Plan B (17 page)

 

L
ast year I was invited to Park City, Utah, to give some lectures just after Easter, and I scammed a free ski week out of the deal. Sam invited his friend Tony, and I invited my friend Sue Schuler. She was a great companion, younger than I but already wise; cheeky, gentle, blonde, full of life—and jaundiced, emaciated, dying of cancer.

She said yes. She had always loved to ski, and was a graceful daredevil on the slopes. I started skiing only six years ago, and tend to have balance and steering problems. I fall fairly often, and flounder getting up, but I
enjoy the part between the spills, humiliations, and abject despair—sort of like real life.

No one in Sue's family, including Sue herself, was sure whether she'd be able to ski, or whether she would make the trip at all. But I was. No one could have known that she would die only one month after my invitation. I thought that if she saw those Wasatch Mountains, she'd at least want to try. I invited her because otherwise I was never going to see her again—she had cancer of the everything by then—and because she was distraught on Easter when I called to say hello. I felt she ought to have one last great Easter before she died. That would make up for a lot. Easter is so profound. Christmas was an afterthought in the early Church, the birth not observed for a few hundred years. But no one could help noticing the resurrection: “Spring is Christ,” Rumi said, “martyred plants rising up from their shrouds.” Easter says that love is more powerful than death; bigger than the dark, bigger than cancer, bigger than airport security lines.

Sue said yes, she'd meet me in Park City.

I'd met her about a year before, over the phone, through her sister, an old friend of mine. Barb was a sort of matchmaker, who recognized kindred souls in me and Sue, believers who loved to laugh. Barb had known me
when I walked my friend Pammy through her last year of life. Call me crazy, but I did not immediately want to be friends with another dying blonde babe just then. But I felt God's hand in this, or at any rate, God's fingers on the Rolodex, flipping through names to find a last-ditch, funny, left-wing Christian friend for Sue.

It was March 2001. The wildflowers weren't in bloom yet; the bulbs hadn't opened. A month before she called me for the first time, Sue had been told that tumors had developed in her liver and lungs. She had been in a deep depression for a while, but she finally followed Barb's advice to call me after various people at her church kept saying that she could be happy—she was going home to be with Jesus. This is the type of thing that gives Christians a bad name. This, and the Inquisition. Sue wanted to open fire on them all. I think I encouraged this.

Some of her evangelical friends had insisted sorrowfully that her nieces wouldn't get into heaven, since they were Jews, as was one of her sisters. I told her what I believe to be true—that there was not one chance in a million that the nieces wouldn't go to heaven, and if I was wrong, who would even want to go? I promised that if there was any problem, she and I would refuse to go. We'd organize.

“What kind of shitty heaven would that be, anyway?” she asked.

That was the beginning of our friendship, which unfolded over a year and some change, a rich condensed broth of affection and loyalty, because there was no time to lose. I couldn't believe how beautiful Sue was when we met face to face: I hadn't expected that earthy, dark irreverence to belong to such a beauty. She started coming to my church soon after, and we talked on the phone regularly. I had one thing to offer, which is that I would just listen. I did not try to convince her that she could mount one more offensive against the metastases. I could hear her, hear the fear, and her spirit. Sue had called on New Year's Day 2002 in tears, to say she knew she was dying.

I listened for a long time; she went from crushed to defiant. “I have what
everyone
wants,” she said. “But no one would be willing to pay.”

“What do you have?”

“The two most important things. I got forced into loving myself. And I'm not afraid of dying anymore.”

She got sicker and sicker. It was unfair—I wanted to file a report with the Commission on Fairness; and I still want to ask God about this when we meet. That someone so lovely and smart and fabulous was going to die, and
that horrible people, whom I will not name, would live forever—it broke your heart. At the same time, she had so much joy. She loved her family, her friends, and eating. She ate like a horse. I have never known a woman who could put it away like Sue. Her body was stick-thin, and on top of that, the skin on one leg was reptilian, with twenty-two skin grafts from her knees up past her hips, which she'd needed upon contracting a flesh-eating disease at a hospital after one of her countless cancer surgeries.

