Plan B (6 page)

Even as we improved as teachers and as students, the children continued to have raging impulse-control problems; the very thing that made them spontaneous and immediate could also make them mean. One day, a mouthy eight-year-old said something insulting about my dreadlocks. Rather than hit him over the head with the Wiffle Ball bat, which was my first impulse, I sat beside him and said, “It's only been in the last ten years that I learned how beautiful my hair and I are, so please don't say critical things about me. It hurts my feelings.”

He gaped at me, and said, “You're freaking me out, Octopus Head.”

The other teachers and I had dreamed of taking the kids on field trips, to remove them from the grip and tangle of life—of a day on the beach; of sandy, sacramental hot dogs; of playing in the ocean, making sculptures, and drawing with sticks. But we could barely manage them in class.

Then there was the fact that although there were equal numbers of blacks and whites in the church, all the teachers were white. We wanted the influence of the black adults. But only a few of them volunteered to assist (we gratefully put them on the schedule), and we white teachers were too shy to say anything. Even at a progressive and diverse church like ours, it's sometimes hard to bring up uncomfortable racial issues. After a while, though, there was a small breakthrough.

One of our teachers, a blue-eyed blonde, stepped to the pulpit during worship to talk about something that was tearing her up. She was teaching Sunday school that day, and had to make it quick. She said that even though she was a progressive and a civil rights activist, she had secret thoughts about race that scared her, that made her feel she did not deserve to be part of the church anymore. She'd been watching the news, she told us, and the image of a black man in a T-shirt had flashed on the TV screen, and her first thought had been, “What did he do?” He hadn't done anything—he was an expert on the law. She didn't have a clue where to begin with this old ugly thing inside her, except to stand before us, crying, and say it.

Then she walked down the aisle to go teach, and so she did not see that every single person in the church had stood to applaud her.

While she had not been referring specifically to her confusion about the lack of adults of color at the Sunday school, her words wedged open the topic of race. We let things sit for a while before being more specific, because somehow, without our particularly noting it, we had grown to enjoy Sunday school more and thus were not as resentful that only white people were teaching. Time and one another's support had helped us develop muscles—as when Sam helped me start doing push-ups. At first, it was pathetic. But he bossed me until I could manage six or seven, and eventually three sets of ten.

I protested: “Jesus never forced Mary to do push-ups.”

“Mary was a weakling.”

But Mary was anything but weak. Denise Levertov writes:

But we are told of meek obedience
.
No one mentions courage
.

 

The engendering Spirit

did not enter her without consent
.

I know what Sam meant, though. He meant bony, and worried, like the Mary in most art. I personally like to think she looked like a demure Bette Midler.

We read the kids Scripture every week, even though they squirmed and yawned—we had concluded that people who made farting noises, and weapons out of Doritos, should not determine what we did and didn't do in class. There's a lovely Hasidic story of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put Scripture on their hearts. One of them asked, “Why
on
our hearts, and not
in
them?” The rabbi answered, “Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your hearts, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.”

We often had a dozen six- to nine-year-olds, and another dozen ten- to twelve-year-olds, with five or six babies and toddlers careening around. We thought of a youth group for our teenagers, but we didn't have enough staff. Actually, we didn't have any teenagers, either, but would soon. Sam was twelve and a half, as were two other kids. We needed more people to help. We kept talking to one another, and to our pastor, Veronica, and then were ready to talk to the congregation. A few of us came to the
pulpit. We said that we believed that the truth would set us free, and the truth was that the Sunday-school staff was burned out, that there were almost no people of color, and that if we didn't get more help, we'd have to close down.

The shit hit the fan, to use the theological expression.

A number of people in the church were outraged, both parents and nonparents; they felt they had been ambushed and judged. Others, of every race, came forward to support us, although they did not offer to help teach. I heard that people were talking behind our backs, and I wanted to call Veronica and tell on them—Pastor, Pastor, so-and-so was bearing false witness against us! I felt shame, and a hopelessness that there could ever be, even in one church, let alone the nation, true racial reconciliation.

