Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace (7 page)

M
y parents were about the pursuit of the so-called good life. When they fell in love after World War II, it was as intellectuals. This meant that you went out with other couples like you—good-looking, highly educated, and ironic folks who listened to Coltrane and Miles Davis, and raised their kids to be extremely high achievers, drank a lot of wine, passed along great books, knew about the latest poets, and cooked Julia Child’s recipes and cutting-edge ethnic food.

I still remember my mother fully engaged in a number of enlivening, centering pursuits—cooking, writing for local papers, reading, baths, hanging out with her best women friends making marmalade or chutney (then trying to trick the
poor children into liking it). And the figs my father and I devoured from our friends’ backyards—how perfectly one fit into your mouth, the succulent flesh with just a little something to chew against to keep you focused, the honey juice that didn’t run down your chin but ran down your throat, bathing you in the exotic ancient pleasure of a most common fruit.

The food and life my parents created would have been delicious and nourishing, if it had not been for one tiny problem—that they were so unhappy together. My brothers and I ate cassoulet at a table where our parents avoided making eye contact and, rather than shout, which was considered déclassé, engaged in clipped conversation. It was
The Joy of Cooking
meets Harold Pinter. So the steamed persimmon pudding was easy on the taste buds but hard to swallow, because it came at such a cost: a lump in the throat, anxiety in our bellies.

What had happened that turned my parents from the bright young things who fell in love over literature and wine to a cheerless woman and man who after dinner took their books and glasses to opposite ends of the living room, connected only by a lily pad of children on the rug between them, lost in homework?

I think the answer is what didn’t happen: They were not able to take their pleasures, their love of their children, out to the next concentric circle, where something bigger awaited. My mother and her women friends made not only vats of that world-class chutney but also
mole poblano
and cakes from scratch, and yet because she was empty inside and stayed in a miserable marriage for twenty-seven years, she who cooked like a dream could not ever feel satisfyingly filled and got fat.

I found the spiritual food for which I longed as a child in the families of my two best friends. One was Catholic and lived down the block. The Catholics said grace before serving up aggressively modest fare—English muffin pizzas, tuna noodle casserole, fish sticks. The parents seemed to enjoy each other’s company: what a concept. Sometimes they yelled at each other and then later hugged and kissed in the kitchen—oh my God. It had never crossed my mind that peace could be found in full expression, in yelling and weepy embraces.

I also loved to eat with—and be with—a Christian Science family, who did not yell but read the Bible and Mrs. Eddy together. When I was at their house, we prayed, eyes closed, breathing deeply. In the silence you could feel and hear your own
breath in your nostrils, and that could be both relaxing and scary, like having a car wash in your head. Of course, I did not mention this to my parents; they would have been horrified. For me it was heaven, even though we frequently ate snacks for dinner—popcorn, store-bought pie. This food was so delicious because of the love in that house, the love that had at its core a sweet, strong marriage. The parents did not yell or kiss as much as the Catholics, but I felt enveloped by the friendly confidence of their faith, and I was sad each time I was remanded to the spiritual anorexia at my house.

By the time I was in high school, I did what all bright perfection-seeking girls learned to do, besides staying on my toes because something bad might be about to happen: I dieted. Or, come to think of it, binged, dieted, and binged, like my mother, but never felt that simultaneous state of being full without being stuffed. And like my father, I began to drink a lot. Like both of them, I had the disease called “More!” and absolutely could not feel gently satisfied.

Nothing can be delicious when you are holding your breath. For something to be delicious, you have to be present to savor it, and presence is in attention and in the flow of breath. It begins in the
mouth, my parents’ preferred site of comfort, and then it connects our heads to our bodies through our throats, and into our lungs and tummies, a beautiful connective cord of air.

In the middle and late 1960s, two things came along that started to give me my life back: the counterculture and the women’s movement. A beautiful hippie teacher at my small high school gave me
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
and then Virginia Woolf’s journals, all of which I consumed like someone at a hot-dog-eating contest. My best friend, Pammy, and I together discovered Jean Rhys and
Ms.
magazine. Then I went to a women’s college, and the older girls and professors gave me the Margarets, Atwood and Drabble, and the first Nora Ephron collection, and it was all like when Helen Keller discovers that Anne Sullivan is spelling W-A-T-E-R into her hand, and wants her to spell everything in the world now. I was learning the secrets of life: that you could become the woman you’d dared to dream of being, but to do so you were going to have to fall in love with your own crazy, ruined self.

I met in circles with more and more women, who, over lentil soup and Milanos, taught me about my spirit and my needs and my body. I met with
mixed groups of people to strategize protests or save open space, and we gobbled down rice and beans. I showed new friends how to make my parents’ cassoulets. They taught me about halvah, pomegranate wine, and massages to heal both body and soul.