I ask you.

This business of having been issued a body is deeply confusing—it's another thing I'd like to bring up with God. Bodies are so messy, and disappointing. Every time I see the bumper sticker that says, “We think we're humans having spiritual experiences, but we're really spirits, having human experiences,” (a) I think it's true, and (b) I want to ram the car.

Sue and I met one last time on the Thursday after Easter 2002 in Park City, to celebrate the holiday privately, a week late. We shared a king-size bed in the condominium. Sam and his friend Tony took the other bedroom, reducing it to Pompeii within an hour. Then, their work completed, they shook us down for sushi money and headed out for the wild street life of Park City.

The thing about Easter is that Jesus comes back from the dead both resurrected and broken, with the wounds from the nails still visible. People needed to see that it really did happen, the brutality, the human death. He came back with a body—not like Casper or Topper; he didn't come back as the vague idea of a spirit returning. No, it was physical, a wounded body. He had lived, he had died; and then you could touch him, and he could eat; and these four things are as bodily as life gets.

The first thing Sue and I did was to locate an Easter Week service online, and we followed it to the book. Well, sort of, in the reform sense of “followed” and “book.” That night we celebrated Maundy Thursday, when Jesus had Passover with his disciples before his arrest and gave them all communion. We used Coca-Cola for wine, and Pepperidge Farm Goldfish for the bread, broken in remembrance of him.

Then we washed each other's feet. Jesus had washed his disciples' feet, to show that peace was not about power; it was about love and gentleness, and being of service. Washing Sue's feet was scary. I did not feel like Jesus. I felt very nervous. I don't even like to wash my own feet. We put some soap in a Tupperware tub, and she sat on the couch, and I lifted her feet into the warm water and
washed them gently with a soapy washcloth. And then she washed mine.

I watched Sue sleep beside me in bed off and on all night. Sometimes she was so still that I was sure she was dead. She looked like a beautiful corpse, slightly yellow, slightly smelly, ethereal. She'd snore softly, or open her eyes and look at me. “Hi, Annie,” she'd say in a small voice.

In the morning after breakfast, Sue, Sam, Tony, and I took the ski lift to the summit. The boys disappeared. Sue, wearing a lavender ski jacket, had 110 pounds on her five-foot-nine frame, and she was wobbly and trembling. People turned to stare at her, because she was yellow and emaciated. She smiled; people smiled back. She had great teeth. “Oh yeah, and I used to be
built
,” she said, as we got our bearings in the snow. “I used to have a
rack
on me.” We stood together at the summit, looking at the mountains and an endless blue sky, and suddenly I fell over. She helped me up, and we laughed and headed down the mountain.

She hadn't been on the slopes for years, and she moved gingerly; the air was thin and she had cancer in her lungs. Then she pushed hard on her poles and took off farther down the mountain. At some point she turned
around and waited for me, and as soon as I saw her, I stopped, and fell over again. There I was, sprawled in the snow, with my skis at an angle over my head, looking like Gregor Samsa in
The Metamorphosis
. She waited for me to get up and ski to where she stood, and then she taught me one of the most important things I have ever learned—how to fall better. She pointed out that when I fell, I usually didn't fall that hard. “You're so afraid of falling that it's keeping you from skiing as well as you could. It's keeping you from having fun.” So each time I fell, I lay there a moment, convinced that I had broken my hip, that it was all hopeless, and she would show me how to get back up. Each time, I'd dust the snow off my butt, look over at her, and head back down the mountain. After she saw that I could fall safely, she tore off down the slope.

We celebrated Good Friday that night, a week late. It's a sad day, of loss and cruelty, and all you have to go on is faith that the light shines in the darkness, and nothing, not death, not disease, not even the government, can overcome it. I hate that you can't prove the beliefs of my faith. If I were God, I'd have the answers at the end of the workbook, so you could check as you went along, to see if
you're on the right track. But nooooooo. Darkness is our context, and Easter's context: without it, you couldn't see the light. Hope is not about proving anything. It's about choosing to believe this one thing, that love is bigger than any grim, bleak shit anyone can throw at us.

