Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace (14 page)

T
he good news is that we’re all doomed, and you can give up any sense of control. Resistance is futile. Many things are going to get worse and weaker, especially democracy and the muscles in your upper arms. Most deteriorating conditions, though, will have to do with your family, the family in which you were raised and your current one. A number of the best people will have died, badly, while the worst thrive. The younger middle-aged people struggle with the same financial, substance, and marital crises that their parents did, and the older middle-aged people are, like me, no longer even late-middle-aged. We’re early old age, with failing memories, hearing loss, and gum disease. And also, while I hate to sound
pessimistic, there are also new, tiny, defenseless people who are probably doomed, too, to the mental ruin of ceaseless striving. What most of us live by and for is the love of family—blood family, where the damage occurred, and chosen, where a bunch of really nutty people fight back together. But both kinds of families can be as hard and hollow as bone, as mystical and common, as dead and alive, as promising and depleted. And by the same token, only redeeming familial love can save you from this crucible, along with nature and clean sheets.

A great friend who became a grandmother this week is already being tortured by the baby’s parents and the grandbaby mama’s family, and
the baby is five days old
. My friend wrote to say she was trying for compassion and focus on the big picture. I wrote back that these go only so far. What really helps is radical self-care, and revenge.

Okay, I was just kidding about the revenge. Sort of.

I
will
say that in the face of this, maybe patience is not an awful thing to practice. The alternative is to jack oneself up with passionate convictions, self-righteousness, wounded silence, and blackmail, like dear old Mom and Dad used to do. Hey, how
did that go? Pretty well? Helping pump Dad out of his bizarreness, so there’d be Reaganomics trickle-down, and thus Mom would be semi-okay, and then maybe the kids?

The last time I had a chance to choose between the old ways and the new was a month ago, when various family members, me included, had fallen, each in separate areas, into hardships that simply couldn’t all be happening at once but were—legal, mental, custody, spousal. And health. So we gathered around the dinner table at my house, to which we had brought roast chicken and heirloom tomatoes, cheese, brown rice, and buttery Brussels sprouts with lemon and soy, along with what everyone had secretly brought to the feast, the indigestible sorrows of life.

Over dinner, we threw everything old-school at our problems—intelligence and wit and compassionate listening, and also the unconscious effort to power up, by taking inventory of all the offending parties. We had a bright conversation, and lots of attack humor, everyone zinging like electrified molecules. And there I sat, cute wise Annie, being the butt of most of the comical attack humor, fending it all off while feeling more and more vulnerable and wishing they would leave.

That night, after everyone left, I cleaned up the kitchen, which is always my favorite part of any dinner party, even at my own house. Then, as I was walking toward my bedroom, past the riverbanks of my grandson’s and niece’s toys and art supplies, I heard a high-pitched, warped voice. It said, clear as a bell, “Annie.” I stopped and looked around. Obviously I had imagined it. I did not hear it again and attributed it to a brain glitch. But when I got to my bedroom door, it called to me again, “Annie,” like a sick, witchy, ancient woman. I went back to investigate. It was deeply weird, with no possible explanation, unless the dogs were punking me. Or, more likely, the cat. When I didn’t see anything that could possibly explain it, I went to bed.

A few nights later, there it was again, without warning, and I wondered if I was losing my mind. Not, I might add, for the first time in my life.

It gave me the chill. It made me feel desperately alone. Like everyone, I’ve had a huge lifelong package of fear and self-doubt that was always waiting to claim me, which I’ve tried rather successfully to keep contained, but now there seemed to be a leak in the vessel. A friend once called this sense of being too alone “the desperate plain,” the
looming desolate stretch of ground, no trees to shelter you, no water, no way to escape, nowhere to hide or find comfort, strewn with rocks and a few random snake holes. You are stripped down existentially, you are naked, you are nuts.

