Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace Read online

  One day not long after, she sidled up to me at school and asked me if I had an extra copy of the book I had written about being a mother. It is black-humored and quite slanted: George H. W. Bush was president when Sam was born, and perhaps I was a little angry. I had these tiny opinions. I wrote an anti–George Herbert Walker Bush baby book.

  So when she asked for a copy, I tried to stall; I tried to interest her in my anti-Reagan writing book. But she insisted.

  A few days later, filled with a certain low-grade sense of impending doom, I gave her a copy, signed, “With all good wishes.”

  For the next few days, she smiled obliquely whenever I saw her at school, and I grew increasingly anxious. Then one day she came up to me in the market. “I read your book,” she said, and winked. “Maybe,” she whispered, because my son was only a few feet away, “maybe it’s a good thing he doesn’t read.”

  I wish I could report that I had the perfect comeback, something so polite and brilliantly cutting that Dorothy Parker, overhearing it in heaven, raised her fist in victory. But I could only gape at my enemy, stunned. She smiled very nicely and walked away.

  I called half a dozen people when I got home and told them about how she had trashed me. And then I trashed her. And it was good.

  The next time I saw her, she smiled. I sneered, just a little. I felt disgust, but I also felt disgusting. I got out my note to God. I said: Look, hon. I think we need bigger guns.

  Nothing happened. No burning bush, no cereal flakes dropping from heaven forming letters of instruction in the snow. It’s just that God began to act like Sam-I-Am from Green Eggs and Ham. Everywhere I went there were helpful household hints on loving one’s enemies, on turning the other cheek, and on how doing that makes you look in a whole new direction. There were admonitions about the self-destructiveness of not forgiving people, and reminders that this usually doesn’t hurt other people so much as it hurts you. In fact, not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die. Suggestive fortune cookies, postcards, bumper stickers began to pop up here and there—everything but skywriting—yet I kept feeling that I could not, would not, forgive her in a box, could not, would not, forgive her with a fox, not on a train, not in the rain.

  One Sunday when I was struggling with this, the Scripture reading came from the sixth chapter of Luke: “Forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.” Now, try as I might, I cannot find a loophole in that. It does not say, “Forgive everyone, unless they’ve said something rude about your child.” And it doesn’t even say, “Just try.” It says, If you want to be forgiven, if you want to experience that kind of love, you have to forgive everyone in your life—everyone, even the very worst boyfriend you ever had—even, for God’s sake, yourself.

  A few days later I was picking Sam up at the house of another friend and noticed a yellowed clipping taped to the refrigerator with “FORGIVENESS” written at the top—as though God had decided to abandon all efforts at subtlety and just plain noodge. The clipping said forgiveness meant that God is for giving, and that we are here for giving, too, and that to withhold love or blessings is to be completely delusional. No one knew who had written it. I copied it down and taped it to my refrigerator. Then an old friend from Texas left a message on my answering machine that said, “Don’t forget, God loves us exactly the way we are, and God loves us too much to let us stay like this.”

  Only, I think she must have misquoted it, because she said, “God loves you too much to let you stay like this.”

  I looked nervously over both shoulders.

  A couple of days later my enemy’s boy came to play at our house, and then she came to pick him up just before dinner. And for the first time, while he gathered his things, she sat down on the couch, as if she had done this before, as if it were the most natural thing. I felt around inside my heart, and it was not so cold or hard. In fact, I even almost offered her a cup of tea because she seemed sad or maybe tired. I felt a stab of kindness inside, until her son came bounding out of Sam’s room, shouting that he’d gotten 100 percent on his arithmetic test and Sam had gotten two wrong.

  “Traitor!” Sam shouted from his room, and slammed the door.

  By bedtime, Sam said he forgave the boy but didn’t want to be friends anymore. I said he didn’t have to be friends, but he did have to be kind. At breakfast, Sam said he still forgave him, but when we got to school he said that it had been easier to forgive him when we were farther away.

