Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace Read online

  Well, okay: but just briefly. Do all Europeans who survived World War II eat garbage? Not simply cutting off half-inches of mold on cheese to save the rest of it: I do that. I mean the insistence that the bit of toasted bagel that Sam left on his plate yesterday makes a perfectly nice breakfast today—for her. She’s not trying to make me eat it, and still it enrages me.

  “Gertrud!” I say. “That is garbage!”

  Or I’ll come upon her gnawing on an absolutely white cantaloupe rind that she’s found on Sam’s plate. Or she’ll wrap up overcooked ravioli from yesterday that she wants to take with her when we leave tomorrow, to eat for dinner when I drop her off. It’s table scrapings.

  But mostly, we find enormous solace in each other. We read the papers together, angrily, muttering. She reads Noam Chomsky for pleasure. She brings me great chocolate.

  We hike almost every day when we are in the mountains. On our last night together, two years ago, we went stargazing at High Camp, in Squaw Valley. Already at 7,500 feet, we took the gondola up to the meadow, where fifty others had gathered to watch a Perseid meteor shower. There were two astronomers to guide us, with powerful telescopes.

  Gertrud was by far the oldest person there, by a good ten years or so. She was wearing a hat, warm clothes, and hiking boots, and she had her walking stick, ready for action. You could tilt your head back and see a shooting star every few minutes. Gertrud held on to my arm, leaned back unsteadily.

  The astronomers started with easy stars, constellations and planets, Cassiopeia and Venus, almost below the horizon; they showed us star clusters, and told us how many millions of galaxies there are, infinitely bigger than our old Milky Way, trillions and gazillions of light-years distant, and all the while there are shooting stars and showers overhead. Gertrud leaned on me, held tight to my arm, and whispered in my ear, “We don’t need so much information! Right there is the best thing of all, our dear old friend the Big Dipper.”

  We had hiked on this exact spot of land the day before, on our yearly wildflower walk, and the sky then was as bright as the field of weedy yellow flowers had been.

  Gertrud won’t wait in line. Maybe it is a European thing, like the garbage eating. Maybe she has waited in enough lines to last a lifetime. But I took my turn when she said she was steady enough to stand alone. When I reported that you could see twin stars and stellar graveyards through the telescope, she said rather huffily, “I’ll just wait right where I am, and see what I can see.”

  The stars were as close as berries on a bush.

  After a while, though, Gertrud began to shiver. The night was not that cold, but she is so thin. She teetered as she held on to me, and I stood like a handrail while she got her balance. She held on so tight that it hurt: I could see that her knuckles were white, by the lights of the stars and the gondola. I rubbed her shoulders briskly, as you would warm a child just out of the ocean, and we headed back down the mountain.

  I was reminded of that evening when I called her from Berkeley at three-thirty the day she was going to sell her house and asked her if she’d like me to pick her up. “Yes, please,” she said. When I got to her house an hour later, she was waiting outside, ready for action again: this time, instead of hiking boots, she was wearing a dark blue knit cardigan with gold buttons, and a scarf tucked in around her neck; very nautical, still the admiral of her ship. She was teary but composed. All I knew to do was to be willing to feel really shitty with her.

  “When did you decide to sell the house?” I asked when we started out.

  She said with genuine confusion that she didn’t know how it had come to be—she had meant to sell only the parcel. A number of friends had convinced her that it made sense to sell both properties now and rent the house back for a year. This would give her time to find a smaller place, with a garden and a view, and people around to help her in case she fell.

  “Couldn’t you hire someone to help around the house and drive?”

  She said she had changed her mind too many times, had put everybody through too much already: the realtor, the buyer, and her children.

  Everything in me wanted to save her—to offer her the extra room in our house, or promise to drop in on her every day. But instead I did an incredible thing, something I have not done nearly enough in my life: I did nothing. Or at any rate, I did not talk. Miserable, and desperate to flee or to fix her, I listened instead.

  Fear and frustration poured out of her as we drove past my entire childhood, past the hillsides that used to be bare of everything, where we slid down the long grass on cardboard boxes, past the little white church on the hill, past the supermarket built on the swamps where we used to raft, past the stores on the Boardwalk, where the Christmas star shines every year.

  Then, without particularly meaning to, just before we got on the clotted freeway, I pulled off the road and parked the car in a bus zone.

  “Wait a minute, Gertrud. Let me ask you something: What do you want to do? What does your heart say?”

  She answered after a long moment. “I don’t want to sell my house.”

  “Are you sure?” This was shocking news, and the timing just terrible.

  “Yes. But now I have to. I’ve changed my mind so often.”

  Neither of us spoke for a minute. “But that’s the worst reason to do something,” I finally said. She looked at me. “You have the right to change your mind again.”

  “Really, Annie?”

  “Yep.”

  Gertrud glanced around with confusion, disbelief, misery. She dried her tears, reapplied lipstick, and picked at invisible lint on her blue knit sweater.