I nursed my resentments and disgrace like young plants, watering them, trimming back the dead leaves, making sure they got enough sunlight.

At times like these, I believe, Jesus rolls up his sleeves, smiles roguishly, and thinks, “This is good.” He lets me get nice and crazy, until I can't take my own thinking and solutions for one more moment. The next morning, I got on my knees and prayed, “Please, please help me. Please
let me feel You while I adjust to not getting what I was hoping for.” And then I remembered Rule 1: When all else fails, follow instructions. And Rule 2: Don't be an asshole.

I called the person with whom I was angriest, and I apologized for harboring resentment toward her. She said, “I'm so glad you called. That was brave of you.” I tugged at my Mary.

It was one of those tortured, blame-filled, wounded conversations I associate with old boyfriends, where they get to come across as very calm and centered, while I sound ten minutes away from being institutionalized. The woman listened to my frustration that the Sunday-school teachers were exhausted. Then I cried from the heart, “Why don't more of you black people help us with the kids?”

She did not say anything, in an extremely loud way.

“That's not what I meant.” I started to fume. “It came out wrong.” But in the sickening silence of held breath, I realized that that was indeed what I'd meant to say.

“Annie,” she said, very kindly. She asked me if it was possible that the only people who felt they had a skill or calling to teach all happened to be white.

I didn't know about that. I think we both wanted to get off the phone, but we stuck it out; and we simply kept talking. By the time we hung up, things weren't quite as strained between us. I sat on the couch, astonished. God must see me as so many people at once: beloved, nuts, luminous, full of shadow.

Then I called everyone else I was mad at.

Some conversations went better than others, but not one person volunteered to help. Yet time, and showing up, turn most messes to compost, and something surprising may grow, and I have noticed this especially at my church. Over the next weeks, half a dozen people committed to helping once a month—black, white, men and women—and a young Asian man agreed to teach the Gospel through martial arts. Now we have a dozen adults, a paid director, and as many as thirty kids, a youth group of six or seven, and several little ones.

The youth group is close-knit, integrated, and fierce in maintaining its boundaries. You must be thirteen or older to belong, no exceptions. I tried to bribe Sam into letting my friend Pammy's twelve-year-old daughter come one Sunday, and he shook his head, unrelenting.

The other teachers and I took the teenagers out for a day at the ocean not long ago. Stinson Beach was blue and
breezy, and the kids stood looking around like developers. After a while, the roar of the ocean, the smells, the hard sand here and the soft sand there, the sun on their faces and the frigid water on their feet, changed them: they started to move, and to throw stuff at one another. I grew up on the beaches of West Marin, taking in the presents the ocean gives, plastic made beautiful, glass turned to jewels, calligraphy on the sand—bird tracks, footprints, seaweed—and you couldn't get us kids out of the water until we were blue and shivering. I stood on the beach that day with our youth group, hailing Mary; then I got up my courage and waded in, to my knees. The ocean is so female, amniotic, and the waves and sand scour you like a mother with a washcloth.

The kids went in. They yelped as the cold water covered them, and they splashed and screamed, and shoved one another a little more roughly than they had in my dream of this day. Still, as I watched them being cuffed by the breaking waves, submerged, missing for a moment, then reappearing, spluttering, laughing, I thought of what this dream had taken: all those times we teachers had had to ask for help, and had plugged away without enough resources, without knowing how, or whether, we were going to manage. And it had taken much more letting go
and trusting than we had felt capable of. I remember getting knocked around in these waves when I was young, and how it felt when grown-ups picked you up and tossed you into the air or the water, exciting and scary all at once, and you knew you would always be caught.

 

H
aving a good dog is the closest s0ome of us will ever come to knowing the direct love of a mother, or God, so it's no wonder it knocked the stuffing out of Sam and me when Sadie died. I promised Sam we'd get another puppy someday, but privately I resolved to never get another dog. I didn't want to hurt that much again, if I could possibly avoid it. And I didn't want my child's heart and life to break like that again. But you don't always get what you want; you get what you get. This is a real problem for me. You want to protect your child from pain, and what you get instead is life, and grace; and though theologians insist that grace is freely given, the
truth is that sometimes you pay for it through the nose. And you can't pay your child's way.

