Plan B (18 page)

“I can't speak for you, miss,” Tom said. “But I'm going back to my room pretty soon, and I'm going to stretch out and read all morning. And if there is crème brûlée again for lunch, I think I'll be able to get through the day.”

That sounded like a plan. I got into bed with a stack of magazines. Tom had given me
The Nation
and
Harper's,
while the receptionist at the spa had lent me
Harper's Bazaar,
and the combination was perversely right.

After a while, though, I went to visit Tom, whose room was next door to mine. He was lying on his back, reading a book about Muslim culture.

“I get so afraid,” I said.

“And God delights in you, even when you're scared and at your craziest. Just like God delights in the men in their flag bikinis, with their little units showing.”

“I don't get it.”

“I'm incredulous, too.”

I stretched out beside him on the bed, laughing. “Some of these people seem to be drinking dozens of nice social drinks all day,” I said.

“As soon as we're tied up near a beach, we'll have them all thrown overboard. After lunch, before boating. Until then, we'll just be kind and say, ‘Hi! How are you doing? Can I get you another crème brûlée?' ”

It was beautiful and dreamy up on deck. I lounged on a chair in the shade, in my shorts, studying the people who were lying in direct sun. I heard my father's dermatologist explaining to him, thirty years ago, “A tan skin is a damaged skin,” when he was treating him for melanoma. I practiced identifying with a few people nearby, but not the thin, lithe, young, tanned, toned beauties. What was the point? It was like a caribou's comparing herself with a cat, a different species altogether. That's me in twenty pounds, I thought pleasantly, looking at one woman. That's me in twenty years, I thought, watching an old man with Coke-bottle glasses. I closed my eyes and listened to the engines, and to distant voices. I felt as though I were inside a great breathing being, buoyed up by the water in the pool, the pool buoyed up by the ocean, floating on the
earth. I remembered learning to swim in the deep end of the rec center pool, when my dad would hold me up until I felt safe enough to rest down into the water and float. In those days, we all spent too much time in the sun—who knew?

I slathered on more sunscreen, pulled my floppy lavender hat down lower, and covered my legs with a towel, even though I was in shade.

I slept and woke a few times over the next hour. Once when I came to, a bevy of young women was swimming in the pool, so sunlit and Pepsodent and similar that for a groggy moment I thought they were doing synchronized swimming. They stirred my memory of the older girls at the rec center, the thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, practicing in the deep end while we younger girls paddled nearby, agog, flannel fish sewn to our suits so the lifeguards would know we could swim. We worshipped the peppy, vigorous older girls in their white tank suits and bathing caps with petals and chin straps, swimming on their backs in perfect circles like a dream, like a wedding cake, suddenly dipping beneath the turquoise water, the pointed stalks of their legs reappearing first, and then the rest of them, as they floated on their backs like skydivers in a daisy chain.

When I was young, I thought that this must be what heaven was like, to be one of those teens. When you're synchronized, you are all beautiful—Breck girls opening and closing like anemones in time-lapse photography, kaleidoscopically.

I fell asleep again, and when I woke, Buddy was standing over me, calling my name. Sam was peering at me with disapproval, as if he'd found me sunbathing in biohazard gear. Buddy bent down beside me.

“Things are clearly growing uglier down in the boiler room,” Buddy whispered. “We need to be on the lookout for possible security breaches.”

“Who's the leader of the uprising?” I asked.

“The revolution is being led by unseen forces. In the boiler room.”

Alex held his finger to his lips. I nodded grimly.

Tom and I were out on deck that afternoon, waiting for Buddy. Everything was more fun when he was around. Sam and Alex had fallen in with a roving gaggle of teenagers, had gone off to God knows where.

“Why are you always chewing on ice?” I asked.

“Rage,” said Tom.

“I'm worried about what Sam and Alex do after we go to sleep,” I said. “I'm afraid they sneak into the bars. It's such a mean, scary world. And Sam can be so mean to me, too.”

