Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace Page 11

  He brought Connie to my house one weekend, and it was love at first sight for all of us. My four-year-old grandson fell to pieces of love in her presence. She is so pretty, buxom with snowy white hair and bright blue eyes, white teeth, long legs, and a comfortable tummy, the whole package. And she hikes as fast as I do, or at least she did until the last round of chemo. Her true beauty is inside, in her goodness, her generosity, her courage. We were doomed, all in this together now—we would help her fight tooth and nail, offer prayer support, see her in perfect wholeness.

  Within two weeks of our meeting her and bonding, her doctor found tumors in her lungs.

  The experts couldn’t treat the lung cancer in Chico, so they sent her back to UCSF Medical Center, one of the country’s great research hospitals. But she would need to live locally. When you are on clinical trials, there are endless scans, EKGs, side effects, and so on, making it necessary to be close by.

  So she and John and the dogs have come for two or three nights almost every week for six months.

  She is easy to be around, although she can drive you nuts, because she cannot receive without trying to make it up to you. For instance, she constantly does the dishes and puts things away. She details my kitchen as if it were a car. She says, “It’s the least I can do,” as if she needed to pay me back. But I often can’t find what I’m looking for. When she reads this someday, I would like to mention again that we do not put our fruit in the fridge. Also, I have not seen my cheese slicer since John started bringing her around.

  She simply does not complain about her lot, as she fights to survive. I hate this. She remains hopeful, most days, that she will be healed. I want to shake her and say, “For the love of God, what’s wrong with you? Whine, girl. Bitch and moan.”

  The morning after she found out she had metastases in her lungs, we went for a hike at Deer Park. We both see the glory of God in birds and wildflowers, and the meadows where it seems like a bear might suddenly appear, and the dappled light. The difference is that she doesn’t have the dark black sense of humor that our family relied on for survival. For example, we passed a pile of feathers that morning, then the body of a finch. She said, “Poor little guy.” She saw one of God’s creatures called home. I saw CSI: Birds—to me, it looked like it had been dragged a ways, shedding feathers, as if a coyote had had it in a Hefty bag in the trunk of its car, lugging it there by its underarms: “Morty, get his feet . . .” We walked along, bumping shoulders.

  Until two weeks ago, she had as bad a sweet tooth as John or I, although John indulges his like a dog, while I mostly try to stay away from sugar. They kept bringing sacks of fun-size chocolate bars, six-packs of Klondike ice cream bars. I asked them not to, begged and pleaded, but this took time for us to work through. The low point, for me, was one Saturday when I discovered in the freezer two packs of Klondike bars, which they eat after I go to bed, and Connie also had brought me a two-pound bag of M&M’s. I didn’t even know they made two-pound bags, and I am an aficionado. That very same weekend, I texted John from the market to say I was on my way home and ask if they needed anything. He texted back, “We’re fine. Connie is baking.” I clutched my head and dug my fingernails into my forehead.

  When I got home, the house was aromatic with the twenty-four mini glazed banana muffins she’d made while I was gone. Helpless and angry, I reminded them that I was off sugar.

  “Just try one,” she said. I said no, thanks. I didn’t want one. I can resist banana-based desserts. My brother jovially said, “Just try one—they are Connie’s specialty.”

  “No, thank you,” I said again. But they wouldn’t back off. It was Green Eggs and Ham. I thought I was going to have to shoot one or both of them. Finally, as God is my witness, Connie came toward me with a piece of warm glazed banana muffin and said, “This was mother’s recipe!” I snatched it from her like a monkey and took a bite, then another. Then I ate several whole muffins. I had to hide the remaining eighteen or so, but luckily was able to find them in the morning and eat a few more. It took four days to get off sugar again after they left. I threw out the leftover Klondike bars.

  They brought more when they came the following week.

