Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace Read online

  I am three years old, at our family cabin in Bolinas, before the town becomes a counterculture artists’ community. My grandparents paid two thousand dollars for a rustic one-room cottage that was several hundred yards from Duxbury Point, from which you could see a great expanse of ocean, the horizon, and the reef below.

  My grandparents, who had traveled the world in their work as Christian missionaries, had brought back eight or so Mexican sorcery masks made of wood, and they hung these on the cabin wall. Each one had devil eyes surrounded in white that glowed in the dark. The fangs did, too. I had already begun my work as a lifelong insomniac, and would stay up or wake in the glare of these eyes and teeth, terrified to the core. I remember that when my parents tried, grumpily, to comfort me in the middle of the night, I pointed to these masks as the source of my terror. They said reassuring things, like “Oh, for Chrissakes, Annie. Those are just masks!” Strangely, this did not help me sleep. So I’d crawl over onto my older brother’s side of the trundle bed and drift off. My presence would wake him up. He would push me back onto my side of the bed. I would come crawling back like green slime. He’d bulldoze me with his feet. I’d come back. Then he would begin to hit me. Anyone would have hit me, I realize now. Jesus would have hit me.

  Sometimes I even woke screaming from these nightmares at the cabin. This further endeared me to everyone. I also had dreams back at home where the masks had found me, ten towns away, and one in which my mother turned around at the stove with a spatula in one hand, her sanpaku eyes glittering behind a bruja mask with hemp hair. But the masks stayed up. Why didn’t my parents or my grandparents replace them with something that made me feel safe, like, say, framed Audubon duck paintings? I was still afraid at eight and nine, and still couldn’t sleep. By then I had migraines, too, and felt freakish and forlorn.

  The reality is that most of us lived our first decades feeling welcome only when certain conditions applied: we felt safe and embraced only when the parental units were getting along, when we were on our best behavior, doing well in school, not causing problems, and had as few needs as possible. If you needed more from them, best of luck.

  It also doesn’t help that the planet is not nearly as hospitable as one might have hoped.

  In the beginning, there was implantation, which was either the best or the worst news, and then God or life did some voodoo knitting that created each of us. We came into the world one by one. The next thing we knew, we were at the dinner table with delusional and unhappy people, who drank, or should have drunk, and who simultaneously had issues with rigidity and no boundaries. These people seemed to go out of their way to make it clear that we were not the children they’d had in mind. You were thwarting their good intentions with your oddness and bad posture.

  They liked to think their love was unconditional. That’s nice. Sadly, though, the child who showed up at the table for meals was not the child the parents had set out to make. They seemed surprised all over again. They’d already forgotten from breakfast.

  The parental units were simply duplicating what they’d learned when they were small. That’s the system.

  It wasn’t that you got the occasional feeling that you were an alien or a chore to them. You just knew that attention had to be paid constantly to their moods, their mental health levels, their rising irritation, and the volume of beer consumed. Yes, there were many happy memories marbled in, too, of picnics, pets, beaches. But I will remind you now that inconsistency is how experimenters regularly drive lab rats over the edge.

  Maybe they knew the child was on to them, could see through them, could see the truth, could see how cracked, unstable, and distant they were. We knew their most intimate smells and sounds and vulnerabilities, like tiny spies. The whole game in the fifties and early sixties was for no one to know who you really were. We children were witness to the total pretense of how our parents wanted the world to see them. We helped them maintain this image, because if anyone outside the family could see who they really were deep down, the whole system, the ship of your family, might sink. We held our breath to give the ship buoyancy. We were little air tanks.

  They knew deep down they were manic-depressive crazy people, but they wanted others to see them as good family men and women, peaceful warriors, worker bees, and activists who were making the world safe for democracy. Their kids knew about their tempers and vices, but the kids were under the wizard’s spell, and also under the constant threat of exile or hunger.

  The silver lining to this is that since the world we came into is an alcoholic, sick, wounded, wounding place, we also ended up with an owner’s manual for dealing with craziness. We knew how to keep secrets. Also, our parents came with siblings who adored us, because we were not theirs. They actually got me. When I’d come through the door, the expression on my uncles’ and aunts’ faces would be so happy. There she is! There’s Annie. Isn’t she something? The way they looked across the table at me, with pleasure and wonder, taught me what love looked like.

  Their love was dependable refuge during the life-threatening teenage years. No one on earth feels less welcomed and more deformed than teenagers. Drinking was essential to my feeling semi-okay. Until I discovered booze, I’d always felt that I was invisible to the beautiful people, while under observation by my parents, and teachers, and most horribly, myself. I was so loved by best friends, yet I was scared a lot of the time, of many people, of failure, of sexual things that I thought or did or wanted to do. I developed a lot of charm, humor, and smarts, so I could bat the demons away. But they always came back.

  Teachers began to welcome me, almost like friends, because I was smart, funny, and desperate. They gave me a lot of encouragement when I most felt like a complete loser, and then they gave me the great books that held the key to life: All humans felt alone, damaged, deformed, alien, and toxic. Toxic R Us. And all of the great writers drank, except for Kafka and Nietzsche, neither of whom you exactly wanted to be when you grew up.

