of the field trip she said sweetly, “I just want you to know, Annie, that if you have any other questions about how the classroom works, I’d really love to be there for you.”

  I smiled back at her. I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.

  It drove me to my knees. I prayed about it. I prayed because my son loves her son, and my son is so kind that it makes me want to be a better person, a person who does not hate someone just because she wears spandex bicycle shorts. I prayed for a miracle; I wrote her name down on a slip of paper, folded it up, and put it in the box that I use as God’s in-box. “Help,” I said to God.

  There wasn’t much noticeable progress for a while. I was asked to bake something for the farewell party on the last day of school. I couldn’t do it. I was behind in my work. Also, I was in a bad mood. But I at least went to the party, and I ate the delicious cookies my enemy
made, and we mingled a little, and I thought that this was progress. Then she had to go and wreck everything by asking, “Did you bake anything?”

  I don’t bake. I baked for school once and it was a bad experience. Sam was in kindergarten at the little Christian school he attended, and I baked a dozen cupcakes for his class Christmas party and set them out to cool. Sam and I went outside to sweep the AstroTurf. (Okay, okay, I also don’t garden.) Suddenly Sadie came tearing outside—our dog, who was so obedient and eager to please. But there was icing in the fur of her muzzle and a profoundly concerned look on her face. Oh my God, she seemed to be saying with her eyes: Terrible news from the kitchen!

  Sam looked at me with total disgust, like “You ignorant slut—you left the cupcakes out where the dog could get them.”

  The next morning I bought cupcakes at Safeway. Like I said: I don’t bake.

  I also don’t push Sam to read. There wasn’t much pressure for anyone to read in first grade, which was good because my kid was not reading. I mean, per se.

  My enemy’s child was reading proficiently, like a little John Kenneth Galbraith in a Spider-Man T-shirt. He is what is referred to as an “early reader.” Sam is a “late reader.” (Albert Einstein was a “late reader.” Theodore Kaczynski was an “early reader.” Not that I am at all defensive on the subject. Pas du tout.)

  Sam and this woman’s child were in the same second-grade class, too, and the next thing I knew, she had taken a special interest in Sam’s reading.

  She began the year by slipping me early first-grade books that she thought maybe Sam could read. And Sam could certainly read some of the words in these books. But I resented her giving them to us with a patronizing smile, as if to say her child would not be needing them because he was reading the new Joan Didion.

  I went to the God box. I got out the piece of paper with her name on it. I added an exclamation point. I put the paper back.