  Eventually, though, they caught on, and stopped bringing so many sweets. I in turn stopped flinching like one of the Three Stooges if they slipped up. I’m amazed by how well we are doing, as this has been a steep learning curve for all of us, and there will almost certainly be many tough days ahead. Not only did we get our big brother back, but we’ve ruined him a little, in the best possible way. He has softened his stance on all people; I don’t think he’s even an evangelical anymore, or if he is, he’s not a very good one. For instance, at Christmas, I watched him fall for the transvestite emcee at the LGBT’s gigantic World Tree of Hope lighting at the City Hall rotunda. He mentioned her a couple of times the next day, as a her: as Donna. He is a new man, which is what he promised God to be. He feels his infallibility, rigidness, and ridiculousness now, and he lets us be with him in that. He can look down the long dark corridor of life and know he cannot fix it with spackle or duct tape; he cannot avoid it or trick it out. It is going to get us all, maybe Connie first, but we will stick together in all this left-field love.

  Airborne

  Ski Patrol

  Not too long ago, I was skiing in the mountains where Sam and I spend a weekend or two most winters. Nowadays, he instantly disappears with the hordes of snowboarders. I believe he is somewhat embarrassed to be seen with me: once, standing next to him and his friend at the bottom of a hill, I fell over for no reason. And in fact, the very first time we went skiing together, I skied in a strangely slow, inexorable path for a hundred feet or so, straight into a huge net at the bottom of the slope, erected to protect the small Ski Bear children from being crushed. Then I got tangled up in it, like a fish.

  After Sam disappears, I usually take the chairlift to the top of the pony slope for a couple of runs, which anyone can manage. And I triumph. I roar down the slight incline, pretending to be an Olympian. Filled with confidence, I try the easiest intermediate slope, where I mostly fall or slide down on my butt for the first run, and then have a few extended runs of four or five minutes when I am actually skiing. By my second run down an intermediate slope, I am on my feet almost the whole time, skiing triumphantly for America.

  But this time, as the chairlift carried me to the top of the intermediate slope, which I had just skied down, I experienced a moment’s confusion, born of hormones, high altitude, and a light snow falling. I suddenly could not remember whether the stop we were approaching was the same one I had just skied down from. The chair slowed and lowered for us to disembark, and my seatmate got off and zipped away like a swallow, while I sat there torn between wanting to get off and thinking that mine was the next stop.

  The chair jerked forward and resumed its ascent. I looked around for landmarks but saw only brightly colored skiers in clusters, and I was pretty sure that this was not the right stop . . . until a second later, when I realized I was mistaken—it was the right stop. By then, the chair was four or five feet off the ground and rising. But I did not let this deter me. I took a long, deep breath, wriggled to the edge of the chair, and flung myself off into the snow—flung myself, the way stuntmen fling themselves onto the back of speeding trains, or a clown flings himself from a bucking bronco, mugging bug-eyed for the crowd.

  I estimate that I was five or six feet off the ground for the timeless instant of eternity before I crashed down into the snow. I landed hard, proving the theory of gravity once and for all. I was somehow still on my skis, for a moment, until I fell over.

  I do not imagine anyone had seen anything like this before, someone hurtling into outer space with such force, from such a low starting point. I felt like Icarus, near death in the snow, with melting skis instead of wings.

  I was immediately aware of two things: that I was not badly hurt, and that most people were pretending not
to have noticed, out of kindness, or horror, or mortification. I am ever my mother’s daughter, and so my first impulse was to smile with confidence to the few who were watching, wave like a politician campaigning from a rarely used horizontal position.

  “I’m okay,” I said to two pretty women who came over and offered to pull me up. I continued to wave nonchalantly, as if this sort of silly thing happened to me all the time. I told them that I just needed to catch my breath. They made sympathetic cooing sounds and skied away. I sat up and leaned back on my hands in the snow.

  By the time I finally stood, my hands were frozen. I was winded, ashamed, confused, bruised—grateful only that Sam hadn’t seen me. He’d have died. He would have stabbed himself repeatedly in the head with his ski pole.