After the Good Friday service, Sue wanted to show me her legs, the effects of all that skin grafting. The skin was shocking, wounded and as alien as snakeskin.

“Wow,” I said. Sue let me study it awhile. “I have trouble with my cellulite,” I said, guiltily.

“Yeah,” she answered, “but this is what me being alive looks like now.”

She had fought militantly for her body over time, but she was tender and maternal with it. She took long, hot baths at night, and then smoothed on lotions.

The next morning we celebrated Holy Saturday, the day before Easter, when Jesus was dead and hidden in the tomb, and nothing made sense, and no one knew that he was going to be alive again. Most of his disciples had left Golgotha on Good Friday even before he died; only a few women remained at the cross. The disciples skulked off like dogs to the Upper Room, to wait, depressed and drunk—or at least this is what I imagine. I certainly
would have, and I would have been thinking, “We are so fucked.” Father Tom adds that there was a lot of cigarette smoke that night, and Monday-morning quarterbacking.

One thing Sue wanted to do before she died was to get a massage, to be touched sensuously again, so we arranged for massages on this Saturday.

“I'll tell you,” she said, as we walked to the salon, “you don't see a lot of bodies like Sue Schuler's here in Park City, Utah.”

Sue got a gorgeous masseur from India—he looked like Siddhartha—while I got a tense white German woman. Sue and her masseur walked off together, and she glanced over her shoulder with the pleasure of someone on her way to her bridal suite.

My masseuse looked like she was impatient to start slapping me.

When I saw Sue again, an hour later, she smelled of aromatic lemon oils.

“Did you feel shy at all?” I asked.

“Nah!” she told me. “Not after I gave him a tour of the bod.”

Sue got up early on Sunday, the day we were leaving. The sun was pouring through the windows; there was a bright blue sky. She no longer looked jaundiced. She was
light brown, rosy. She made us her special apricot scones, small, light yellow, flecked with orange fruit, for breakfast. I tried to discourage her, because I didn't want her feelings to be hurt if the boys turned up their noses: “The boys won't eat apricot scones,” I insisted. “They eat cereal, Pop-Tarts . . . treyf!”

“Oh, they'll eat my scones,” she said slyly. And they did; we all did. We ate all but four, which she packed up for us to take on the plane. Two survived the drive to the airport in Salt Lake City. They were gone by the time we arrived home.

 

T
he aunties have put on weight since our last trip to the tropics, the aunties being the jiggly areas of my legs and butt that show when I put on a swimsuit. I had fallen in love with them five or six years ago, the darling aunties, shyly yet bravely walking exposed along the beaches of Huatulco, Mexico. Used to having them hidden in the dark of long pants and capris and the indoors, I suddenly understood that they had carried me through my days without complaint, strong and able, their only desire to accompany me, on beaches, in shorts, and to swim in tropical water. I vowed to include them from then on, to be as kind and grateful as possible.

But that had been nearly fifteen pounds earlier.

Now they wanted to come with me to the Caribbean.

My friends Buddy and Father Tom had persuaded me to go on a cruise with them in March 2003, shortly before the United States went to war “preemptively” in Iraq. Tom said the trip would be a lot like the cruises I take in the comfort of my own home when the world has gotten me down, left me incredulous and defeated. At those times, I make a nest for my baby self on the couch in the living room. I stretch out with a comforter and pillows, and magazines, the cat, unguents, and my favorite drink, cranberry and soda with a lime twist. These are periods of stress and Twilight Zone isolation, marked by hypochondria, numb terror, despair, and the conviction that I must go on a diet. Even at—especially at—these times, I hate to stop, though I know that to go faster and faster and do more is to move in the direction of death. Continuous movement, I tell myself, argues a wasted life. And so I try to create a cruise ship, to carry me back toward living.