Awareness dawned on me in these years that the values of my parents’ lives, of the good life, were going to be part of an evolutionary journey—the marvelous food and storytelling, bookstores, hiking—along with what I found in the religious houses of my childhood friends and in churches, along with sharing the deepest truth with women in profound and very funny conversation, along with silence and meditation. God: this was so radical, and so delicious.

I am not saying that it became easy. Like learning the piano or Spanish or meditation, I had to practice and do poorly—I had to read difficult material, and then stay with it, and talk to others, and slowly start to understand. Then I had to try something else hard and worthy. I had to seek wisdom, teachers. And oh, relationships. Don’t even get me started, unless I have all day to describe the total, almost hilarious
inappropriateness of every fixer-upper, I mean man, I tried to get to love me. But as Rumi said, “Through love all pain will turn to medicine,” not most pain, or for other people; and the pain and failures grew me, helped slowly restore me to the person I was born to be. I had to learn that life was not going to be filling if I tried to scrunch myself into somebody else’s idea of me, i.e., someone sophisticated enough to prefer dark chocolate. I like milk chocolate, like M&M’s: so sue me. But I no longer have to stuff myself to the gills.

I mean, not very often.

I learned from all my teachers that when I feel like shoveling in food, a man, or expensive purchases, the emptiness can be filled only with love—a nap with the dogs, singing off-key with my church. Or maybe, perhaps, a fig.

I learned that opening myself to my own love and to life’s tough loveliness not only was the most delicious, amazing thing on earth but also was quantum. It would radiate out to a cold, hungry world. Beautiful moments heal, as do real cocoa, Pete Seeger, a walk on old fire roads. All I ever wanted since I arrived here on earth were the same things I needed as a baby, to go from cold to warm,
lonely to held, the vessel to the giver, empty to full. You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing that you are worth profound care, even when you’re dirty and rattled. Who knew?

N
o one can prove that God does or doesn’t exist, but tough acts of forgiveness are pretty convincing for me. It is so not my strong suit, and I naturally prefer the company of people who hold grudges, as long as they are not held against me. Forgiveness is the hardest work we do. When, against all odds, over time, your heart softens toward truly heinous behavior on the part of parents, children, siblings, and everyone’s exes, you almost have to believe that something not of this earth snuck into your stone-cold heart.

Left to my own devices, I’m a forgiveness denier—I’ll start to think that there are hurts so deep that nothing can heal them. Time alone won’t
necessarily do the trick. Our best thinking isn’t enough, or we would all be fine, instead of in our current condition. A lack of forgiveness is like leprosy of the insides, and left untreated, it can take out tissue, equilibrium, soul, sense of self. I have sometimes considered writing a book called
All the People I Still Hate: A Christian Perspective
, but readers would recoil. Also, getting older means that without meaning to, you accidentally forgive almost everyone—almost—so the book would not be long.

You forgive your mother, for having had such terrible self-esteem, dependent on being of value to all men, everywhere, in every way. You forgive her for not having risen up, for not teaching you how to be an autonomous, beautiful woman, for not teaching you how to use eyeliner and blotting papers, and for not having been able to lose the extra fifty pounds that led to childhood embarrassment and your own lifetime obsessions. You forgive your father, for—well, you know—everything. The masculine shut-downedness, for which only the Germans have a word, the faithlessness, the drinking, and the general contempt for women, with their icky, messy, mysterious bodies and minds. You forgive all but the very worst
boyfriend, with whom even Jesus struggles. You forgive awful bosses, gravely incompetent doctors. You forgive your child’s peers who bullied him or first got him smoking cigarettes or weed. You forgive your professional rival, especially if you surpass him in stature, and his books sell poorly, and his hair falls out, and people can finally see what a generally loathsome pervert and fraud he is, ideally in the book review section of
The New York Times
. You mostly forgive life for being so unfair, for having stolen away from and saddled us with so much, for being so excruciating to most of the world. You even semi-sort-of-mostly forgive yourself, for being so ridiculous, such a con, a nervous case, a loser.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a giant wound is created, revealed, reopened. Your child has grown to hate and blame you, bear false witness against you; or your sister’s ex charges someone in the family with a ghastly crime to wreak revenge. Or someone steals your retirement savings. Or your ex marries an adorable, mature teenager.

I have been known to hold the random grudge, usually against a really rotten egg. Yet for two years recently I was quite mad at my dad—the person I loved best.

The problem with this is that he has been dead for thirty-four years. Also, he died tragically, way too young. So you’d think I might cut him some slack.