“He's very different with us from how he is with you. He's wonderful with us. All kids' behavior makes their parents a little crazy sometimes. And vice versa. My ninety-four-year-old mother said something annoying to me over the phone on Christmas Eve, and I whined at her, ‘I
hate
it when you say that.' So she says it again, right? I said, ‘Please don't say that. It makes me feel like an eleven-year-old.' And when she said it again, I slammed down the phone. She's ninety-four! I'm a middle-aged priest—and it's Christmas Eve! I wanted to throttle her over the phone. But I finally figured out that it was
my
craziness, so I went to see her at the old folks' home, and I brought everyone communion, and it was lovely.”

We stood at the railing, our backs to the sea. Even from fifteen feet up, I could see the corrugated skin, the lumps and veins and chicken-skin knees of other passengers. I saw huge guts, bad moles. There were many fat, hairy middle-aged men in teeny bikinis, many matronly middle-aged women with big fallen breasts and poor posture—that which used to be the offering was now the
burden. But it's our hearts that weigh us down. Who could even imagine what cargo these people carried? One old woman seemed to be wearing oversize pink-tinted panty hose. They looked like the pink tights we wore for ballet lessons, a room of small girls in black leotards, leaping about the rec center's deeply scratched polished floors. Because I was so thin, my tights were always baggy, but I felt pretty—until I would hear a grown-up ask my mother, “Don't you ever feed her?” and my mother would laugh, as if this was so witty, even though we heard it all the time. But she'd be mad when she told my father later. He always used the word “slender” to describe me. The pink stockings on the cruise ship turned out to be the old woman's own skin. She had grown too thin for her tights, and they were bagging on her.

Saint Bette said that heaven is where people finally stop talking about their weight and what they look like. I feel grateful just to think of Bette Midler's being alive during my years on the planet—just as I do about Michael Jordan and Nelson Mandela. Gratitude, not understanding, is the secret to joy and equanimity. I prayed for the willingness to have very mild spiritual well-being. I didn't need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with
redwood trees. And in a sudden moment of clarity, I realized that I also needed to create my own cruise ship again.

I said good-bye to Tom, and stopped at the snack bar for a glass of cranberry juice and soda with lime. I went by the café and asked the aunties what they might like for a snack—bread pudding or fruit salad. They wanted half a sandwich, a lot of bread pudding, and one small whole-wheat bun. I think they would have ordered a bread beverage if they could—beer, with hops and barley, or in the interest of sobriety, a raisin-bread frappé. Bread is as spiritual as human life gets. Rumi wrote, “Be a well-baked loaf.” Loaves are made to be eaten, to be buttered, and shared. Rumi is saying to be of service, to be delicious and give life.

The aunties know things.

I went to my room, changed into my swimsuit, slathered on sunscreen, and stopped at the spa for a couple of magazines. I went on deck, where people lay sunbathing. I found a lounge chair in the shade and lay down. At first I used my towel as a blanket, but even in the shade it was hot, and the aunties felt smothered. They love the sun. So I took off the towel, and then my shorts, and ate my bread pudding. I opened a magazine. Every so often, I looked up and smiled at people walking by.

Once again: If Jesus was right, these are all my brothers and sisters.

And they are
so
letting themselves go.

This is not how Jesus would have seen things, but at first I couldn't help it—once again I saw an expanse of walruses, big wet bodies flopped down on towels, letting it all hang out. Some people were sleeping in the sun. I worried about their sunburns and melanomas, as some of them had moles I thought should be looked at when we reached the next port. People were putting cool lotion on their bodies, and on one another. They got up and returned with drinks. They handed one another caps and visors, and covered one another with towels.

I drank my cranberry and soda, and put more lotion on the aunties. They loved it out here on deck—the sun, our favorite drink, watching the company onboard. I felt safe with the people around me now. This sense of safety suddenly made it clear to me that, looking at us, God saw not walruses but babies: radiant and befuddled, all these hearts at temporary rest. When you rest, you catch your breath, and it fills your lungs and holds you up, like water wings, like my father in the deep end of the rec center pool.

 

I
am honored and surprised when people ask me to speak at their graduations, and this is what I say:

This must be a magical day for you. I wouldn't know. I accidentally forgot to graduate from college. I meant to, thirty-some years ago, but things got away from me. I did graduate from high school—do I get a partial credit for that?—although, unfortunately, my father had forgotten to pay the book bill, so at the graduation ceremony, when I opened the case to look at my diploma, it was empty. Except for a ransom note that said, See Mrs. Foley, the bookkeeper, if you ever want to see your diploma alive again.