  Still, several days later, when the mother called and invited him to come play that afternoon, Sam desperately wanted to go. She picked him up after school. When I went over to get him, she offered me a cup of tea. I said no, I couldn’t stay. I was in my fattest pants; she wore her bicycle shorts. The smell of something baking, sweet and yeasty, filled the house. Sam couldn’t find his knapsack, so I looked around for it. The surfaces of her house were covered with fine and expensive things. “Please let me make you a cup of tea,” she said again, and I started to say no, but this thing inside me used my voice to say, “Well . . . okay.” It was awkward. In the living room, I silently dared her to bring up school, math tests, or field trips; I dared her to bring up exercise or politics. As it was, we had very little to talk about—I was having to work hard making sure she didn’t bring up much of anything, because she was so goddamn competitive—and I sat there politely sipping my lemongrass tea. Everywhere you looked was more façade, more expensive stuff—show-offy I-have-more-money-than-you stuff, plus you’re-out-of-shape stuff. Then our boys appeared, and I got up to go. Sam’s shoes were on the mat by the front door, next to his friend’s, and I went over to help him put them on. As I loosened the laces on one shoe, without realizing what I was doing, I snuck a look into the other boy’s sneaker—to see what size shoe he wore. To see how my kid lined up in shoe size.

  And I finally got it.

  The veil dropped. I got that I am as mad as a hatter. I saw that I was the one worried that my child wasn’t doing well enough in school. That I was the one who thought I was out of shape. And that I was trying to get her to carry all this for me because it hurt too much to carry it myself.

  I wanted to kiss her on both cheeks, apologize for all the self-contempt I’d been spewing out into the world, all the bad juju I’d been putting on her by thinking she was the one doing harm. I felt like J. Edgar Hoover, peeking into the shoes of his nephew’s seven-year-old friend to see how the Hoover feet measured up, idly wondering how the kid’s parents would like to have a bug on their phone. This was me. She was the one pouring me more tea, she was the one who’d been taking care of my son. She was the one who seemed to have already forgiven me for writing a book in which I trashed her political beliefs; like God and certain parents do, forgiven me almost before I’d even done anything that I needed to be forgiven for. It’s like the faucets are already flowing before you even hold out your cup to be filled. Before forgiveness.

  I felt so happy there in her living room that I got drunk on her tea. I read once in a magazine that in Czechoslovakia, they say an echo in the woods always returns your own call, and so I started speaking sweetly to everyone—to the mother, to the boys. And my sweet voice started getting all over me, like sunlight, like the smell of the Danish baking in the oven, two of which she put on a paper plate and covered with tinfoil for me and Sam to take home. Now obviously, the woman has a little baking disorder. And I am glad.

  Trail Ducks

  At the height of summer, my least favorite season, one I would have skipped if I were God, one of my best friends had a breakdown. He is my age and almost like a brother to me, highly accomplished, well employed, newly married to a fabulous woman, and prone to severe depression. He had not been able to stop thinking about killing himself, even though he adores his wife, his son, his work, and us, his friends. So he had been in what he referred to as “the bin” for three weeks, and was now at a halfway house, where he would stay for two weeks before reentry into h
is life. I had not seen him in a few days, and one sultry evening, empty and anxious, I suddenly got it in my head to go visit him. It was five o’clock, three hours before visiting hours ended, and it made perfect sense that even in my mental and sweaty condition I would drive on the freeway for an hour to support him in dealing with the mess of his breakdown and rehab, the strain it put on his marriage, fatherhood, career. Maybe, subconsciously, it was to make myself feel holy and purposeful, and to buoy myself up.

  Also, it would help me deal with my own loneliness, because I was going to drag someone else along with me. I knew just the person.