Nah.

I was, seriously, a perfect daughter. I got great grades for him, kept the family together, rubbed his feet, and read way beyond my years, starting at five, like a cross between a geisha and Susan Sontag. Later I could dazzle his friends with my charm. He loved this. I overlooked the weaknesses in his character, and the destruction these weaknesses wrought on our family. I made him drinks, I drank with him. I became who I am—a writer, intellectual, conversationalist—to please him.

I was twenty-three when he got sick with brain cancer in his early fifties, after which I devoted myself to his care. I hung out with him every day, because his girlfriend, D, and my older brother had jobs and my younger brother was in high school. I took him to most of his doctor appointments, chemo, radiation, for two years. I kept hope alive when his mind was still working, and then I became his hospice care and mother when it failed.

I never quite got over his death, not really, and I missed him beyond words. So much of his life
and passions—literature, hiking, birds, writing—became mine. Except for these weaknesses of character—wine, women, the way he’d treated my mom—he’d been a great father, handsome and witty to boot, like a Kennedy.

However, a few years ago I came upon a journal he kept for the first year of his brain cancer. Actually, D sent it from the East Coast, where she lived with her husband of thirty years, with a note saying she thought I would want to have it. She and I had not spoken since Dad died. He had been diagnosed only one month after they fell in love, and while we knew she’d gotten a bum deal, there had been distance between her and my brothers and me both while Dad was alive and after he died.

I dove into the journal, the lake of my father being alive again, so glad to hear his voice, looking forward to the good memories—mostly, of course, of him and me.

But instead, he wrote about how comforting D’s company and devotion were, along with some harsh things about me, such as how unpleasant it was that I was sometimes so emotional. For example, I cried openly because the person I loved most was dying so young. He wrote some things about how I tried too hard to be brave and hopeful. He
wrote: “Annie came to the hospital, full of the usual false good cheer and bad jokes.”

After reading this, I felt as though everything in the known world was now open to dispute. I was stung, shaken to my boots. I didn’t even know where to start processing this. So I cut him off.

My heart was hard by the next day, when the tears stopped. I put him out, literally; I took his journal to the garage. I summoned what self-esteem I could, and anger. The hell with him. What a dead guy. Talk about losers. Seriously—dead as a doornail. I had spent my life trying to get him to honor me. I needed to get on with my own life.

Yeah, right.

Despite talking about the betrayal with my best friends, my therapist, and my younger brother, who had been barely mentioned in the journal, I could not let go of the resentment. The bruise went so deep. Besides, it was intoxicating. Resentments make even the best of us feel superior. I’ve always found a kind of comfort in them, as if they were wire monkey moms, a place to hold on that is better than nothing.

I passed through all the stations of the cross—the hurt, numbness, disgust, the thoughts of
revenge, the reversion to Tony Soprano’s childish response to his mother—“You’re dead to me.” This was not a recipe for self-respect, to be almost sixty, acting ten. You are so dead to me—double dead, infinity dead.

Addicts and alcoholics will tell you that their recovery began when they woke up in pitiful and degraded enough shape to take Step Zero, which is: “This shit has got to stop.” Fortunately, with twenty-six years of church, twenty-five years of recovery from alcoholism, twenty years of brilliant if intermittent therapy, and the loving friends in my inner sanctum, I got to Step Zero in only a year. Well, maybe a year and a half.

Growing up is not going nearly as efficiently as I had hoped.

Finally, though, I climbed out of my hole onto Step Zero. I’d had my fill of being in the hole of self-righteousness. I was no longer willing to let this neon insult overload me and wipe out whatever other visions I might have of life, and of myself.

Somehow I had a fleeting sense of doubt that something had been
done
to me, as opposed to my father’s having acted out of his own fears and
compulsions, his need to convey his truth, as I had acted out of mine, and D had acted out of hers, in sending me the journal without warning me of its contents. And I mean
fleeting
, but still a crack.

The beginning of forgiveness is often exhaustion. You’re pooped; thank God.

You don’t get there by willpower. The readiness comes from the movement of wisdom and good will, or what maybe in a crazy moment of abandon I’d call grace. To take far loftier examples than our own, people told Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, “If you stop now, all those lives will have been in vain.” But he said, “Enough. It’s over.” After 1945, instead of people saying, “Let’s pound the Germans into the ground,” the Marshall Plan came to be. Let’s rebuild. Let’s help our enemies rebuild, and see what happens.

Something deeply mysterious jiggles loose in us that finally says, I’m going to let it go, instead of breathing the hot little flame into a conflagration.

I was done not forgiving my father or D, though I wanted to forgive them, which was a start, but I felt like a shivering blue child being told to jump into the cold pool.