  When we pulled onto the old friend’s street, she said, “Oh, Annie. This will be such bad news for everyone else but me.”

  “There’s a first time for everything,” I said. “Besides, your friend’s son can build a nice home for himself on the parcel.”

  Everyone was waiting for us when we arrived, and managed to be giddy and gentle at the same time. Gertrud was fussed over. These were not men in black capes with twirly moustaches, stealing her house away; they were dear friends. After a few minutes of small talk, she looked at the ground. Then she did not look up for a while. Everyone grew quiet, puzzled.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” she then said, firm, clear, deeply apologetic. “I don’t want to sell my house. Only the parcel.” I held my breath. Old age on a good day is a dance we don’t know the steps to: we falter. We may not be going in the direction we’d anticipated, or have any clue at all about which way to turn next.

  “Gertrud,” they said, “are you sure?” She nodded and said, “Yes, yes,” and held on to the arms of her walker so her knuckles turned white, as on the night of the meteor shower. Her voice was trembly. I remembered how she’d shivered from the cold. I remembered how the astronomer pointed out that the stars were not all one color: there are orange stars, red stars, pale yellow stars. Venus so close and bright I thought it was a plane, and through the telescope I could see fuzzy cotton balls hundreds of millions of miles away, stellar graveyards and stellar nurseries where stars were being hatched.

  Barn Raising

  On an otherwise ordinary night at the end of September, some friends came over to watch the lunar eclipse, friends whose two-year-old daughter, Olivia, had been diagnosed nine months earlier with cystic fibrosis. Their seven-year-old daughter, Ella, is Sam’s oldest friend: they met in day care and have been playing together for so long that I think of her as Sam’s fiancée. Now the family has been plunged into an alternate world, a world where everyone’s kid has a life-threatening illness. I know that sometimes these friends feel that they have been expelled from the ordinary world they lived in before and that they are now citizens of the Land of the Fucked. They must live with the fact that their younger daughter has this disease that fills its victims’ lungs with thick sludge, harboring infections. Two-week hospital stays for nonstop IV antibiotic
s are common. Adulthood is rare.

  Twice a day, every day, her parents must pound her between the shoulder blades for forty-five minutes to dislodge the mucus from her lungs. It amazes me that Sara, the mother—fortyish, small-boned, highly accomplished—can still even dress herself, much less remain so tender and strong.

  The night of the lunar eclipse, some of our neighbors were making little cameo appearances on our street, coming outside periodically to check on the moon’s progress, as if it were a patient: “How’s his condition now?” But Sara and I stayed outside and watched the whole time. It was so mysterious, the earth’s shadow crossing over the moon, red and black and silvery, like a veil, and then receding, like the tide.

  Ella calls her little sister Livia; she stayed overnight with us the day Olivia was born, and we cooked pancakes in the shape of the letter O to celebrate the baby’s arrival. From the beginning, Olivia always got sicker than other babies; she caught colds that wouldn’t leave, which led to coughs that sounded like those of an obese alcoholic smoker. But her doctor never found anything really wrong, and antibiotics always seemed to clear up the symptoms. Now she and I hang out together in her room and eat chocolate, and I tell her that in a very long time, when we both go to heaven, we should try to get chairs next to each other, close to the dessert table.

  “Yes!” she agrees. She has round brown eyes and short yellow hair. What a dish! “More chocolate,” she cries, and throws me the ball she is holding—I tell you, this girl’s got game. I taught her to love chocolate, which her parents still hold against me.

  Whenever I’m out of town I worry that there will be bad news when I come home, that friends will have come over to their house not knowing they were about to come down with a cold, and Olivia will end up back in the hospital on the two-week IV drip. She has a blue toy phone that she calls me on frequently. Sometimes when I am out of town, I imagine her calling me and chatting away on her phone. I was gone for a week of teaching at the end of summer this year, and I kept thinking of her. I almost called California to hear her voice. I was working too hard and staying up too late every night, and the people I was with were drinking a lot. I started to feel like a tired, wired little kid at a birthday party who has had way too much sugar, who is in all ways on overload, but still finds herself blindfolded and spun around for a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, and then pushed more or less in the direction of the wall with the donkey on it. But I was so turned around, so lost and overwhelmed and stressed, that I couldn’t even find where the wall with the donkey was—or even in what direction it might be. I couldn’t take one step forward without the chance that I was actually walking farther away from it. And it took me a while to remember that for me, the wall with the donkey on it is Jesus.

  I didn’t call Olivia, but I kept her in my prayers. I said to God, “Look, I’m sure you know what you’re doing, but my patience is beginning to wear a little thin. . . .”

  A few days before the eclipse, I arrived home but only after Sam had gone to bed. I lay down next to him and watched him sleep. There was an ordinary moon in the sky; I studied Sam by its light and felt entirely pointed in the right direction. Olivia’s father, Adam, had left a message on our machine, letting us know that Olivia had been sick again while I was gone. They had managed to keep her out of the hospital, but it had been touch-and-go for days. Watching Sam sleep, I kept wondering, How could you possibly find the wall with the donkey on it when your child is catastrophically sick? I don’t know. I looked up at God, and thinking about Olivia, about how badly scarred her lungs were already, I said, “What on earth are you thinking?”