We should never have gotten a dog to begin with—they all die. While it is subversive when artists make art that will pass away in the fullness of time, or later that day, it's not as ennobling when your heart breaks.

When Sam was two, and George Herbert Walker Bush was president, I noticed I was depressed and afraid a lot of the time. I figured that I needed to move, to marry an armed man, or to find a violent but well-behaved dog. I was determined, as I am now, to stay and fight, and the men I tended to love were not remotely well enough to carry guns, so I was stuck with the dog idea.

For a while I called people who were advertising dogs in the local paper. All of them said they had the perfect dog, but perfect for whom? Quentin Tarantino? One dog we auditioned belonged to a woman who said the dog adored children, but it lunged at Sam, snarling. Other dogs snapped at us. One ran to hide, peeing as she ran. I took the initiative and placed an ad for a mellow, low-energy guard dog, and soon got a call from a woman who said she had just the dog.

As it turned out, she did have a great dog, a gorgeous two-year-old named Sadie, half black Lab, half golden
retriever. Sadie looked like a black Irish setter. I always told people she was like Jesus in a black fur coat, or Audrey Hepburn in Blackglama, elegant and loving and silly. Such a lady.

Sadie was shy at first. The vet said she might have been abused as a puppy, because she acted worried about not pleasing us. He taught us how to get on the floor with her and plow into her slowly, so that she would see that we meant her no harm—that we were, in fact, playing with her. She tried to look nonchalant, but you could see she was alarmed. She was so eager to please, though, that she learned to play, politely.

Sadie lived with us for more than ten years, and saw us through great joy and great losses. She consoled us through friends' illnesses, through the deaths of Sam's grandparents. She and I walked Sam to school every day. She was mother, dad, psych nurse. She helped me survive my boyfriends and the sometimes metallic, percussive loneliness in between them. She helped Sam survive his first mean girlfriend. She'd let my mother stroke her head forever. She taught comfort.

But when she was about to turn thirteen, she developed lymphoma. The nodes in her neck were the size of golf balls. The vet said she would live a month if we didn't
treat her. Part of me wanted to let her die, so we could get it over with, have the pain behind us. But Sam and I talked it over, and decided she would have half a dose of chemo: we wanted her to have one more good spring. She was better two days after the chemo. She must have had a great capacity for healing: she went in and out of remission for two years. Toward the end, when she got sick again and probably wasn't going to get well, the vet said he would walk us through her death. He said that even when a being is extremely sick, ninety-five percent of that being is still healthy and well—it's just that the other five percent feels so shitty. We should focus on the parts that were well, he said, the parts that brought her pleasure, like walks, being stroked, smelling things, and us.

Our vet does not like to put animals to sleep unless they are suffering, and Sadie did not seem to be in pain. He said that one day she would go under a bed and not come out, and when she did, he would give us sedatives to help her stay calm. One day she crawled under my bed, just as he said she would.

It was a cool, dark cave under my bed, with a soft moss-green carpet. Sadie's breathing was labored. She looked apologetic.

I called the vet and asked if I should bring her in. He said she'd feel safer dying at home, with me, but I should come in to pick up the narcotics. He gave me three syringes full. I took them under the bed with me, along with the telephone, with the ringer off, and I thought about injecting them all into my arm so my heart would not hurt so much. I wonder whether this would be considered a relapse by the more rigid members of the recovery community. I lay beside Sadie and assured her that she was a good dog even though she could no longer take care of us. I prayed for her to die quickly and without pain, for her sake, but mostly because I wanted her to die before Sam got home from school. I didn't want him to see her dead body. She hung on. I gave her morphine, prayed, talked to her softly, and called the vet. He had me put the phone beside her head, and listened for a moment.

“She's really not in distress,” he assured me. “This is hard work, like labor. And she has you, Jesus, and narcotics. We should all be so lucky.”

I stayed beside her on the carpet under the bed. At one point Sadie raised her head to gaze around, looking like a black horse. Then she sighed, laid her head down, and died.