  College gave me passionate friends, some of whom stayed close, along with a sense of both political and creative purpose, from which I have not veered. But at some point you had to leave; you tried to make a life. You know the rest. The eerie carousel ride of adulthood, the warped music, gaudy paint, the vertigo of triumphs and hidden dangers in grown-up life.

  High performance always made everything better. An awful lot of busyness helped, too, but not nearly as much as alcohol or sex, preferably both.

  Then, in my thirties, my system crashed. I got sober, because I had gone crazy. A few women in the community reached out to me. They recognized me as a frightened lush. I told them about my most vile behavior, and they said, “Me, too!” I told them about my crimes against the innocent, especially me. They said, “Ditto. Yay. Welcome.” I couldn’t seem to get them to reject me. It was a nightmare, and then my salvation.

  It turns out that welcome is solidarity. We’re glad you’re here, and we’re with you. This whole project called you being alive, you finding joy? Well, we’re in on that.

  I learned early in sobriety that there were two points of view about me—how my close friends saw me, and how I saw myself. I figured it was obvious that I was a fraud, and kind of disgusting. My friends thought I was irresistible, profoundly worthy of trust. I thought at first that one view must be wrong, and I made the most radical decision, for the time being, to believe my friends. I welcomed my lovable self back, with a small party, just the cat, me, and imaginary cups of tea, which I raised with an outstretched pinkie.

  This welcoming toward myself took a big adjustment, a rebalancing of my soul. There had been so much energy thrown into performance, achievement, and disguise. I felt I had gotten a permission slip for the great field trip, to the heart of myself, in the protection of a few trusted friends.

  Frankly, I was hoping to see more white cliffs and beaches, fewer swamps and shadows, but this was real life, the nature of things, full of both wonder and
rot.

  As soon as I was able, my friends encouraged me to go back to reclaim the devious, dark part of me. I invited her in: Pull up a chair at the table, hon. We’re having soup tonight.

  So our families were train wrecks; we’ve ruined the earth; kids die all the time. How do we understand that something welcoming remains, sometimes hidden, that we can still trust? When all seems lost, a few friends, the view, and random last-ditch moments of grace, like Liquid Wrench, will do. Otherwise, I don’t know. We don’t exactly solve this problem, or much of anything, although one can learn to make a perfect old-fashioned, or blinis.

  I’ve discovered that offering welcome helps a lot, especially to the deeply unpleasant or weird. The offer heals you both. What works best is to target people in the community whom no one else seems to want. Voilà: now welcome exists in you.

  We want you, as is. Can you believe it? Come on in. Sit down. Let me get you a nice cup of tea. Would you like a lime juice bar?

  From the time I got sober and started remembering my dreams in the morning, the old cabin has been the setting for most of the dreams that involve my family. It is a stand-in for the dinner table, for the saga of intergenerational sickness, mental illness, secrecy. My very favorite dream featured a family reunion years ago, where my grown brothers had gathered for a meal at the dining table with our parents, who were alive and healthy. The cabin looked like it had been tricked out by Laura Ashley, with bed skirts on the trundle beds, doilies on the chairs. Sadly, though, someone had tracked in dog poop, and gotten it all over the rugs and bed skirts. My younger brother leaned over at the table to whisper in my ear, “This would be such a cozy place, if there wasn’t shit all over everything.”

  That pretty much says it for me. I’m sure your family was fine, and if that is the case, never mind. But I have needed a book of welcome for such a long time. I didn’t know how to let go of judging people so quickly, on how they look, or dress, or speak, so I couldn’t stop judging myself. I didn’t know welcome was a matter of life and death. Look how often lonely people kill themselves, or others. Look at what squandered and ridiculous lives most people lead.

  Until recently I barely even knew the signs of welcome, like the way a person plopped down across from me and sighed deeply while looking at me with relief: a shy look on someone’s face that gave me time to breathe and settle in. I didn’t know that wounds and scars were what we find welcoming, because they are like ours.

  Trappings and charm wear off, I’ve learned. The book of welcome says, Let people see you. They see that your upper arms are beautiful, soft and clean and warm, and then they will see this about their own, some of the time. It’s called having friends, choosing each other, getting found, being fished out of the rubble. It blows you away, how this wonderful event happened—me in your life, you in mine.

  Two parts fit together. This hadn’t occurred all that often, but now that it does, it’s the wildest experience. It could almost make a believer out of you. Of course, life will randomly go to hell every so often, too. Cold winds arrive and prick you; the rain falls down your neck; darkness comes. But now there are two of you. Holy Moly.

  The book of welcome says, Don’t blow it! The two nonnegotiable rules are that you must not wear patchouli oil—we’ll still love you, but we won’t want to sit with you—and that the only excuse for bringing your cell phone to the dinner table is if you’re waiting to hear that they’ve procured an organ for your impending transplant.