The third time I heard the voice, I thought, “It’s come for me.” The “it” was the spooky internal voice made external, the black-dog voice of insomnia and hangovers. All the specters I’ve imagined and suppressed for fifty years were finally coming for me. I could hear this voice out loud, in my living room, wheedling: “Annie.”

It was filled with supplication and despair, and taunting, like an earworm, the piece of music you get in your ear and try to shake, like a dog with a foxtail, but it won’t let you go—it could be a jingle for a plumber or Metamucil. Only this one was the brainworm that has been there since I was a child, beneath all the activity, distractions, success and obsession and brilliant conversations and busyness and horns honking.

It is the voice containing the knowledge that my parents’ lives were insane, and that caused me to be insane, too, and that will cause the little ones to be insane, too, someday.

The shrill, small voice used to say, “Tick tock, tick tock,” but now it was saying, “We
told
you so. Crazy as a
looooon
.”

I did everything I could to keep the patient comfortable: I went for extra-long walks with the dogs, focused on my work, was extra-kind to myself. But I heard it again a few nights later.

I looked around in the general area it came from, where my grandson’s toy box was, and I sorted through the toys carefully, shaking them to make them say my name.

None of the toys said my name. A good sign.

I looked through my darling niece’s box of ersatz makeup. Maybe it was the blue glitter lipstick.

Above the toy box, to the right, were bookshelves. Was one of the
books
saying my name? I checked out this lead and came up empty. Excellent news. Next I tried to ignore it. I didn’t want to have to call a psychiatrist or 911. I kept shaking it off, telling myself sternly that there would be an explanation, something ridiculous, worse than the books or the toys or the makeup wanting to say my name. Strangely, though, I who tell my friends everything didn’t mention this one little sitch to anyone.

I hurried along to my bedroom each night. The prospect of hearing the voice was like a baited hook dangling right there, and if I bit, it would finally, after all these years, pull me into its huge whale self, swallow me whole. Poor old mind. It has been through so much, under extreme pressure from the day I was born, assailed by doubts, driven crazy by parents, by mean kids, bad skin, the losses of real life. And here I’ve climbed out, and usually feel good, competent, and generous, and then this hideous thing gets out of the coconut shell. “Annnie. Annnnnie.”

It was like an auditory rash. It was Jiminy Cricket.

A couple of nights when it called me, I went purposefully to my bedroom, then tiptoed burlesquely back into the living room to outsmart it and catch it in the act. But it didn’t speak to me those nights.

It has always drilled away at me, this diminishing, mocking voice—and I haven’t even had bosses or husbands. I’ve mostly kept it buried or muffled, but there have been many times of frozen, shamed loneliness, in public, or with a sweetheart, or at family gatherings, or when deeply alone, like now.

One night after I tiptoed back to the living room, as I lay in bed with earplugs, I wondered if it might be something like those remote-control fart machines that people find so amusing: an old woman sits down at the head of the table at a restaurant for a birthday celebration, and the comical, desperate middle child pushes a button, and a loud splutter erupts.

But I looked and could not find a remote-control fart machine.

Prayer helped, prayer always helps, and mostly I had sweet, creative, spiritual days—mother, grandma, auntie, and sister days, in most ways the best of my life—and then every few nights it called to me. It was like I heard the owl call my name, with Bette Davis playing the role of the owl. I kept remembering Roman Polanski movies. The voice might as well have been saying,
“No good, no good, no good.”
And, “What a stupid life you’ve had.” I did not hear it on days when the family wars burned brightest. It haphazardly harangued and laughed at me, for trying to keep the world in order by poring over my ledgers, my possessions, obsessions, and achievements, while everyone else surely had a life of presence and fulfillment.

I’d hear it only at night, late, softly but clear.

But willingness comes from the pain, and when I got to the point of believing I had really lost my mind, another voice inside me stepped in, grown-up and gentle. This one said, “Well? Who knows. Maybe not . . .”