  My friend Janine would agree to come, spur of the moment. She loves this man, too. She loves any excuse to escape from her house, where there were three kids, one of whom was recovering from a bleed in his brain, caused by tumor, along with the in-laws who had arrived to help her care for the kids. Now, you would think a woman with a sick kid would be exempt from being sucked into my good-idea field trips, but no, this is not how it works: see, it would help her, too. Two birds with one stone: Annie would be helping everyone! Plus, Janine would drive. She has a huge mega-car with GPS, a built-in hands-free speaker phone, a great stereo.

  I printed out a map and directions from MapQuest before I went to her house. I brought two ice-cold bottles of water and a baggie full of almonds, which I believe have medicinal powers, like SSRIs and blueberries.

  I drove to her house, which was bustling with good cheer. The kid who had been so sick sat watching TV, surrounded by loud love. I hugged all the teenagers and in-laws, and spent a few special quality Annie minutes with the recovering boy, cajoling him into a little chat. Then Janine and I set out for the town of Rohnert Park, which less charitable people called Rodent Park, a mysterious place with lots of meth labs and trailer parks, to which I have rarely been. We felt very superior and organized, in her perfect car, with our map, directions, water, and almonds. And we love each other’s company. We were both sober, crabby Christians, with a purpose: to bring our best selves to this dear friend, whose wife and child were at home while he recovered from suicidal fixation. Our directions gave us the confidence to start out on the journey, to get on the freeway and drive to the residential care facility, an hour away, one exit and two right turns off the freeway. Easy.

  We didn’t even turn on the GPS.

  The sun seemed to be thinking about setting, and hung low in the sky, and it was lovely to be together, cruising along, talking about her son’s slow but steady progress and our dear friend’s sudden breakdown.

  “It’s all so lifey,” Janine said. “It’s why we love TV so much.”

  We drove for nearly an hour and then started watching for our exit. The car phone rang, and Janine took it without seeming to move a thing. Maybe she has an AT&T chip embedded behind her ear. At any rate, she said, “Hello?” and it turned out to be Cathy, the woman in charge of transporting Janine’s car back from the hospital in Houston where her fourteen-year-old son had been in rehab. The car was going to be delivered the next day, and Janine made arrangements, which is to say, we both listened while the woman chattered. “Yes,” Janine said a number of times. “The post office in town, at noon.” I smiled and made the universal sign of chattering fingers. “Yes,” she said again. “Noon. Yes, correct: the post office.”

  I studied the directions. But when Janine clicked off the phone, we noticed that none of the exits was listed, and we realized we had gone too far. So we pulled over and turned on Janine’s GPS, shaking our heads and laughing at ourselves about what confident little schoolgirls we had been, gripping our MapQuest directions but not paying attention.

  The GPS lady told us to make a U-turn and get back on the freeway, heading south. We had driven 11.2 miles too far. Eleven miles too far! Oh, well, we said, and drove south. We drove along, gossiping, eating toasted almonds, and were within two miles of our destination when Janine’s wonderful husband, Alan, called from Europe. His name and cell phone number appeared on the GPS screen, replacing the map. His big booming voice came through the speakers, asking her if she had a few minutes, but she explained that we were nearly at our destination, and had already missed our exit once. Could she call him back as soon as we arrived?

  All the pieces of the puzzle of Janine’s impossible life and sick child had kind-of-sort-of come back together today, and she didn’t want to bum anyone out, especially her husband, who’d been through so much. But there was a long, bad silence from his end. It was clear that he was in a state, not just out of the country. And not just in any country, but in Germany.

  “Fine,” he said. “Good NIGHT.” She tried to wheedle him into a better mood and said she’d return his call within five minutes—but he’d hung up. Oh, well, we said again, shrugging. It seemed to be our mantra. It’s actually not a bad prayer, either.

  One mile away now by the map on the GPS, we went back to concentrating like children. We were going to get there with close to an hour left. The GPS lady said our exit was in .3 miles.

  And right then, Ring Ring Ring.

  Cathy’s phone number replaced the map on the GPS screen. The Houston car-transport person had one more question.

  We both laughed, even though I realized somehow that we were going to miss the turnoff again. There were construction signs everywhere down here, blocking our view of the exits. Janine took the call.