  At the age of sixty, I finally realized that I had been raised not to say “You’re welcome,” and I began to wonder how this habit had reinforced my sense of separation. When I grew up, girls were taught to minimize how much they had given, how much time and hard work something had taken. It might not even be noticed at first, because people expected you to do things for them. They felt entitled to largesse. So there was a double abnegation—your possibly sacrificial act of generosity wasn’t noticed the first four times, and then when you were finally thanked, you were taught to respond, “Don’t mention it.” Or, “You’d have done the same.” Glad to do it. It’s nothing.

  If generosity is nothing, then what is anything?

  Now I make myself accept gratitude. I look people in the eye, and say gently, “You’re really welcome.” I might touch their cheeks with the backs of my fingers. This simple habit has changed me.

  For instance, this morning I dreamed I was in the cabin, boxing up things for a move. This very morning, God is my witness. I thought I was alone, but my younger brother kept showing up to help me with the move, taking furniture and books out to a borrowed truck. He drove me to my new cottage, near Agate Beach, where we spent our childhoods walking with our parents, looking for sea glass and fossilized bits of whale bone, peering into tide pools, sometimes falling in. The new cottage was warm and shabby chic, but each time we went back to the old cabin for another load, my heart ached with what a great little place it had been. After unloading the boxes of books from the truck, we climbed into my 1959 Volkswagen Bug and I drove us to a gathering of sober alcoholics in the old town library. There were the familiar worn hardwood floors, and candles and the lifelike plastic flowers you see on Buddhist altars. There was a man in the parking lot selling eighteen varieties of real yellow flowers from a flatbed truck. Then an ancient German woman, whose groceries I’d been carrying because she seemed frail, opened my VW by sharply wrenching the door handle, which had apparently been stuck. She said to me, “Oh, this sometimes happens to my cars, too. It will be fine for the time being. Thank you for your help.”

  I said, “You are quite welcome.” And I awoke.

  Ladders

  In May 1992, I went to Ixtapa with my son, Sam, who was then two and a half. At the time, my best friend of twenty years, named Pammy, had been battling breast cancer for two years. I also had a boyfriend with whom I spoke two or three times a day, whom I loved and who loved me. Then, in early November of that year, the big eraser came down and got Pammy, and it also got the boyfriend, from whom I parted by mutual agreement. The grief was huge, monolithic.

  All those years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly and as privately as possible. But what I’ve discovered since is that the lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it. San Francisco is a city in grief, we are a world in grief, and it is at once intolerable and a great opportunity. I’m pretty sure that only by experiencing that ocean of sadness in a naked and immediate way do we come to be healed—which is to say, we come to experience life with a real sense of presence and spaciousness and peace. I began to learn this when Sam and I returned to the same resort three months after Pammy’s death.

  I took him back partly for reasons of punctuation. He was different this time, though. We both were. I had discovered that I could just barely live without Pammy. Whenever I went to her house to visit her daughter, Rebecca, I heard Pammy’s flute, remembered exactly the yellow of her hair, felt stalked by her absence, noted by it. It was like the hot yellow day that Faulkner describes in Light in August as “a prone and somnolent yellow cat,” contemplating the narrator. At any moment, the cat might suddenly spring.

  Also, I was a little angry with men at the time, and scared; in the aftermath of the romantic loss, my heart felt like it had a fence surrounding it. Now Sam seemed to be standing with me behind this fence; he seemed to feel safe only around me. He was sweet and friendly but shyer, no longer the social butterfly he had been the year before, when Pammy had still been alive. Back then I could leave him all day in the resort’s child-care program. This time he was clingy and heavily Oedipal. I began to call myself Jocasta; he began to call me darling.

  The first year, I’d come here alone with Sam. I mostly swam and ate by myself, walking into the dining area three times a day
feeling shy and odd, cringing, with my arms stiffly at my sides like Pee-wee Herman. But this year I was with my friend Tom, an extremely funny Jesuit and sober alcoholic, who drank like a rat for years and smoked a little non-habit-forming marijuana on a daily basis. He also did amyl nitrate, although he said that this was just to get to know people.

  His best friend, Pat, was along, too. I found that I could hardly stand for people to have best friends who were still alive. But when Sam and I had breakfast with both of them at the airport the morning we left for Mexico, they made me laugh and forget myself.

  Pat is a very pretty woman in her late forties who is about a hundred pounds overweight, and sober seven years.

  “Pat has a lot of problems,” Tom told us over breakfast.

  “This is true,” said Pat.

  “She was sober for four years,” he continued, “until her husband got brain cancer. Then for a few years she had a little social Tylenol with codeine every day, with the merest slug of NyQuil every night for a cold that just wouldn’t go away.”

  “I was a little depressed,” she said.

  After breakfast, we flew to Ixtapa. Adobe haciendas, cobblestone paths, a long white beach, palm trees, bougainvillea, warm ocean water—and no one back home desperately hoping I’d call.

  Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day at numbness, silence. I was hoarse for the first six weeks after Pammy died and my romance ended, from shouting in the car and crying, and I had blisters on the palm of one hand from hitting the bed with my tennis racket, bellowing in pain and anger. But on the first morning in Mexico, the lazy Susan stopped at feelings of homesickness, like those I had when my parents sold the house where I grew up.