I went to Goucher College in Maryland for the best possible reason—to learn—but dropped out at nineteen for the best possible reason—to become a writer. Those of you who have read my work know that instead, I accidentally became a Kelly Girl for a while. Then, in a dazzling career move, I got hired as a clerk-typist in the Nuclear Quality Assurance Department at Bechtel, where I worked typing and sorting triplicate forms. I hate to complain, but it was not very stimulating work. However, it paid the bills, so I could write my stories every night when I got home. I worked at Bechtel for six months—but I swear I had nothing to do with the company's involvement in the Bush administration's shameless war profiteering. I just sorted triplicate forms.

It was a terrible job, at which I did a terrible job, but it paid $600 a month, which, augmented by food stamps, was enough to pay my rent and grocery bills. This is a real problem if you are crazy enough to want to be an artist—you have to give up your dreams of swimming pools and fish forks, and take any old job. At twenty, I was hired as an assistant editor at a magazine; I think that was the last real job I've had.

I bet I'm beginning to make some parents nervous—here I am, bragging of being a dropout, and
unemployable, and about to make a pitch for you to follow your creative dreams, when what parents want is for their children to do well in their field, to make them look good, and maybe also to assemble a tasteful fortune.

But that is not your problem. Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to live it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it, and find out the truth about who you are.

At some point I started getting published, and experienced a meager knock-kneed standing in the literary world, and I started to get almost everything that many of you graduates are hoping for—except for the money. I got a lot of things that society had promised would make me whole and fulfilled—all the things that the culture tells you, from preschool on, will quiet the throbbing anxiety inside you. I got some stature, the respect of other writers, even a low-grade fame. The culture says these things will save you, as long as you also manage to keep your weight down. But the culture lies.

Slowly, after dozens of rejection slips and failures and false starts and postponed dreams—what Langston Hughes
called dreams deferred—I stepped onto the hallowed ground of being a published novelist, and then, fifteen years later, I started to make real money.

I'd wanted to be a writer my whole life. But when I finally made it, I felt like a greyhound catching the mechanical rabbit she'd been chasing for so long—discovering it was merely metal, wrapped up in cloth. It wasn't alive; it had no spirit. It was fake. Fake doesn't feed anything. Only spirit feeds spirit, your own and the universal spirit, in the same way that only your own blood type, and O negative, the universal donor, can sustain you. “Making it” had nothing that could slake the thirst I had for immediacy, and connection.

From the wise old pinnacle of my years, I can tell you that what you're looking for is already inside you. You've heard this before, but the holy thing inside you really is that which causes you to seek it. You can't buy it, lease it, rent it, date it, or apply for it. The best job in the world can't give it to you. Neither can success, or fame, or financial security—besides which, there ain't no such thing. John D. Rockefeller was once asked, “How much money is enough?” and he answered, “Just a little bit more.”

It can be confusing—most of your parents want you to do well, to be successful. They want you to be happy—or
at least happyish. And they want you to be nicer to them, just a little nicer—
is that so much to ask?

They want you to love, and be loved, and find peace, and laugh and find meaningful work. But they also—some of them, a few of them (not yours—yours are fine)—they also want you to chase the bunny for a while. To get ahead, sock some money away, and then find a balance between the bunny chase and savoring your life.

But you don't know whether you're going to live long enough to slow down, relax, and have fun, and discover the truth of your spiritual identity. You may not be destined to live a long life; you may not have sixty more years to discover and claim your own deepest truth. As Breaker Morant said, you have to live every day as if it's your last, because one of these days, you're bound to be right.

It might help if I go ahead and tell you what I think is the truth of your spiritual identity. . . .

Actually, I don't have a clue.

I do know you are not what you look like, or how much you weigh, or how you did in school, or whether you start a job next Monday or not. Spirit isn't what you do, it's . . . well, again, I don't actually know. They probably taught this junior year at Goucher; I should have stuck around. But I know that you feel it best when you're
not doing much—when you're in nature, when you're very quiet or, paradoxically, listening to music.