  Cathy wanted to verify that there was only one post office in town.

  Janine said, “Correct,” and then covered her mouth. Now we were in hysterics, the kind women friends dissolve into where there is seriously risk of pee. I saw out of the corner of my eye that we were about to pass the exit. I yelped, and Janine hit the brakes, but she had to drive on or risk being hit by the car behind us.

  We shook our heads and looked to the GPS for rerouting information, and it was then I understood that beneath the hysterics were the other kind, of weeping and gnashing of teeth. We drove another mile looking for an exit, but it was all wreckage and detour signs. What seems true is that something in life, on the highways or in our hearts, is always being installed, or being repaired, or being torn down for the next installation. Or the mess of the repair or tear-down is being cleaned up and cleared out. I wiped at my eyes, kind of confused about the tears, and wondered if Janine’s massive car had a gift shop where I could buy some Kleenex. I found some in the glove box.

  Somehow, now silenced, we took the overpass that got us back on 101 North, and we made a right turn, and then one more turn, and another, until we pulled up in front of our friend’s halfway house. Bzzzztt, my BlackBerry buzzed with a text: Our friend’s wife wanted me to know she appreciated our visiting her husband, but her feelings were hurt that we hadn’t included her. She would have loved to be part of our outing.

  I wrote back from the passenger seat that I loved her and was sorry but it had been spur-of-the-moment and I had rushed out the door without thinking.

  Janine stayed in the car and called her husband in Germany. I could tell it was going to be an unhappy conversation. I got out and walked to the front door. I automatically became the take-charge auntie you’d think anyone would like to have step into their screwed-up life now: organized, positive, on board.

  It was twenty past seven, which meant we still had forty minutes to visit. My friend was waiting near the door, expressing worry that something had happened to us, and he looked so vulnerable there—I felt terrible that we were late, and I hate when people are late, even for dinner or a movie, much less a situation like this—that I started to cry.

  Tears just burst into my eyes, pooled, and ran down my cheeks. Of course I know by this late in life that laughter and weeping are connected at the hip, but I had so wanted to bring my friend the peace of God, and for life and comfort to work, however briefly. Is that so much to ask?

  Yeah, well, good luck.

  My friend showed me around. He had his own room, with a photo of his fa
mily, and books. It was sweet. I breathed into that fact, this hilarious demonstration of what you set as the direct trajectory of your goal and, instead, of how things tend to turn out in real life—the overshooting of exits, and Cathy, and the angry husband and the hurt wife, and the messes of our lives pulling on our hems like sticky two-year-olds—and how at the same time, you got where you wanted to be.

  We sat on his bed in his small room for a moment, until Janine came through the doorway, shaking her head with exasperation at whatever she and her husband had talked about. Now she looked drawn and pale, like the mother of a kid with a brain tumor. She and our friend hugged. Everything suddenly felt awkward, and as if there was not nearly enough time. Here is the one tiny problem with good intentions: There are always uninvited voices and obstructions, nattering and nipping and whining and tugging at you. Always. The kernel, the motive, may be lovely, compassion and selflessness, wanting to be of service, and it is still nourishing, but there is the rest of the shit that comes with it. All of it takes so much more energy, and detours, to get anywhere in life, even to Rodent Park.

  Janine’s husband had only wanted comfort. Our friend’s wife just wanted to be included, to have company and camaraderie in the hardship. Cathy at the car company wanted to make plans to return Janine’s car, and to celebrate the completion of the toughest, saddest possible circuit—the family and the car back home after such a haul. Kind of a miracle, really.

  Getting found almost always means being lost for a while.

  The circuitous routes and endless interruptions continued inside the halfway house, with lost souls wandering around or sitting dazed in front of bad TV in the living room; two people sat in the den, where our friend had planned for us to sit and talk. Here I wanted to bring my goddamn solace, and all the visiting solace rooms were taken! It so sucked.