The main difference between my cruise, though, and the one Tom and Buddy wanted me to go on, was that at my house, during school hours, there is no one around to whom I have to be nice, and no one who will see me in a bathing suit. And my cruise takes only two hours, instead
of a week. It's unbelievably healing; it resets me. Yet it takes time, at least two hours. You can't rush a cruise ship; you can't hurry doing nothing. After a while, you see the sweetest, most invigorating thing of all: one person tenderly caring for another, even if it's just me taking care of me on my old couch.

Tom and Buddy persisted, and Sam was desperate to go, and Tom pulled some strings to arrange for nearly free passage on an Italian cruise ship. He and I would give lectures on faith to a group of sober people, in exchange for a week traveling among Caribbean ports with Buddy, Sam, and Sam's friend Alex.

Sam and Alex and I got up one day at dawn and flew to Fort Lauderdale. I had developed a tic by the time we met up with Tom and Buddy at the dock. I'm the world's worst traveler, afraid of all the usual things—of wars, of snakes, of sharks, of undertows. But I was also worried about group hugs, VX gas attacks, and huge platters of cream puffs. I was afraid I would never be able to stop eating the cream puffs once I got started: I saw myself as Al Pacino in
Scarface,
facedown on the plate of cocaine, only I'd be buried in puff pastry, custard in my hair.

I love to swim in warm seas but hate getting there. I cling to the motto of my favorite travel agents, Karl and Carl, who advise, “Trust no one, see nothing.”

A thousand people were waiting to board when we arrived at the dock. The predominant adornment—stitched, beaded, embossed, tattooed—was the U.S. flag. There were lots of women with big hair, but as Ann Richards once said, “The bigger the hair, the closer to heaven.” My sense, which was confirmed in conversations later in the week, was that these were not people with a lot of money: these were largely people who saved to go on cruises every few years.

Tom was wearing a T-shirt with the Arabic alphabet on it. Buddy had a bag of M&M's, and the five of us ate them by the fistful. Tom and Buddy, in their upscale hobo clothes and with the beginnings of beards, stuck out in the bright, cheery crowd. People gave Buddy second looks, because he's the last person you'd expect to find on a cruise ship, besides me. He's in his mid-fifties, and to the untrained eye looks sort of seedy: overweight, with flyaway hair and at least two front teeth missing, as if he'd just gotten out of bed and forgotten his partial dentures.

Tom travels worldwide to lead spiritual retreats and teach English, and very little worries him when it comes
to travel. Buddy, in contrast, had not been on a boat since the Vietnam War, and everything waterish scares him. As soon as we were safely onboard, he became convinced that the ship would tip over. Then, after we were shown to our rooms by smiling, handsome young men, he became convinced that a revolution was brewing among the cabin help. And that John Ashcroft was spying on us three adults, because of Tom's shirt, and also because, while standing in line in port, we had accidentally expressed our opinions on George Bush's sobriety and deft diplomatic touch in the Middle East.

Sam and Alex went off on their own, and we went to sit outside and look out at the ocean, which was kindergarten blue. People streamed past us in bright-colored leisure wear and with flags—flag pins, T-shirts, purses, sarongs, swimsuits, baseball caps, fingernails. A woman with a huge blond beehive wrapped in a flag scarf walked by, and Buddy turned to Tom with a look of horror. “Live and let live,” said Tom. “The rain and the sun fall on the just and unjust, and while this is offensive, it is true.”

I loved my room. It was small and clean and had a porthole—and there was no one else in it. I could have stayed there forever, if I hadn't been in there with myself.
I started to channel Buddy: worried about the ship's tipping over, water pouring through my porthole, shark attacks. I put on some shorts and announced to the aunties that we were going for a brisk walk on the ship's promenade. They are so in love with me, as if I were a gentleman caller. Half the time I am hard on them, viewing them with contempt, covering them in blue jeans when it is hot, threatening to do something drastic one of these days—I'll make them start jogging, that's what I'll do! Or I'll get them some lymphatic seaweed wraps, bandage them like mummies in Saran Wrap, and then parboil them for an hour. Sometimes I catch myself being mean to them, and my heart softens, and I apologize, hang my head, and put lotion on them, as if laying on hands. And after periods when I have acted most ashamed of them, I adorn them with children's tattoo bandages, with butterflies and wolves.

