Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace Read online

  In the photo, she is wearing her usual bizarre mask of makeup, which I have always believed was a way of maintaining both disguise and surface tension; it had humiliated me. But in this one picture, instead of feeling humiliated, I could finally see what she was shooting for: to appear beautiful and worthy, a vigorous woman on this earth. She is posing in front of a vase of flowers, clasping one wrist with her other hand, as if trying to take her own pulse. She had been divorced for eight years or so by then. One of her eyebrows is arched, archly, as though one of us had once again said something dubious or socially unacceptable. One-third of her is in darkness, two-thirds of her is in light, which pretty much says it.

  You can see what a brave little engine she was, even though she’d lost everything over the years—her husband, her career, her health. But she still had her friends and family, and she stayed fiercely loyal to liberal causes, and to underdogs. And I thought, Well, I honor that, so we’ll start there.

  The next thing I knew, I had called my relatives, most of whom still live in the Bay Area, where we all grew up, and invited them to dinner on my mom and her twin’s birthday, to scatter her ashes. Those ashes of hers were up against a lot—that our lives were better since her death—but I believed that if we released her, this would release us; and she could release herself. Releasing her would crack my hard shell, and some of the Easter-egg dye of my mother might remain, in beautiful veins. Or else I would have a complete breakdown and start to drink again, and Sam and I would have to go live at the rescue mission. What I knew was that it was the next right thing to do.

  Two weeks later, three aunts, an uncle, half a dozen cousins, my brother and sister-in-law, Sam’s six-year-old second cousin, Dallas, and Gertrud, my mother’s lifelong best friend, came to dinner at my house. I adore these people. I have also had fights with some of them over the years, have said terrible things, have been accused by one of them of great wrongs, for which I would never be forgiven. We’ve had the usual problems: failed marriages, rehab, old resentments, miserable lumpy family secrets, so much harshness and intensity. But if I had the time, I could tell you all the ways we have loved and cared for one another over the years. We’re just another motley American family, still enduring. At holiday time, my friend Neshama’s father-in-law used to look around at his family, shake his head, and say, “We are a bum outfit.” I love that.

  After dinner, we hiked up the hill to the open space closest to my house. One of my aunts, who told me to say she is fifty-four, totters when she walks now, and needs arms to hold on to. Dallas glommed on to Sam, who dragged him along like carry-on luggage, rolling his eyes but pleased. The wind was really blowing, and the sun was starting to go down. Sam and Dallas tore to the top of the hill, while the rest of us took one another’s arms, blown and buffeted by the wind, walking in a doddering procession the rest of the way.

  The sun was setting behind a ghost cloud, illuminating it, imposing a circle of light over it, like a cookie cutter. There were eucalyptus trees in a circle around us at the edge of the grass, looking like they were holding down the earth, like bricks on a picnic tablecloth in the wind. The trees were the only things between us and the horizon. We could see 360 degrees above fleecy trees, golden hillsides, small towns. The wind made us feel even more exposed than usual. It was so gritty that it flayed us—but lucky us, someone pointed out, with bodies to be assailed. Dallas tore around the periphery having goof attacks, flirting with Sam.

  “Does anyone want to see my fireworks?” he kept calling out. “Will anyone come and see them?”

  “When we’re done,” his mother told him sternly. “Now leave us alone.”

  We stood in a circle for a few minutes. “I knew that if I asked you to come tonight, you would,” I said. We all cried a little. My cousins really loved my mother. She had a sweet voice, one of them said, and was always kind to them. Gertrud said, “The nature of life is harsh, and Nikki got some terrible breaks. It wasn’t fair how things turned out for her. But she did a lot of good in her life, and we will always miss her.”

  “Yes, we will,” a couple of people said responsively, the way we do at church. My heart was suddenly heavy with missing her, even as I felt the old familiar despair that she had been my mother. I just tried to breathe.