It was lovely and amazing. I was marshaling a parent whom I hadn’t had consistently as a child, who assured me that we would figure it out, together. This person believed what I reported, and felt that my perceptions could be trusted or were at least worthy of investigation. My parents of origin more often explained how I must have gotten the wrong idea, because everything was actually just fine, couldn’t be better.

And one night, this other presence suggested that since the demon with its hideous chipperness seemed to appear as I headed for sleep, we would stay up together until we found out what it was.

We sat on the floor with the lights on, the dogs beside me, and the kitty resting on the couch above us. I heard the silence of an ideal life, a beautiful creative home, now with a grandchild in it most days, pets, beloved friends, books. Of course, there was hugely screwed-up stuff going on in my family’s life, too, that could not
possibly
be God’s will for us, especially not for the young ones in my
family. How can God possibly expect us to accept God’s will, when it can be such awful stuff? Why would you possibly pray for the power to carry out God’s will when, if God will just hear you out, you think it’s a very poor plan?

And right that minute, I heard the small, shrill voice: “Annie, Annie.” I moved on my butt toward the toy box and the bookshelves and sat in silence. I listened, like a scouting party for myself. Finally, I heard it again. I could tell that it wasn’t coming from the toy box, but from the bookshelves. I sighed with relief and a sense of progress.

I scooched forward to some of my most beloved possessions, my books, which have been in almost the exact same place in the four years since I moved into this house. I sat and looked lightly upon them, practicing patience, until my eyes landed on a woodcut puzzle that I’d brought back from the Frankfurt airport the year before.

The puzzle consisted of five colorful jungle animals cut out from a board the size of a legal pad, with a tiny battery embedded in the back that gave voice to the animals: an ascending moan for the elephant, a strange
crick crick
for the crocodile,
eee eee eee
for the monkey, a mumbly roar for the
lion, and a
caw-caw
for the parrot. I reached for it. All the parts were in place. I lifted the elephant out, and when I replaced it, heard nothing. Same with the lion, the monkey, the crocodile. But when I lifted out the parrot and then fit it back into its slot, I heard, “Annnnnnnie. Annnie.”

I threw my head back, laughing—those fucking Germans!—until the kitty ran for the kitchen. I followed after her, to get a replacement battery. Talk about total overwriting by the universe. Here, like everyone else I knew, I’d constructed my life to keep the brainworm at bay, by often turning everything on, all day and all night—the TV, the computer, NPR, the car, the espresso maker, the iPad, the crazy animated collage of life, the distraction circus. Yet all the noises and voices and feelings and memories that had somehow become compressed in me, like oil from fossils, had been rising from the earth into one soft cry, and it was my own name. Me: Annie, beautiful, ruined, touching, shadowy, loving, and mad-as-a-hatter me. I put a new battery into the casing of the puzzle, replaced all the animals, and then lifted them one by one: the elephant moaned, the monkey squealed, the crocodile cricked, the lion roared,
and the parrot said, “Caw, caw.” I patted my shoulder and laughed gently, and put the puzzle back on the lowest bookshelf. Then I got up to do the single most reliable, comforting, celebratory spiritual action I know: I put clean sheets on the bed and smoothed out their crisp freshness, soft as cool skin.

O
n my forty-ninth birthday, in April 2003, I decided that all of life was pointless, and I would eat myself to death. Three weeks earlier, George W. Bush had launched war on Iraq. These are desert days. However, after a second cup of coffee, I realized that I couldn’t kill myself that morning—not because it was my birthday, but because I’d promised to get arrested the next day. I had been arrested three weeks earlier with an ecumenical bunch of religious peaceniks, people who still believe in Dr. King and Gandhi. Also, my back was out. I didn’t want to die in crone mode. Plus, there was no food in the house. So I took a long, hot shower instead and began another day of being gloated to death.