Sam and Alex became co-conspirators with Buddy on our way to dinner the first night, after he announced to them, sotto voce, that he had discovered plans for an uprising among the cabin crew, brewing, even as we walked, in the boiler room. After that, the boys would follow him anywhere.

On the way to the dining room, Buddy took us on a tour of the ship's more glaring infirmities: gouges in the wall, various cracks that needed caulking. He showed us to the fancy glass elevators in the center of the ship, from which people were streaming on their way to the dining rooms, past well-appointed shops and bars, ornate columns and marble staircases. When everyone had gotten out of one elevator, Buddy stared inside and clutched his head. He looked at Sam and Alex to see if they had noticed: the handrail had pulled free, and screws stuck out of the walls. “What if the
hull
is like this?” he said. Alex and Sam gripped their foreheads.

I walked to dinner with my arm on Buddy's, like royalty, past the shops, where vendors stood in the doorways and called for us to come in, like the sirens in the
Odyssey
. Buddy, with his missing front teeth and mussed-up hair, pulled me close, protectively. “This woman is
incorruptible
!” he cried to them.

There was way too much food on the cruise, every time you turned around. Half of me wanted to eat it all, and half wanted to go on a diet. I heard my therapist reminding me again and again that diets make you fat and crazy, ninety-five percent of the time. So I asked the aunties, who get out so rarely, what
they
wanted to eat. They
covered their mouths; it was too ridiculous to say. Eventually they chose slices of mango, cocktail prawns, and whole-wheat buns still hot from the oven, and two servings of crème brûlée.

Sam and Alex wore white shirts and khakis to dinner, and the five of us sat with four adults we'd just met. I watched the other adults relate to the boys, who talked away like normal people, making shifty eye contact as they spoke; when others spoke, the boys listened. Every so often Sam looked at me with a vague scorn, as though he thought I was talking too much, but I tried to let him be. I am not here to be his friend. I'm here to be me, which is taking a great deal longer than I had hoped, and I am here to raise him to be a person of integrity and joy. Besides, the kid you know at home is only a facet of the child who lives in the world. His voice, bearing, and vibe change to suit the company, as in those flip books where you can change the hat, head, torso, and legs of the figure, so that an admiral with a spyglass can turn into a pirate, then into a sea monster, then into a sailor or a porpoise. I liked to watch Sam discover parts of himself through other people at the table, the way I have liked to watch him over the years discover Caesar salad, and the Rolling Stones, and even, to some extent, me.

“Why are you eating such weird food?” Sam demanded of Buddy, who had chosen only an appetizer and dessert, pumpkin soup and crème brûlée.

“I'm preparing for the nursing home,” Buddy said, opening his eyes wide. It took a moment for Sam to realize Buddy was teasing. “I am! I practice sleeping with a pillow between my knees, so I don't get bedsores.”

“Oh, Buddy,” said Sam, so affectionately it was as if the flip book had just gone past the spy, past the pirate, past the hoodlum, to a young sweet boy.

I met up with Tom and Buddy for breakfast the next morning. They already had been to the Internet café and were filled with the latest evidence that the United States really was about to attack Iraq within days. “The whole world hates us now, and I'm so afraid,” Buddy said. “I don't feel there's any hope at all—I feel like one of those goats you see in Indonesia, that tour guides bring along with them, tied to the top of their buses, when they take people to see Komodo dragons. They toss the goats over the cliffs to the Komodo dragons below.”

“
Live
goats?” I asked.

“The goats
have
to be alive, because the dragons want to play, and it's more fun for the tourists.”

“Maybe the goats don't know what awaits them.”

“Of course the goats know,” Buddy replied. “The smell of Komodo dragon shit and dead goats gets stronger the closer they get.”

“What are we going to do? I mean, seriously.”