  Just when I thought things couldn’t get much worse, nausea struck, wave after wave, like morning sickness, and I thought, I’m going to throw up in the snow! Ladies and gentlemen, now for my next trick . . . I pretended to pinch my nostrils against the cold, but was actually pressing my hand to my mouth to hold back the tide. My head spun, and I prayed, Help me, Jesus, help me, the way a very old woman at my church named Mary used to pray at her most afraid and delirious, right in the middle of anything—sermons, songs: “I know my change is gonna come, but touch me now, Lord.”

  I don’t know how long I stood there with my hand clamped to my mouth, only my poles and a frayed, patchwork faith to support me. All I knew was that help is always on the way, a hundred percent of the time. Rumi said, “Someone fills the cup in front of us.” I know that when I call out, God will be near, and hear, and help eventually. Of course, it is the “eventually” that throws one into despair. For instance, even now, I know America will be restored again, eventually, although it is hard to envision this at the moment, and it could take a century or more for the nation and the world to recover from the George W. Bush years. But they will. God always hears our cries, and helps, and it’s often a surprise to see what form God will take on earth. In the old joke, a man whose plane crashes in the tundra bitterly tells a bartender that God forsook him—that he waited in vain for divine intervention, and would have died in the snow . . . if it hadn’t been for some fucking Eskimos who came by. So maybe a tall, strong man with a medical toboggan would be by soon, or the two pretty women, or Jesus in earmuffs.

  Instead, a short, plump woman pulled up on skis a few minutes later. She was wearing an orange cap and an official jacket from the ski resort.

  “I think I’m going to throw up,” I said, so she wouldn’t get too close.

  “Well, then, let’s just stand here a moment,” she said. She had acne and chapped cheeks, and small brown eyes.

  “I think I might need help,” I said, which is something I force myself to say every few years.

  “You landed so hard. I saw you from up above.”

  I shook my head, bewildered, on the verge of tears. “Are you on the ski patrol?” I asked.

  “Sort of. I’m here to help in non-emergency situations like this. Why don’t you come with me.” She stepped out of her skis and stood on my bindings so that I could step out of mine. We picked up our skis and I trudged after her through the snow.

  We walked to a ten-by-ten-foot wooden shack away from the lift and went inside. It held two long benches, a folding chair, and shelves laden with first-aid equipment, bottles of water, used coffee cups, a walkie-talkie; and it was warm from a kerosene heater. There were two shabby windows, through which you could see snowy pine trees outside. The woman poured me a miniature Dixie cup of water, but my face was so cold that I couldn’t get my lips to work and I dribbled water down my front like an aged, numbed-up woman at the dentist’s.

  She took the cup away from me. “Let’s get your gloves off first,” she said, and pulled them off, as gently as if they were mittens connected inside my jacket sleeves with a string.

  She laid my gloves on the chair near the heater and pulled off her own. “Mine are nice and toasty,” she said. “You can wear them for a while, until yours warm up. I’ll be back soon—there are only a couple of us working this spot today.” She went outside without gloves, her bare hands jammed into her pockets.

  After a while, I stretched out on one of the benches and closed my eyes. The kerosene smelled like lacquer, and I kept feeling waves of nausea. My bones were cold. I could isolate the icy scent of pine trees that snuck in through the walls. Sometimes grace is a ribbon of mountain air that gets in through the cracks.

  I practiced concentrating between the waves of nausea, the way I did when I was in labor, savoring ice chips and apple juice between contractions. Miles from home, holed up deeply alone in a smelly hut, I had the old, familiar feelings of separation: from myself, from God, and from the happy, pretty people outside.

  I thought of the woman from the ski patrol with her small brown eyes. She looked like the monk seals that swim ashore in Hawaii to rest on the sand. The adult seals are six and seven feet long, and they all look like Charles Laughton. The newest tourists on the beach think they are dying and need to be rescued, but anyone who has been there even a day knows that they come onshore to rest. Pool workers from the beachside resorts arrive with yellow safety tape and traffic cones to rope off a space for the seals to rest in. The first time I came upon one in the sand, I thought it was trying to make eye contact with me—I was its last, best hope of being saved. It had sand around its eyes and lots of shark scars. Rory, my boyfriend at the time, who surfs in Hawaii every year, laughed and explained that the seals are perfectly fine, and when they are rested, they waddle back to the ocean.