I couldn't believe that she was gone, even though she'd been sick for so long. I could feel that something huge, a tide, had washed in, and then washed out.

I cried and cried, and called my brother and sister-in-law. Jamie said Stevo wasn't home, but she would leave him a note and come right over. I prayed again, for my brother to be there before Sam came home from school, so he could take Sadie's body away, to spare Sam, to spare me from Sam's loss.

I kept looking at the clock. School would be out in half an hour.

Jamie and their dog, Sasha, arrived seventeen minutes after Sadie died. I had pulled the carpet out from under the bed. Sadie looked as beautiful as ever. Jamie and I sat on the floor nearby. Sasha is a small white dog with tea-colored stains; she has perky ears and tender eyes and a bright, dancing quality—we call her the Czechoslovakian circus terrier—and we couldn't resist her charm. She licked us and ran up to Sadie and licked her, too, on her face. Then she ran back to us, as if to say, “I am life, and I am here! And my ears are up at this hilarious angle!”

Stevo finally arrived, only a few minutes before Sam was usually home from school. I wanted my brother to hurry and put Sadie in the car, but it was too horrible
to think that Sam might catch him sneaking Sadie out like a burglar stealing our TV. So I breathed miserably, and prayed to be up to the task. Stevo sat beside Jamie. Then Sam arrived home and found us. He cried out sharply and sat on my bed alone, above Sadie. His eyes were red, but after a while Sasha made him laugh. She kept running over to the dead, exquisitely boneless mountain of majestic glossy black dog in repose on the rug. And she leaped on the bed to kiss Sam, before tending to the rest of us, like a doctor making her rounds.

Soon things got wild: My friend Neshama came over, and sat down beside me. I had called her with the news. Then a friend of Sam's stopped by, with his father, who slipped behind Sam on the bed like a shadow. The doorbell rang again, and it was another friend of Sam's, just passing by, out of the blue, if you believe in out of the blue, which I don't; and then a kid who lives up the hill came to borrow Sam's bike. He stayed, too. It was like the stateroom scene in
A Night at the Opera
. There were five adults, four kids, one white Czechoslovakian circus terrier, and one large dead black dog.

Sadie looked like an island of dog, and we looked like flotsam that had formed a ring around her. Life, death, dogs—something in us was trying to hold something
together that doesn't hold together, but then does, miraculously, for the time being.

Sometimes we were self-consciously quiet, as if we were on the floor in kindergarten, and should stretch out and nap, but the teacher had gone out, and so we waited.

The boys eventually went downstairs and turned on loud rock'n' roll. The grown-ups stayed a while longer. I got a bag of chocolates from the kitchen, and we ate them, as if raising a toast. As Sadie grew deader and emptier, we could see that it was no longer Sadie in there. She wasn't going to move or change, except to get worse and start smelling. So Stevo carried her on the rolled-up carpet out to my van. It was so clumsy, and so sweet, this ungainly car-size package, Sadie's barge, and sarcophagus.

We could hear the phantom sounds of Sadie for days—the nails on wood, the tail, the panting. Sam was alternately distant and clingy and mean, because I am the primary person he banks on and bangs on. I stayed close enough so he could push me away. Sadie slowly floated off.

Then, out of the so-called blue again, six months later, some friends gave us a five-month-old puppy, Lily. She's a Rottweiler/Shar-Pei/shepherd mix, huge, sweet, and well behaved—mostly. She's not a stunning bathing beauty
like Sadie. But she's lovely and loving, and we adore her. It still hurts sometimes, to have lost Sadie, though. She was like the floating garlands the sculptor Andy Goldsworthy made in the documentary
Rivers and Tides
: yellow and red and green leaves, connected one to another with thorns, floating away in the current, swirling, drifting back toward the shore, getting cornered in eddies, drifting free again. All along you know that they will disperse once they're out of your vision, but they will never be gone entirely, because you saw them. The leaves show you how water is like the wind, because they do what streamers do in a breeze. The garlands are a translation of this material; autumn leaves, transposed to water, still flutter.