Everyone I know has been devastated by Bush’s presidency and, in particular, our country’s heroic military activities overseas. I can usually manage a crabby hope that there is meaning in mess and pain, that more will be revealed, and that truth and beauty will somehow win out in the end. But I’d been struggling as my birthday approached. Bush had stolen so much from us, from our poor and elderly, since the very beginning of his reign, and especially since he went to war in Iraq. I wake up some mornings pinned to the bed by centrifugal sadness and frustration. A friend called to wish me Happy Birthday, and I remembered something she’d said many years ago, while reading a
Vanity Fair
article about Hitler’s affair with his niece. “I have had it with Hitler,” Peggy said vehemently, throwing the magazine to the floor. And I’d had it with Bush.

Hadn’t the men in the White House ever heard of the word “karma”? They lied their way into taking our country to war, crossing another country’s borders with ferocious military might, trying to impose our form of government on a sovereign nation without any international agreement or legal justification, and set about killing the desperately poor on behalf of the obscenely rich. Then
we’re instructed, like naughty teenagers, to refrain from saying that it is an immoral war that has set a disastrous precedent—because to do so is to offer aid and comfort to the enemy.

While I was thinking about all this, my Jesuit friend Tom called. Usually he calls to report on the latest rumors of my mental deterioration, drunkenness, or promiscuity, how sick it makes everyone to know that I am showing all my lady parts to the neighbors. But this time he called to wish me Happy Birthday.

“How are we going to get through this craziness?” I asked. There was silence for a moment.

“Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe,” he said.

Father Tom loves the desert. A number of my friends do. They love the skies that pull you into infinity, like the ocean. They love the silence, and how, if you listen long enough, the pulse of the desert begins to sound like the noise your finger makes when you run it around the rim of a crystal glass. They love the scary beauty—snakes, lizards, scorpions; kestrels and hawks. They love the mosaics of water-washed pebbles on the desert floor, small rocks that cast huge shadows, a shoot of vegetation here, a wildflower there.

I like the desert for short periods of time, from
inside a car, with the windows rolled up and the doors locked. I prefer beach resorts with room service. But liberals have been in the desert for several years now, and I’m worn-out. Some days I hardly know what to pray for. Peace? Well, whatever.

So the morning of my birthday, because I couldn’t pray, I did what Matisse once said to do: “I don’t know if I believe in God or not. . . . But the essential thing is to put oneself in a frame of mind which is close to that of prayer.” I closed my eyes and got quiet. I tried to look like Mother Mary, with dreadlocks and a bad back.

But within seconds, I was frantic to turn on the TV. I was in withdrawal—I needed more scolding from Donald Rumsfeld, and more malignant celebration of what half the nation agreed, in April 2003, was a great victory for George W. Bush. So we couldn’t find those stupid weapons of mass destruction—pick, pick, pick. I didn’t turn on the TV. I kept my eyes closed and breathed. I started to feel crazy, and knew that all I needed was five minutes of CNN. I listened to the birds sing outside, and it was like Chinese water torture, which I am sure we don’t say anymore. Then I remembered the weekend when eleven million people in the world
marched for peace, how joyful it was to be part of the stirrings of a great movement. My pastor, Veronica, says that peace is joy at rest, and joy is peace on its feet, and I felt both that weekend.

I lay on the floor with my eyes closed for so long that my dog, Lily, came over and worriedly licked me back to life. That cheered me up. “What did you get me for my birthday?” I asked. She started to chew on my head. That helped. Maybe the old left is dead, but after we’ve rested awhile we can prepare for something new. I don’t know who can lead us away from the craziness and barbarity; I’m very confused now. But I know that in the desert, you stay out of the blistering sun. You go out during the early morning and in the cool of the evening. You seek oasis, shade, safety, refreshment. There’s every hue of green, and of gold. But I’m only pretending to think it’s beautiful; I find it terribly scary. I walk on eggshells and hold my breath.

I called Tom back.

He listened quietly. I asked him for some good news.

He thought. “Well,” he said finally. “My cactuses are blooming. Last week they were ugly and
reptilian, and now they are bursting with red and pink blossoms. They don’t bloom every year, so you have to love them while they’re here.”