  The eclipse moved in such peculiar time. Maybe it’s that I’m so used to blips and sound bites, instant deadlines, e-mail. But the shadow of the earth moved across the moon in celestial time, somehow slowly and fleetingly at the same astronomical moment. It seemed as if the moon were being consumed, and as if all the moons that ever had been were being consumed all at once. As if, in its last moments, you got to see the moon’s whole life pass before your very eyes.

  On New Year’s Day, before her diagnosis, I was out at Stinson Beach with Sam and with Olivia and her family. They have a huge German shepherd, who is always with them; he hovers over Olivia, looking very German. He was with us on the beach that day, chasing sticks that Adam threw. It was one of those perfect Northern California days when dozens of children and dogs are running on the beach and pelicans are flying overhead, and the mountains and the green ridges rise behind you, and it’s so golden and balmy that you inevitably commit great acts of hubris. Olivia seemed fine—happy, blonde, tireless. Just a few days before, her parents had taken her to the doctor for lab work, because of her severe colds. But she didn’t have a cold on New Year’s Day.

  Then two days later Adam called with the news that she had cystic fibrosis. Now, seeing her the night of the eclipse, her upward gaze of pure child wonder, I find it hard to remember when she wasn’t sick and harder to believe that she is.

  Olivia laughs at all my jokes. The night of the eclipse I kept pointing to our dog, Sadie, and saying, with concern, “Isn’t that the ugliest cat you’ve ever seen?” and Olivia would just lose her mind laughing.

  After the diagnosis, we were almost too stunned to cry. Olivia’s family has a tribe of good friends around them, and everyone wanted to help, but at first people didn’t know what to do; they were immobilized by shock and sadness.

  By mid-January, though, I had a vision of the disaster as a gigantic canvas on which an exquisitely beautiful picture had been painted. We all wanted to take up a corner or stand side by side and lift it together so that Olivia’s parents didn’t have to carry the whole thing themselves. But I saw that they did in fact have to carry almost the whole heartbreaking picture alone. Then the image of a canvas changed into one wall of a barn, and I saw that the people who loved them could build a marvelous barn of sorts around the family.

  So we did. We raised a lot of money; catastrophes can be expensive. We showed up. We cleaned, we listened, some of us took care of the children, we walked their dog, and we cried and then made them laugh; we gave them privacy; then we showed up and listened and let them cry and cry and cry, and then took them for hikes. We took Ella and Olivia to the park. We took Sara to the movies. I took Adam out for dinner one night right after the diagnosis. He was a mess. The first time the waiter came over, he was wracked with sobs, and the second time the waiter came over, he was laughing hysterically.

  “He’s a little erratic, isn’t he?” I said, smiling, to the waiter, and he nodded gravely.

  We kept on cooking for them and walking the dog, taking the kids to the park, cleaning the kitchen, and letting Sara and Adam hate what was going on when they needed to. Sometimes we let them resist finding any meaning or solace in anything involving their daughter’s diagnosis, and this was one of the hardest things to do—to stop trying to make things come out better than they were. We let Sara and Adam spew when they needed to; we offered the gift of no comfort when having no comfort was where they had landed. Then we shopped for groceries. One friend gave them weekly massages; everyone kept giving money. And that is how we built our Amish barn. Now things are sometimes pretty terrible for the family in many ways, but at the same time, they got a miracle. It wasn’t the kind that comes in on a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day float. And it wasn’t the one they wanted, where God would reach down from the sky and touch their girl with a magic wand and restore her to perfect health. Maybe that will still happen—who knows? I wouldn’t put anything past God, because He or She is one crafty mother. Yet they did get a miracle, one of those dusty little red-wagon miracles, and they understand this.

  Sara was in a wonderful mood on the night of the eclipse. The viral cloud of autumn was about to descend, though, and this meant the family was about to find itself more exposed to danger, to cold germs, flu bugs, and well-meaning friends. There would be constant vigilance, fewer visits, endless han
d-washing, extra requests for prayer. There are a number of churches in the Bay Area and in fact around the country whose congregations pray for Olivia every week. And maybe it is helping. Still, the specter of the cold season hung above Olivia’s parents that night like the mysterious shape-shifting moon. Sam and Ella stood off by themselves like teenagers, Olivia hung out with her mother and me. We all stared up into the sky for a long time, as millions and millions of people everywhere were doing, so we got to feel united under the strange beams of light. You could tell you were in the presence of the extraordinary, peering up at the radiance beneath the veil of shadow, the intensity of that rim of light struggling through its own darkness. Olivia kept clapping her hands against the sides of her face in wonder, as if she were about to exclaim, “Caramba!” or “Oy!” When the moon was bright and gold again, she ran up the stairs to join her sister and Sam, who were cold and had gone inside to play.