  The reason I never give up hope is that everything is so basically hopeless. Hopelessness underscores everything—the deep sadness and fear at the center of life, the holes in the hearts of our families, the animal confusion within us; the madness of King George. But when you do give up hope, a lot can happen. When it’s not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens like one of those fluted Japanese blossoms, flimsy and spastic, bright and warm. This almost always seems to happen in community: with family, related by blood or chosen; at church for me; and at peace marches.

  Then my brother Stevo walked away from where we stood, and began to pry open the plastic box with a knife. “Want to see my fireworks?” Dallas cried, and his mother shushed him again. He raced about on the hillside. It was distracting, like having a puppy in church, but the sun defused my annoyance, and I remembered C. S. Lewis’s wonderful observation, “We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it.” Except for Sam and Dallas, we were as big and slow as herd animals at a watering hole. We watched Stevo take out the bag of ashes and open it into the wind. He flung Nikki away from the sunset, and the wind caught her and whooshed her away. Of course some of the ashes blew back onto my brother, and onto Gertrud, who stood beside him scattering flowers into the plume. Ashes always stick and pester you long after you have scattered them; my brother looked like he’d been cleaning a fireplace.

  Then Dallas called out again, “Want to see my fireworks now? Doesn’t anyone want to see my fireworks?” We all turned back toward the sun, where he stood, and gave him the go-ahead. He reached into his pockets, withdrawing fists full of something, and looking at us roguishly, he flung whatever he held up into the air. It turned out to be tiny pebbles, but because he tossed with such ferocious velocity, as high as he could manage in the wind, when they rained down on us in the very last of the sun, they shone.

  Brotherman

  We’re not what we do, but what we receive. I have only now learned this, at the age of sixty, from my older brother, and I think he has just learned it from me. He turned sixty-two yesterday. The last thing I remember, he had just gotten his braces off.

  When he came out of my guest room for coffee, I commented on the tufts of hair like pampas grass in his ears. He pretended he couldn’t hear, cupped his ear, and shouted, “What’s that?” When my darling nephew called to wish his dad Happy Birthday, I took the phone and told Tyler to speak as loudly as possible. “Your father is as deaf as a post now,” I said. This is not true, although he has been nearly crippled at times over the last ten years by rheumatoid arthritis.

  He is just over six feet tall, with thick gray hair and our mom’s brown eyes. He’s stocky and heavily muscled, although the last time he worked out was during the Carter administration.

  I’ve really known him only a couple of years. I have always been close to my younger brother, Stevo, who helped me raise my son, but John is my prodigal brother. A lot of people are not aware that I even have an older brother, as twenty-five years ago he moved three hours away and forgot to visit us much until two years ago.

  We went to visit him and his family a few times. We loved him, his wife, and his son, and having enjoyed our time together, we could all check it off the list.

  His fiancée, Connie, and I celebrated his birthday by letting him sleep late and making him coffee. They had been to a prominent faith healer the day before, who they hoped could heal Connie’s cancer. Today they left my house after breakfast for their weekly visit to the oncology department at UCSF Medical Center, where she is in clinical trials for stage four, metastatic, breast cancer, which is now in her liver and lungs. She has a bad atti
tude toward getting much more chemo, as she and my brother are to be married in May, and she hopes not to be bald or violently ill.

  They are the two happiest people I see on any given day. It has crossed my mind that they do this to hurt me, but they simply love each other and God so much.

  Taking bundles of stuff that is seemingly futile and painful and making it work as well as it can did not used to be John’s strong suit. He was not able to do this with our family. Ours was like any other family, basically well-meaning, with lots of addictions, secrets, and mental illness. We were such a polite catastrophe that everyone’s energy went to survival, self-medication, Mask Making 101, and myopia.

  He was two years old when our parents brought me home from the hospital to destroy his life. He looked at me and said to Mom and Dad, “Take it back.” Until my birth, he had been brilliant and precocious—speaking at two—but afterward, not so much.