I know you can feel it and hear it in the music you love, in the bass line, in the harmonies, in the silence between notes: in Chopin and Eminem, Emmylou Harris, Neil Young, Bach, whomever. You can close your eyes and feel the divine spark concentrated in you, like a little Dr. Seuss firefly. It flickers with life and relief, like an American in a foreign country who suddenly hears someone speaking English. In the Christian tradition, they say that the soul rejoices in hearing what it already knows. And so you pay attention when that Dr. Seuss creature inside you sits up and strains to hear.

We can see Spirit made visible when people are kind to one another, especially when it's a really busy person, like you, taking care of a needy, annoying, neurotic person, like you. In fact, that's often when we see Spirit most brightly.

It's magic to see Spirit, largely because it's so rare. Mostly you see the masks and the holograms that the culture presents as real. You see how you're doing in the world's eyes, or your family's, or—worst of all—yours, or in the eyes of people who are doing better than you—much better than you—or worse. But you are not your
bank account, or your ambition. You're not the cold clay lump you leave behind when you die. You're not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are Spirit, you are love, and even though it is hard to believe sometimes, you are free. You're here to love, and be loved, freely. If you find out next week that you are terminally ill—and we're all terminally ill on this bus—what will matter are memories of beauty, that people loved you, and that you loved them.

So how do we feed and nourish our spirit, and the spirit of others?

First find a path, and a little light to see by. Then push up your sleeves and start helping. Every single spiritual tradition says that you must take care of the poor, or you are so doomed that not even Jesus or the Buddha can help you.

You don't have to go overseas. There are people in this country who are poor in spirit, worried, depressed, dancing as fast as they can; their kids are sick, or their retirement savings are gone. There is great loneliness among us, life-threatening loneliness. People have given up on peace, on equality. They've even given up on the Democratic Party, which I haven't, not by a long shot. You do what you can, what good people have always done: you bring
thirsty people water, you share your food, you try to help the homeless find shelter, you stand up for the underdog.

I secretly believe that this makes Jesus love you more.

Anything that can help you get your sense of humor back feeds the spirit, too. In the Bill Murray movie
Stripes,
a very tense army recruit announces during his platoon's introductions: “The name's Francis Sawyer, but everybody calls me Psycho. Any of you guys call me Francis, and I'll kill you. . . . And I don't like nobody touching me. Any of you homos touch me, and I'll kill you.” The sergeant responds, “Lighten up, Francis.” So you may need to upgrade your friends. You need to find people who laugh gently at themselves, who remind you gently to lighten up.

Rest and laughter are the most spiritual and subversive acts of all. Laugh, rest, slow down. Some of you start jobs on Monday; some of you wish you did—some of your parents are asthmatic with anxiety that you don't. They shared this with me before the ceremony began.

But again, this is not your problem. If your parents are hell-bent for someone in your family to make a name in the field of, say, molecular cell biology, then maybe when you're giving them a final tour of campus you can show them to the admissions office.

I would recommend that you all take a long deep breath, and stop. Just be where your butts are, and breathe. Take some time. You are graduating today. Refuse to cooperate with anyone who is trying to shame you into hopping right back up onto the rat exercise wheel.

Rest, but pay attention. Refuse to cooperate with anyone who is stealing your freedom, your personal and civil liberties, and then smirking about it. I'm not going to name names.

But slow down. Better yet, lie down.

In my twenties I devised a school of relaxation that has unfortunately fallen out of favor in the ensuing years—it was called Prone Yoga. You just lay around as much as possible. You could read, listen to music, you could space out or sleep. But you had to be lying down. Maintaining the prone.

You've graduated. You have nothing left to prove, and besides, it's a fool's game. If you agree to play, you've already lost. It's Charlie Brown and Lucy, with the football. If you keep getting back on the field, they win. There are so many great things to do right now. Write. Sing. Rest. Eat cherries. Register voters. And—oh my God—I nearly forgot the most important thing: Refuse to wear uncomfortable pants, even if they make you look really
thin. Promise me you'll never wear pants that bind or tug or hurt, pants that have an opinion about how much you've just eaten. The pants may be lying! There is way too much lying and scolding going on politically right now without having your pants get in on the act, too.

So bless you. You've done an amazing thing. And you are loved; you are capable of lives of great joy and meaning. It's what you are made of. And it's what you're here for. Take care of yourselves; take care of one another.

And give thanks, like this:
Thank
you.