“I hate cactuses,” I said. “I want to know what to do. Where we even start.”

“We start by being kind to ourselves. We breathe, we eat. We remember that God is present wherever people suffer. God’s here with us when we’re miserable, and God is there in Iraq. The suffering of innocent people draws God close to them. Kids hit by U.S. bombs are not abandoned by God.”

“Well, it sure looks like they were,” I said. “It sure looks that way to their parents.”

“It also looked like Christ had been abandoned on the cross. It looked like a win for the Romans.”

“How do we help? How do we not lose our minds?”

“You take care of the suffering.”

“I can’t get to Iraq.”

“There are folks who are miserable here.”

After we got off the phone, I ate a few birthday chocolates. Then I asked God to help me be helpful. It was the first time that day that I felt my prayers were sent and then received—like e-mail. I tried to cooperate with grace, which is to say, I
did not turn on the TV. I asked God to help me again. The problem with God—or at any rate, one of the top five most annoying things about God—is that He or She rarely answers right away. It can take days, weeks. Some people seem to understand this—that life and change take time. Chou En-lai, when asked, “What do you think of the French Revolution?” paused for a minute—smoking incessantly—then replied, “Too soon to tell.” I, on the other hand, am an instant-message type. It took decades for Bush to destroy the Iraqi army in three weeks.

But I prayed: Help me. And then I drove to the market in silence, to buy my birthday dinner.

I flirted with everyone in the store, especially the old people, and I lightened up. When the checker finished ringing up my items, she looked at my receipt and cried, “Hey! You’ve won a ham!”

I felt blindsided by the news. I had asked for help, not a ham. This was very disturbing. What on earth was I going to do with ten pounds of salty pink eraser? I rarely eat it. It makes you bloat.

“Wow,” I said. The checker was so excited about giving it to me that I pretended I was, too.

How great!

A bagger was dispatched to the back of the
store to fetch my ham. I stood waiting anxiously. I wanted to go home, so I could start caring for suffering people or turn on CNN. I almost suggested that the checker award the ham to the next family who paid with food stamps. But for some reason, I waited. If God was giving me a ham, I’d be crazy not to receive it. Maybe it was the ham of God, who takes away the sins of the world.

I waited ten minutes for what I began to think of as “that fucking ham.” Finally the bag boy handed me a parcel the size of a cat. I put it with feigned cheer into my grocery cart and walked to the car, trying to figure out who might need it. I thought about chucking the parcel out the window near a field. I was so distracted that I crashed my cart smack into a slow-moving car in the parking lot.

I started to apologize, when I noticed that the car was a rusty wreck, and that an old friend was at the wheel. We got sober together a long time ago, and each of us had a son at the same time. She has dark black skin and processed hair the color of cooled tar.

She opened her window. “Hey,” I said. “How are you—it’s my birthday!”

“Happy Birthday,” she said, and started crying.
She looked drained and pinched, and after a moment, she pointed to her gas gauge. “I don’t have money for gas or food. I’ve never asked for help from a friend since I got sober, but I’m asking you to help me.”

“I’ve got money,” I said.

“No, no, I just need gas,” she said. “I’ve never asked someone for a handout.”

“It’s not a handout,” I told her. “It’s my birthday present.” I thrust a bunch of money into her hand, everything I had. Then I reached into my shopping cart and held out the ham to her like a clown offering flowers. “Hey!” I said. “Do you and your kids like ham?”

“We love it,” she said. “We love it for every meal.”

She put it in the seat beside her, firmly, lovingly, as if she were about to strap it in. And she cried some more.

We kissed good-bye through her window. Walking back to my car, I thought about the seasonal showers in the desert, how potholes in the rocks fill up with rain. When you look afterward, there are already frogs in the water and brine shrimp reproducing, like commas doing the macarena, and it seems, but only seems, that you went from parched to overflow in the blink of an eye.