  The prince was deposed. Our younger brother was born five years after me. My parents were in over their heads. They might have been able to raise one child successfully. Even better, orchids, or llamas. Stevo and I were both reading by age four. John could not keep up and did not try. Instead, he did everything he could to feel better, including a lot of recklessness. He found me annoying and, with my bizarre looks, a major embarrassment. He hit me a lot. He put the barest possible energy into our family, while—this is true, if pathetic—I’ve spent most of my life force trying to keep us together. He moved out; I went east for college. Mom and Dad finally divorced.

  When our father got sick, John would come by for dinner with Dad’s girlfriend, Stevo, and me, but these were brief visits, not to be in the fray with us. We were always glad to see him, and he can be warm and affable, but he always had somewhere else to be, as he had just met and fallen in love with the woman he’d marry and live with for thirty-three years. By the end, my younger brother and I were bathing our dad, managing his catheters, keeping his mouth fresh. I would have loved not to do this, too.

  Thank God all three of us were drinking and using drugs.

  Any semblance of order that Stevo and I might have had came apart when our father got sick, but we had each other, and we lurched drunkenly onward. Five years later, John got clean and sober, as did Stevo and I two years later. John moved farther away.

  He married the lovely woman he’d met, who was from a culture of discipline, politeness, tidiness, codified response, and ritualized appreciation. It was a perfect mesh, after a childhood in our crazy no-boundary foxhole family. He wanted mesh, not mess. We called him Brotherman behind his back, abridged from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, because he was the successful son.

  He got a good job in the insurance industry and bought a house with a pool. This was mind-blowing, that our reckless hippie brother had become so straight and successful, with such an impressive surface. Stevo, Mom, and I were raw, overly sensitive, needy, and broke.

  Mom loved John more than life itself, and definitely more than she loved Stevo and me, who helped her shop, drove her around, and included her in our lives. What did this get us? Well, the great blessing of service, of doing the right thing, of being manic little church mice, but when John called her, she’d exclaim, “Isn’t John a love?” She mentioned his calls every time we spoke, for weeks. “Oh, I had the nicest talk with John. Isn’t he a love?” It was hard to take, but not his fault. Still.

  His wife was sweetly distant, his child gorgeous and easy, and he got promotions, whereas Stevo and I were loving shambles, in the hearts of cousins and extended family, our lives full of irregularities and holes. But we had great kids and each other. We both had God in our lives, the greatest friends, and the hiking trails of Marin.

  John and I talked on the phone every few months, and twice a year, if we were lucky, he stopped by on a kingly visit. He gave generously to our kids, his niece and nephew. He had impeccable timing, though, and while never there for regular old holidays with the aunts, uncles, and cousins, he was there for the most important occasions of state. He came to Stevo’s wedding and our beloved uncle’s funeral. And he happened to be there for our mother’s last day on earth. So he always got written down in the guest book, and he got full credit.

  Everyone went crazy if my brother John showed up, especially, I might add, me. His presence made any occasion special. Oh my God, cousin John was actually there.

  I loved him deeply and knew he loved me, but it didn’t add up to much. The way he had shamed me in childhood still hurt. I felt burned by how little he was able to help with Dad and then Mom. I did not know very much about who he was on the inside, what he felt, the price he’d paid to survive our weird, tense, Kabuki childhood.

  Years ago I came upon Dag Hammarskjöld’s line “Forgiveness is the answer to the child’s dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean again,” and knew that this could not happen for us, that our parents were gone and John was just John. Take it or leave it. Life on life’s terms.

  The first sign that there was a crack in his shell was when he joined a fundamentalist church, with a thousand members and a Christian rock band. He’d always been utterly uninterested in faith, while Stevo and I were both believers. He’d converted. It seemed like an hour later he’d become a pillar of that church, a Bible teacher and youth leader. Our churches were 180 degrees apart in style and politics—he was strictly evangelical—but now when he visited, we could stay up all night to talk about Jesus, the mysteries of faith, the movement of grace all around us, and lives redeemed against all odds. He’d go back home and it would be months before we’d talk again.