Horribly, when all you want is relief from the pain, you instead need to tune in to it, right in to
the lonely clench. You need to know how much the toxin has invaded you.

So I began to breathe into the fist, like loosening a knot. I raised my eyes to my father, who actually wert in heaven, and this put him in perspective: he didn’t get to be alive anymore. He had paid. What a flawed and complex person, so erudite and brilliant. Who looked at the track marks on my fifteen-year-old brother’s arms and pretended not to see. And who stood vigil at San Quentin when they gassed someone. Who orchestrated a warm, active relationship between his children and his mistress, all while still married to our mother. Who took us all clamming at minus tides, dug around with trowels in the sopping sand at dawn, then made us clam chowder for dinner. Who wrote like a dream and made a living as a writer, and yet died in debt. Who betrayed his longtime mistress, with whom he’d betrayed our mother. Who lived as much as he could the Emerson line “The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.” Who faced his death with a lot of dignity. Who was who he was who he was.

I will never know where that willingness to see him came from, although talking with friends is where most of my insight comes from. As my heart
softened slightly, my gut, the seat of the pain, rose in wonder, like a brass band, and said, “Hey, wait—I support this. I support you.”

Seeing him as a human provided me with the courage to stand up to the resentment and say, I’m not going to let you rob me anymore of my sense of modest generosity.

People like to say, “Forgiveness begins with forgiving yourself.” Well, that’s nice. Thank you for sharing. It does and it doesn’t. To think you know is proof that you don’t. But forgiveness sure doesn’t begin with reason. The rational insists that it is right, that we are right. It is about attacking and defending, which means there can be no peace. It loves the bedtime story of how we’ve been injured. The rational is claustrophobic, too. The choice is whether you want to stay stuck in being right but not being free or admit you’re pretty lost and possibly available for a long, deep breath, which is as big as the universe, stirs the air around, maybe opens a window.

I called on spirit, whom I usually picture as either a breeze or Isaac Stern, but this time I saw a psychiatrist with a clipboard. She listened, said, “Hmm,” nodding as I spewed it all out—the wrong, the blame, the exhaustion. Hmm. If someone
listens, deeply, you’ve been heard, which helps you absorb it, and you can lay it at the feet of the right god. You can forgo the arithmetic of adding up the damage again, lay your Bartleby ledger in your lap, and look up. Looking up is the way out. And Hmm is very close to Omm, which is the sound of the universe. Hmm, she said: good work.

I felt as if I had gotten a leg and most of one shoulder out from the bell jar. There was fresh air on my skin. Rumi wrote, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” In that field, you’re under a wide swath of sky, so the story becomes almost illimitable, instead of two small nutty people with grievances and popguns. You have to leave your crate, though; this will not happen inside your comfort zone. But if you can make a break for that field, you might forget all the whys, the nuance, details, and colors about the story that you’re sure you’ve gotten right, that doom you.

So you sacrifice the need to be right, because you have been wronged, and you put down the abacus that has always helped you keep track of things. This jiggles you free from clutch and quiver. You can unfurl your fingers, hold out your palm, openhanded.

At some point in the process, I remembered something my vet said years ago when my old dog Sadie was dying. He said, “Most of her is fine, and still loves being here. Very little of her is diseased.” So I looked around for any healthy tissue. I’d published a novel that was a love letter to my family and D. I had honored them, captured my family’s finest, funniest moments, and with this novel, my career began. I was swamped with memories unspooling backward from my father’s death, through all the years, to the first time I remember him, when I was two or three, buttoning my sweater. Spooling forward through the years, walking with him as often as we could after he got sick, and how long he refused to acknowledge that his brain was damaged, even after he wrote notes to himself directly on his girlfriend’s kitchen table, bypassing the need for paper or index cards, while looking as professorial as ever. Even as he combed the cats with barbecue tongs, which I am probably weeks away from doing myself, and which the cats loved. At one of his last outpatient appointments, when D and I had to support him from the car, as if he were blotto, the oncologist asked if he was having any trouble walking. My father thought this over, and said no, not that he’d noticed. Then he turned to
his girlfriend and me, puzzled by this odd question, and asked: Had
we
? We both shrugged, innocent as Little Rascals, not wanting to hurt his feelings. No, no, we hadn’t noticed anything.

I also had a soupçon of knowledge: You know by a certain age that, contrary to appearances, all of us are weird, with our squinchiness, jabs, denial, judgment, tone deafness, and we can also be so lovely that it breaks your heart.

Months after the journal arrived, I wrote a note to D, apologizing for how long it had taken me to thank her for sending the journal. I sent love, and meant it, which was a miracle.