  This is how I feel about the world much of the time, when I am not feeling too far gone: Things are how they are supposed to be, all evidence to the contrary. Life swims, lumbers across the sand, rests; lumbers, swims, rests.

  I lay there on the bench immobilized. If I had been a monk seal, I could have waddled up into a sitting position, slid off the bench, and pulled myself by my flippers back into the ocean. Rory once saw a mother monk seal teaching her pup how to rest by swimming up onto the sand for a while before slipping back into the waves. The two of them practiced over and over, then disappeared into the water. Remembering this made me miss Sam terribly. I felt discarded, and I needed for time to pass more quickly. I would be fine with life’s contractions if they would simply pass when I am ready for them to, so I can be okay again and remember what, after all, I’m doing in labor. Being human can be so dispiriting. It is a real stretch for me a lot of the time.

  I put my nose to a crack in the wall so I could smell the pine.

  I couldn’t wait any longer for the ski patrol woman to come back. Where was she? She’d said. She was my only real friend, and I was such a mess. Her voice was gentle and kind—“O that today you would hearken to His voice,” the psalmist wrote, and “harden not your hearts.” Okay, fine, I said to God, and then noticed that I was much less of a frozen mess than I’d been earlier. This was a lot. I could have sat up, but I wanted the ski patrol person to see the full extent of my suffering—if she ever in fact returned.

  I thought of the people I know from church and political circles who are doing a kind of psychic ski patrol in the world, noticing when people are in trouble, refusing to look away, offering an ear and their own warm gloves to wear.

  Twenty minutes later, my ski patrol woman did come back, rubbing her bare hands together.

  “How you doing?” she asked. At first the enthusiasm in her voice worried me, because she sounded as if we might now move on to calisthenics. Then I could tell that she knew I was fine, better, rested. I was peaceful: she was my own private pool-worker, my own mother seal. I sat up and breathed in the fresh air from the open door.

  She gave me another Dixie cup of water, and I hoisted it Germanically.

  She walked over to the heater and checked my gloves. “They’re all ready to wear again if you’ll give me mine back.”

 
I stood up. I felt like my old self, which is to say creaky but okay.

  “I’d take the chair down,” she said. “Unless you really want to ski.”

  I really wanted to ski. I’d already had one great run down this slope.

  She made a huge fuss over me when I left, as if I’d been in an avalanche. I pulled on my gloves and headed out onto the huge white ocean of ice. I put on my skis again and headed down the slope. I glided and fell and got back up and skied little by little, the very best I could, all the way down the mountain.

  Knocking on Heaven’s Door

  So there I was, on a plane returning home from St. Louis. Or rather, there I was in a plane at a gate at the St. Louis airport with, I think, the not unreasonable expectation that we would be in the air soon, as our flight had already been delayed two hours. I was anxious to get home, as I had not seen Sam in several days, but all things considered, I thought I was coping quite well, especially because I am a skeptical and terrified flier. In between devouring Hershey’s chocolate and thirteen dollars’ worth of trashy magazines, I had spent the two hours of the delay trying to be helpful to the other stranded passengers: I distributed all my magazines and most of my chocolates; I got an old man some water; I flirted with the babies; I mingled, I schmoozed. I had recently seen what may have been a miracle at my church and had been feeling ever since that I was supposed to walk through life with a deeper faith, a deeper assurance that if I took care of God’s children for God, He or She would take care of me. So I took care of people, and hoped that once we were on board, everything would go smoothly.

  My idea of everything going smoothly on an airplane is (a) that I not die in a slow-motion fiery crash or get stabbed to death by terrorists and (b) that none of the other passengers try to talk to me. All conversation should end at the moment the wheels leave the ground.