  John still had such a handsome, hard casing that when God finally reached a tipping point with him, He or She had to use a very heavy hand: John got severe rheumatoid arthritis, which sent him to bed for days on end during flare-ups. He cut his work life in half, needed a cane to walk, and then a cart for longer distances, like getting around the Chico’s Costco. Then his liver began to harden and die off in spots. And those things he had always kept at bay—the grimy, the real, and the powerlessness—were now obvious aspects of his life. The smooth ride was over.

  He knew he needed something. He reached out to God, and the next thing he knew, God, with God’s infinitely absurdist humor, gave him us, my brother and me.

  We received him without a lot of thought. We just loved him. That was the whole story: love. He was our big brother. It was like we had dog brains, whatever was right in front of our noses was reality, and he was right in front of our noses. He started coming to stay at my house for the weekend, with his dogs; when he and his wife split up, he got two of the three little dogs, both barkers. One is a very elegant small old lady named Allie, who is lovely, but bossy and queenly and incontinent, and the other, named Baxter, is a nervous case who has to wear a ThunderCoat to help with his anxieties, like a swaddled baby or a patient in a flannel straitjacket. I think he may have tiny continence issues, too, although Allie gets the blame. So every time John came, I had four dogs, a cat who was afraid of the strange little pee-pee dogs, one grown son, and a young grandchild. Stevo and his wife and daughter often came for dinner, and it was mercifully not at all like old-home week. It was a new constellation of Lamotts.

  John, Stevo, and I have been collectively sober for eighty-four years. It’s a start.

  John found refuge among the people he had hurt and neglected. I still had some little grudgelets and feared he would leave us again, but the three of us were slowly growing up. That, grace, and exhaustion with myself allowed me to forgive. I did not want to keep score anymore. I always won, but got booby prizes. Annie, 17; John, 11—here’s your travel mug, miss. If I hadn’t let go, there would have been nothing but more shit and holes ahead, but because I did, there was possibility, of him and me connecting, deeply, impossibly. For me to whap that possibility away would have been crazier than I have the energy for these days.

  Two years ag
o, he came for a visit, and we drove out to the coast and talked more honestly than we ever had. He confided on one of our drives that he thought his marriage might be ending, both parties ready to move on after my nephew left for college. They had been more like a business for years, raising their fine son together. There was no acrimony. So even though his marriage wasn’t going to hold, family would, in the weedy, root-filled ground of his siblings. And it was good.

  When we started to call him Brotherman as a term of endearment, he seemed to like it.

  One night eight months ago when he was staying with me, and had sprung in his uncley way for family-night pizza, he mentioned that he was interested in a woman he knew from church, whose daughter had been in his youth group.

  “Oh,” my brother and I said. “Tell us about her.”

  He said she was beautiful inside and out, one year younger than he, with two daughters, one in her late thirties with two children, and one who was eighteen, who lived with Connie. He said that she had a great positive outlook on life, a powerful warmth, and a nice sense of humor, and most important, that they could talk all day, every day.

  “She sounds perfect,” I said.

  “Well, there’s this one thing,” John allowed, “besides the fact that I’m not divorced.”

  Oh, well, I thought, she’s just learning English, or has a glass eye, or keeps snakes. Whatever.

  “She has metastatic breast cancer, that’s in her liver now. She’s had it for two years, and had massive chemo, twice. She was in remission, but isn’t anymore.”

  “Ah,” we said politely, although I wanted to add: Run, John, run—go, dog, go! Be her dear friend, or ditch her sorry-ass cancery self. I can’t take any more, because of course it’s always about me, Al Franken.

  Instead, he fell deeply in love with this beautiful, warm, adorable, deeply damaged woman, and it stretched him. He was able to make a net wide enough to hold her.